Watching Nature Breathe

To me, one of the most engrossing things to get seduced by is what I call “watching nature breathe”. This practice simply entails sitting or standing still, focusing on a place where the stable and the temporal meet, and then just waiting to see what happens.

The possibilities for such enchantments exist all over the place—and not just in the countryside. For example: you can watch the morning sun gently sink over the face of a rock, through the trees in a woodland, or even down the side of your house. You can get absorbed in how a breeze riffles long grasses. You can gaze at a single bough on a tree on a spring day and see what birds and insects come to land in it. You can witness clouds and sky interacting in the windows of a skyscraper.

Here’s a little video I made the other day as I watched nature breathe in the form of water flowing over a patch of ice in a hemlock forest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *