Wordless Wisdom: Seven Life Lessons from the Natural World
Einstein once said, “Look deep into nature, and you will understand everything better.” From the Buddha who attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree to Isaac Newton who stumbled upon gravity under an apple tree, great thinkers and spiritual leaders throughout history discovered profound clarity and solace in nature.
I've long sought answers to life’s big questions in the words of spiritual teachers, in the souls of my favorite authors, in the mental clarity of meditation, and in the depths of textbooks. These answers have only recently begun to paint themselves into vibrancy and clarity as I’ve developed a deeper connection with the natural world.
Despite living in a city, much of my free time is spent in nature – meditating outdoors, volunteering at local green spaces, and most recently spending the summer on a permaculture farm. The more time I spend mindfully engaging with nature and learning about natural systems, the more I’m reminded of my own identity as part of the living world and connected to everything around me. With this has come an enduring sense of peace that I haven’t found elsewhere. It hits me in small moments of clarity – when I stand in awe at the base of an enormous old tree or when I lay in the grass on a sunny day and feel my body melt into familiar ease. My time spent in nature has shed light on some important pieces of wisdom within these seven universal themes:
Being versus Doing
Attention
Connection
Patience
Perspective
Acceptance
Motivation
Being versus Doing
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” – Walt Whitman
When I’m feeling overwhelmed, worried, or lost, my most reliable antidote is a quiet moment in nature. Although seemingly obvious to some, I’ve only recently begun to feel the true potency of its effects. As I make my way outdoors and ease into awareness of my surroundings, suddenly the thoughts and emotions that feel so constricting are given some space to breathe. As I focus on the physical sensations around me – feeling the breeze on my skin, listening to the sounds of ruffling leaves, filling my lungs with fresh air – I’m given a momentary reprieve from the ceaseless thoughts and worries.
In my repeated attempts to cultivate this state of mind, I’ve regained my respect and reverence for the lost art of doing nothing. By making the time to be alone outdoors with no tasks, activities, or destinations, I give myself the space to be truly present. For a few moments, I ask nothing of myself except to simply observe and sense the living world around me. This way of thinking challenges some of my most deeply-entrenched learned behaviors. Like most of us, I want to spend my time wisely and productively. I allocate much of my time each day with careful consideration in pursuit of larger goals and future states that lie ahead. It’s hard not to feel guilty or antsy when I sit and do “nothing”. But in the act of just being in nature, even just for a few brief moments, I let myself slow down and be curious and captivated by my surroundings; and I find myself amazed by what this opens up.
To be still in nature is to be reminded of a different way of being in the world. It illuminates the distinction between doing and being; and it reveals the fact that most of my time is spent living in the former but most of my peace and happiness is found in the latter. There is an enduring joy that we tend to look for in all the doing, that can be made available to us just by slowing down, observing, and being.
2. Attention
“[The] kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim — because attention is the doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Last year I stumbled upon a book by visionary ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer titled Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Her poetic observations and spiritual reverence for nature were what initially inspired me to reconnect with nature and tune into the wonders of the non-human living world. In her book, Kimmerer addresses one of the greatest needs of our time – the need to pay attention. “Paying attention,” she says, “acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness… creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve...”
Until recently, most of my time spent in nature was also spent lost in thought, deep in conversation, or engaged in some activity. Learning to direct my attention in nature to my immediate surroundings, I start to more deeply appreciate the marvels that surround me. In something as simple as observing a tree, the closer I look, the more I’m in awe of its mysterious qualities - how it remains rooted into the ground all its life, communicating with its neighbors through an underground network, creating habitats for plants, birds, and microorganisms in a thriving interconnected network. Kimmerer reminds us that attention is the gateway to wonder. Playing with this attentive curiosity leads me away from my own internal dialogue to an unexpected joy in discovery.
According to modern neuroscience, this kind of playful attention – one that is mesmerized by rays of sunlight on leaves or the subtle movement of water droplets – can reduce our distress and mental fatigue. Our brains rest and our attention is restored whenever we enjoy what’s called soft fascination, which is anything that entices our attention but doesn’t demand it.
