Speaking of Foxes

Yesterday morning the turkeys walked across our snow-covered lawn. This morning, a fox.

Seconds before, our deck had been full of squirrels scavenging for sunflower seeds. They disappeared. I walked into the kitchen just in time to shout "Fox!" to Bill at the kitchen table.

The fox was in no hurry, so i fumbled with my smartphone-camera and snapped a couple of photos before the fox disappeared into the shadows of the forest.

If we are foxy in our meditation, we can catch those dagnabbit distractions before they lead us into completely forgetting our meditation object.

One possibility is to open the lens of awareness wide. The squirrels who disappeared had wide-open awareness, which told them to skedaddle because danger was afoot.

With wide-open awareness, we can catch the distraction before it catches us. Otherwise, our mind goes trotting off into the woods.

Forest Bathing

Cloud Mountain Retreat Center is located in the coastal range of Washington state, about an hour north of Portland, Oregon.  The meditation hall is nestled on a wooded hillside of Western red cedar, Douglas fir, and Western hemlock. The evergreens of this Evergreen State are tall. Really, really tall.

Walking in the silence beneath the giant trees, I am surrounded by three-foot tall ferns, Oregon grape, moss on the ground, and more moss hanging from the trees. I smell the forest floor. In splotches, I feel hot sun. I am not carrying a camera. My inner naturalist delights at the sight of spiderwebs glistening in a ray of sunlight. A deer ambles across my path and stops and looks at me.

I feel calm. My mind is quieter than usual.

I’m forest bathing.

Beech Hedge

Here in England and Scotland, we often see beech hedges--an inventive way to make use of those copper-y beech leaves that don't fall off until the very end of April. A beech hedge can be one "wall" of a garden "room."

The idea of a beech hedge is particularly attractive to me since i live in the woods, which is full of beech saplings. I recently heard the state archaeologist give a talk, and he said that 6,000 years ago, just after the Ice Age, beech made up 36 percent of the forest in Vermont. My guess is that it still does.

My neighbor, who lived in England 40 years ago, is trying to create a beech hedge to keep the deer out.

How do you create a protective hedge so that the positive qualities you wish to grow will actually grow? For instance, it's difficult to listen to the news and cultivate happiness at the same time. The news gives us many opportunities to practice compassion, but i often get stuck in ain't-it-awful or some other form of aversion. Aversion is a mental weed that i do not want to propagate.

My "hedge" means i don't read or listen to the news very much--maybe 5 minutes a day reading the headlines in our town newspaper. It's amazing how much i absorb through osmosis.

Here in the U.K., the news has been interminably of Brexit for the past two years. People are good and tired of that "news," which could just as well be called "olds."

It's time to build a hedge around your precious time, your precious life.

Forest Skyline

A few years ago, I bought a cup on Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands in Washington state. This is my favorite cup, though its colors are not my usual colors.

And then, this week, I "saw" for the first time that this cup is the same colors as the sky and the forest. In fact, its abstract edginess even looks like the forest skyline.

This is what perception does: enables us to re-cognize something familiar, something with which we have associations. In reality, the cup is about sky and forest as much as a cloud looks like a camel. Perception comes and goes and enables us to get along in the world, but when you look closely has no real reality.

Never mind. I still love this smallish cup of green and blue.

When We Can't See the Forest for the Trees

Driving home from Boston late Saturday afternoon in the pouring snow and without snow tires :( we found a B&B in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire and homed in for the night. Sunday morning dawned with a blue sky and melting-wet roads.

We drove home through the spectacular beauty of snow-laden pine trees interspersed with khaki green, gold-brown oak trees that still have all their leaves. The combination made for beautiful mottled hillsides. I really had no idea of the dense oak population in New Hampshire forests.

We often can't see the forest for the trees. We are so focused on the thoughts in the mind that we don't notice the mind itself. We "believe" our thoughts and think they are real when they are but momentary firings of neurons, passing through quickly. And then they are gone.

We've had 10,000 thoughts in the past 24 hours. Where are they now?

We've been so intent on the trees (i.e., our thoughts), that we haven't noticed the forest of the mind just being there.