Two worlds collided this week when I went into the depths of White Clay Creek for my biology class. On my usual trips to the woods I tend to stay on land and make my way around the edges of the creek. This week there were a lot crunchier, brown, and disheveled leaves on the ground than there were in the last. But those leaves soon turned to mush as I took my first steps into the river this Friday afternoon.

I automatically felt the chill of the river make its way through my rubber soles of my rain boots and a shiver ran through me from my contact with the ground to the top of my head. For the first time this semester, I didn’t feel myself sweating due to the heat. The sun was shining but the wind was making sure I was cool.

We mediated this week in class and while it has been something that I dabbled in throughout my life, it is not something that I do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. But taking a deep breath in the creek, it reminded me to how I felt when mediating in class and something that I had also read by Scott Russell Sanders.

“As the family grew to four, six, eight, and eventually thirteen, my grandfather used this hammer to enlarge his house room by room, like a chambered nautilus expanding its shell,” Sanders wrote. While the only wood around me was either thriving in the forest or deteriorating in the river, I felt the expansion in my chest.

Deep breath in, hold it, deep breath out.

While my breath began to slow down in mediation, the rushing of the river at my feet gave me the same feeling of settling into my own being.

It’s a funny thing that when you decide to look into your own mind it feels like a ping-pong ball going back at forth. But as I focused on the rush of the river at the creek and the pattern of my own breath during class it was harder and harder to find where the ping pong ball was going. Leaves flowing through the creek were easier to relate to at this point.

They just flow by, passing with the rush of the river, and then disappear around the corner of the creek. They don’t come back, they’re in no hurry, and they especially don’t cause a feeling of panic to rush through my body or cause a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Suddenly the world seemed larger, the air more dense, if sound could be held back like any ordinary traveler,” Russell wrote.

While I may be picking up mediation as a daily ritual, it feels like nature has actually been doing the same thing for me all along. Silence is scary but it’s also soothing when you give it a chance.