William James, widely considered the father of modern psychology, said: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” When I spend time in nature with a present and engaged mind, I can learn to respect and savour life in each moment regardless of how seemingly mundane. Orienting my attention like this reminds me that I have the power to create my experience in each moment – one of boredom, frustration, preoccupation, or one of wonder and appreciation.
3. Connection
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir
The more time I spend in nature, the more I start to see myself within a larger interconnected network. Each ripple of water, each landing of a bee, each growth of a sprout plays its role in Earth’s greater cycles, and reminds me of my own role. I watch animals and gusts of wind carry the fruits of a plant to help spread its seeds; I watch bees and butterflies transfer pollen from one flower to the next; I revel in the strangely sweet scent of earth after rainfall, produced by bacteria in soil meant to signal the presence of water. As I bear witness to nature’s brilliant transportation and communication systems, these simple observations offer me a surprising sense of solace. I feel less alone, less trapped inside my own head, and less convinced that I am so separate from others.
Observing and connecting with the living world has this way of dissolving the perceived boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world. In nature, organisms in isolation are known to be less resilient and have lower rates of survival than those in positive relationship to others. We see that monoculture fields producing a single crop species don’t have the same resistance to pests and disease found in species-diverse areas. As humans living in the digital age, we are all familiar with isolation and loneliness and how this affects our mental and physical health. Our socialization and culture teach us that we are separate, self-existent individuals. But as human beings our nature is inextricably connected with each other and our world. Our survival depends on the food, water, and air we constantly take in from our surrounding environment, as well as the support we get from others: each breath we take is the exhale of a tree producing oxygen; every aspect of our being is fueled by the food we eat; we rely on plants’ ability to transform light and water into the nutrients that make their way to us; and as babies, we are born helpless into the world and we depend on others to care for us. Our connectedness is more than something that just sounds nice. Interdependency is a biological reality. We survive and thrive when in positive relationships to all that surrounds us.
When I really connect to these realities, I no longer take them for granted – I have a much deeper appreciation for the revitalizing quality of air in natural environments, a greater satisfaction in growing my own food or herbs, and a stronger resolve to care for others and the Earth. And somehow I also feel less lonely.
4. Perspective
“We take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.” - Iris Murdoch
When I sit at the base of an enormous tree, I’m struck by how differently two living beings can perceive time. A tree can live through generations of human lifetimes – hundreds and even thousands of years. The contrast deepens as I consider the insects and microorganisms living on that tree whose entire lifespans can last less than one full day. The more I dive into these contemplations, the more I notice the things that preoccupy my mind shrink away as I see my life with a wider lens. I start to loosen the rigidity of my own worldview.
Rachel Carson observed “against this cosmic background, the lifespan of a particular plant or animal appears, not as drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.” My life – its details and its dramas – which seem so all-encompassing and which, because it is all I know, appears to represent the totality of lived experience, is far from that. No matter how expansive my life appears, as one human I am privy to only a small slice of the bigger picture and the greater cycles of this universe.
In moments of open-mindedness, I can feel that my sensory experience is not the whole story. Lying in the grass feeling sunlight warm my body, I consider how many different perceptions of sunlight occur in a single moment. Light takes a drastically different form for me than it does for a plant. It can illuminate my surroundings, warm my body, brighten my mood, and color the world around me. But to plants, light is food - the vital sustenance that powers their entire being. This idea is deeply embedded in the core teachings of the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness. This tenet suggests that all things are empty of an intrinsic nature. Without diving too deeply into a discussion on emptiness, the important takeaway is that the concept asks us to question our perceptions. It asks us to consider the fact that everything we perceive is inextricably tied to our labels and conceptual ideas about those things. And this philosophy invites us to step back and see more.
Each time I connect with the lived experience of another being, I am offered a chance to emerge from my own narrow interpretation of reality. These moments ask for acceptance of the limits of my own knowledge and, in larger part, the limits of human capacity for comprehending what this world is. In the same way we open our minds to people from different cultures and backgrounds, when we open our hearts to the “other”-ness of non-human life, we can find wisdom on the nature of reality beyond the scope of our own worldviews.
