The Bottomless Sit

Simon Barnes, from Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible In Our Lives:

I was in an ebony glade in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, sitting with my back to an ebony tree. I had been sitting there for an hour, scarcely moving. ...

When I entered the glade, every bird in the place would take to the wing and vanish, shouting alarm calls, and the impalas—more antelopes, grazers, usually seen in gatherings of at least 20—would bark their own alarm call and vanish. I had emptied the place in an instant. I had broken it.

The spell for mending was all in the sitting.

Bit by bit, life would reassemble itself all around me. ... It was as if I was slowly becoming invisible: my human nature drifting away into the landscape or being absorbed by the tree. And after a while my invisibility began to make other creatures visible. I was ceasing to matter. ...

Sitting still. We humans are busy creatures, always getting on with something, always moving or talking or checking our phones. We have a terrible fear that if we stop for a moment we will miss something. The exact opposite is true.

Here's a little more from that [Rudyard] Kipling tale quoted above, a story from The Second Jungle Book: "Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement, and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor." ...

Introduce yourself to the bottomless sit by easy stages: after all, you're enjoying yourself, remember. At the start of every sit—especially when you're new to it—you will get fed up and restless pretty quickly: how long have I been sitting here . . . Seems like hours. Whose idea was this? I thought there were supposed to be birds here? You may find your hand creeping towards your phone; you've just remembered something frightfully important and incredibly urgent.

But there's a moment when you go through a door. The urge to move decreases. ... And—suddenly but subtly—you realize that time has changed gear on you. You're no longer waiting; you're just sitting, and you're not sure whether that's ten minutes you've been sitting or twenty, or maybe even more. ...

"Teach us to care and not to care," wrote T. S. Eliot in "Ash Wednesday." "Teach us to sit still." ...

Perhaps a quiet mind is easier to find when you're not seeking it for its own sake. ...

You are becoming less an observer of the wild world than a living part of it.