One always walks in silence. Frederic Gros

The first shift to silence occurred surprisingly just ten minutes into my morning walk. Following my usual route through the village park, onto a street, down a hill, I turned onto a stretch of private road. Since I picked up any fallen branches or litter along the way I figured that it was okay to ignore the No Trespassing sign. Plus, this stretch of road, surrounded by second-growth trees, was usually a good spot to see or hear a few interesting birds.

Reaching the point where the road became a driveway, where it would be intrusive to continue, I turned around, saw the sun shining on the open road ahead and felt a strong pull to continue, a silent motivation to follow where the way would lead.

I followed the road, heard the steady sound of my feet.  I felt liberated, free to join a journey, free from all the internal monologue I had been using to plan the walk, calculate the time it would take, devise the route, and talk myself into getting out of the door. It was, I reflected, much better to be pulled forward by silent, heart-felt motivation than to be pushed by noisy internal chatter.

Noticing

On to a grass path and down a long hill, I strode. My steps grew quieter, the touch of my feet softer upon the earth.  Shifting into a natural rhythm, arms moving, breath evening out, I began to see more—the burgundy-colored stems of red osier dogwood stretching toward the path, the tan textured swirls of last year’s meadow grasses splayed across the ground, and the crinkled brown leaves clinging to the pin oaks.  Wispy, white clouds drifted above the horizon beneath a cobalt-blue sky.

Pausing, I heard a soft rising and falling weeesh as a gust of wind blew through the green branches and long slender needles of a white pine tree. A distant, honking drifted down from high above.  Looking up, scanning the sky, I spotted a long shifting V of Canada geese winging steadily northward.

With the pleasant exertion of walking, I began to feel comfortable in and adapted to the brisk 45-degree air.  A gentle breeze touched me face.  The mid-March sunshine warmed my neck and back.

All these sensory impressions in tandem with my steady steps drew me increasingly into the simple present moment, pushing thoughts of past and future off the worktable of my mind.  It was not silence, but it felt quieter inside as all the running monologue about things said and unsaid and done and not done from yesterdays and tomorrows faded away.

Time

Pulled increasingly into the present, my clock-based plan—walk an hour, cover three miles, achieve 6300 steps—began to feel irrelevant.  As the linear time scale of minutes, hours, and days dissolved I found myself noticing other cycles of time.

Near a beaver pond I heard a soft honking back and forth. Stepping up on a rock I caught a view of two Canada geese standing next to an open patch of just melted water. As soon as the ice melts the geese and ducks arrive.  This was a breeding pair looking for a nesting spot.

The two geese were on a tight schedule, closely following spring as it spread north.  They had urgent time bound business to do—locate a safe place to build a nest, hatch the eggs, and raise their goslings. Simultaneously, these two geese were participants in a perennial cycle, a migratory cycle that had been going on for centuries, going on way before I was born and that would continue long after I departed.

Stepping onto an old farm road, paved in the 1930s, I saw moss and grass edging in from both sides slowly covering the road. In another twenty years this road would disappear, vanish as so many roads of human enterprise have been covered by the passage of time.

I noticed a deer path winding through the woods, joining the road and then fifty yards ahead left heading back into the woods. Before the road there may have been a deer trail, a trail widened and worn by Native Americans and then turned into a dirt road by pioneers. This was a road with a history.

Continuing into the woods I saw the forest floor covered with a mottled tan and brown blanket of last year’s leaves, leaves that would in the soft rains and warming days and night of spring began to break down, joining previous layers of leaves, eventually composting into soil.  It was such composted soil that would nourish this year’s rich canopy of green leaves. I saw the perennial cycle of decay, dissolution, nourishment, and rebirth all occurring in a maturing second-growth forest that was now more than a hundred years old, a forest with its own rhythm of succession, the pines and hemlocks moving in, part of an even greater time cycle.

In the woods stood a huge rock, deposited during the last glacial age.  Green mosses grew up on its sides. Across the top and on any flat edges ferns and tiny plants established a foothold. The mosses and plants would, over centuries, break down the boulder, returning it to the earth from which it had formed—a time cycle almost impossible to comprehend.

I paused, took a few sips of water, and contemplated these longer cycles of time. The measures of time where I normally lived, hours, days, weeks, and months melted away.   I felt smaller, miniscule, yet simultaneously more substantial joined to cycles longer and greater, a quieting insight, another dimension of silence.

Wordless

A faint trickling sound emanated a tiny, normally dry watercourse now filled with snow-melt water. I watched the tiny stream flow over dirt and rocks and listened to the soft bubble and burble as the water dropped down into a ditch.

