Meditiations

Human wellbeing needs time and space for turning down the internal, mental chatter and repetitive focus on 'things to do', 'things to worry about' or 'problems to solve'. Present moment awareness is about setting aside these concerns and focusing on the body and your immediate perception of the world; allowing the mind to calm and slow down. One way to do this is through contact with nature.

Many people throughout history have intuitively understood how contact with, and quiet awareness of, the natural world provides, healing, contentment, a sense of reconnecting with the self and deep connection with the world...

Listen to the sounds of the bush while you read

The path winds ahead and disappears invitingly among the trees.

My senses are alive to red and brown shining from the canyon wall,

Warm in the evening sun.

A soft touch cools my face and ripples leaves overhead.

A magpie makes new music for its friends somewhere high up to my left.

The sensations fill me up, remade in every moment,

While the path turns to follow the creek.

A deeper pool where the current slows lets me into it.

Sun waits on the brow of the hill for the Earth to turn.

Trees whisper of the coming night.

My skin shivers.

There is nothing to do or say.

Matthew Fisher

Philosopher & artist (1960 -)

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in

the eyes of others only a green thing that stands

in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and

deformity... and some scarce see nature at all.

But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature

is imagination itself.

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hands,

And eternity in an hour.

William Blake

English engraver, illustrator, & poet (1757 - 1827)

I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare
Winters before I was born of song and story,
Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation,

The great ash long dead by a roofless house, its branches rotten,
The voice of the crows an inarticulate cry,
And from the wells and springs the holy water ebbed away.

A child I ran in the wind on a withered moor
Crying out after those great presences who were not there,
Long lost in the forgetfulness of the forgotten.

Only the archaic forms themselves could tell!
In sacred speech of hoodie on gray stone, or hawk in air,
Of Eden where the lonely rowan bends over the dark pool.

Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain,
Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red,
Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain.

Kathleen Raine
Poet (1908 - 2003)

It has happened to me, while taking solitary walks through

the woods of Baarn, that I would suddenly stop in my tracks

and stand stiff as a board, overcome by a frightening,

unreal and yet blissful sense of standing eye to eye with the inexplicable. That tree there in front of me, as an object, as

part of the woods, is perhaps not so amazing, but the

distance, the space between it and me, suddenly seems unfathomable.

MC Escher

Dutch artist and illustrator (1898 - 1972)

The three girls were seated around the fire, the eldest making bread, the middle daughter tending the fire, while the youngest sat beside me enlisting me as a playmate in a pat-a-cake type of game. I can’t recall ever being in a busy situation of cooking and fire-building that has such an ease and restfulness about it. Meltingly so. An absent-minded efficiency. The sun had set but the sky still had some light in it and from my place inside the tent I gazed in rapture at the beautiful silhouetted profile of the Bedouin girl, the breeze slightly blowing her veil, standing in the tent entrance, silently looking out at the sky.

Nomi Kluger-Nash - Resurgence
Jungian psychologist

When in the exercise of his powers of observation man undertakes to confront the world of nature, he will find at

first experience a tremendous compulsion to bring what he

finds there under his control. Before long, however, these

objects will thrust themselves upon him with such force that

he, in turn, must feel the obligation to acknowledge their

power and pay homage to their effects. When this mutual interaction becomes evident he will make a discovery

which, in a double sense, is limitless; among the objects he

will find many different forms of existence and modes of

change, a variety of relationships livingly interwoven; in

himself, on the other hand, a potential for infinite growth through constant adaptation of his sensibilities and

judgement to new ways of acquiring knowledge and

responding with action.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German dramatist, novelist, poet, & scientist (1749 - 1832)

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

It is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein

US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

Yet our weary civilization has a great longing, not for achievement, not for the high arts of the Renaissance, the wonders of the world, but for something simple and primordial that we have lost. But now it seems to me that all that is over; if I could – but I cannot – I would lay down that burden, that responsibility, and be with the leaves in the garden, the tree outside my window – an acacia, beautiful with its heavy white flowers – with the birds who always have time, with the clouds and the rain. In our terrible urban civilization, who has time for life itself? Some pray, some meditate. These may perhaps bring that moment, or they may be yet another distraction, like early morning physical exercise or switching on the news almost as soon as we are awake. We do not listen, we do not see the real world very often.

Kathleen Raine
Poet (1908 - 2003)

The earth here is deep.

