Reconnecting with Nature

“Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.”

Gary Snyder

I’ve been going outdoors to my favourite little spot to sit down for years and it was only recently that I read about the phenomenon and the popularity of ‘sit spots’ or ‘Gaia spots’ as they have been termed. At its simplest it just means going outdoors, sitting down and opening your senses to nature; then coming back and repeating on a regular basis, preferably somewhere near home, since otherwise it’s not so likely to happen regularly. 

It’s a practice. I only realised this point more recently: the fact that I was going out most days for nature walks and then sitting down, opening up to my sensory experience and reconnecting with the deeper more instinctual part of our nature. I am convinced that this simple practice can do much to help people reconnect to nature, our ancestral heritage and home.

 My favoured spot is on my nearby allotment, a bench nestled under the shading canopy of some low trees. Here I come winter or summer, gazing out on a tiny pond in front of me where the birds come to drink and bathe year round. In summer I’m shaded from the sun and in winter my hands and feet may be freezing, but that’s all part of the changing experience.

It’s not about thinking, labelling, or even observing, but on allowing one’s senses to gradually become activated: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and especially feeling. It can help to start simply by, for example, closing your eyes, and listening just for sound. What can you hear? Perhaps the rustle of leaves, the dull thrum of a jet far above, or a blackbird singing. Just experience the sound without trying to identify it.

Still with eyes closed, try to find out what you can smell.  Perhaps nothing at all at first, since we’re so unaccustomed to exercising this sense that it is semi-atrophied: then maybe faint whiffs of perfume from flowers, or the distinct freshness of cool outdoors air, or the earthy smell (petrichor) from the soil after a light rain on dry earth, or the musty smell of decaying wood. 

At first it might feel boring because it can seem like nothing much is happening, but persevere and soon there will be little openings and it starts to get interesting. Then when you return to your spot over a period of time you start to notice what has changed: what has grown; the opening of buds and flowers, different bird sounds, the changing mood of your spot; different light according to the seasons. You become connected to the weather, the seasonal changes and cycles of nature. In front of me, I’ve been watching the elegant silver birch logs which served as little tables, gradually disintegrating over a few years and have seen all the varied life on them.

As you continue, it becomes apparent that although the senses are discrete organs, in reality, much of the time the senses aren’t experienced separately; instead a synesthesia of sensory experience is both very common and natural. For example, I hear the gentle rustle of the leaves in the breeze and in the big poplar trees in the background which contribute to an ensemble of subtle sounds somewhat like the sand shifting on a beach in the tide. There’s the cool sensation of feeling the wind caressing my skin; and there’s the visual spectacle of myriad small branches swaying in the breeze and the changing greens and silver as thousands of leaves turn in the sunlight. I listen to the scratchy twitter of the goldfinches in the trees above my head, conversing with each other in their high pitched voices.

A tiny leaf warbler – a chiffchaff –  tentatively comes down to the pond, perching delicately on the stem of the hollyhocks, before coming for a bathe in the water creating small ripples. I’m transfixed by such little occurrences and can almost feel the pleasure and sensation of bathing myself. You can find yourself entering into a visceral experience of shared identity.

I do this in the city because that’s where I live. Of course I love being out in more wild places in nature, but at root it’s not really about the place, it’s far more to do with one’s consciousness and presence. A back garden or a balcony will work fine or a bench in the local park; you just want somewhere with at least a modicum of life, whether trees, flowers, insects or birds. If you can’t be in communion with nature in such urban spots, it won’t help being out in a national park or nature reserve, as it’s about the quality of presence rather than the amount of biodiversity. 

My other local favourite spot is out on the balcony of our fourth floor flat, watching the herring gulls wheeling in the sky and following the life of the local flock of street pigeons with my companion cat, who likes to sit still with me there. It’s about a changed relationship, a different sense of identity and this can be practised and developed. We can’t recreate indigenous experience but we can discover and experience being part of nature, and our essential non separation.

I regard my seat as my sacred spot; it becomes sacred to me from the being and love that I bring to it. Of course it’s not sacred because of it being any kind of auspicious unusual place; it’s a brownfield site, where former docking industries once scoured the land, before being allowed to be reclaimed by nature over the last few decades. But such spots can become auspicious and sacred for us, by virtue of our being fully present there over time. You develop a deep relationship with your chosen spot by coming regularly throughout the year, through all the seasons and weather, seeing the cycles of growth and change; the trees and shrubs and even the stones become, in a way, personal companions and friends.

This kind of relationship has become second nature to me now; a sort of natural meditation with the joy of not being alienated from nature. I lie back and look through the patterns of leaves above to the infinite cerulean sky above. The canopy of branches above me offers shade in the heat of summer now and the dappled sunlight highlights the intricate shapes of the leaves. The view in front of me is overpoweringly GREEN –  comfrey, grasses, water reeds, borage and many other plants of all shades of green – but it is often the sheer impossibleness of the green which seems to soak into my being, soothing; it feels like an ancestral home. 

