Afterword
Every time we stand at the edge of the woods with a new group of students, it is apparent that for most of them there is a sense of separation from nature. This separation manifests in so many ways: Nature is a place like a museum, where you don’t touch things; or it is a place like a gym where you go to train your body; or it is a place like an amusement park where you go to have fun experiences; or it is a place like a meditation hall where you go to ponder your personal stressors and anxieties. Exciting, boring, scary, or relaxing, all these ways of knowing nature keep it external and an auxiliary add-on to their life. But, through practices like those in this book—mindfulness, contemplation, and quality time out of doors—we begin to see a shift. Perceptions sharpen, and students begin reflecting on how they feel a deep kinship to the outside world. They often say when they are in nature that now they feel they are Home.
Our hope is that this book will aid your own explorations, that your edges, the sharp delineation between you and what is outside of you, also will have become fuzzier. That you, too, feel intimately connected to the outside world, and it to you. We hope that from this place of deep nature connection the spirit of stewardship and caretaking of the Earth also grows within you.
Opportunities for practice are everywhere. The natural world is all around. It doesn’t matter if it is a small park, some dirt access road, or an overgrown abandoned lot in the city. Ultimately, we are nature. We don’t need to go anywhere to experience that. We only need to open fully to our senses to feel the reality of it.
We are especially grateful that over the years we have had access to a particular secluded area along one of our hometown’s creeks. By going to this spot season after season, year after year, over and over, we have developed what environmental psychologists call “place attachment.”1 This place has truly become an old friend. Together, we remember countless stories from times when we found the tracks of river otters, bobcats, and a bald eagle on the sandbanks. We have watched the turbulent rush of chocolate-colored water during spring floods and seen subzero days when the stream’s flowing water transformed into a frozen mosaic of crystals, fractals, and ice sculptures. There were moments when we felt that we had seen it all, and other times when we realized we had not even scratched the surface. This is a living stream—over the years, through multiple floods, we have experienced the creek bed shift one hundred feet to the east of where it is now. We remember when the giant sycamore tree that now rests in the creek, creating habitat for fish, was standing and growing along its bank, creating habitat for birds and mammals. These are memories, and they are threads of a fabric that weaves us together. This place attachment facilitates the development of deep empathy and compassion, as we connect more to the natural world as a whole. We are compelled to care for that which we love. Explore your area wherever you are and find places where you can also feel the warp and weft of the fabric, the strands of the web.
Even a long human life is extremely short in the grand scheme of things. Each day is precious, and certainly the Earth and all its inhabitants would benefit from us practicing moment-to-moment awareness. Developing a kind presence, equanimity, gratitude, and the skills to take wise action is at the very least a noble way to use what poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.”2 And, as with all our practices of meditations, when we find we have forgotten ourselves, become lost or absent, we can always find our place again. We can always come home.
Let us end where we began. Step outdoors, breathe, slow down, and let life in. Play. Smile. Wander. Let the world move you. Be awestruck. Find the universe in a flower. Lose yourself in a birdsong. Feel these things in your body. Come back to your senses again and again and again.