The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.
Interpretation
The tranquility of nature can bring a sense of fulfillment even without clarity about one's desires.
In this quote, Peter Matthiessen reflects on the transformative power of nature's stillness. He suggests that the serenity found in landscapes, which once provoked feelings of restlessness, now brings him peace and a sense of satisfaction, indicating that sometimes life's answers are discovered not through active searching, but rather through quiet contemplation and connection with the natural world.
In practice
This quote could be shared in a meditation class to emphasize the peace found in nature.
Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
With the coming of spring, I am calm again.
Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise.
No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.
The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and starlight, the world of soil and sunshine, of meadow and woodland, of hickory and oak and maple and hemlock and pineland forests, of wildlife dwelling around us, of the river and its wellbeing--all of this [is] the integral community in which we live.
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.
A plant is like a self-willed man, out of whom we can obtain all which we desire, if we will only treat him his own way.
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