Just Go Outside

Part of the blessing of being born in a human body is that we have senses. We can perceive the beauty around us in the natural world, and perceiving creates awareness. Humans have a particular depth of awareness: we can perceive ourselves perceiving. It comes straight back into us, into our felt sense, into our understanding of ourselves as witness of ourselves in the world.

So start there. Go outside and let your eyes perceive beauty.

You don't need the wild to begin. If you live in a city, it might be a grove of planted trees, a garden, a patch of sky between buildings. It might be standing at a window, out on a balcony, or in your backyard if you have one. Look at the sky and the sun. Watch the way the leaves move in the wind. Notice a glimmer of light catching the waxy side of a broad leaf. It does hit different out in the wild, but you work with what you have. You start somewhere.

In my experience, if you slow down enough to be with nature, it affects your human. Let the stories wait for a few minutes. Drop out of the head, down through the heart space, through the spine and into the belly, and let your body make contact with the air around you.

This autumn, where I live in the Rocky Mountains, the season is turning, and you can see it all around you. The deciduous trees are changing colour. The larches are turning too. There's mist in the morning and a different kind of humidity in the air. The rivers are lower and running more slowly. The animals' coats are thickening. Geese are flying over in their V formations, heading for warmer places. In the late evening, before the sun sets, the light gets potent, and the golden hour feels brighter. I love the crispness in the air.

Even as it heads toward the cold and the resting, this time of year is very bright and very alive, ready to receive the intentions, the blessings and the seeds that will incubate through the winter.

I go outside every day, and at night too. This fall I drove through the Rockies to the West Coast, and for the first time in my adult life that I can recall, I drove right through autumn, through the height of the mountains. It was beautiful.

Out there, I'm most me. This practice has been with me my whole life. In nature I'm just being, not in the hooks and the thinking and the over-intellectualization. I am nature.

It's so familiar to me that I'm more comfortable out there than I am with humans. Humans can be so loud and noisy, and a lot of them fill the silence. Not all of them. I'm very quiet. I have extra-sensory ways of perceiving, and I see and feel and sense it all. When people are tapped into the noise and the buzzing of it all, that's not me.

So go outside. Let yourself perceive beauty, and be in it. Just go outside. Just be.