notes from the nilgiris

nature makes quick work of habitual patterns of thought

I have been thinking deeply about nature similes and they way they tend to evoke an instantly graspable image in my mind. As quick as lightning. As steady as a stone. As tenacious as ivy. As old as the hills, which is the one I was thinking about as we negotiated the hairpin bends carved into the Nilgiris like sleep wrinkles on skin. We keep these linguistic relics of our ancestral connection to the natural world, and wear them out like prayer beads. We scatter them like breadcrumbs along the trail of human consciousness, whispered echoes of a time when we were nature and nature was us.

I think one of the secrets to adulting is that you have to dress the part. Act as if you’re already the healthiest person you can be. Act confident even if you don’t feel it on the inside. Take the seat at the table even if you feel you haven’t earned it yet. Humans don’t like cognitive dissonance, and our minds shift our self-perception to match our actions, and our brain rewires to make the act feel more natural next time, which turns into a nice little self-fulfilling loop. You grow into the skin.

We hold in the palm of our hands some of the most advanced technology in human history, that allows us to do things that previously took hours, in fractions of seconds. It should follow that we’re one of the most relaxed generations of all time, and yet we are the most frantic our line of ancestry has ever seen. Our attention fractures like light through a prism. I have loved watching the rise of slowpunk, the defiant antithesis to the frenzy that we’ve been spoonfed as good for us. A return to the pace of clouds across blue skies. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. In the hills, I revoke the world’s access to my attention both by force and by choice. My homestay’s brochure comes with this guidance:

Reception here is temperamental. Take this time to do a digital cleanse and spend time with your loved ones and yourself.

I sit on a rock under a tree overlooking a valley whose ever-ness is astounding. I take the cleansing air into my lungs, smooth the dog’s soft fur, let sudden raindrops run through my hair like a tributary finding its course. I try to melt into the landscape like moss on stone so that, when someone asks me what I did, I can simply say: you just had to be there.

Nature makes quick work of habitual patterns of thought. It is far far easier to relax into a state of non-conceptual awareness in the depths of a eucalyptus forest than in your meditation cushion, earplugs all the way in. Sometimes, real meaning-making happens not in the rational mind, but the intuitive body. To understand that is both a liberation and a challenge, because it comes with a request for a willingness to not know. To stop playing at Rorschach’s test for some time. To let go of the distinction that the moss ends where your feet begin.

Is the refusal of purpose the pinnacle of maturity?

---