Once again, a blinding whiteness painted the ground disguising mid-March as a winter wonderland in the arctic north. And once again, these woods had a fresh clean slate with all of last week’s footprints buried beneath the snow.
I sat at my familiar rock after brushing it’s powdered cap off with my sleeve. Week after week I’ve come here with the snow hindering physical change to my untrained eye. This however seemed to evoke more vibrant sensory awareness. It was colder than I remembered in past weeks. The sharp cold entered my lungs reminding me of the feeling Vick’s vapor rub gave me as a child when I was sick. A slight gust of wind caressed by exposed face and neck biter enough to send chills down my spine. It was only a matter of time before my toes felt numb and I was consciously aware of the rock beneath me as if I was sitting on a block of ice.

The sky was white. But a grayish white that wasn’t blinding to look at and contrasted against the earth’s pure white floor. I had spent so much time observing the ground in weeks past but with everything covered in snow I found a new appreciation in looking above. Once my eyes adjusted to the change in view, I could focus on the varying shades of grey and white swirling above. Thick clouds flowing in compliance with wherever the wind wanted to guide them.
The one-square-meter patch of ground David Haskell calls his “mandala,” his symbolic representation of the universe, is just as much affected by this sky and these clouds as the white tail deer that crosses in its boundaries and the microorganisms living within. For the first time since coming here I thought of my patch of woods on both a philosophical and universal level, rather than just my neighborhood or even my country and the local behavior impacting it. People have a profound interconnection with nature that operates at and through every scale, from the molecular, as Haskell observed, to the cosmic. His mandala vision reveals the universe in a patch of soil, which is astonishing once really thought about.

I laid back completely relaxed with my arms spread open in the snow. I briefly closed my eyes and let out a deep sigh upon reopening my eyes. Again looking up at the swirling clouds, I imagined the universe beyond them—much like in movies when the camera zooms out from planet earth until it disappears among the millions of starts. It’s miraculous to thing how insignificant these cold woods are I lay in, yet how significant they are all at the same time. Significant to the deer cutting through these woods. Significant to the birds chirping overhead. Significant to the trees and the fish swimming in the stream below, significant to the insects and microorganisms that my blind eye couldn’t even see. Significant to me.

We all have our blind spots to nature, just as the universe may have a blind spot to microscopic planet earth. But nonetheless, we are all interconnected and everything is complex, lively and important in it’s own respect. Modern man has become blind, he needs to slow down, find stillness and rebuild his connection to nature. Through our appreciation of our surroundings we can learn again how to live in harmony with the world. These ordinary woods I venture to each week are made special by concentrated attention, an “oases of contemplation” that can “call us out of disorder.”