There’s a feeling you get about an hour, hour-and-a-half into a steep hike. As you breathe, so does the world around you. Pulsating, taking on new shapes and colors, shapes and colors that were already there but take on new meaning as you travel deeper. The trees come alive. Clearly, they were alive before, except for the snags, but they might talk to you. Not necessarily in a speaking voice, but it’s like you have a telepathic connection with the trees, the plants, the tiny beetle digging through the dirt.
Frequently, I find myself lying down in the forest. There’s something that happens with depth of focus. If your eyes were a camera lens, they’d have a really wide aperture. That small beetle, the dirt, the undercover becomes a world within itself. You can see that there are many worlds in one when you lie down and hold your gaze at a pocket of ferns, which becomes a copse of large jungle trees when your eyes are 3 inches from the ground. If you focus with even more intensity, you can watch the ants climb up the branches of this pocket of ferns, which becomes like an Ewok village.
The sound of water from a small creek trickles in the background and may come to the foreground. With our senses in a hyper-sensitive state, perception changes.Look closer.
