'Mindfulness in Texas Nature' author pens practical guide

Michael Smith is an Arlington-based writer and naturalist. He is author of two books on reptiles and amphibians and a new book Mindfulness in Texas Nature, published by Texas A&M University Press in July. The book draws on his expertise in regional ecology as well as his 35-year career as a Psychological Associate.

Texas Green Report reporter Marshall Hinsley talks to Smith about how to practice mindfulness in various Texas ecoregions, our resistance to it and what we gain by incorporating nature and mindfulness into our lives.

Transcript

 MARSHALL HINSLEY: The importance of dropping all your worries and immersing yourself in the healing properties of the natural Texas landscape, in this episode of the Texas Green Report, a production of Green Source Texas and the Memnosyne Institute. I'm Marshall Hinsley.
Michael Smith is an Arlington-based writer and naturalist who's authored two books on reptiles and amphibians and a new book, Mindfulness in Texas Nature, published by Texas A&M University Press in July of 2024.
The book draws on his expertise in regional ecology, as well as this 35-year career as a Psychological Associate, and conveys how nature heals our bodies and our minds, especially if we focus on the sights, sounds feelings and scents around us.
The book also acquaints nature-seeking readers with several destinations in Texas that Smith says are perfectly suited for practicing a mindful relationship with the outdoors.
Michael, what do readers stand to gain from your book and how does your background in psychology factor into it?

MICHAEL SMITH: This book is about seeing and experiencing nature in Texas, the prairies, the deserts, and mountains, the pine forests, and other ecoregions. In particular, it is about ways to be fully present when visiting those places, freed from the distractions and restlessness that can let the sights, sounds, smells and other sensations slip past us before we really notice.
So that's the idea of being of practicing mindfulness in these natural places. And I wrote it because really a lot of the things that I write are about encouraging all of us to reconnect with nature better. And there's been such an estrangement from nature for a lot of people, and I think that it does have some real advantages. There's some real benefits that it provides us.
My background in psychology provided me with some greater understanding of how humans interact with things, how we experience emotions like awe, and in particular, how we use our attention and awareness in ways like is the case in mindfulness.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: Do you feel that there is some disconnect that is harming people, with nature?

MICHAEL SMITH: Well, I do in several ways. One is that nature has increasingly a whole suite of benefits to mind and body. That is, time spent in nature is associated with decreases in blood pressure and decreases in the kind of ruminative thinking that tends to make us depressed and even increases in things like immune function and so on. So there are a lot of benefits to people for being in nature.
Actually, the folks that in particular, the folks that study a practice called forest bathing or Shinrin-yoku have done a lot to show how it may increase T cell activity and what's called natural killer cells, N.K. cells, which tend to attack diseased or even tumor cells.
And they've done experiments where one group goes into the forest. The other spent some time in a hotel. And they compare those levels of those things afterward and find that there are elevated amounts of them in the folks that went through the forest.
There's a lot of medical and psychological benefits to nature and mindfulness and contact with nature.
And then the other benefit is about protecting and maybe healing nature — that is, the more we're estranged from it, the more it doesn't matter if it's healthy or not; the more it's not so important if there are wild places or not. And we've lost a great deal of that. We've lost a great deal of both the big, wild places like national forests and monuments and so on, and also a lot of more local, smaller places.
And it's a shame both for us and just for the health of the place we live. We want, we all want to breathe clean air and and have pollinators still making plants reproduce and not go away. There's just a host of benefits that nature provides us that people become less aware of as they become more estranged from nature.

MARSHALL HENSLEY: Your book is a fairly quick read. What will readers find in it?

