To Be Still

My “season of listening” continues. . . . And for a while this afternoon it continued in nature – at the Prayer Tree by Minnehaha Creek in south Minneapolis to be specific.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one writer whose words I’m using as a guide throughout this “season of listening” is Eckhart Tolle. It seems appropriate, then, to accompany my photos of today with excerpts from that part of Tolle’s book Stillness Speaks in which he talks about nature.

We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating – lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.

We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be – to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.

Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural exists.

To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness.

Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.

When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm by being there fully. Be still. Look. Listen. . . . All things in nature are not only themselves but also one with the totality. They haven’t removed themselves from the fabric of the whole by claiming a separate existence: “me” and the rest of the universe.

The contemplation of nature can free you of that “me,” the great troublemaker.

– Eckhart Tolle
Excerpted from Stillness Speaks
Hodder & Stoughton, 2003
pp. 77-78

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Season of Listening
• Eckhart Tolle on Silence and Stillness
• Eckhart Tolle on Going Beyond the Thinking Mind
• Time to Go Inwards
• A Prayer of Anchoring
• Today I Will Be Still
• Cultivating Stillness
• Inner Peace
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• Mystical Participation
• I Need Do Nothing . . . I Am Open to the Living Light
• Stepping Out of Time and Resting Your Mind
• In the Stillness and Silence of This Present Moment
• The Beauty and Challenge of Being Present in the Moment
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• Cosmic Connection
• The Mysticism of Trees
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• To Dream, to Feel, to Listen
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All
• The Source is Within You
• Forever Oneness
• In the Midst of the “Great Unraveling,” a Visit to the Prayer Tree
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• In This In-Between Time
• Waiting in Repose for Spring’s Awakening Kiss

Images: Michael J. Bayly.