THE ZEN OF SEEING

When I first moved to the country, I had trouble locating the wildlife that I knew was all around me. This ranch land is full of hidden life, but being a city girl I couldn’t seem to find it. It took awhile before I learned to see… (and in the meantime, I felt like a complete idiot).
     Now it’s possible I overestimated the numbers of animals and birds that generally roam across the plains. And it’s certain that I didn’t know quite where to look. But I’d hate to count the number of times I trained my binoculars onto some fascinating little critter that turned out to be — another cow patty. It was my secret shame.
     The good news is that observational skills, like any other kind, get better with regular use. And now, these several years into the journey, I see it was a zen-like process that helped me on my way.
     The first step in the journey was to forget about the birds and wildlife I wanted to see, and concentrate on the empty landscape. An understanding of the surface — whether sky or trees or rolling prairie — might help me perceive the small signs of change upon it.
     This meant getting acquainted with my country home, with the several vistas here, and with the particulars as well: the sagebrush and wild grasses, the different trees, and groups of trees, the bare branches birds so like — the hills and dales of the place. It took awhile and was largely an unconscious endeavor, but over time I began to feel more at home. I gained what is sometimes called a sense of place.
     It wasn’t only sight involved. The sound of emptiness became familiar too. And once it did, the sounds that stood out and caught my ear were much easier to hear.
     Over time, I came to know how different trees move differently in the wind, how the sunlight falls throughout the day, and where its shadows are. I learned which places offered shelter from the south wind, and which the north, and I learned where the wind is not constrained. The more I took in the details of the place itself, the more easily I could spot its wild inhabitants.
     Take the long pasture that borders the creek. Until I knew the patterns of grass and leaves and shadow there, I wouldn’t have noticed a silent procession of Bob Whites creeping by, or the horizontal shape of a coppery Brown Thrasher thrashing in the leaves. If I hadn’t learned how the prairie to the west looks at twilight, I might have missed the Nighthawks hawking there.
     It wasn’t something planned or deliberate, this process, but now that the landscape is planted firmly in the back of my mind, it’s easier to see what else is out there.
      This isn’t to omit the other kinds of learning we must do, the careful acquisition of detail and behavior that helps us sort out our furry and our feathered friends. Accumulating facts is easier when we’re comfortable with our surroundings, so learning the lay of the land is always useful.
     Perhaps the larger lesson — the zen of it all — is that we must fully comprehend what empty is, to know when it gets full.