Let Nature Fill You Up

My eight-year-old was reflecting on something his grandfather had written — a story about an art lesson where you draw your hand. The catch is that you aren’t supposed to look at your drawing until it’s done (your eyes never leave your hand) and you don’t lift the pencil from the page. In the end, you have an abstract, continuous line drawing that likely doesn’t look much like a hand at all. The lesson, his grandfather wrote, is not about the drawing at all. It’s about paying close attention to the fine details of, in this case your hand, and letting go of your analytical mind to just be a conduit of what you are observing.

Heady concepts for an eight-year-old perhaps.

Though after thinking it over for a bit, he said, “it’s like you have to slow down and let nature fill you up.”

There are, of course, many ways that people describe this same concept, be it mindfulness or meditation, prayer or reflection — terms used for engaging in the present in a moment of stillness. But my new favorite phrase for this is letting nature fill you up.