Daily Life at Edenhope Nature Preserve

IIf one person at Edenhope awakens to a state of bliss and serenity, then sooner or later everyone is sure to share in it too. The peace we experience through daily meditation permeates and flows between everybody here, not because of what we are doing but because of how we are being.

You awaken to the sounds of birds, the squawks of wild roosters as they scrabble throughout the forest. The valley is set in shade, and the calming sound of the river flowing suffuses your dreams in your half-awakened state. The hours of early morning are optimal for meditation; from the moment you open your eyes, the peace of this place is alive in you and sets you in motion to begin the day.

Rising from your bed, your prepare yourself without haste to join the rest of the group in the meditation space for our shared morning practice. You notice the freshness of the morning air, clean in your lungs, and the clear feeling in your system that follows a good night’s rest. Your inside world is humming, and you bask in it, and it expands to touch the vibrancy of this place in nature.

Seated on your cushion, you allow the energy of the morning to rise inside you as the peal of birdsong pitches in the canopy outside. This is a gloriously natural consequence of daily meditation practice: without the need for outside stimulants to boost your energy, your practice suffuses you with sufficient inspiration to flow through the morning with ease and grace.

You are radiant with a certain glow that everybody in the meditation space is sharing in as you sit together; you gently take all the others here into your awareness, appreciating all the individual parts that make up our community. The silence between us all has a certain richness about it, a quality that nourishes us as we prepare to start the day.

Each person in the hall leaves gradually, in their own time, to do their morning things. Presently we meet in the communal area to prepare breakfast — usually a smoothie made with papayas and bananas from the garden, or some herbal tea.

Maybe we all take our smoothies together outside this morning, as the rays of pale sun begin to draw pools of light beneath the trees. Maybe we talk and laugh, or maybe we don’t say anything at all and just sit here together, enjoying the silence and each other. It’s worth saying something about the quality of our interactions here; our talk tends towards what is relevant to our experience in the present moment, rather than anecdotes and opinions from the past.

Soon you prepare yourself to start on some projects in service of the community; we all meet and discuss what is needed and who is to do what. You might take on an area of the garden with a friend, pruning and planting until you work up a fine sweat, or there might be a wall that needs painting or a lunch that needs making or a perhaps even a combination of a few of those things that contribute to the active life of the community.

Whatever you are doing today, the feeling of peace and serenity stays with you: it charms your work, as moments of intense focus spill over into bursts of inspired laughter, and when you look back at what you have done you are amazed at how much progress can be made in such a short amount of time when you start the day feeling settled in yourself and inspired by the community you are part of. Because you spent your morning in the garden, or at the worksite, or in the kitchen, something at Edenhope is now more beautiful than it was yesterday.

As the sun moves towards its crest in the sky, a few of us go to take a dip in the cool river to wash off after our morning efforts. It’s so much fun down here! Diving, splashing, dancing on rocks; small children bobbing around, and everything feels so infectiously good. There are little white butterflies dancing through the air and fish swimming alongside us in the river. Here we are really in the heart of nature, only a minute away from our community dwellings.

Now everybody is hungry, and our friends have made a beautiful lunch, which is our main meal for the day. There’s probably a big salad full of delicious things from the garden with a nice sauce to go on it, and a pot of yam or taro with coconut milk, a dish of greens, and a delicious curry with home-made pickles and a refreshing cup of kombucha to go along with it. Yum!

You can barely wait to tuck in, and yet before we share our food together we take a moment’s pause: gathered around the table, we all close our eyes and offer an om or a short prayer of thanks for this food. From that silent space of communion, nourished first by the presence of peace at our community table, we take our lunch.

We eat. The food is good. We eat more. We rest after lunch, because the day is hot. Everybody goes to take some quiet time alone, maybe for an hour or two. Perhaps you feel inclined to do something creative: journaling, art, or reading an inspiring book. Or maybe you go back to the river or for a walk through the forest, beautiful places where you can feel the power of your inner silence.

When the heat subsides, your energy lifts again; time for another burst of gardening or building, or helping to clean the shared spaces and collect firewood from the forest, just doing something that you know needs doing. The pace of the afternoon is gentle; we meet and talk about things, taking time for reflection and creativity.

Late in the afternoon somebody might pick up an instrument and we all play some music together. Or we have a dance by the riverside. Maybe we light up the sauna or set a bonfire. The afternoon recedes into a gentle dusk, and the pitch of birds and insects begins to rise in the canopy surrounding us. It’s a very good time for our evening meditation.

A potent silence opens up inside as you rest upon the cushion in the meditation space. The day’s activities melt into a radiant nothingness as you listen to the sounds of nightfall at Edenhope; always the river, ever flowing beside us, and the crickets and native birds offering their final chorus of the day.

A sense of peace swims into you with the sounds, and your breath softens as your body and mind succumb to the spell of deep relaxation. Your finite, embodied self dissolves into the infinite consciousness of Self; you release whatever positions, attachments, and perspectives you carried with you into the meditation hall into the bliss of that realization. Time no longer passes; it too dissolves in the silence, and in its wake the understanding emerges that this moment of communion is what you came to live in nature to experience.

Maybe you share in our way of life for a few months, as an antidote to the stress and difficulty of your life in the world. Or maybe you choose to remain here longer, moving ever deeper into the peace inside you and sharing the love and blessings of this place and the vibrant community it houses. It is a matter of alignment; this place is a sanctuary, and for a some a sanctuary is needed to sustain the presence of life inside us.

You will have a very different experience here from anybody else, and day-to-day life at Edenhope will not always be as peaceful as on such a day as this. Some days are less harmonious, and some days are very difficult, but so it is everywhere; here, at least, we have a unified intention towards peacefulness in all of our thoughts, words and deeds throughout the day.

Here, peace is our intention and shared purpose. Here, we are experimenting with how to integrate harmony as our ordinary and lived experience. Here is a place to learn and share the highest ideals in life: compassion, truthfulness, and the preservation of pristine nature.