The Core Routines of Awareness

The Core Routines of Awareness

Chris Lay, NOLS Instructor

[I wrote this essay after a particularly inspiring course this past summer.

The topic is how to gain greater nature awareness, a theme that often runs through my courses and my past articles in this newsletter.]

Yesterday, I went for a run in the forest behind my dad’s house. I scared up some deer, snuck up on a few others, stopped to watch a red-tailed hawk soaring high above, smelled the cherry-like aroma of the blooming flowers, felt the mud squish between my toes, followed a few fresh red fox tracks, came eye to eye with a mink not 20 feet away from me across the river, floated down the river as the lightning, thunder, and rain crescendoed all around me. What a gift it is to be alive. I smiled as I said it over and over again.

It’s not every day that I get to share a rainy afternoon with some deer, a red-tailed hawk, and a mink, especially in the midst of suburban Maryland! Yet experiences like these happen to me more and more. Are they just coincidences? No way. I believe they are a result of a handful of deliberate practices that I have slowly incorporated into my everyday life over the past 6 years. I call them the core routines of awareness. Here they are, in no particular order:

Find a “Backyard”

Do you have a place in the world that you know really well? Can you imagine that place in your mind’s eye? Can you see all the intricacies of the place, can you smell the smells, hear all the subtle sounds? What’s it like there at night or during the winter? Who lives there? For some of us, we probably don’t have a place that we know really well mainly because we’re always moving around. For others, like myself, the place that I can envision the best in my mind is the house I grew up in. I can see the peeling wallpaper, I can hear the clicks of the desk drawer opening, I can smell my parents bedroom furniture.

The most powerful key to gaining greater awareness is familiarity. How much time do you spend outside? And of that time you spend outside, how much of it is spent focusing on something like running or mowing the lawn or hiking or climbing or talking to someone as you cook dinner over the camp stove? I would bet that most of us have spent precious little time actually “being outside”.

It really is simple: if you spend lots of time outside sitting still, watching, smelling, listening, feeling…., you will get more and more glimpses into the “more than human” world of nature. Every place I frequent I have what I call a “backyard”, or “secret spot”, if you’ve ever read The Education of Little Tree. It’s just a place where I go and sit and observe, sometimes for 3 minutes, sometimes for 3 days. In California, it’s a beautiful open ravine near my house. In Lander, it’s the stream that crosses Lincoln Street between the Noble and the RMB. In Maryland, it’s the creek behind my dad’s house. It’s no coincidence I saw a mink there yesterday; I saw mink tracks there 2 years ago and I’ve had my eye out for them ever since! Find yourself a “secret spot” and go there as much as you can. Make it convenient; otherwise you’ll never go. You don’t have to go to “wilderness” areas to see some amazing stuff; there might be minks right in your backyard!

Slow down

I enjoy running, it’s probably my favorite form of exercise. Years ago, I used to run all the time. I ran fast, my concentration was fully on pushing myself. I often timed myself. I seldom saw much. Yesterday I went running in my sandals on a muddy game trail. I dodged greenbrier, hopped over fallen logs, and chased deer as far as I could into the woods when I scared them up. I stopped and sat down when I heard the hawk. I watched it for a good 5 minutes while I sat motionless trying to quiet my breathing. I fell to my knees when I caught sight of a tail-flick out of the corner of my eye. A young doe up ahead had not noticed me. I stalked up the side of the hill toward it. I got so close! I stopped at the river for a swim. That’s when I saw the mink. Again, no coincidence. The first thing I did was stop, slow down and look around when I arrived. Fish in the water, water striders on the surface, fox tracks in the mud, and a mink staring at me through the long grass on the far bank.

It’s hard to slow down. We get no encouragement from popular culture to do it. We only have 1 hour set aside in our busy day to go running which means that we’d better use that hour for running! A packed schedule will sentence you to tunnel vision for the rest of your life. You won’t have time to stop and smell the cherry-like flowers along the trail or take that other trail back to the house that you’ve never taken the time to explore yet.

Be child-like

Remember when you could just sit in the grass for hours and be totally content playing with a couple of small sticks? If you can’t remember yourself, take some time and go to the local park and watch little kids. Small children are the greatest teachers. They marvel at everything! Their curiosity is unbounded. They experience joy so fully. We can do the same thing as adults. We can paint our faces with charcoal or splash water at each other. Or we can take off our shoes and squish our feet through the mud. We can float down the river during a downpour.

