From Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self-Discovery, by Mark Coleman

I grew up in the transition zone between the suburbs and farmland, close to the North Sea in England. My friends and I spent our summers playing in farmers fields, creating burrows in hay stacks and tunnels through the wheat and barley fields. The most profound memory I have of that time is perhaps the simplest one. On one particular sunny day, around the time I was ten, I found myself spending the day alone. I tunneled through rows of wheat stalks and lay down in the middle of a fully ripened wheat field on a bed of dry grassy stalks. Held in a sea of warm grain that gently swayed in the breeze, I felt drunk on the musky, earthy fragrance all around me. Looking up at the deep blue sky through the golden heads of wheat, my heart was perfectly content. All seemed perfectly well in the world; everything was just as it should be.

Meditation and the Outdoors: A Natural Fit

Summer brings a chance to reconnect with nature. Too frequently, however, our own modern lifestyle habits -- e.g., our goal orientation, tendency to classify and judge -- inhibit us from really experiencing nature.

I bought this property for the beautiful view and for it's connection to a protected wetland. I now have four tractors out my window. The city has decided to reconstruct the wetland portion that borders my porch. Somehow I think they have the wrong idea; that they can improve it by plowing it under and starting over. The first day the trees came down the birds went crazy. Where will they land? Where will they nest? They had lost their homes. Then the massive earth plowing began. The ravens went crazy picking up the carnage that was left. The next thing to go was the pond. As the digger arm came down I felt sorry for the frogs that had sung me to sleep night after night.

My husband and I love to hike. We only really got into it a few years ago, when our two children got old enough to accompany us on some of our shorter rambles. (They are now twelve and thirteen.) We’ve put in some pretty serious mileage in the last three years, including hiking 96 kilometers (59 miles) in four days. (The kiddies stayed with Grandma for that one!)

 

We had hiked enough (all short day hikes) that we felt pretty confident that we could be able to do the hardest hike in the Maritime Provinces, Cape Chignecto Provincial Park. The hike is a grueling 52-kilometer (32 mile) coastal trail that promised, in return for all our hard work, some pretty spectacular scenery. We had only ever “backpacked” for one night prior, but that didn’t worry us. We had hiked plenty of trails before that were rated as difficult, and we found them to be a breeze. Although this trail was rated as “Very Challenging”, we thought perhaps like so many other trail descriptions that this would be a bit of an exaggeration, or perhaps not apply to “fit” folks like us.

“Taking your practice outdoors into nature as the tradition originally began, is an amazing way to balance your own healthcare, your own internal system, and to begin to generate the ability to feel the rhythms of the planet and to feel the rhythms of nature, so that the desire to help the planet begins to naturally arise. Because what we develop and care for in ourselves, we naturally want to act on that.

“And so by taking a practice which most of us do on a Tuesday night at 6 o’clock on the way home from work, which is in a yoga studio with a bunch of other people – maybe it’s a hot, sweaty practice and you’re using it as a way to check out of your life - look at that. There’s a way that you can shift that.