The Forest Edge

Pine trees looming through thick mist and snow, Strathspey

I took this a couple of years ago during a really hard winter spell.  It was hard work breaking trail on skis through deep fresh snow, up the trail to the forest edge.  I loved how the shapes of these big pines started to appear through the freezing mist.  I had been hoping to reach the sunshine above the mist, but it didn’t happen that day…

I’ve experienced exactly this feeling of connectedness with everything, past present and future, standing amongst the pines:

“The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.”

– Shinkichi Takahashi,  ‘Zen Poems of  China and Japan’

Meanwhile, back in the difficult world of feeling our emotions and understanding how the charge of our stored emotions drives our present…

“It’s extremely important to widen the gap between impulse and action; and that’s exactly what mindfulness does. This is one of the big advantages of mindfulness practice: it gives us a moment or two, hopefully, where we can change our relationship to our experience, not be caught in it and swept away by impulse, but rather to see that there’s an opportunity here to make a different, better choice. I think that understanding the basic neural mechanisms involved is an aid to mindfulness because it tells us we don’t have to get swept away.”

– Daniel Goleman ‘Emotional Intelligence’