When we are very still, when we truly calm the seas of our thoughts, we access the true intellect (buddhi) in an increasingly powerful way. This allows us to see more deeply into situations and gain greater insight and wisdom about the reality that surrounds us.

                                    The Eternal Self by Phil Nuernberger

Phil’s words inspired me to revisit stillness, to again experience those unique moments of clarity that arose whenever I sat silently in nature.  I was curious to explore his idea that stillness allows one to see things more clearly, to access what he calls the discriminating mind.

More inspiration for a sit spot devoted to stillness came from the words of Helen MacDonald in her book Vesper Flights.  She wrote about her newly found love for sitting, waiting, and seeing, a process she described as requiring “meditative patience.”   She added “The longer you sit there, the more you become abstracted from this place, and yet fixed to it.”

Preparing

Like any adventure in nature a sit spot is always a journey into the unpredictable, a passage into the unknown.  Driving to Prompton Lake under a cloudy sky in dim predawn light I wondered how I might best prepare myself for the hour ahead. 

Let go of personal concerns and gaze around at nature might be one way to prepare I thought.  Driving down the long gentle slope of Bowen’s Hill I looked towards the distant Moosic Mountains, a line of rounded, forested peaks topped with a spine of tall, white, churning wind mills.  Mountains reaching to the sky were always an uplifting, nature anchoring view for me. 

Once parked in the boat ramp lot I paused to look out at Prompton Lake. I saw an open expanse of still water bordered by dense forest and set beneath a canvas of puffy gray clouds back lit by the striving light of the rising sun, a panorama soothing, inviting, and promising.

Emerging from the car I shouldered my back pack and camp stool, walked across the parking lot toward the West Shore Trail and stepped beneath an archway of tall white pine trees.  My footsteps were muffled by a layer of fallen tan pine needles that told a story of the pine trees dropping the old to prepare for the new, for next spring’s new green needles.  It was a story of the perennial cycle of the seasons.

Entering the narrow, winding, leaf covered West Shore Trail I felt a connection to nature that heightened my readiness to sit in stillness and silence.   Perhaps the only other ingredients I could add to my preparation would be an open heart, a curious mind, and a sense of gratitude to be outside and to see a new day begin.

Sensing                       Interval 1                    7:08 am

I set up my camp stool beneath the big black cherry tree at my home sit spot on the little peninsula on Prompton Lake.  A soft southeast wind touched my face.  The same soft breeze gently swayed the uppermost branches of the trees back and forth like strands of sea kelp flowing with the waves and tides.

Leaves, mostly maple and ash, fell from the trees, drifting and spiraling down. A single leaf landed next to me touching the ground with a barely discernable rustle and merging into the accumulating leaf litter.

A catbird mewed.  A blue jay called jay, jay, jay.  A Carolina wren sang a cheerful tea kettle, tea kettle, tea kettle.  A goldfinch sang a per-chick-oree flight song.  Song sparrows called soft chimp, chimp chimp contact calls back and forth.

Bringing myself more into the present I stretched my hearing further out on the circle of sound.  Somewhere on the lake a female mallard voiced a single hoarse “quack.”  A flicker called a resonant ki-ki-ki-ki from the woods across the lake.  I heard a duck take flight; feet pattering across the water, wings flapping faster and faster until silence said it was airborne, the sounds creating a perfect action picture in my mind.

Light Ascending                     Interval 2                    7:18 am

It was a gray morning without a dramatic sunrise yet I sensed the gradual spread of illumination. The colors of the leaves on the trees grow more vivid, shades of yellow, orange, red, burgundy, tan and brown.  The leaves on the ground grew more vivid too, a mosaic of fall colors.

I glanced up through the tree branches and spotted an area of blue sky with a single pinkish cloud, a reminder that the sunrise always brings a color show; sometimes spectacular and sometimes subtle, but always a color celebration of the new day, a celebration to be seen when sitting still.

