One sunny day this past April, I spent several hours walking among the trees, flowers, dells, and ponds of my favorite nature sanctuary, Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Spring is pure paradise at Mt. Auburn: Leave your physical form at the front gate and become one with the spirit of seasonal rebirth all around you! There is an underlying stillness that fills the air. Even the birdsong and wind through the trees seem to arise from that stillness.

I could feel it in my own heart as I listened to the trilling of hundreds of American toads at Halcyon Lake and sat next to the sunning turtles at Willow Pond. My eyes closed, I sensed both the life-force energy and the profound silence within the sounds of spring. All motivation for movement of any kind fell away. I stopped taking the occasional nature photo—it felt like a distraction. 

I was reminded of visiting the Hopi mesas in Arizona, where the indigenous people there ask that visitors not use cameras or take pictures. I can remember a sense of relief and letting go into the immediacy of the experience. No striving to record what was happening, just a release into Presence, fully connected, heart and soul. The Hopi in their wisdom know that this is the essence of daily life, being fully present. This memory filled my awareness as I opened my eyes and saw the turtles with their heads raised to the warmth and light of the sun. In sitting with them, I too was fully present.

Temples, spiritual sanctuaries, and libraries usually request that visitors observe silence while there. Cemeteries too ask for quiet, in respect for those who have passed and those who may be grieving. I feel that Mother Nature asks this of us as well in all natural settings. When the noise of traffic, machinery, and human voices falls away, there is just silence, the essential stillness of the human soul—where we come home and know fully that we and Nature are one.

In springtime, at a place like Mt. Auburn, where life visibly renews itself in the flowers and trees and the migrating birds, I experience this most profoundly. My inner spirit is also renewed listening to the infinitely varied voices of Nature all around me, which are somehow part of the silence. As I walk, eyes, ears, and heart fully open, any residue of mental separation disappears: no subject or object; no this and that. Stillness and sound are One, within me and everywhere else.