Follow your heart

I was sitting on my dad’s porch in the late afternoon when I heard the thunder yesterday. I immediately envisioned myself down at the river in the pouring rain. I didn’t hesitate. Soon, I was off on an adventure through the jungle. Thank goodness I went. After 2 years of looking, I finally saw that mink.

Follow your heart, listen to your intuition, hear the voice of God, etc. Whatever you want to call it, I believe it is a very real part of human consciousness. In our culture, we focus on the logical and rational, so much so that some of us forget that there’s much more to life than logic. If you learn to listen to your intuition, it might tell you to go to the river or it might help you avoid a dangerous situation.

Create a need to always pay attention

At the end of a course, students are often amazed at how much they learned in such a short amount of time. Although I’d like to take some credit as an inspiring teacher, I’m afraid most of the reason they learned so much in so little time was because they needed to learn it. They needed to learn to cook, to start their stove, to navigate off-trail, to belay safely. Need can be your greatest teacher. Hunter-gatherer peoples needed to pay attention all the time because there were dangers that were ever present, such as large predators and neighboring enemy tribes.

We don’t have many large predators or enemy tribes (on second thought, maybe we do), but that doesn’t mean we can’t create an additional need to pay attention. On a course, the need for heightened awareness is obvious. Staying safe, found, and healthy (both as an individual and as a group) requires heightened awareness. I up the ante even more by playing awareness games throughout a course: I encourage everyone to continually try to sneak up on one another (with a few rules, the game is safe and fun for all who want to play). Sometimes, I bring a few clothespins and challenge everyone to pin them on the fronts of each other without getting caught. I’ll encourage hiking groups to hide from other groups within 10 feet of the trail. These games encourage us to keep each other out of tunnel vision. The process is often hilarious and the results are often that we see more of the world going on around us.

When I’m out by myself in the woods, I’ll often try to travel without being seen. I’ll hide beside trails when I hear someone coming. When there are no people around, I will often challenge myself to not disturb any animals. This requires hyper-vigilance, especially with birds. Birds are the car alarms of the forest; they will let everything else in the woods know exactly where you are by their reactions to you (whether vocal or physical). If you can learn to walk through the woods without disturbing birds, you’ll be able to touch a deer some day. I’ve gotten pretty darn close a couple of times.

Lose your mind, come to your senses

I once met a blind person who could distinguish some of their close friends and family by smell, sometimes from up to 30 feet away! Humans have amazing sensory capabilities. Yet, most of us do not use them to nearly their full extent. How often are you conscious of your peripheral vision? How often are you really tasting your food as you eat it? What other sounds are you really aware of as you read this article? How often are you aware of your entire skin? Do you ever smell anything?

No one needs to teach us how to use our senses, we just need to remember to use them! This can be no easy task, given the world we live in. From a young age, we have been taught to focus. We are constantly filtering out sensory input in order to concentrate. We live in climate-controlled spaces that don’t allow us to experience a wide range of hot and cold or wet and dry. In short, our advances in technology have led to a regression in the use of our senses.

There are many ways to break out of our cultural pattern of sensory deprivation. Wide angle vision (the deliberate awareness of the full circle of your peripheral vision) is a simple practice that I teach on my courses. I use wide-angle vision as often as I can, even when I’m typing. When I’m driving, I use my peripheral vision to count hawks perched in trees along the road. It’s fun! Once I actually spotted a whole nest with babies and all (I had to pull over once I saw that!). You still have to focus your vision to see minute detail, just remember to come back to wide-angle vision whenever you don’t need to be focusing.

Try blindfolding yourself for 10 minutes while you walk through your house. Then try it for a whole day while you go about your normal life. There is so much to learn from doing this. Not only will your other senses be magnified, you’ll start using another part of your brain that we’re not used to using in this culture. There are many other games you can play to enhance your senses. Whenever I remember, I actually do what I call a sense meditation, in which I basically envision myself having the eyes of an owl, the ears of a deer, the nose of a coyote, etc… It really works! As I was running yesterday, I stopped when I caught the scent of a deer that had crossed the trail. If I hadn’t been doing this sense meditation right then, I would have kept right on going, oblivious to the fresh sign. The smell was so strong in that one spot that I bet I could have tracked it much like a dog would for some distance. It was wild!

