Category: Nature

Sweet Peas and Dancing Trees

When you move from one place to another, the way in which you view your surroundings day to day changes. Depending on how far you move and how different one location is from another, your perceptional shift can be imperceptible or radical. But it always happens. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I used to move frequently for just this reason: it was like throwing everything up in the air and starting all over again. Whether across town or coast to coast, the world was a different place. Traveling has the same effect. All my senses come alive in new ways. I am consciously interrupting habit, and I love it.

My partner and I recently moved to a condo on the opposite side of Boston from where we had lived for years in various apartments. This was after a move to Florida for two years. It is wonderful to be back in Massachusetts, and this current move has introduced us to an entirely unfamiliar town, quite different from where we used to live. It took a number of months for me to open fully to the change. I really missed where we lived for so many years (which was very close to Mt. Auburn Cemetery, my favorite nature sanctuary). Now, however, gradually, the sense of newness is reawakening my full awareness in unexpected ways.

For instance, last week on my daily walk I discovered bright pink and white sweet peas growing wild in the area next to the woods across from our condo. It was such a delight because it reminded me of my childhood in the Illinois countryside, where sweet peas blanketed the fences with their beautiful blooms. I never knew they could grow wild in the fields like I am seeing here. These were covered with bees and butterflies, and I stood watching them for quite a while in deep appreciation.

This past spring the cherry, crab apple, and red bud trees blooming here were also a surprise, as were the dozens of song sparrows and house finches singing all day from March on. Joined by cardinals, robins, Carolina wrens, gold finches, red-winged blackbirds, and catbirds, they have been a particularly powerful welcoming for me, as I was uncertain how many birds would be nearby. But the woods that surround the condo buildings are a natural habitat for them. Flocks of spring migrants have flown in, as well as birds that remain here all year. The entire area is alive with avian life.

The trees themselves are my latest source of inspiration and wonder. As the weather and winds change, the tall, intensely green oak, maple, beech, birch, and other trees reflect the shifts in air movement in quite dramatic ways. They dance! From our third-floor windows, I watch them quite literally dance with the wind, swaying synchronously like an Alvin Ailey or Martha Graham dance troupe. The music of the spheres seems to move them, and I feel a part of the greater movement of the universe as I watch their collective branch and leaf motion so perfectly in unison against the sky and clouds. Each time I gaze at them is a fresh look at life itself.

Every day now, my heart expands in gratitude for these gifts of Nature that surround me—and for the ability to see and hear them. As my habitual ways of perceiving fall away, the world opens up around me, and I remember that this can happen anywhere at any time. Moving does shake things up, but I can also keep my sensual acuity sharp by living each moment with wide-open awareness. Even walking in the same area in different seasons is a continually new experience. As I look out my window each morning at the ever-changing details of the natural world before me, I feel such joy—and my soul dances with the trees.

The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

I’ve been visiting it regularly for more than 40 years: Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1831 as the nation’s first garden cemetery, it remains a place of natural beauty and peace for those mourning loved ones as well as those who come to walk quietly and appreciate the diverse landscape. Old oaks and maples, flowering trees and bushes, butterfly garden and wildflower meadow, ponds, dells, and hills all combine to create a vibrant habitat and nature sanctuary. To me, in every season, it truly is the most beautiful place on Earth: the deep greens of summer, the red/gold/orange leaves of fall, the sparkling snows of winter—but especially the rainbow colors in springtime.

Spring! The word carries within it the feeling and the movement of the season. My heart literally springs with joy when I walk through Mt. Auburn’s gates and see the new yellow-green leaves on the trees and the daffodils and narcissus springing into bloom. These are special days of excitement and joy for me, too, because of the annual spring bird migration: a vast diversity of birds flying marathon miles from Central and South America to North America. Many of them I see only once a year as they stop on their flights north to nest and raise their young. Each sighting is a cause for celebration. Yay—you made it, sweet little being!

At the end of April this year, I made my first spring trip across town to Mt. Auburn, and as I walked along Indian Ridge to Auburn Lake (also known as Spectacle Pond), tears filled my eyes at the beauty of the azaleas bursting with red and white blossoms and the magnolias covered with huge pink blooms. And then the birdsong! Warblers, tanagers, thrushes, catbirds, and the whistling notes of the orioles, all of them virtuosos of song. No human symphony orchestra could be more varied and beautiful. Every year I feel this way. Every year I know I have walked into paradise on Earth, a gift of a lifetime.

