I am standing in front of a small forest lake, looking at a huge tree in the middle of it. I haven't moved for a full ten minutes.
I'm not alone. There, in the tree, sits a golden eagle — an encounter I could never have imagined when I set out on my hike that morning.
When you finally leave the parking lot and enter the trail, for the first few minutes you feel deaf. The silence is so thick, you can almost touch it. After the noise of the city, the constant distractions of your phone and the small but heavy conversations with people along the way, you can't hear anything in the forest. Your overwhelmed mind and your hearing go numb.
So you step onto the trail and simply walk, heavily, for the first few hundred metres. As you go deeper into the shadows, the heaviness of everyday life begins to lift. And, after ten minutes or so, you start registering tiny movements.
What your eyes took for a big leaf turns out to be a resting place for a small snake. You stop and stare at it, not understanding where it came from or how it managed to appear so miraculously on this seemingly lifeless patch of green.
You call to your fellow hikers to stop. In a moment, everyone is oohing and ahhing, rustling through their backpacks and clicking their cameras. The disturbed snake lifts its head, watches us reproachfully, then makes its way to the other side of the trail and disappears into the bushes.
That's why, when my eye catches another movement in the branches, I stop again and stand silently.
I've never seen a bird so huge. Its wings are like parachutes, carrying it towards the tall, lonely tree. It lands softly on a branch so thick that, from where I'm standing, the eagle looks almost like a sparrow.
And this time, I'm not moving.
I stand there in awe and silence. And finally, I can hear.
Small branches cracking somewhere around me. The soft rustle of water as a yellow leaf lands on its surface. The whistle of wings as smaller birds fly past. Their chatter.
These noises are so delicate that you have to tune in to hear them.
And once you have the patience to stop rushing past seemingly identical bushes, you begin to notice how different every plant is. How every patch of forest is full of life.
You just have to stop long enough to hear it.