Use your imagination

Imagine that you’re an owl, sitting high up on a branch perfectly camouflaged into the bark. You are light, your silent wings are neatly folded by your side. You are still. Your eyes are wide open. They are so big that they can no longer swivel in their sockets. They are fixed into position straight ahead. Looking out into the distance to the horizon, notice that even though you’re looking straight ahead, you can also see quite a distance to the left and right as well as up and down without moving your eyes at all. You are sensitive to the slightest movement, even at the edge of your peripheral vision. And you are still.

One of the best ways we learn is by imitating other things. Owls are masters of wide-angle vision. What better way to practice utilizing your peripheral vision than by imagining you are an owl. This may seem silly, but it’s exactly what master athletes do. The high jumper may imagine that he has powerful springs attached to his legs. He can see himself in his mind clearing the bar before he actually does so in reality. After checking me out for a little while on the other side of the river, the mink started walking upstream. I followed him on the other side, imitating his movements as best I could. Mink move in a smooth wave-like motion, it’s very distinctive. What’s it like to see through the eyes of a mink? I got down on all fours close to the ground and did my best to imitate. I wonder what the mink thought of me!

Ask questions

When I called my wife and related my experience down at the river, she immediately started asking me questions. “Are you sure it was a mink? Couldn’t it be a river otter? What did it’s tail look like? Was it walking or swimming? How was it moving? Was it bothered by your presence? Did you find its tracks? How big were they? Could you make out a gait pattern? …..” and on and on like that. I knew the questions were coming so I was sure to pay attention at the time to as many specifics as I could. Of course I couldn’t answer all of them, but with practice, I’m able to answer more each time.

When a student approaches me with a question about the natural world, I often respond to them with more questions. If I feel especially enthusiastic, I might not ever give them an answer. I’d just fire questions at them with the goal of expanding their awareness. It really works! Consider rarely answering questions that your students ask you. You may know the answer, you may not; either way, when you respond with another question, you bring them to a deeper level of awareness. Don’t overwhelm them, just dangle a question or two out there on the edge of their awareness to pull them further. That’s what my wife was doing for me. If you don’t have someone to question you, then just question yourself. You can use your journal as a place to record your answers.

Use your elders

For some of us, we may know some wise elders that could teach us about nature. Most of us probably don’t (but our kids might someday!). Don’t despair, for a lot of wisdom resides in books these days. Field guides are the modern day equivalent of an elder. No exaggeration, I own more than 50 field guides. I collect them; I find them in used bookstores or on my grandmother’s bookshelves. I haven’t read every single page of every book yet, but I’ve read quite a bit of some of them. When I journal about an event like an encounter with a mink, I’ll often page through some field guides to help me learn more about what I saw. Yesterday, I looked through my small mammal guide that I happened to have with me.

Reflect on your experience

Sometimes, you don’t realize you learned something until you reflect on it later. After reflecting on my experience yesterday, I put 3 observations together that I never would have correlated otherwise. On my run, I noticed some small raccoon tracks in a muddy side creek, I saw some strange looking scat that I had never seen before on a multi-species game trail bordering a corn field, and I saw what I’m pretty sure was a mink. It was when I thought about the smallness of the raccoon tracks that I made the connection. Perhaps they were instead mink tracks and perhaps that mystery scat was from mink! Who knows? But it all came from reflection. Keep your reflections in a journal; sometimes months later when you reread your writing, even more insights will pop out.

Be thankful

Give thanks to the people in your life, the earth, the waters, all the beings in the waters, the plants, the animals, the trees, the birds, the winds, the clouds, the moon, the sun, the stars, the unseen forces that guide us, the creator of all things. I try to give thanks to all those things every day if I remember. Being thankful will help you project a peaceful intent. Regardless of how bad your day is going, you can always be thankful for something. It is truly a gift to be alive!

Some final thoughts

My dad has pets: 3 cats and 2 dogs. Despite occasionally getting frustrated with them, he really likes them. In fact, he’ll bend over backwards to make sure they’re taken care of. He buys them good food, he lets them go in and out, he frequently takes the dogs on walks, he takes them to the vet when they need to go. He willingly invests significant amounts of his time and money to maintain their high quality of life. What if he were to extend that care and attentiveness to the mink living in his backyard? Obviously, he couldn’t keep it as a pet or take it to the vet, but he could help maintain the health of the streamside ecosystem in his backyard. And if he approached in the right way, he might even get some glimpses of that mink some day. Now imagine if my dad’s entire community cared for the wildlife living in their backyards to the same degree that they cared for their pets. He would live in a changed world.

The first step in this process is awareness. You’ve got to know that mink live in your backyard before you can care about their quality of life. What lives in your backyard? I keep finding more living in mine.