Awake in the Wild

Of course, there is a time and place for thinking, planning, and analyzing. We just need to learn when it is appropriate to think and when to let it go and instead inhabit our physical sensory world.

Goethe, the great naturalist and observer writes, “If you want to reach the infinite . . . explore every aspect of the finite.”

We can begin to experience nature as a doorway to the sacred, a way to find stillness, silence, and timeless mystery.

We can spend so much time in our homes, cars, offices, and shopping malls that we feel removed from nature and separate from each other and even ourselves. With our world so circumscribed, we become cut off from a natural vitality and connection with life. We may feel numb, flat, or simply disconnected from a sense of purpose. Spring flowers and wi

When we are simply attentive to the raw data of sensory experience, we cultivate a quality of bare attention that is free of concepts, that doesn’t make more out of something than it actually is, that doesn’t build a story around the experience or analyze the experience or imagine a different or better scenario. It is a way of being that is free fr

By staying with our raw sensory experience, we cease to see the world through our concepts and subsequent fears. We learn to meet our experience just as it is. A sound is just a sound; a sensation is just a sensation. Nothing more, nothing less. There is profound peace in this quality of presence.