Being present is not a solo act:
Elements and beings that connect us to or divert from the moment
I was made acutely aware this week of the many currents constantly feeding into my life and my perception of it.
Travelling rom a quiet corner of Berlin to Istanbul, then to Moscow my thoughts, emotions, identities and available life strategies were changing like spring weather.
People, birds, billboards, the air, the trees were all whispering their stories to me, that were showing up as my thoughts and impulses.
Are they really? And if not how do we navigate the pulse of life with its multitude of players with more awareness and hopefully agency?
It didn’t come to writing time this week, so I am re-stacking a newsletter from half a year ago where I am exploring a related idea.
Wishing you a graceful flow in the currents of life.
And now to presence
It has been on my mind a lot lately.
Why? Because I believe it’s where everything begins and what life is made of:
Our sweetest and most painful memories
Our deepest connections
Our biggest insights
A state as desirable as it is elusive.
We often see presence as a solo act and our individual responsibility. That used to be me—breathing, meditating, going for walks—you name it.
Yet, despite all the effort and years of formal practice, it often felt forced. As if I had been a hamster in the wheel of self-improvement. To be in the moment, I had to be running.
Hey, get back there on the wheel, baby!
Things started to shift last summer, and it began with an interesting experience. Here are my biggest insights from decoding it and testing my findings.
The Day Time Stretched
Last August, I was in Montenegro, dropping my daughter off at camp. I had planned for two and a half days on my own by the coast, but due to that massive airport shutdown, I ended up with just one. Somehow, I decided that to make the most of the day, it would be best to leave my phone behind.
And so, I went out to explore without an agenda. It was a beautiful summer day on the coast. Just me and an emerald body of salty, almost body-temperature water surrounded by mountains.
Naturally, I first went to the water. Swimming, and mentally checking my watch: “That should be enough swimming. I should stick to my plan of exploring now.”
Bit by bit, this emerald water slowed my thoughts and brought me into an effortless state of being. Floating. Soaking. Being in the sun. Staring at the water. Taking in the glorious presence of the mountains.
This is THE water. I had to take it with me, so made the video the next morning.
I did go for a walk, then for another soak. Then I had some local fish, and then another soak. When I got home that day, I realized that it had felt much longer than a day—more like a 5-day breathwork retreat from my mentor.
Ever since, I’ve been trying to deconstruct that experience and have shared it with some of you.
What made it feel so slow? So regenerative?! Why was it so easy to be in the moment?
No phone? Nature? Definitely, yes. But something more seemed to have happened. Here are two big learnings I want to share.
Phone as a seductive mind-travel machine
First, I hadn’t realized the magnitude of the influence my phone has on me, my state, and hence my life.
Yes, I knew it’s highly distracting. It quickly makes me foggy and tired. But if I just have it with me and don’t use it, it should be fine, right?
Not really. Since that day, I’ve been testing with and without my phone. I’ve concluded that having a phone with me is like having a piece of my favorite candy in my pocket at all times. Emotionally draining if closely examined.
Here’s what having a phone means:
I am tracked (by the phone).
I can look up maps, words, etc., outsourcing my learning.
I am accessible to others (even with “do not disturb” turned on).
I always have the possibility to “travel” to another place by checking messages or going online.
Which makes my phone:
A multifunctional time-travel machine that pulls me away from the present.
An outsourcing agency for things I would otherwise learn by exploring and experiencing.
A greedy magnet drawing attention and focus, creating a continuous drip, even if hardly noticeable.
In other words, my phone has quite a big say in my presence. And considering how much time we spend with it, it’s a force I need to keep in mind and work with.
Practically speaking
Here are a few things I’ve started doing:
Turning off the phone when I want uninterrupted time.
Getting out into the world for a walk or grocery shopping without my phone.
Turning off the phone and everything else powered by electricity (including lights) for an evening—an adventure in itself!
Spending a few days without the phone every couple of months (I’m lucky to have this opportunity during my Wilderness Educator program).
These might seem small, but they’ve made a difference. It feels like someone who had always been secretly rushing me is now upfront about it. And I can negotiate.
Co-regulating with Elements and Beings
The salty water soak was a big part of that deep presence experience, which had me thinking about nature—more specifically, about the elements and their effect on my state.
We know about the role of elements. We call presence “being grounded.” We get fired up too easily nowadays and dream of more flow in life. We also know how nature is soothing, de-stressing, etc.
Yet that day, the experience with the water was more profound.
I trace it to the fact that my relationship with nature was changing at that moment; the Wilderness Educator program was on the horizon.