The stilled flow in cold tension;

Muscular, replete.

It suffers life to grow.

The layers of life are deep.

Generations plump the folded sheets of moss

Around the shadowed boles

Of twisted trees. Between they recede

In blurred palettes of black and green.

A long note, cold, deep,

Rings on silently and sweet

For long so ever long.

I am a fragment of song,

A brief harmonic ripple

On the edges of a temple gong

Ringing in the mountain keep.

Under my feet the tendrils blindly

Drink the cold river.

Matthew Fisher

Philosopher & artist (1960 -)

When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river,

to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not

listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not

bind his soul to any particular voice and absorb it

into his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the

unity; then the great song of a thousand voices

consisted of one word: Om – perfection.

Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha

Swiss (German-born) author (1877 - 1962)

What I want to talk about is another special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call "contemplation". When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening. Through the years, we have listened to our stories. They are told and sung, over and over, as the seasons go by.

Today we still gather around the campfires and together we hear the sacred stories. As we grow older, we ourselves become the storytellers. We pass on to the young ones all they must know. The stories and songs sink quietly into our minds and we hold them deep inside. In the ceremonies we celebrate the awareness of our lives as sacred. The contemplative way of dadirri spreads over our whole life. It renews us and brings us peace. It makes us feel whole again… In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.

Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years… There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.

Dr. Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann

Aboriginal elder, educator and artist, Daly River region, Australia

I do my utmost to attain emptiness;
I hold firmly to stillness.
The myriad creatures all rise together
And I watch their return.
The teaming creatures
All return to their separate roots.
Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.
This is what is meant by returning to one’s destiny.
Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.

Woe to him who wilfully innovates
While ignorant of the constant,
But should one act from knowledge of the constant
One’s actions will lead to impartiality,
Impartiality to kingliness,
Kingliness to heaven,
Heaven to the way,
The way to perpetuity,
And to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.

Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
Chinese Taoist philosopher(s) (500 - 400 BC approx)

Istigkeit – wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use?
‘Is-ness.’ The Being of Platonic philosophy – except that
Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque
mistake of separating Being from becoming, and identifying
it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could
never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining
with their own inner light and all but quivering under the
pressure of the significance with which they were charged;
could never have perceived that what rose and carnation so
intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, that
what they were – a transience that was yet eternal life

Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception
English critic & novelist (1894 - 1963)

Reflect upon the beauty of the way in which both the land and sea are made
And contemplate the attributes of Allah outwardly and secretly
The greatest evidence to the limitless perfection of Allah can be found
Both deep within the self and the distant horizon.
If you were to reflect on physical bodies and their marvellous forms
And how they are arranged with great precision, like a string of pearls;
And if you were to reflect on the earth and the diversity of its plants
And the great varieties of smooth and rugged land in it;
And if you were to reflect on the secrets of the oceans and their fish,
And their endless waves held back by an unconquerable barrier;
And if you were to reflect on all the secrets of the heavens –
The Throne and the Foot-stool and the spirit sent by the command –
Then you would accept the reality of the tawhid* with all your being,
And you would turn from illusions, uncertainty and otherness.

(*The doctrine of divine unity)
Shaykh Ibn al-Habib The Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad Ibn al-Habib
Islamic scholar and poet
Sufi Master of the Darqani-Qadiri Order (1862-1972)

In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it,-- dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it. I wish to get the Concord, the Massachusetts, the America, out of my head and be sane a part of every day.

Henry David Thoreau - The Journal
Naturalist and author (1817 - 1862)

When I’m working with a material it’s not just the

leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are

behind them that are important. That’s what I’m

trying to understand, not a single isolated object

but nature as a whole – how the leaf has grown,

how it has changed, how it has decayed, how the

weather’s affected it. By working with a leaf in its

place I begin to understand these processes.

Andy Goldsworthy

British environmental artist (1956 -)

When I was a boy of thirteen and played with the great conductor Bruno Walter, I was struck when he expressed so passionately his wish that he might hear again the symphonies of Beethoven played for the first time.

Yehudi Menuhin - Resurgence

Violinist (1916 - 1999)

We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful

that our knowledge not close the circle, closing

out the void, so that we forget that what we do not

know remains boundless, without limit or bottom,

and that what we know may have to share the

quality of being known with what denies it. What is

seen with one eye has no depth.

Ursula Le Guin - Always Coming Home

Writer (1929 -)