Stepping further I came to an unnamed stream that coursed through a culvert under the road, a stream swollen with snowmelt, flowing and twisting over rocks and around logs, a stream singing an exuberant swishing-swirling sound.  I heard bass notes—water gurgling over a big rock—and heard higher melodic notes—the stream pouring over and through a pile of branches. 

I proceeded further to an old stone bridge that crossed the stream above a dam built many years ago. Here the full snow-melt stream roared over the dam cascading on to the rocks below. I watched the water crash and swirl into eddies of tan frothy foam and heard the ever-changing rumbling and roaring of the falling water. If the rivulet was a solo instrument, the stream a string trio, then this waterfall was the full symphony.

There were more sounds—the rising and falling of the wind whisper-whooshing through the dense boughs of a tall spruce tree. I heard bird songs, the lilting per-chik-oree of goldfinches, the exuberant conk-la-reee of recently arrived red-winged black birds, and the pure whistled right here, right here of a cardinal.

All these nature sounds of water, wind, and bird song induced a deep sense of enjoyment that steadily accumulated into joy. I felt an uplifting, sparkling sensation spread through my body, tranquility infuse my mind, and a keen sense of appreciation flood my spirit.

My internal language changed. At first, as I took in the sights and sounds of nature, I used full, complete, grammatically correct sentences—The stream is flowing loudly. Then I began to use single words—trees, wind, birdsong. And then even the words vanished. I began to experience sights and sounds simply and directly.

This seemed like another dimension of silence. Words, it seemed, could not keep up, could not do full justice to the intensity and the rapid flow of impressions.  Into the silence left by the departure of language flowed body feelings, effervescent emotions, and clear insights.

The Commonplace

After three miles of walking the whippy-snappiness left my legs.  The goal to log a set number of miles, and the agenda to maintain a specific mile per hour pace gone as well. I was more concerned about making it home.

My fatigued legs, striving now for a natural economy, sought out the most efficient and least effortful strides. I heard my footsteps crunching over gravel, crinkling over grass and leaves, and padding quietly over a blanket of pine needles. On top of this steady, rhythmic baseline, emotions, triggered by commonplace things, floated like melodic lines.

I saw a white poplar tree in bloom, delicate furry down-drooping catkins. No one, I thought, gathers poplar stems for a spring bouquet. For allergy sufferers the pollen-laden flowers would trigger alarm and initiate a search for a bottle of Zyrtec.  

For me, these flowers induced wonder. Why did they bloom so early, well before the leaves emerged? Were they pollinated just by the wind? I looked closely at the delicate cream-colored catkins, top-tinged with a fringe of burgundy, and felt awed by their beauty,

Further down the path I came to a scraggly Norway spruce, a gangly sapling that no one in their right mind would select for Christmas. Yet, as I came closer, I noticed that the needles had taken on a luminous shade of green, triggered by the lengthening days into growth mode. I saw the tan buds at the end of each branch, swelling slightly, poised for growth. I thought how different the experience of growth was for this evergreen, exponential growth from the tip of each branch, growth so different from the linier human growth that I knew.  But wait, maybe mentally, emotionally, and spiritually we humans can grow exponentially as well.

I came to a spray of pussy willows in bloom. At first glance, a common sight. Bunches of pussy willows are one of the cheapest spring bouquets available in supermarket flower shops. Pausing and gazing I detected a subtle vibrant shiny light spreading from each furry bloom. The arrangement of the living stems reminded me of a celestial constellation.

Back

I stepped over the remnants of an old stone wall back into my yard.  I saw the grass littered by branches brought down by winter winds and ice storms. The garden gate had been heaved out of alignment by the repeated deep frost. Multiple cones of dirt dotted the lawn, the handiwork of digging moles.  Immediately I began to talk to myself about the tasks awaiting me. The silence of walking vanished.

Yet something had changed. I understood more about silence now. New neuronal pathways had been formed or latent pathways activated.  It might, I thought, be easier to rejoin silence on future walks.

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If you want to learn more about mindfulness in nature, look at my latest book, Nature’s Pathways to Mindfulness available on Amazon and through the publisher Shanti Arts.  Links below:

Nature’s Pathways to Mindfulness: Harvey, John: 9781962082266: Amazon.com: Books

Nature’s Pathways to Mindfulness, John Harvey

The opening quote is from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros, a lovely book that I think only a Frenchman trained in philosophy and imbued with a romantic spirit could write.

For more information on the golden trifecta of nature sounds (wind, water, and birdsong) check out The Nature Fix by Florence Williams, page 98.