Land of Rest

The snowy woods.  Its silence is otherworldly.  I don't know what takes other guys into the woods, but for me it's mostly the silence.  And the solitude.  And the possibility of discovery.  There's a profoundly spiritual calm that settles over me when I've been in the woods--especially in winter, but not uniquely.  It doesn't have to be beautiful woods.  It doesn't have to be a long trek.  All I need is silence, an absence of distractions, and eventually a reasonably comfortable place to sit.

Once on Bear Mountain--just north of New York City on the Hudson River--I made a long trek through the snow and came across two Asians meditating.  They sat still as stones and didn't even acknowledge my presence.  I thought I'd just chanced upon the dead bodies of two guys who were just too stuffy and proud to fall over.  I had never seen anyone meditating in the forest before.  Now I do it, and to my knowledge, no one has ever witnessed it.

The worst thing about doing your spiritual practices in the snowy woods is that by the time you get up and hike back to your car, your body is no longer in perpetually-warm hiker mode.  Meditating in the snow puts the body and the mind on autopilot.  You've essentially turned off the inner furnace for 20 minutes, and the hike back can be pretty damn cold.  And yet, I live for it.  That sylvan fix is the one thing that makes everything else in my life possible.