I knew I
wanted to live in the mountains of western North Carolina by the time I was 17.
Just something about the greenness and the clear, chatty streams, the clouds
drifting across the mountains that made me feel
good.
Took me 25
years to get here, and I’ve lived here now for 18. Nothing just naturally
brings me out of worry and hurry and frustration and into peace like walking in
all this beauty.
Wendell
Berry says it wonderfully in his poem, The
Peace of Wild Things.
When
despair for the world grows in me
and
I wake in the night at the least sound
in
fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I
go and lie down where the wood drake
rests
in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I
come into the peace of wild things
who
do not tax their lives with forethought
of
grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And
I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting
with their light. For a time
I
rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Mindfulness
practice also brings us, step by step, into the presence of still water—where
we begin to be able to not tax
our lives with forethought of grief—or the thousand other ways we burden ourselves.
By
slowly uncovering and nurturing clarity, wisdom and compassion at our core,
our wild things also begin to come in
peace. Amazingly we find (without having to travel any distance at all) we too,
little by little, rest in the grace of the world, and are free.
