“Nature is our mother. Because we live cut off from her, we become sick,” wrote Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh while reminding us that the essential part of mindful living is going outside the city and reconnecting with Mother Earth, the wellspring of vitality and well-being.

It’s unfortunate that we rarely go to the country and almost never for a whole day or to spend the night. When we do, we arrive in good spirits, enjoy the fresh air and wide-open landscapes, eat good lunch, but subconsciously we feel invisibly trapped, homesick, and discontent.

And yet how longingly we envision the peace of the countryside that we would almost flee, if only we could so easily and gracefully! How often in the city, among the tall buildings, busy streets, and crowds of people we suppose that peace, prose, and definitive reality are out there, among the trees, grass, and a gentle breeze that cannot be heard rather than here, where irresistible tablecloth of civilization makes us forget and numbs our feelings.

At what point in our lives has artificial become natural and what’s natural has become almost strange and something alien to us? This befuddling question is what author Deborah Underwood and illustrator Cindy Derby explore with meditative immersion in Outside In, a series of enchanting watercolor paintings that transport us into a different reality, a reality that frees us and makes us more alive and present.

Now
sometimes even when
we’re outside…
we’re inside.

We forget Outside is there.
So Outside reminds us
with flashes at the window
and slow magic tricks.

We feel Outside
in the warm weight of our cats
and the rough fur of our dogs.

Outside shows
there is a time to rest
and a time to start fresh.

I’m here,
Outside says.
I miss you.

And we answer.

“In the meditative domain, the best way to achieve your own goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment,” Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote while reflecting on seven foundations of meditation that we can use to access the wisdom of our body and mind. “With patience and regular practice, movement toward your goals will take place by itself.”

While navigating the narrow and, for the most part, unknown lanes of meditation we constantly strive to unravel that locus of sensations we call our soul. During the subtle minutes that pass as we try to follow our breath, we feel like a dream among dreams of a different sort in the transitory traffic of our thoughts.

As we continue on, our bodies are lost in the intricate labyrinth of sensations trying to cope with the notion of unreality and feigned existence, of occupying this tiny space of the vast universe, this point of contact with objective reality of the here and now.

This subtle struggle of our spirit to remain undetached and completely unified with the present moment is what Gil Fronsdal explores with grounded simplicity and much-needed relatedness in his book The Issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfulness Practice. He writes:

Mindfulness entails knowing what is happening in the present moment while it is happening. It is a training in how not to be lost in thoughts, opinions, and reactivity. … Mindfulness strengthens our ability to avoid harmful impulses and to act beneficially. … Training in mindfulness is thus a training in finding the point of contact. Another way of saying this is that it involves the search for “the issue at hand.” I like this expression because the image of a hand suggests what can be touched, what can be directly seen and felt.

As we start our solitary peregrination of finding a delicate anchor to the realm of felt experience we may become disillusioned with our child-like impatience as vast silence, impassive to slight sounds, assaults and overwhelms us. But this should not discourage us, Gil Fronsdal notes with deep wisdom drawn from his journey on a Buddhist path, for even a mere fact of being aware of moments of defeatism and weakness is the first step in the right direction.

Consider a mountain stream where the water is quite clear, and seems placid and still. But if you place a stick into the water, a small wake around the stick shows that in fact the water is flowing. … Similarly, the practice of mindfulness is a reference point for noticing aspects of our lives that we may have missed.

This is especially true in regards to the mindfulness of breathing, a simple technique accessible to everyone who wishes to master the art of mindful living. Attending to our breath may bring up concerns and the momentum of the mind that disperse our attention and weaken our resolve. If we remain with the breath, then the practice is working. If we fail to do it, then the practice is also working. Gil Fronsdal writes:

Sometimes your attempt to be with the breath is the only way that you see the speed at which the mind is racing. Riding on a train, if you focus on the mountains in the distance, you might not notice the speed of the train. However, if you bring your attention closer, the rapidly appearing and disappearing telephone poles next to the tracks reveal the train’s speed. … Remember, if we learn from what is going on, regardless of what is happening, the practice is working, even when it seems not be working, when we aren’t able to stay with the breath.

For more on mindfulness meditation, complement this particular lesson from The Issue at Hand with meditation teacher John Kabat-Zinn’s advice on seven foundations of meditation that we need to know and practice every day.

“When I think of my mother,” wrote great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh in Peace is Every Step, a collection of mini-meditations and mindfulness activities we can practice to cultivate inner tranquility and stillness. “I cannot separate her image from idea of love, for love was the natural ingredient in the sweet, soft tones of her voice.”

Reading these lines made me remember my own mother and even though she has long since passed away, whenever I look into the mirror I see her in the features of my face and can’t help but think that she’s always present in me. There is a sense of invisible continuity that can’t be put into words.

There is another very deep observation that Thich Nhat Hanh makes about our connection to our parents, “If we look closely at our body, we will see that it is a gift from our parents and their parents. … As we continue to meditate on this, we see clearly that the giver, the gift, and the receiver are one. All three are present in our body.”

This subtle interrelation of the giver and the gift, a mother and a child, is what beloved poet Billy Collins explores with exquisite tenderness and warm humor in his instant classic The Lanyard included in the collection The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. Enjoy:

THE LANYARD
by Billy Collins

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

“Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude,” wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh while reflecting on how we can make a sacred space for deep contemplation and creativity within our lives.

Moved by the same desire to reconnect with the essence of one’s own being, in 1845 the great Transcendentalist philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) embarked on a voluntary two-year exile in the woods, an experiment in simple living and contemplation of nature, which later became the basis for his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. This is what he noted in one of his journal entries, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

For Thoreau, nature was one of the most healing elements that could sustain one’s soul through the manifold perils of life. But the transition was not as smooth as he expected. About a few weeks after he came to the woods, and only for an hour, he doubted if near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. But at the same time he was aware of a slight insanity in his mood and foresaw a quick recovery. Thoreau writes:

Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of seasons I trust that nothing can make a life a burden to me.

What he lacked in human company he made up plentifully by observing the natural phenomena around him:

Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in the scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

When he did meet someone from the nearby village, they often said to him, “I should think you would feel lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and nights especially.” To which he was tempted to reply:

What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.

Then towards the end of the chapter he concludes:

The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?