“Nature Loves to Hide”

About 2,500 years ago, the pre-Socratic Mystic-Philosopher Heraclitus wrote:

Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (Physis kruptesthai filei)

This phrase is often translated as “Nature loves to hide” or “Nature loves to conceal herself.”

What could this enigmatic phrase mean? In what way does nature love to hide?

Physis (roughly pronounced “fusis”) is a term that carries the same connotations as our word “nature”: the natural world of trees and elk and fungi as well as “the way things are,” their character or tendency, a connection I explored in a past blog: “What is Ecodharma?”

Nature, in the sense of the world of living beings, is a direct manifestation and expression of the “way things are,” the universal laws that govern reality, which we saw is also what we could understand as the “dharma” that the Buddha taught. The Buddha taught us methods and strategies to help us to directly see the ways things are, how reality expresses itself. That “seeing directly” (a translation of the Buddhist term vipassana) is, according to the Buddha, inherently liberating. We begin to see the way things truly are and then are naturally led to live in attunement and alignment with that way, with the dharma, with nature, with physis.

So Heraclitus is here pointing to something about reality itself: it expresses itself in such a way that is somehow a kind of hiding, a concealment. Is this really the case? Isn’t the world manifest all around us? Isn’t it full of things to see and to touch? Is it really hiding itself? And as scientific exploration continues its march of uncovering the nature of things, isn’t nature pretty fairly understood, made clear and manifest? Perhaps the workings of a grasshopper is not fully obvious at a glance, but can’t I look up everything that I would need to know in a book of biology or entomology?

And yet, even after I’ve looked up all the things I could know about a grasshopper, understood its evolution, its anatomy and physiology and behavior, have I really encountered it at all? Hasn’t it continued to “hide” something from me? Isn’t its true nature, the way it is as itself, still concealed from me?

It seems to me that the true grasshopper, the grasshopper itself, loves to hide itself from me, unless I allow it to be itself, unless I allow it to reveal itself on its own terms, which I can only do if I also allow myself to relax into simply being there with it.

When I choose to stop, to drop my seeking after anything, and relax into presence and unconditional openness, the grasshopper (or the tree or my friend) is free to be simply as it is, and can then hide or reveal itself, can remain concealed or blossom into unconcealment.

There is an idea in nature tracking called “the circle of disturbance” and “the circle of awareness.” When we move through nature with our own human-centered agenda (hiking to the summit, catching up with a friend, playing a sport), our circle of disturbance is large and our circle of awareness is small. And in that mode, nature seems to hide itself. The birds fly further away, deer run and hide.

When we practice nature meditation, we invert that dynamic. Our circle of disturbance shrinks and our circle of awareness expands. And when we do that, nature starts to open up to us, to reveal itself. There is something truly magical about spending time in nature simply being present and aware. The birds return and sing their secret song, the bees and bugs and deer all get on with their usual way of life, usually hidden from our view. When we allow nature to hide itself, it also starts to reveal itself in new ways. And perhaps in those circumstances of real presence and openness, of paying loving and curious attention, nature also loves to reveal itself. As Franz Kafka beautifully wrote:

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Even when I do create the conditions for nature to show itself to me on its own terms, when it “rolls in ecstasy at my feet,” I think it is still hiding something of itself, of its infinite depths. Something of the mystery is never fully revealed, nature is always in this magnificent dance of hiding and revealing. And when we allow that movement, when we behold the revelations as well as honor the hiddenness, we start to attune ourselves to the way things are, to the dharma, and perhaps also find the liberation and freedom in letting things be just as they are, in letting nature hide from us, waiting in stillness for it to “roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Come join us in one of our monthly Nature Meditation Retreats to experience for yourself the magic of letting nature reveal to you its hidden treasures.