Machu Picchu and the Napali Coast are spectacularly stunning, as are the Southwest’s red-rock deserts and the Caribbean’s turquoise seas. So many wonders in the world, all extraordinary—and yet, it is a small, quiet nature cemetery in Massachusetts that moves me most, heart and soul. I feel Spirit everywhere there. My parents are with me, as is every friend I’ve ever shared a walk there with. And every migrating bird I’ve seen in every year since the 1980s, each special and unrepeatable.

The memories are countless, all of them interwoven with the course of my life—and continuing into the future. One of the reasons that Anne and I moved back to Massachusetts after two years in Florida was for those longtime memories of people and places here. Including our wedding at Auburn Lake with friends and family present exactly ten years ago this June! The saying goes that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” True, but for me it’s in the heart of the beholder. There is no beautiful place on Earth that touches my heart more than Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Signs

It has been my experience that the universe often sends us signs to light our way or guide us on our life journeys. If one unexpectedly appears, I pay attention, often with shivers of synchronicity and a bit of awe. When Anne and I were searching for a new place to live, we went to countless open houses throughout areas north, west, and south of Boston. It was interesting but also frustrating because we didn’t see anything that was exactly right—and we lost the bid on one we really liked. As the end of our apartment lease drew closer (and we knew our rent was going up significantly), the pressure we felt increased.

We continued to look, and then there was one new open house at a condo community we had previously looked at but thought was a bit far away. Since this new condo seemed perfect for us, we decided to visit again. The night before the open house, just as I was going to sleep, I heard an eastern screech owl calling outside the window. I had not heard one for several years, and never near that particular location. I listened to its haunting call for several minutes before it stopped. Hearing it in the deep silent darkness felt almost sacred. The next day, we drove to the open house, and as we walked through the rooms, my eye was caught by a small painting on the wall: it was an eastern screech owl. Immediately, I had a profound inner sense that we were meant to live there. And, indeed, that is exactly what happened. Our bid was accepted, and we moved in several months ago.

Anne and I believed the owl was a sign for us, a signal pointing the way. That has helped us as we acclimated to a completely new town and very different surroundings. It has been difficult at times to let go of the familiar and jump into the unknown, even if it seems right. Interestingly, it’s the birds and the trees that continue to reassure us that we have made the right choice. The woods around the condo community are filled with birds, which in turn fill my heart with joy because I had been concerned that there wouldn’t be birds nearby when we moved. Especially robins, one of my most beloved birds.

I need not have worried. In fact, robins became the symbolic welcoming committee in the months after our move. Entire flocks of them flew overhead and landed in the nearby trees and on the ground, even in January. They ate juniper berries from the evergreens and foraged around through the leaves for insects. On any given day, I would encounter a dozen or more, which of course made me feel happy and also more “at home.”

As winter turned gradually to spring, house finches and song sparrows began their spring songs. The loud cheery call of the bright red male cardinal filled the air each morning from the very top of trees I passed on my walks. Deep in the woods I heard titmice, blue jays, goldfinches, and canyon wrens calling. Red-winged blackbirds arrived, heralding the beginning of spring migration, and their musical trills added to the orchestral mix. The presence of this large wooded area was a magnet for so many kinds of birds, and as the weeks passed, more and more spring migrants arrived (including Baltimore orioles!).

All of this was immensely reassuring to me, and once again I felt, as I had with the eastern screech owl, that the birds were giving us repeated, unmistakable “signs” that this was truly our home, as it was theirs. When a robin flies to a small tree next to where I’m standing and looks me in the eye with that friendly, intelligent robin gaze, I trust the perfect unfolding of my life here among the birds.

Bird’s Eye View

Anne and I live now in a third-floor condo overlooking an expanse of woods. In the past, we’ve always lived in second-floor apartments, so this is a change of perspective. We are at bird level. Blue jays and robins fly past our windows. We see more of the sky and continuously changing cloud formations. The sunlight moves into the trees at sunrise and fades to shadow at dusk. From a distance, we see flocks of birds land on the tree branches. As they fly through the sky and perch in the treetops, birds take in a multi-level overview of their environment. From our windows, I am coming to know a bit of how they experience the world.

