Do You Find Your Bliss in Nature?

Spring, waterfall splashing Creek music, trout swim, new ferns I’m done by July

I wrote a whole book about bliss. Spent years on it. You’d think I’d be the last person who needed reminding.

But recently, while on a backpacking trip in California’s Ventana Wilderness, I stood in front of a small waterfall and felt something quietly come undone.

The creek music came first

Here’s the thing nobody tells you. Before you see a small waterfall, you hear it. Creek music, I started calling it. And it isn’t one sound, it’s layers. Water hitting rock, water hitting water, a thinner trickle off to the side you can’t quite locate. And then I just watched the fresh, clean water splashing down a mossy rock face into a clear pool, new ferns along the edge.

A trout moved in the pool. Quick, then gone. Light coming through the leaves and breaking up on the surface. Cold air rising off the water even on a warm afternoon. That day, instead of hiking for miles or fishing for hours or reading a book on my phone, I just rested and looked around. I wasn’t busy. I was patient. I was quiet.

And then I had a conversation with a waterfall. It was surging with energy, nourishing the pond, reawakening the ferns and moss. It was loud, and happy, and celebrating life. But the waterfall also told me it wasn’t always full of such energy. Only in spring and early summer did it flow. The rest of the year it lay dormant, its energy quieter. “It’s my cycle. I’m good with it.”

Bliss isn’t a view

Sometimes we treat bliss like a destination. A better beach, a taller mountain, a cleaner sunset than the one we got last time. So we collect places, photograph them, move on, and mostly don’t remember them.

But bliss isn’t a view. It’s a relationship with nature, with other humans and living beings, with deities, with a waterfall. The waterfall didn’t ask me to collect it. It asked me to stop. And I’ll tell you what took me most of a lifetime to believe: you are allowed to stop. The world you carry around in your head will keep. It did for me.

Maybe that’s one flavor of bliss. Not the grand feeling we chase, but the small one we keep walking past because it asks us to be still long enough to receive it.

When did you last really arrive?

When did you last really take in something wild and growing, fully there, nothing else pulling at you? Not photographing it, not narrating it to anyone, just there. For most of us it’s been longer than we’d like to admit. Body in one place, mind a thousand miles off, and the moment slips by without us in it.

Do you find your bliss in nature? Is it water, or the quiet under big trees, or the way the air feels right before rain? I don’t think there’s a wrong answer. I think most of us just haven’t stood still long enough to remember. And the place to start looking for your bliss in nature usually isn’t somewhere new. It’s somewhere you already know, finally given your whole attention.

If you’ve got a place like that, I’d love to hear about it. Share Your Bliss Story and tell me where you go to slow down. I read every one. Or maybe you can write a Haiku poem about it.

Canti,

Pak Dave