| Copyright 2002
Wilderness Drum, Inc.
All rights reserved Closer to the Earth
Steve Beyer Being Something Else A way to get close to nature is to change into a member of another species. This imaginative exercise can shift our perspective in the same way as can looking at things up close, or standing upside down, or lying on the ground naked. In doing these experiments, you can set aside language, analysis, self-consciousness, and simply be what you have become. Or you can be linear and rational; for example, you could keep a daily journal of the life of the creature into which you have changed. But always use all your senses – touching, seeing, hearing, smelling – in order to drink in and absorb this new way of being in the wilderness.  Become a tree. Think of how long you have been standing, how patient you are. Feel the presence of the other trees around you. Feel your deep roots, solid in the earth, absorbing moisture and nutrients. Spread out your arms, and feel your leaves absorbing the sunshine and changing it into food. Think of your trunk – a solid mass of wood at the core, living skin just below the bark. Feel the energy of the earth moving through you.
Become a tree. Feel a bird hop on your branches, looking for insects under your leaves. Think of the bird building a nest on your branches. Think of squirrels spending the winter sleeping in your trunk. Think of a fox in a lair down among your roots. Think of a woodpecker pecking under your bark and pulling out the insects it finds there.
Become a tree. Live through a violent thunderstorm; feel your roots hold you in place while your branches sway in the strong wind and lightning strikes about you. Live through a winter; sleep under the heavy weight of the snow. Live through a spring; feel the new buds form, the leaves grow, the warmth of the sun waking you.
Think of an attribute you wish to acquire – courage, silence, patience, joy. Identify some feature of the natural world which embodies that attribute. Courage might be embodied by a cougar, silence by a cloud, patience by a spider, joy by a hummingbird. Become that thing – a tree, a mountain, the wind, a bear, a raven. Continue until you feel a change that indicates you have absorbed the way of being of that part of nature. Was the change what you expected? < Previous Next > |
