Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
-William Stafford
I’ve just returned from our annual Labor Day weekend camping trip to Patrick’s Point State Park, something my wife and I have been doing on a fairly regular basis for over twenty years.
Our first family trip was 1992 when Teresa, our youngest was about six months old. We stayed at the Lost Whale Inn, a bed and breakfast a few miles north of Trinidad. I remember Teresa crying at 3 a.m. and me deciding the only way to soothe her was to put her in the car seat and drive. I drove thirty miles north on 101 until the fog got so thick, I felt like I wasn’t driving anymore. I was sitting in my car and the speedometer said 60 but I saw no movement anywhere around me, just thick wispy whiteness enveloping me like a giant pillowed cloud.
Suddenly I braked the car without exactly knowing why and then I saw him, a dark shadow looming ever larger in front of me as I slowed and finally stopped within inches of the 700-pound antlered beast, a Roosevelt Elk. He stared at me thoughtfully, snorting out puffs of white vapor, grateful I suppose to be alive, before he wandered off casually like a ghost and was swallowed by the dark shadows that hung like giant velvet curtains around us.
The next two or three years we camped in a tent at Sounds of the Sea just across the road from The Lost Whale but since 1995 it was always Patrick’s Point.
It became an annual ritual for us and two other families, their children close to our daughters’ ages. We missed in 2007 when Nancy was newly diagnosed with breast cancer and again in 2008 as I took my turn in the hospital recovering from my motor scooter crash. But nearly every other year, we were there.
Nestled in the midst of towering redwoods, spruce and hemlock, the park is a piece of paradise edged by the awesome, rocky beauty of the Pacific Ocean. Treks on the miles of hiking trails are always transformative opportunities to commune with nature while the meditative rhythms of the sea are soul-soothing reminders to relax and let it all go.
On this most recent trip, I took some time to read from Eckhart Tolle’s book, Stillness Speaks. He writes, “We depend on nature for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating – lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.
“We have forgotten what rocks, plants and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be – and to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is Here and Now.
“Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists.
“To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness.
“Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so, the same stillness arises within you.
“You sense how deeply it rests in Being – completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.”
We have forgotten what the natural world knows. Our language-laden, time-bound minds are more a curse than blessing. We think our way into madness and misery while the sun slowly rises and gulls glide in the morning light.
“Only when you are still inside do you have access to the realm of stillness that rocks, plants and animals inhabit. Only when your noisy mind subsides can you connect with nature at a deep level and go beyond the sense of separation created by excessive thinking.”
At this moment we possess the capacity to step back from or go beyond our thinking minds and observe, notice and see without judging, clinging or rejecting. We can see our minds and our selves as products of the natural world, as products of the beauty we see all around us. As we awaken to our true nature, we are more alive, more connected and more whole. This can happen right now. It is our choice.
Doug Craig graduated from college in Ohio with a journalism degree and got married during the Carter administration. He graduated from graduate school with a doctorate in Psychology, got divorced, moved to Redding, re-married and started his private practice during the Reagan administration. He had his kids during the first Bush administration. Since then he has done nothing noteworthy besides write a little poetry, survive a motorcycle crash, buy and sell an electric car, raise his kids, manage to stay married and maintain his practice for almost 25 years. He believes in magic and is a Sacramento Kings fan.
