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A Walk in the Woods Always Brings Me Home
When the universe decided to manifest human beings on earth, it stirred air and sun, water and earth together, and after just a few billion years of experimenting with these ingredients, trying this and trying that, keeping what worked and not what didn’t—voila: me!
I need to breathe air and drink water, to eat food and get lots of sunlight, because I am those things. The reason I can’t travel ten miles above the earth and survive (without a spacesuit) is because I am the earth. Just as homemade cookies are the ingredients from which they are made—flower and sugar, milk and eggs (and wheat and sugarcane, cows and chickens), so we are our mother and father, our ancestors, and all the elements of the universe.
As Thich Nhat Hanh often taught, remove the tree from the paper—or remove the cloud, the sun, the rain, the logger, the wheat that became the sandwich that the logger ate for lunch—remove any of these things from the paper, and there is no more paper.
Likewise, remove the earth, water, sunlight, or air from the human; there is no more human.
I think this is why I love to walk in the woods so much. There, on a path soft with pine needles, surrounded by the thick trunks of tall trees and with glimpses of a sparkling lake in the distance, I feel comfortable and safe, like a baby wrapped in its mother’s arms. I walk slowly as I watch the leaves and twigs pass beneath my feet. I look up and see the kaleidoscopic pattern of pine branches against the blue sky; a pattern that changes and evolves as I move.
The Eastern Towhees chirrup in the undergrowth, searching for berries. Blue jays squawk and chase each other through the high branches. The path bends gently and then slopes toward the shore, becoming rocky where the rains have washed away the soil and leaves. I see the roots of trees exposed at the eroded edges of the trail, and I think about how the trees are also a part of the earth, just like me. The trees are my brothers and sisters.
Reflecting like this in the woods, where the air is fresh and the sounds of forest life are palpable, unlike the muted din of traffic at home, I begin to understand more clearly the Buddhist teaching of no-self.
As only an idea in a book, no-self is useless to me. It’s a truth that must be known at my core, as I know when I am hungry, or when it’s time to go to sleep. When I intuit this connection—no, not connection; this inter-being—with all other things, when I feel in my heart that the air I breathe is part of who I am and what I am made of, that the sun’s warmth on my face is my very source; when I see the sparkling water and know that it manifests in me, in the clouds, in the trees and birds and in the air itself—then I feel the oneness of all things completely. And feeling the oneness completely, I know that I am not separate, that I am not an entity independent of all other things, with a unique, separate self. I, and all other things, are one.
Before beginning my mindfulness practice, I had taken for granted my belief in a separate self, forgetting my true identity. Now, because I pay attention, because I look and listen and keep my conditioned beliefs and opinions at bay so I can be open to the truth of the here-and-now; because I meditate in order to open some quiet space inside where the true nature of self and reality can reveal itself; because of these things, I know that I am everything.
Grasping my non-self nature of inter-being with all things is so wonderful; it means there is nothing to strive for, nothing to scorn, nothing to struggle with, nothing to cling to.
All is as it is.
I am of nature and nature is of me. And I just want to say thank you; thank you, nature; thank you, universe, for not giving up on your creative aspiration; how sweet it is to be alive as a manifestation of you!
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A beautiful and humbling reflection, Don.
This was beautiful ✨️ I listened to it while on my walk and it was as if you caught my mind today.
Have a blessed day.