I am not doing anything in particular but just sitting, not trying to still my mind or watch my mind. Usually with eyes open, in touch with all my senses, though I might close my eyes at moments if the urge arises. It’s just being here, not focussed on inner or outer but both and neither; a kind of daoist meditation, if you like. The daoists called it ‘quiet sitting’, while Wordsworth called it  ‘wise passiveness’. The animate side of consciousness that we share with all other beings starts to be activated. If practised for a while, people can be amazed at the increased sensitivity and richness of what they now experience. With time and practice, one’s sensory awareness becomes far beyond what most people can even imagine and one can get a lived sense of how indigenous peoples have universally felt all of nature as being animate. This is because if you engage in this long enough, you can’t avoid the fact that sensory perception is participatory, that the senses participate fully with our surroundings and it’s a two way process. The human organism cannot help but experience everything as alive, as animate. The notion that you’re just the disembodied observer as you sit there, is a deeply encultured and abstract stance which doesn’t accord with the reality of creaturely existence. We are always participating, entangled with the earthly world of which we are intrinsically a part.

My friendly robin usually appears on a nearby branch often at eye height. He cocks his head towards me, his liquid black eye holding me in his gaze as he is in my gaze. Letting that sink in, is mysterious and endlessly fascinating. The dark wonder and weirdness of being in contact with other intelligences that are radically different from our own human intelligence; so other and yet simultaneously such kinship and identity. 

Robin and I sit in the gloaming on a summer’s evening. He accepts and trusts me and perches alongside me, looking out together; I feel we are in contemplation together. Robins have bigger eyes than other songbirds and stay up later into the evening when the light is fading. Robin is here year round, and he’s looking a bit tattered after the rigours of the breeding season and asks for some sunflower seeds to help him through the summer moult.

I listen and feel and look, connecting with the otherness of sentient life forms. The deep green ivy moves day by day creeping over the rotting logs in front of my seat; plants move, but at their own pace and if you come regularly year round, you get to follow their cycles and spurts.

Sometimes a tiny insect or spider will catch my eye and I enter into a totally different scale of perception, absorbed by the minute spider hanging on its gossamer thread and lowering herself down from the branches above; I am lost in wonder and awe as this being goes about her daily life in a parallel cosmic world.

Getting down on all fours next to my tiny pond, I often gaze at the life beneath the surface. A galaxy of life reveals itself; to me as exciting as the latest images from the new James Webb telescope. I watch little newt larvae (tadpoles) gliding over the stony substratum, with their feathery external gills and minute legs giving them the look of miniature dragons in this underwater world.

Other beings start responding differently to you as you engage in this way as they can feel your peaceful intentions and more aware state of mind. I talk to birds and mice and squirrels and foxes and they soon drop their guard. Twice I have had foxes come to lie down and die at my sacred spot; it can’t be a coincidence as I haven’t heard of any other allotment plot holder having the same experience. I think that the foxes just somehow feel my spot as a safe place. We modern humans have become so atrophied in our feelings and distracted by our frontal cortex noise, that we are simply not in tune with the rest of nature. But we are animals too and our sensory experience can be reactivated.

If it seems like I’m describing a lot going on in nature, it’s just because I’m tuning in to it and becoming sensitive to all around me; my urban spot is not really at all rich in biodiversity, being in the middle of the city. You don’t have to have any particular natural history knowledge to benefit from sitting quietly in nature. And conversely, having extensive knowledge about the natural world needn’t be a barrier and can actually enhance our participation and sense of awe. As long as cerebral knowledge is secondary to the lived experience of connection, it can enrich and add wonder. For example, I love the small thrushes called redwings who visit each winter and my love is only enhanced knowing that they arrive having flown right across the North Sea from Scandinavia to spend the winters in relatively warmer Britain. Indigenous peoples have always had extensive knowledge of all the different plants and their use; and of all the many varied animals and birds and their habits and calls. In fact if you spend time at your sit spot over a significant period of time, you can’t help but develop some kind of genuine lived experience of natural history.

Gradually this can become a natural way of being and I find that whether I am sitting at my spot or walking in nature or in the midst of the city, my senses are always awake and it starts to feel that the doors of perception are opening. 

As Blake said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

For the further you go into all this, it takes you way beyond mere sharpening of the senses, into a felt identity with the more-than-human world, and an accompanying  deeper reverence, empathy and kinship.  And it deepens the mystery and wonder of how directly experiencing being completely here in this one local spot is a way to connect us palpably to every other place.

The health benefits of time spent in natural settings and in green environments, whether walking, sitting or gardening, is now scientifically well documented. Healing occurs faster in patients in hospitals merely by the addition of green pictures of nature on the wall. On our local allotment where I sit, one plot has been given over to patients referred by local GPs to come and get their hands in the soil and commune with others. This so-called social prescribing can be more effective than medication for anxiety and depression. For myself, this connection with nature helps keep me sane amidst the horrors of escalating ecological devastation.

To my mind, the deeper benefit of quiet sitting in nature is the emotional connection that develops. So many people in the modern world are dissociated from the natural world; they spend little time out in green spaces and even when they do, they are often buried in their smartphone screens and headphones. So most people don’t feel a big emotional connection with nature and consequently don’t care enough to demand change or to be part of trying to arrest this spreading ecocide. A simple practice like I have described above could really help change our attitude and orientation for the benefit of all beings who we share this precious world with.

 “We will not save what we do not love. And we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred.”

Thomas Berry, eco theologian

“You begin by dealing with the particular with attention, with thoroughness, you don’t neglect and ignore one single particular in your daily living. All the particulars are the emanations of the Whole, expressions of the Whole. So you see the Wholeness concealed in the part. You have no other way to get related to the totality but through the particulars. Is not that beautiful?

When you are totally attentive,  alert and sensitive to the particular,  in that attentiveness,  in that sensitivity, the awareness of the Whole shall be there. You don’t have to make an effort.”

Vimala Thakar, social activist & spiritual teacher