5. Patience
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” – Lao Tzu
We measure progress in our lives as a positive indicator that we are moving in the right direction. In many aspects of my life including my work, studies, meditation practice, and personal growth, I often feel stagnant and frustrated by what I perceive as lack of progress.
Harvard psychologist and author Dan Gilbert explains how we struggle with this misconception known as the end of history illusion, we tend to assume that who we are at the present moment is the final destination of our personal growth. We have done this throughout childhood and at each point along our personal journeys thus far; although we can look back and recognize how much transformation has taken place since some point in our past, we fail to accurately predict how much we will continue to transform. In essence, the theory says that at every point in our lifetimes, we seem to have a persisting present-day illusion that who we are in this moment is who we will be for the rest of our lives. As he puts it, "human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished."
When reflecting on my personal growth and development, I’ve found comfort in observing the pace of natural processes in nature. Each time I plant a seed, I’m reminded to trust the pace of nature as I wait for the buds to sprout. Some emerge immediately, others take their time. One morning, like magic, I’ll find small green stalks boldly emerging out of the ground. Some are strong and sturdy one day, wilty and weak the next. Each time one begins to wilt I’ll be sure that sprout is dying. And then one week later, it’s back to vitality, vibrant and strong. As a plant grows, some of its leaves will yellow and fall off, some stems will bear flowers, some flowers will wither. I’ve learned to stop seeing a single sign as predictive of the plant’s overall health or growth. No longer shocked by these erratic patterns, I’ve come to trust that plant growth is far from linear, much like our own.
As I start to see my personal journey in a similar light, I can find peace amidst the ups and downs and the changes in speed and trajectory, while trusting that all the while I am still moving in the right direction. Nature reminds me to be patient and to surrender to the nonlinear, dynamic process of growth.
6. Acceptance
“Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.” – Pico Iyer
As I write this, I am watching the world around me slowly move through autumn into winter. Each year around this time I feel more viscerally aware of time passing. I’m filled with nostalgia and longing. I yearn for summer’s warmth and start to feel weary of the coming colder, shorter days. This year every morning I started my day with a few minutes in the park, looking to nature for guidance on how to be with the changing of seasons, and change in general, in a different way.
The natural world embraces transformation with grace. Leaves don’t seem to put up a fight as they change hue and float off of their life-sustaining branches. It’s this sense of change taking place without struggle. As trees shed their leaves and plants face the bitter cold air, the changes in colors and textures make the world come alive in a way that is undeniably stunning. As I watch this process I can see what it might be like to inhabit transient moments with more ease and flow, embracing each one without trying to hold on too tightly.
7. Motivation
“If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.” – Eleonora Duse
Practicing meditation in nature has fueled my motivation for developing mindfulness and cultivating an awakened mind. Being in nature reminds me why I meditate. The distinction between being lost in thought and being an observer of the thinking mind is sharpened outdoors. Meditating on a cushion indoors, the moment I catch myself lost in thought – some storyline, internal dialogue, a complex imaginary situation or future plan – I feel a palpable change in my body. A sense of ease floods through my body and some heaviness lifts as I escape the strange gravity of thinking. With quiet rejoicing I can return to the subtle radiance of the moment.
When I practice outdoors, however, this moment of return takes on an entirely new form. In this moment of reawakening, when I am outdoors surrounded by the natural world, my senses flood my consciousness and paint the world in vibrant color. The sounds of ruffling leaves and swaying trees, the quality of lights and colors and shapes, the feeling of wind against my skin, the smells and crisp fresh air all create a stunning symphony of sensations that pull me into the present moment. As I return to this vibrant aliveness, I wonder where it had all gone while I was lost in thought. Shocked by the power of my mind to mute out so much with the loudness of thoughts, I become aware of just how much I’d been missing.
Reconnecting with nature has felt like coming home. As I deepen this connection through my attention and care, I continue to find clarity, solace, and peace. With each lesson from the natural world, I learn to surrender to the vibrant life around me and tune in to what I so deeply don’t want to spend my life missing. Nature continues to illuminate my understanding of what it means to live a meaningful life – and revitalizes my motivation to live it boldly.
Source: Mindful Columbia