Nature Journal | Still the Mind to See and Hear

Summary: Still the mind to see and hear things you ordinarily wouldn’t notice. My walking meditation helps settle the audio-visual chatter.

9/17/20 Thursday | Today I stopped at the creek to gather a few rocks. Before that I’d spent the mid-morning hours pulling PDF’s of my old blogs so I can keep them in the files with a bunch of other old memories. Before that, I fed the horses and cat, and went off for my daily bit of exercise.

My morning mile is more than just exercise for my body. It is also a layered meditation. It’s the only kind of meditation I seem to be able to do. I’ve never been able to sit in stillness and quiet my mind, though I would like to learn. For the first half, I slow-jog and it quiets the mind. Second half is communion. I walk back toward the house for the second half of the mile, and focus on sights and sounds. Just as with the mind, there’s a lot of AV chatter to still. After that, in the stillness, I hear and see the quiet and distant things. The creek has voices and her song is slow and melodic this morning. Each little spill a different tune. The driveway looks a uniform tan, but individual colors reveal themselves on closer, focused attention. I love having this relationship with nature. It fuels my life. 

There are a lot of benefits to meditation, and many ways to approach the practice.

What is AV chatter?

AV is ‘audio-visual’. So it’s just like all the random thoughts that keep popping into your mind when you’re trying to still the mind. Instead, it’s sounds and sights. ‘Chatter’ is all the things you normally see and hear, and most of the time it’s the things easiest to focus upon.

Hear

Still the auditory chatter. With sound, at least here, it’s the nearby birds, crickets and frogs, or if the creek is loud, it’s the rushing water. Kind of like white noise or static. Once I set those sounds aside, though, I can hear the things I might not ordinarily hear. A leaf rustling because a beetle is rustling about underneath it. A hawk circles overhead and shrieks. Once, I even heard the screams of something tiny and tracked it down to find a snake eating a mouse.

Another time when I was trying to find a source for a spring, I had to listen hard to hear faint drip-drip of water seeping from beneath a rock uphill. In that instance, I had to still the beating of my heart to hear the fainter sounds. It was an uphill climb, and I’d go from tree to tree and rest with my back against the tree and downhill behind me. My heartbeat was pretty loud after the exertion, and the drips were very faint. But I found the spring source and it delighted me.

See

Visual chatter is similar, but pertains to what your mind allows you to see or recognize. A stilled mind is a lot more receptive than a busy one. The things you see most often are the ones you’re most likely to notice at first glance. Once you get that out of the way, then you’ll begin to notice the things you might otherwise not have seen. An example is the color of our driveway. At first glance it’s all the same dusty color. But when you look closer, you’ll see all the different shades of color in the rocks that make up the driveway. Or you’ll notice the little critters, like the millipede coordinating those thousand legs across the rock next to the one you’re sitting on. Things like that otherwise would escape detection unless it actually climbed on your hand.

An Autumn State of Mind

Since my walk/jog meditation, I’ve been in a state of mind that usually comes around in autumn. It’s a good time for me creatively, especially for my writing, because I’m able to focus and delve deeper than I can when everything else is pulling me from all the other directions. And it’s not that anything external has changed – except the angles of the light, and perhaps the veils between worlds. Sometimes that curtain ripples a little bit. I think this morning was one of those times. It’s the liminality of it all that gets to me. A liminal space is my favorite sort of space. You know, the ‘between’ spaces… between waking and dreaming, the moments between darkness and light at dusk and dawn, the transitional period between seasons or landforms. Those are all liminal spaces.

If you don’t have access to nature, you can create meditation space in your own home. For me, it would be important to get the right lighting and mood, and try to recreate that feeling of liminality that I enjoy so much.

This morning’s mood paved the way for my wading through the past. I started blogging around 2003. Back in the days before there was a ‘platform’, and so all of it was done with HTML. I didn’t think to save back-ups of all those year’s worth of memories, though. As much criticism as the Internet Archives have gotten for copyright infringement, I’ve been very happy to find that I can still retrieve a lot of my early internet blogs from that site.

Here’s one of the stories I wrote somewhere around 2010. Garrison was almost 14, if I’m doing the mental math correctly.