Hiking Alone in Nature

We aren’t alone when we hike by ourselves in nature because nature goes with us. Nature is a companion who walks at our pace, and has stored treasures around each bend in the trail. Sometimes nature converses so loudly that we can’t hear ourselves think, like when we’re standing at the bottom of a waterfall, feeling the earth vibrate from the pounding water. Sometimes it murmurs so quietly that we have to get down on our knees and lean in close to hear what it’s saying.

Often we don’t have to hike very far to feel nature’s presence. All we have to do is find a spot that feels right, sit, and let nature come to us. After half an hour, the birds and animals will set their caution aside, and resume what they were doing, and we can watch them go about their daily lives.

We can also hike on and on without stopping until our senses go on overload and we go numb with the onslaught of amazing image after image.

Wilderness Prayer

Mindfulness is camping in the wilderness, rising at dawn, and listening to nature wake up around you as you cook breakfast over a fire.

Prayer is a conversation we have with the mountains and rivers, with ravens and coyotes. We share our thoughts and feelings, and as we listen to the Other, our perceptions about ourselves and the world change and deepen. As we watch the lives of nature, we grow in compassion for all creatures.

Send Them Outside to Play

If you have no relationship with nature,

you have no relationship with humanity.

-- Krishnamurti

The landscape of one’s home is always sacramental.

 It molds our character. It’s the soil out of which we grow.

 It’s where we either encounter the divine

or we never make the connection.

-- Seamus Heaney

If we have a relationship with nature, we do better in relationships with people because we realize that the health of our community depends on the health of our environment. We realize there are bigger truths in the world than our own personal truths. Nature also has a way of humbling us, and reminding us that we’re not in control outdoors. In nature we become aware of a greater power.

In the Darkness

In the darkness before dawn, in the quiet of the hours before people rise out of their beds, before the sound of traffic on the street picks up, even before the sunlight rises over the hill to wake the birds to come to the feeder, there is a delicious silence. 

In the fullness of this silence, I open myself to the universe, to whatever it wants to share with me today. In the darkness before dawn, I believe that all things are possible.

Nature as Revelation

John Burroughs wanted people to go outside and enjoy the nature that existed around them wherever they were, whether this was forest, farmland, ocean, desert, or a city park. He was concerned that people were staying indoors too much. He wrote this in the late 1800s. I think he’d be more concerned today.