One fine day I walked along a gravel road up the castle hill in the vicinity of my humble abode. The steep ascent really takes energy out of me, and I do not have an ounce to spare. I have inherited low blood pressure and I take tranquilizers. Both make ascents difficult. But I plod on since it is only about 300 feet of elevation gain (100 m). And so, I proceeded with difficulty until almost at the top I heard a noise in the bushes quite close to me. I stopped in terror thinking: ‘Is it a bear?’ There are a lot of bears in Slovenia, but I really doubted there would be one so close to a town. The...

One day I went for my usual walk in the forest, which proved unusual in the way it enveloped. I tend to exaggerate watching my step. That way maybe I do not watch nature so much. So, I decided to listen to the sounds of nature more. I normally concentrate on the chirping and singing of the birds, but this time the risen river after rain was so loud, I could barely hear the birds. The birds that have stayed at least, several of them have flown south already. The swallows desert us in autumn. No more chance of seeing a swallow-dive this time of the year. I saw it once in summer and it was magnificent....

There is a roundtrip walking path around a large governmental estate. The estate is surrounded by a high wire fence. There is even a barbed wire at the top of it. The sight of it used to bother me at first, but not anymore. My husband and I now fully enjoy walking through a forest. It is a most magical place. The forest extends both behind the wire fence, which is on the left of the walking path, and there are also woods on the right side of the hiking route. One thing we like to observe are tree leaves caught in the fence. To me it seemed thinkable that a leaf would fall from a tree and would get...

My husband and I have been listening to lectures by Anthony de Mello, a spiritual teacher and psychotherapist from the former century. One of his teachings is to commune with nature in order to be able to observe the wonders of creation. Watching nature shows us how insignificant we are in the vast universe. And if we are insignificant, so are our worries and other emotions. My husband and I have done nature walks for as long as we can remember, but newly we pause now and then to observe something interesting on the way. Once we spotted a little gray snail climbing up a branch of a low bush. Of course,...