The Bibbulmun track through the Jarrah forest.
While bushwalking in Western Australia, Rodney Marsh practised a silence and attention that allowed him to discover the silence and generosity of the natural world, and how nature can heal and restore the soul. This is the first article in a series of three in which he reflects on how walking in nature nurtures spiritual well-being.
“… coming into the full light of Reality, of falling away from illusion, a great silence emerges from the centre. We feel ourselves engulfed in the eternal silence of God.”[1]
In August 2023 a friend and I set off to walk part of the Bibbulmun Track in Western Australia, between Dwellingup and Bailingup (12 days, 200km). The winter weather was typical for South Western Australia. The air was still, silent and cool (about 15-18oC - perfect walking weather).
My walking partner and I had agreed that, whilst walking, we would maintain a ‘monastic’ silence using only ‘considered’ or ‘necessary’ speech. This silence was also held by the bush. There were, mostly, no bird sounds, except for the dawn chorus, and no wind to rustle the leaves and disturb the silence.
The silence of the Jarrah/Marri forest was a precious gift. To my recollection the only natural sounds we heard were created by the Murray River and the occasional noisy screeching of red-tailed black cockatoos, either adults feeding on Marri nuts or their nestlings noisily demanding food. Fortunately, when the fierce wind and driving rain of winter storm fronts arrived, it was night, and we were ensconced in our warm, dry sleeping bags in the safety of the trekking huts.
Stillness and silence have been, literally, vital to me since I started practising Christian meditation, about fifteen years ago, and, no matter what the season, I have developed the habit of being silent and still, surrounded by the generosity of the natural world. I have learned that nature heals and restores my spirit though attention, presence and silence.
My walking partner and I didn’t realise it at the time, but during the extended silence of our walk, Peace had nestled in our hearts - for Peace, like Hope, is also ‘a thing with feathers’, and, in our hearts the bird of Peace had ‘sung the tune - without the words’ (apologies to Emily Dickinson). The silence around us had nurtured a stillness and silence within us.
We had spent about five days in ‘silent nature’, separated from the ugliness of the ubiquitous noises of the man-made machines with which we have surrounded ourselves in the modern world. This artificial cacophony to which we daily subject ourselves may have become ‘normalised’, but it is degrading our humanity.
As we walked, the silent bush was daily healing our agitated and corroded spirits. Twice, in the course of our walk, the aural infection and corruption of our humanness became apparent to us - machine noises interrupted the silence and wounded our spirits in a profound, visceral way.
The first was when we heard the distant, intermittent, howls and screeches of a massive conveyor belt that carried bauxite ore from the mine to the mill. We heard the sounds first in the overnight hut, but it was many kilometres before we sighted, and then had to walk through the legs of, the monstrous machine.
The second disturbance arose for us, when, after the days of silence, we approached the Coalfields Highway. The roars and groans of the trucks and cars labouring up or speeding down the hill gradually became louder. And the bird of Peace in our breasts took flight! These machine noises precipitated an inner agitation and anxiety. Surely the groans and moans of a dying world!
Aesthetes have always struggled to define or capture the connection they sense between beauty and truth. On the other hand, when we emerged from the silence there was a definite and undeniable link between noise and ugliness.
This noise-ugliness link does not prove there is a connection between truth and beauty, but it continues to persuade me that it is necessary to take a less travelled road to stillness and silence to experience the beautiful, good and true.
The best explanation for our experience of the peace of silence is that Reality is constantly being created from a living flow of love. Creation is sourced in love, fulfils itself in love, and returns to love.
And we humans, each one of us, are a unique part of this flow of life. We can know this Reality through experience because we were created to be part of it. An inner silence, stillness and peace is necessary to experience Reality as a flow from love, in love and to love, and it takes the experience of inner silence for each of us to recognise and play our own part in this flow of life.
I would have never been able to hear the silence of the forest had I not, for the past fifteen years, practised meditation twice daily, following the teaching of Fr John Main. I had to find the silence in me before I could sense it in nature. I kept up my daily practice during my walk. During mid-winter on the Bibbulmun Track the communal trekking huts timetable is governed by the sun - bedtime at sunset and rise to walk again after dawn. This meant my morning meditation involved me rising one hour before dawn and my evening meditation was delayed until all other walkers were safely tucked up in their beds. But somebody noticed - my walking companion decided to become a meditator after our walk!
Rodney Marsh is a retired Uniting Church Minister living on the South Coast of Western Australia. He spent 20 years in Parish ministry and 20 years working as a teacher and Chaplain in an independent Christian School.
For fuller descriptions on the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition, based on the teaching of Fr John Main, see how to meditate or this Video, or https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/blog/the-easter-joy-of-being-in-love
[1] John Main, The Present Christ (NY Crossroad 1991) pp74-76.