Nature Speaks

I was walking along the path without really walking. My body was moving forward, familiar with the route, while my mind was already elsewhere, lightly occupied with thoughts that had little to do with where I was. This is how much of our walking happens: efficient, automatic, barely inhabited.

What interrupted this was something entirely ordinary. The bark of a tree beside the path. Nothing rare or remarkable. Just the surface of the trunk, close enough to be seen clearly if one slowed down. I stopped almost without meaning to and let my attention rest there.

The bark was rough, layered, uneven. Its colours shifted subtly from grey to brown to green, marked by time, weather, growth, and damage. It carried traces of what it had endured without displaying them as a story. I found myself following its lines, not analysing them, simply looking. In doing so, I noticed that my breathing had slowed and that my body had stopped leaning forward, as if it no longer needed to hurry toward whatever came next.

This is one of the quiet effects of attention: when we give it fully to what is in front of us, the mind loosens its grip on what is absent.

After a while, I looked up.

Above me, the tree opened into height and light. The canopy rose far beyond what I had been aware of moments before, branches thinning into sky, moving slightly in the air. From the path below, from my usual forward-facing gaze, I could easily have walked on without ever noticing the tops of the trees. They were always there, but they only appeared when my attention changed direction.

It struck me how often this happens in daily life. We see what is useful for moving ahead, but not what surrounds us. We live inside a narrow corridor of attention, guided by habit, urgency, and purpose. This makes us effective, and sometimes absent. Much of what could steady or nourish us remains unseen, not because it is hidden, but because we do not raise our head.

Mindfulness is not about creating special moments. It is about recognising that life is already offering them, quietly, continuously, without insistence. A tree beside a path. The texture of bark. The simple act of looking up. These are not interruptions to life. They are life, when we are present enough to receive them.

I could have walked past that tree and continued thinking about my day. Nothing would have been lost in terms of efficiency. But something would have remained untouched: the feeling of being here, of inhabiting this moment fully rather than passing through it as a ghost.

To be present does not require stopping everything or withdrawing from the world. It requires only a slight shift: from doing to being, from moving through to dwelling with. When we allow ourselves this shift, even briefly, the ordinary regains its depth. The world becomes less of a backdrop and more of a companion.

Perhaps this is what we forget most easily: that awareness is not something we add to life later, when there is time. It is something we practise here, on the path, beside a tree, by lifting our eyes and noticing that we are alive within a world that is quietly alive around us.

The wild remembers. So do you.