More sounds around me.  Two catbirds mewed. I spotted one, a dark gray shape amidst thick branches.  I watched it flutter to up to a top branch, hop to a lower branch, flick its tail and then slip away. A goose honked in the distance.  The wind carried the distant whoosh of morning traffic along US Routh 6.

Two cardinals called back and forth, relaxed steady, tink, tink, tink contact calls.  A flock of chickadees chattered softly as they flitted through the leafy branches of the big black cherry tree.  There was no alarm in their calls.  Perhaps I was blending in.

Fall, leaves, fall                                  Interval 3                    7:28 am

As I gazed at the leaves drifting down a memory surfaced.  I was in fifth grade watching the clock tick towards 10 o’clock recess, eagerly anticipating a football game with my classmates when Mrs. Johnson, the elderly and kindly teacher for grades 5-8 in the country school I attended announced that we were to write a poem about fall before we went to recess.  I groaned inwardly.

While my classmates bent their heads down and went to work I slipped to the back of the room to the book shelf, found a book of poetry, located poems about fall, and discovered one that seemed so silly to me, so bereft of normal language, that I thought I could copy it and pass it of as my own.  No one would like this poem I thought.  And it was short.  Quickly, I copied it, updated a few of the stupid old-fashioned words, handed it in, and ran out to the football freedom of the playground.

When we returned to the classroom, Mrs. Johnson announced in her crackly voice that one of us had written a beautiful poem that she wanted to share.  When she proceeded to read my submission out loud I cringed.

At the end of the day after all of the other students had left I gathered the courage to approach her desk and confess what I had done.  I showed her the book and the original of Emily Bronte’s poem that begins with the lines:

                                    Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers away;

                                    Lengthen night and shorten day;

                                    Every leaf speaks bliss to me

                                    Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I could tell she was struggling to control her anger.  She told me that what I had done was very wrong and said, “Well John, I hope you remember this for the rest of your life.” 

Even today I can recall the sharp barbs of guilt, the burn of embarrassment, and my astonishing literary naiveté. But now as I watched a gust of wind launch a shower of leaves that fluttered down around me I also remembered the beauty of those words and the way the sounds of words and the rhythm of phrases can so wonderfully describe the world of nature.

Waves                                     Interval 4                                7:38 am

A stronger gust of wind splashed tiny wavelets against the rocky shoreline. In front of me, I noticed three butter-yellow goldenrod blooms atop slender greens stems swaying back and forth in the breeze.  Looking up I saw clumps of gray-white puffy clouds drifting across the sky blown by waves of wind.

A raven croaked.  A great blue heron squawked. A robin called tut, tut, tut.  Cardinals called.  I was surrounded by waves of sound.

I felt how comfortable the skin on my face and hands had become after sitting still in the soft fresh air.  Then, suddenly, I felt an ache in my calves and tightness in my thighs, a little physical rebellion against sitting still that generated feelings of impatience to get to the end of the hour.

I adjusted my position, took a deep breath, settled back and noticed the quick return of happiness to be in the woods.  There were waves of sensations, feelings, and thoughts passing through me.

A moment of regret surfaced.  I was at a bookstore giving a presentation on my book when a man in the audience asked if I observed waves in nature during my hour long sit spots.  In the moment I misunderstood his question.  But he was spot on.  Whenever I sit in stillness long enough I see and hear and feel waves within and without.  It’s all waves.

A Surprising Survivor                        Interval 5                    7:48 a.m.

The light grew brighter illuminating the woods around me.  But it wasn’t just the light.  I was beginning to see more, to see things that I simply hadn’t noticed before.

At my feet grew a single stem of poison ivy, the infamous leaves of three that usually produced an alarm reaction, but now when I looked I saw that these leaves were golden yellow flecked with tiny red spots and were transformed into leaves of beauty. 