I’m a birdwatcher/birder, so I love to see birds close up, but I am learning more about their sounds in living here. Now I often hear the birds before I see them. Because I am familiar with many of their calls and songs, I can usually identify which birds are nearby (e.g., nuthatch, chickadee, goldfinch, flicker, Carolina wren, cardinal, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers); I recognize them from their sound vibration instead of the visual cues. As the weeks go by, I am finding my hearing is becoming fine-tuned. I hear the bird calls and songs more readily and more distinctly now. My experience of being with birds has become as much sound as sight, like listening to an invisible avian orchestra in the trees.

There is a legally blind woman who visits Mt. Auburn Cemetery during the spring bird migration, as I do. She has been a birder for more than 30 years, and as her vision declined, she learned to identify birds solely by sound (after two cochlear implants for hearing loss). In fact, her ability to recognize bird calls and songs is so highly developed that she often hears what others can’t yet see. Or is able to identify a bird that some are hearing but can’t find in the trees. As her physical circumstances changed, her life experience also shifted. She meets the world in a different way now, through sound.

The Maya calendar symbol Tzikin stands for “vision” and is represented by the eagle, who sees a vast panorama of Earth from the skies. Intuition and clairvoyance are traits associated with this sign. Thus, “vision” can mean inner seeing in addition to outer. I would add that it can also mean sound as well as sight. Flying overhead, owls hear the sound of a tiny mouse beneath the snow; robins hear earthworms moving below the grass and soil. We may not be as aurally skilled as birds, but how we each experience the world depends on our own unique physical abilities and life experiences. All of life involves an inner/outer process, so every time we move from one place to another, whether a few feet or many miles, our perspective shifts. Also, as our physical form changes, so too does the way we perceive and receive life.

My “bird’s eye view” where I live now, on an upper floor, includes a wider lens in many ways. But it also includes a deeper listening at every level. Taken together, I experience the world in a more expansive way. Each day I am reminded how the universe is composed of an infinite number of interconnected fractals, which give me and all living beings the opportunity to encounter worlds of wonder in every sight, sound, scent, taste, or touch as we move through our lives.

In Search of Silence

Silence can be hard to find these days, and if you find it, hard to hang on to. The 21st century world is filled with noise almost everywhere, even in places that are supposed to be quiet, like cemeteries and residential areas. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I have to admit that I am a lover of quiet: the silence of meditation rooms and nature sanctuaries. Deserted beaches and country roads. Mountain tops and forest clearings. Mornings before dawn. I gravitate to the absence of any sounds except those in Nature. In recent years, that has become more difficult to discover, particularly in living situations.

When Anne and I moved back to Massachusetts from Florida three years ago, we rented an apartment that was on a busy street in a town northwest of Boston. The neighborhood was generally peaceful, but the traffic sounds on that street continued all day long. Only in the night and early morning hours did quiet descend. We learned to live with it, but it did not engender an ongoing sense of outer peace.  A few months ago, we moved to a condo community in a more rural/suburban area with woods close by and busy streets further away. Very quiet—with one exception: There is a rifle and pistol club down the road, and the sound of gunfire is frequently audible in the distance. Fortunately, the building we live in is relatively soundproof, so we don’t hear it unless we go outside for walks, when it can definitely be disquieting.

As a walking alternative, I often take the train across town to my favorite nature sanctuary, Mt. Auburn Cemetery. I have been going there for many years to experience a quiet, peaceful oasis in the midst of a semi-urban area. Recently, though, there has been a change in focus at the cemetery. They are trying to encourage more people to visit by organizing events such as solstice gatherings, historical walks, etc. Along with that comes new sidewalks in some areas and the (perceived) need to keep them clean and tidy at all times. Enter leaf-blowers—and the deafening noise that accompanies them. When I visit now, if landscaping equipment is in use, I move in another direction, like the birds.

So, are cars, guns, and leaf-blowers obliterating any chance for silent peace in our contemporary culture? Not necessarily. For me, a spiritual perspective helps. From this view, silence is not solely a surface phenomenon in the external world. It lives inside everything, including each one of us. A friend of mine told me that when he visited India, the noise of the crowds and traffic in the cities was almost overwhelming, and yet he felt a deep silence simultaneously. It arose from a Presence deeper than human activity. And it is everywhere if we become aware of it.

Perhaps the secret is to carry silence with you. If I enter a situation consciously aligned with the silent Presence of spirit inside me (and everything), then that is what I experience. If I accept whatever is before me, I access peace. Every day, I relearn that wisdom. Within that space, there is nothing that can disturb my inner peace and silent soul.

“Relax into the part of you that is always silent, always still, always in meditation.”—Panache Desai