Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Australian Aboriginal people describe a certain point in any journey as being “three days deep”. By this they mean that it takes three days alone in the natural world to reach a change in consciousness. After three days, you enter The Dreamtime. Although I made it a rule to greet everyone I passed, there wasn’t any conversation, and in the absence of radio, television and newspapers, the world quietened and the familiar found new forms. Up on the Malvern Ridge, I became aware that it was increasingly a journey into silence, and around each corner was the new lace of spring that I would have otherwise simply walked past.

Most of us on this island live on “the plain” – a busy place of people, traffic, sirens, machines, televisions, mobile phones – and we get used to the noise. But once you are above 200 metres or so, the soundscape quietens, and all those hardwired patterns of thought start to loosen their grip. What had started as an extended route march marked by time and distance began to fall away, or maybe I just began to let it all go. And by the time I arrived in the Shropshire Hills, it was in the midst of a heatwave, warm air blanketing a thousand different shades of green shoots and leaves, and lines of early buttercups bubbling up at the side of the paths. Even the rooks, normally brash in spring, were lulled into becoming languorous sentries. I spent the entire day smiling.’ (from the Guardian)

This is an article I bookmarked a long time ago, intrigued at the similarity of the notion expressed at the beginning, and the common experience in sesshin of the mind quieting after three days.