The Park
Jeffrey Angelson
Back at the Park
Yesterday morning I woke with a quiet pull to go to a park I used to visit often. Years ago I went there almost every day when I was going through a difficult period in my life. Somehow the park had a way of dissolving whatever was troubling me, though at the time I never quite understood why.
I had spent many days there sitting for hours by the lake and then walking the open fields and trails.
It had been a couple of years since I’d been back.
When I arrived, I sat by the lake and simply watched and listened. Not focusing on the breath the way meditation is often taught — just resting attention in the stillness that seemed to hold everything.
After a while something subtle shifted.
At first it felt as though I was sitting there observing the park — the wind moving through the trees, the geese on the water, the distant calls of birds. But gradually it felt less like I was watching these things and more like everything was appearing within the same quiet space.
The sounds weren’t disturbing the silence.
They were part of it.
It was as though stillness was the envelope of everything, and everything — the breeze, the water touching the shore, the birds moving across the sky — was happening inside it.
Within that stillness there was also silence, and from that silence the sounds of the park would appear — a bird calling, wind moving through the branches, the quiet movement of water — and then fade again.
It felt as though everything was emerging from that stillness and returning to it.
Yet the stillness itself never seemed to change.
At one point I noticed the geese drifting quietly across the lake. They never looked toward me, yet I had the sense they were aware of my presence. We were simply sharing the same space.
Thoughts would arise from time to time, as they always do. But something about them felt different now. They seemed no more intrusive than the geese on the water. They were simply there.
I realized I didn’t have to follow them. I could acknowledge them the way I acknowledged the geese — knowing they were present, but letting my attention rest elsewhere.
Occasionally I would quietly say to myself, not now, and the thought would pass. What surprised me was noticing that I actually had a say in it. Thoughts could appear, but they didn’t have to continue.
At first I thought I should return my attention to the stillness the way one returns to the breath in meditation. But then something simpler became clear.
There wasn’t stillness here and thoughts over there.
The thoughts themselves were appearing within the same quiet.
In a strange way, they weren’t interrupting the stillness at all.
They were part of it.
What struck me most was how much I was noticing that I had never seen before. I had walked those same paths for years, yet the patterns of light on the water, the movement of branches, the small sounds of life everywhere seemed newly vivid.
Nothing about the park had changed.
The lake was the same.
The trees were the same.
The geese were the same.
What had changed was simply that there was less thought standing between what was happening and the experience of it.
And when that quieted, the world seemed to come forward on its own.
In that quiet, the usual sense of separation softened. It no longer felt like there was a “me” here observing “nature” out there. The trees, the water, the birds, the sounds — and the awareness in which they appeared — were not really separate things.
Nature wasn’t just something to look at.
It was the seamless movement of one living field appearing as many forms.
When I finally stood up and began walking the familiar trails, the stillness didn’t end. It moved with me. The park, the path beneath my feet, the sunlight through the trees, the distant sounds of birds — it all felt like one unfolding scene.
For a moment it was almost like being inside a movie, except there was no distance from it.
I wasn’t watching the scene.
I was part of it.
Later that night, just before sleep, another image came to me. What I had experienced felt like only a small opening into something much larger — as though my perception had been looking through a narrow aperture.
If that aperture could widen, it would feel less like sitting in a park and more like sitting in the universe itself.
When I left the park, I stopped at a couple of stores to pick up a few things. I noticed my conversations with the woman packing groceries and the woman at the cleaners felt unusually easy and natural — just simple human moments, nothing special, yet somehow very complete.
It was a good day.
Paul Rezendes
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Jeffrey Angelson
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Willow
Jim, Jeffrey, et al
Jeffrey,
It may be an artifact of how you have written it, and correct me if I am
wrong but it seemed to me that there was still a ‘you’ there observing the experience, noticing the
Jeffrey Angelson Mar 13 02:00PM -0400
Maybe — though in that moment the stillness seemed to include even the one
noticing it.
Jeff Angelson
Jeffrey Angelson
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Willow
Jeffrey Angelson
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Willow
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Dan Kilpatrick
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Jeffrey Angelson
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Willow
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