Looking up I noticed that bright burgundy-red leaves cloaked one maple tree while orange-red leaves covered its neighbor.  The big black cherry tree in front of me still held green leaves, but its trunk offered its own view of beauty; textured scales of gray bark streaked with colonies of blue-green and gray lichen.

To my right a bed of ferns had turned yellow, a lacy leafed blanket covering the forest floor.  By the shoreline gold tinged leaves of gray birch trees fluttered and shimmied in the breeze.  Each species of tree, even each individual tree offered its own display of color and beauty before slipping into the long, gray, silence of winter.

A slender, leafless ash sapling about 20 feet high stood right in front of me. When I studied it I realized it was dead.  Positioned under several cherry trees perhaps it hadn’t received enough sunlight.  Or maybe it had fallen victim to insect pests.

Across a small open area I spotted a similar sized ash sapling, this one alive and healthy and still holding leaves.  When I looked more closely I was surprised to see that the main trunk had broken off half way up but the tree had diverted its growth force into a side branch that now grew vertically and had taken over the role of the trunk.

This was resilience in action.  Who would have predicted that the broken tree would survive while the straight tree perished?

Community                             Interval 6                                7:58 a.m.

A gust of wind carried the fresh, invigorating fragrance of open water to my nostrils.  I inhaled the fragrance. 

My gaze drifted to a nearby black cherry tree, its trunk bifurcated about ten feet above the ground.  Two trunks grew skyward; their shape reminding me of a tuning fork.  Higher up one of the trunks split and again two trunks grew straight up, another tuning fork.

Next to it grew a cherry with a single tall trunk covered with dark scaly bark.  The trees were friends, I thought; two black cherry trees growing side by side, helping each other to face the challenges of the seasons.  And there was another cherry just to the left and a fourth to the right, a little community of cherry trees.

Ahead I noticed a grouping of sugar maples, smooth gray bark, cloaked in orange, gold and red leaves, surrounded by a ring of fallen leaves, another community of trees.

I saw a group of tall, straight trunked ash trees with gray-brown furrowed bark.  Their leaves had fallen and now they stood together, tall trunked, bare-branched ready to face the winter

A flock of blue jays called back and forth.  Far up the lake a trio of crow cawed, hailing each other across distance.  The jays and crows belonged to the Covid family, highly social birds that live in extended family units sustained by complex communication.

Behind me faint tsee, tsee, tsee calls.  Turning slowly around I spotted a migratory flock of golden-crowned kinglets flitting busily through the bushes, ducking, darting, gleaning, and moving together in some invisibly directed yet clearly coherent synchrony.

I was surrounded by communities, communities of trees and birds and as I looked down communities of grasses, goldenrods, and ferns.

It seemed as if my perception was abstracted, as if I was seeing beyond the tangible, literal individual trees, plants and birds to another dimension, to a dynamic, interconnected dimension of communities.

In a heartbeat nature perception shifted to personal perception.  I reflected on the communities to which I belonged; family, friends, borough, county, country and world. I felt a bond of connection to each and a renewed commitment to each.

Returning

My hour of stillness was completed.  I walked around the peninsula and took pictures of the lake looking through the trees toward the dam, one of my favorite views. 

As I walked back along the West Shore Trail I reflected on the words of Phil and Helen that had inspired my sit spot session.  Yes, an hour of forest stillness did seem to lead to clarity of vision, to unexpected insights, to what might even be called moments of illumination.

Continuing down the narrow, leaf laden trail, I watched more leaves flutter down and realized that these insights weren’t just intellectual for I could feel a deep grounding connection to nature and to all the human and non-human communities around me.  And on a more practical level I saw the way ahead on several specific contributions I could make to my communities.

This sit spot was conducted on September 29, 2020 at Prompton Lake in Wayne County, Pennsylvania.

You can read about more sit spots and wander walks in this blog or in my book The Stillness of the Living Forest:  A Year of Listening and Learning available on Amazon.com and through Shanti Arts Publishing.

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