It was shifting from the functional—often our default as modern humans: “Let me use nature to calm down”—to: “We be of one blood, ye and I,” in Kipling’s words.
Bas-relief by John Lockwood Kipling, the author's father, depicting Mowgli's farewell to his jungle friends.
I started to feel like “I am nature.” For real. Call it non-duality, nature spirituality, or integrating Western science research on consciousness—it changed a lot.
It’s like I had always been the audience looking at the stage, separated by what performers call the invisible fourth wall. And then, all of a sudden, I was on the stage, living through the experiences of joy and sorrow, and above all, being a part of it all.
The implications have been big, and it’s something I’ll share more about here. But for now, let me just share a few quotes, established in facts, that might gently nudge you into the “We be of one blood, ye and I” vibe:
“Earth’s biosphere is a closed loop, recycling its elements endlessly. This means we are quite literally made of the same materials as the planet itself.
Oxygen from the atmosphere fuels our breath, calcium from ancient rocks forms our bones, and hydrogen from the stars courses through our veins in water.
The water in our bodies today might once have flowed through the veins of a dinosaur. The carbon forming our cells could have been part of ancient forests or primordial seas.”
– A loose quote from Guy Murchie’s Seven Mysteries of Life
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.
It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.”
– Lawrence M. Krauss, Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist
“Trees are social beings. They can count, learn, and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals through a fungal network known as the ‘Wood Wide Web.’”
– Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees
“The human mind developed in a world of animals and plants, and it cannot be fully at home in a world devoid of them.”
– Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human
I saved this one for the end, but this podcast is how the shift started. It’s incredibly poetic and “going-under-your-skin“ yet grounded in science and ancestral knowledge:
“We are a bag of breathing water.
We hold millions of years of animal bodies in us.
You began your journey as a primordial aquatic being with a tail.
We grow the same throat structures as fish.
What becomes the lateral line in fish becomes ears in us.”– Josh Srei, The Emerald Podcast
So, to sum it up, as known by our ancestors and confirmed by Western science: we humans are made of the same stuff as trees, rocks, and stars. Whether we realize it or not, we share consciousness, exchange information, collaborate, and regulate together.
What’s different about us seems to be the speed with which we go through life. Rocks and trees tend to go slower in their reactions and movements.
And isn’t slowing down exactly what we need to be more present?
This hyacinth on my dinner table decided to move and change direction overnight, from vertical to almost horizontal, bending toward the light.
Practically speaking
So where does this leave us with being present?
I believe being present is almost effortless if we manage to connect to this network of life—where we once knew, in our bones, we belonged. And there are a lot of simple ways to start the journey.
As you walk in the forest, remember: the trees are checking you out!
As you laugh or talk to your companion, you’re doing it with the throat structure you inherited from birds.
And as you breathe, your bronchial tree perfectly mirrors the trees outside your window. You are inhaling their exhale and exhaling what becomes their inhale.
What’s that? You guessed it: a cast of a bronchial tree that sits in your lungs!
Again, just realizing this made a big difference in my throughout-the-day presence. Oftentimes, all it takes to feel grounded is connecting to the tree outside of my window, a rooted beech.
Here are a couple more ideas that have made a difference in my life:
Lighting candles more often, especially when I need extra support
Going for walks to one of the lakes nearby and spending time specifically by the water: just staring
Observing nature as if I’d need to draw it from memory later: trees, branches, bark, and plants
Having some contact with trees or plants daily: holding a piece of wood, or observing spring flowers in pots here in Berlin as they grow and change every day
Daffodils in a pot from a local supermarket: they change every day if we care to notice
One takeaway
If there’s one thing I’d love for you to take away from this, it’s this:
Our presence is relational.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s constantly shaped by our environment and other beings. They take us to states ranging from deeply grounded to anxious and distracted.
It’s exhausting—and futile—to reduce our state to our skulls and make it an individual task.
What if instead, we asked ourselves:
What or who do I need to feel present?
What or who is taking the present away from me?
The answers can be as practical as finding a different corner in the room and lighting a candle, sitting near a plant, hugging a tree, or meditating under the Milky Way.
Who knows what bags of salty water and dust of stars will be up to?
And that’s it. Thank you for reading this far.
I’d love to hear any thoughts on this. On presence. Nature. Or the Milky Way ;)
Ways to further explore together:
Listen to the podcast:
The Breath of Life: featuring live conversations on Substack with people who are spreading aliveness and interconnectedness.
Life in Flow: exploring concepts fundamental to Flow in Life in improvised unedited conversations with tow flow-co-creators.
Come on a breath walk with me!
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