When you delve into nature you delve into yourself
When I give myself the time to connect I allow another world to meet my own. It’s about the slowing of step and of thought into deliberate, coordinated movements. It’s ‘making something’ of time which is different to what I usually might. I will ‘mould’ time into an experience of connection.
Even if it’s just to have a moment to think about time, I will go into nature and slow. Often I ‘take’ some time to do something, but I’d rather ‘make’ or ‘create’ some time for it. This gives me a feeling that there’s ‘enough’ time whereas I could easily tell myself I’m ‘stealing’ a few minutes or on ‘borrowed’ time. Why would I want to borrow time when I can create it myself?
There’s something about time that’s malleable. We don’t simply live in clock time because often a ‘moment’ can feel a lot longer that the clock will tell you. My six year old daughter came downstairs the other night at 10.30pm wondering why it was dark because she was in certainty that it was morning. Sometimes ten minutes can feel like an hour (definitely has happened to me when meditating!) and sometimes an hour can go by fast as a drunken night.
My favourite way to slow time is to walk more slowly, to think more slowly and to sit.
So I go to where I can slow the most.
And that’s where rocks are and trees are, where I can sit and just be. I look at the trees and they tell me to take it easy, that I am who I am, and no matter what I look like, I can sit and just be, rooted to the spot. A tree has one place for all its life and I can call it patient and wise. I sit on a rock and it tells me of storm and rains, water and winds that shaped it through millennia and how it sits there and wants for nothing I could understand anyway. In the moments when I contemplate water – where it’s been and where it goes on its endless tour through air and ground – I feel like a passing breath of this world’s journey, a tiny but significant moment in its story.
We can’t save time in a bottle but we can place as much meaning as we can upon it. Create it, make it, stretch it, speed it up, slow it down, ignore it, whatever! I spend time in nature with intent because there I feel rich and so I spend as much as I can.
Make more time for nature.