Last October, at a Buddhist retreat in Southwestern Wisconsin, I led a walking meditation. Here are my words of introduction and closing comments.

Of special note, I’d like to acknowledge Geneen Marie Haugen for her beautiful writing in “Imagining Earth,”a chapter published in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth. Geneen’s wisdom helped shape these instructions.

To Begin:

Close your eyes. Please keep them closed while I speak for a few minutes. l will tell you to open them again, I promise. Close your eyes and listen. I am going to offer you some instructions for our walk. If you’d like to disregard them to carry on with your own internal work, you may.

We are going to walk a while, pause at a rocky vista, and then come back to this starting place. It will be a journey from our cultural domain into nature’s domain. I invite you to step onto the trail as if dirt, rocks, sticks, water, air, and light itself—the whole of the cosmos—were infused with intelligence, awareness, and purpose. The experience will change you.

As you go, I will from time to time ring the bell. During this walk, the bell is the Buddha’s voice asking a single question, “Who are you now?” Every time I ring the bell, stop your walking, look into the mirror of the universe, and answer the question in silence: “Who are you now?” After pausing and taking a few breaths, we will continue on our way.

When we get to the vista, we will rest a while in the temple of the present moment. I invite you to continue your companionship with the animate and inanimate as you sit or stand and gaze upon the landscape. You may want to give the resting place a name and say its name silently to yourself several times.

When we return, please gather again at this location for some closing comments.

But for now, step onto the trail as if it mattered to the life that surrounds us. Look with curiosity and wonder and see earth herself as a dharma talk. Know you are earth walking. Allow earth to walk on your behalf so you can heal.

Now, open your eyes and look into the mirror of the universe. BELL : Who are you now?
 
Conclusion:

Let us acknowledge as a community that earth is not what we previously believed. We are not who we thought we were. And, here is one more insight for the morning: if any of us were to conclude that the self is now one with the universe, we would be clinging to the notion of self. The feeling of interconnection with all of life is powerful, but liberation is free from even this view.