Re-Engaging with Peace – Words of the Land

Do you get wound up, spun out and hair-frizzled sometimes in a frenetic, heroic attempt to cover all your bases? To leap through the hoops? Keep up with all the lists? Don’t drop the ball! Join the modern circus!

Do you have time to stop and breath deep? Ha! Lean against a tree? Are you kidding? Stroll aimlessly down a trail? What, you think I’m a loafer?!

Our human world, personal and societal, generates endless complications, duties and distractions that breed lots of thinking and reacting. The pace of our cognitive engagement picks up exponentially entering the domain of computers and electronic communications. We speed up to keep up, like jackrabbits racing bullet trains. It’s a mental and physical whirlwind. An avalanche of emails and television messages cascades over us, grasping at us, shrieking for our attention with a thousand images and come-ons, few concerned with our well-being. The roar of traffic and machinery and the incessant electronic buzz jangle us, but we get used to it, thinking it’s normal!

Some of us forget over the course of days or months or years that nature even exists at all. We forget that humans evolved in intimate contact with wild presences and lived among them for millennia. Out of touch with nature, we forget the quiet well-being that flows through it.

Nature’s pace is simple, still, flowing, gentle. It’s always there, only requiring our breath and that we drop into the flow and quietness that stream through it. That’s the trick. We get so wound up! It takes a deliberate effort to disengage from the frenzy. To wind down. Let trees and water remind you of a part of yourself that’s always well and always simple.

I talk about breathing with trees, listening to wind, watching the wild world. It all can sound so airy-fairy and irrelevant in the context of this modern human roller coaster of incessant busyness, problems and demands. Yet, what is more relevant than deep peace? What is more practical than a sense of connection to your own fundamental well-being? Isn’t that the point of it all, anyway?

Read the Poem of the Week: Coming Back