Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 40

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 40 - Trees Sway, Mind Mirrors

The wind blew all around and riffled and rioted through the tall cottonwood trees like gusts in a Jackson Pollack painting. I stood at the small cliff edge of the marsh, watching the swirling galaxies of limbs dance. My mental state slipped into an identity with the wind. This felt like a direction to go, yes, for an answer to my question about why one might want to will oneself into an inner place with fewer automatic whirlpools.  

As the trees swayed my corresponding feelings were visceral, cycling like the wind between still and squall. Trees and wind became patterns in my body so prominent that they seemed to fill the place in consciousness where the inner voice would ordinarily be. In fact, the streaming of the inner voice was reduced to a sporadic trickle. It made an occasional, not un-apropos comment: “I should remember this state” and “This is a direction, yes!” But even those mini-whirlpools, though true and useful, felt detrimental to my overall state of identity with the wind’s patterns. So I tried as best I could to dispatch those whirlpool-comments whenever these rather innocuous ones started to drag me in.  

In experiments that monitor individual neurons in the brains of monkeys, neuroscientists have discovered a class of neurons they call “mirror neurons.” Like many neurons, they respond to a selective range of signals. In the case of mirror neurons, the response occurs if the monkey performs a certain task (such as reaching for a banana) or—and this is the key finding—if the monkey watches a second monkey reach for a banana. Perhaps people who enter deep identifications with events in nature are allowing inner motor-region responses in their brain to mirror external events of creatures or clouds or swaying cottonwood trees.   

Such experiences seem more pregnant with expanded sensuous feeling than usual run-of-the-mill observations of the incoming sensory streams. With the cottonwoods, sensuality blossomed without triggering slews of complex thought-emotions or pesky self-generated whirlpools. That fact seemed highly relevant to my ongoing experiments with inner observation. The fullness did not derive from merging knowledge into the sensory experience, however powerful that merging can be, as occurred to me weeks ago with gravity and the real stream, or with the geological layers of El Moro. This new experience with the swaying cottonwoods was mentally subtle in a different way. Perhaps an experience like this tends to happen when nature is peaking in its forces, via tremendous motions or overwhelming sounds, or both as in this case. Could this experience occur with a part of nature that is simply still? Could I look at a flower, internalize the pattern, and feel visceral sensations that also lead me somewhere to a space between inner whirlpools? And if the sensations lead to a state of joy, as in this case with the trees, then I will welcome them, as the wonders of nature become something wondrous within. 

© 2025 by Tyler Volk

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