Today’s podcast episode will introduce a core concept for building deeper awareness of nature’s “rhythms”.
If you want to gain a truly unique understanding of how everything in nature fits together as one intelligent and interconnected system, this episode is for you!
Click play to get started:
The natural world is an incredibly complex web of connections with living and non-living elements all interacting together as one.
Many of these interactions (such as bird language) are normally invisible to the untrained eye.
However with practice and the right guidance, it’s possible for anyone to read the signs and develop a more intuitive, instinctual, or primal relationship with nature.
This process has two benefits:
- You gain practical knowledge & skills for being effective in the woods (like being able to locate and get closer to wild animals, or navigate effortlessly without tools, locate hard-to-find or useful plants).
- There is a psychological shift of inner mind that brings feelings of deep harmony with nature sought by so many cultures throughout history.
It simply requires a bit of practice with sensory awareness & nature observation skills to build your knowledge of nature’s rhythms.
Have You Ever Felt That Nature Is Just Too Complex Or Random For You To Understand In Any Meaningful Way?
That’s because observing the rhythms of nature is kind of like learning a whole new language from scratch.
If you don’t have a fluent teacher, it can be incredibly difficult to learn!
The idea of rhythms is this: Everything in nature is constantly moving through alternating states of activity & rest, and through these movements, sending out ripples of influence through multiple degrees of separation.
Here are a few common examples:
- The rhythm of waves lapping against the shore. Water flows in, then it flows out. (Tides are a higher level of this same rhythm)
- The rhythm of night turning into day. Also the gradual shifting of seasons that changes how this rhythm unfolds every day around the world.
- The rhythm of a bird feeding on the lawn. It stops, looks, listens, takes a few steps, then pounces on a worm. This behavior repeats at a consistent pace of activity.
- The rhythm of a fox moving in the forest. The foxes feet and body have a particular sound, speed, feeling, and look, that changes according to the behavior & mental state of that fox.
- The rhythm of a bee gathering pollen. It lands on a flower, the buzzing stops, it gathers the pollen, then it moves to the next flower. The timing & activity of this rhythm changes according to time of day, season, weather, etc.
- The rhythm of a plant growing day after day. There is a nightly pulse of plant growth as the plant breathes in CO2 and pulls water up from the roots. The plant follows the sun as it travels through the sky.
All these states of life, movement & gradual change through time may seem like random disconnected chaos… but when you discover the larger pattern, there’s actually a cohesive timing and rhythmic pulse to it all.
In this way, nature is like a big symphony where everything you see or hear is an instrument playing together & feeding off each other.
And these shifting rhythms have meaningful messages if we can simply watch & listen deeply enough:
- When something changes in the rhythms of bird activity, it tells us about weather or predator movements.
- By watching for changes in the rhythms of insect activity, we can predict other consequences for plants & animals on the food chain.
- We can also work backwards from shifting rhythms at all layers of nature… Some changes happen in the blink of an eye, while others take weeks or months to evolve.
Author Tom Brown called these shifting rhythms “concentric rings”, and being able to perceive these dynamics with sensory awareness is a core skill for helping people connect at the deepest levels with nature.
Here are some further links to help you develop a rhythmic understanding of nature:
Sensory Awareness Exercises
How To Observe The Wind
Beginner’s Guide To Bird Language
The Wild Observer (Ebook)
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