The Gift of Stillness

On the final hour of this New Year's Day, I received from the forest the gift of stillness.

The forest community is a place of great stillness this time of year, except for a handful of hardy birds, mammals, and even insects. Snow blankets the earth. Balsam trees press in from all sides. These spiry-topped neighbors hold onto their needles year-round, but it's too cold for photosynthesis. 

I am awake but unmoving. I am doing nothing, with senses fully alert, cherishing my every observance of the forest community. For an hour or so, I imagine myself an extension of the forest. I stand still as the trees around me. 

The first ten minutes is to allow time to unfold for the animals who call this place home to accept me as nothing to be alarmed about. The next fifty minutes is for reveling in the forest's gift of stillness. 

This is a sleepy landscape. 

This is a gifted landscape. 

Trees and plants are dormant. Yet many a dormant branch bears gifts of a thousand seeds tucked neatly within hundreds of scaly cones; New Year's feast for the red squirrels who declare themselves the rightful owners of this wooded neighborhood to every passerby. 

On the final hour of this New Year's Day, I received from the forest the gift of stillness. I also received the following gifts:

To have seen a brown creeper who foraged on a tree trunk at arm's length, 

To have been accepted as part of the forest community if only for a little while even by the red squirrels who defend this realm, 

To have caught the gaze of a snowshoe hare tucked beneath a balsam's lowest skirt of branches.

I'm wishing you a happy healthy new year. I'm wishing you the gift of stillness during your next walk in the woods.