MICHAEL SMITH: The first part of it is a description of some of what I've just been talking about with the benefits of time spent in nature and what mindfulness is and how it's practiced. And some of the, without being too dry, hopefully not a dry discussion of the research, but a little touch of why am I saying what I'm saying about the benefits.
Like just, should you take my word for it? Or do you want to know a little bit about the research that documents it? So I throw in a little bit of that, but there's a lot of description of the ecological areas of Texas. So if you want to go practice mindfulness in Texas, where are some places to go?
And so I discussed some of the areas and what they're like where we live in the Cross Timbers and Prairies, part of North Central Texas. But you go west and you get out in the Plains, the Rolling Plains and then High Plains. But if you go east, you get into the Piney Woods and so on.
There's a lot of those ecological regions of Texas.
There's a chapter that's talking about getting ready to go out somewhere, whether it's to your local park or whether it's across the state to a big place and a little bit of discussion about what you might bring, how you might prepare in terms of calling and checking ahead, thinking about what you want to do.
A lot of people think they can go and go off trail and collect things and do things that might not be permitted. And frankly, just making sure it's open. I went to South Texas one time with a friend, and one of our big goals was to see the Sable Palms Sanctuary near Brownsville. And lo and behold, it was closed. Luckily, there was a lot of other things for us to do. There's just a lot of preparation, kinds of things that can be done.
The second half of the book is an exploration of these places following the seasons. So we start with the spring and then summer and autumn, and then winter with a lot of different destinations: The Big Thicket, the Big Bend. There's a National Wildlife Refuge up past Lubbock called Muleshoe National Wildlife Refuge. Each of these places offers something unique and different.
And so we visited. I say we — that was Meghan Cassidy and me. Meghan was the photographer on this book and her contribution is really substantial. So we visited each of these places. And I wrote about what it was like to be there. There's a mix of natural history and mindfulness. That is, if you're practicing mindfulness, if you're paying attention to your breathing for a bit and becoming aware of what's around you and what you're experiencing, and you're not looking to generate thoughts or write stuff or you're just wanting to be there, then you're there. What are the words for that, right?
Afterwards I would write in my journal about what the experience was like. And we would also include natural history: birds, alligators, snakes. And Megan is a spider expert, so there's a few things about spiders. And a little bit about the ecological stuff. So it's a mix of those two things.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: So with the snakes, you've included things that are adverse to mental health.

MICHAEL SMITH: For some people, yes. And what I hope is that their experience would be a little like mine. So to go back a little, I was pretty phobic of spiders as a kid. And because I was really interested in snakes and reptiles, I hung out with people and got out in nature quite a bit and was just naturally exposed to spiders and in fact, it mirrored something in behavioral intervention would be called exposure therapy.
It's actually got the probably the best track record in terms of addressing phobias. And so I was out in places that I enjoyed with people that I felt safe with. And so it was a sort of a safe context. And gradually, I was around spider webs and spiders and didn't have to be real close. Nobody threw one on me or made me afraid. And so just gradually I became less afraid. So I would hope people would have similar experiences with the things that are described in the book.
One of the things I talked about was seeing a spider in the Arboretum in Athens that was hanging upside down in the web, which was in sunlight. And I talked about how the strands of the web would catch the light and as the spider moved or the breeze moved the web, the light would run up and down those strands in just a big collection of sparkles. It was like a little galaxy there that it's hard to be afraid of a spider when you're sitting there being aware of that and that's your frame of reference for that spider is  —look at this beautiful web. It sparkles like a galaxy. And so that's, you know, the deal.
I think the one that would — if there were going to be someone afraid of things that most specifically addresses it is our encounter with a cottonmouth at Caddo Lake.
And a lot of people are afraid of cottonmouths. It's a little bit overblown. They're actually pretty laid back snakes, and they certainly are potentially dangerous, but they don't want to chase you and they don't want to bite you. They really just want to be left alone. So we found this snake and got some photos and I described how once it couldn't escape— once we didn't allow it to leave, then it gaped at us in a typical cottonmouth kind of behavior where it's showing us its white mouth inner lining and as a warning kind of signal. And the snake wasn't attempting to bite us, wasn't attempting to hurt us in any way. And then we walked on and continued with our walk with nobody the worse for it.
Yeah, there are some things that some people might ordinarily think of as creepy. But the description and presentation, I think is — this is part of the place. This is part of nature. And knowing a little bit about it and exercising reasonable caution, there's no need to be afraid.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: Given that nature has the physical and mental benefits that you highlight in the book, what accounts for our separation from something that, apparently, if we gave it more time, we would feel the difference?

MICHAEL SMITH: Yeah, that's, that is a great question. It's almost like that's the big question, right? Why is this happening?

We grow up in a culture that teaches us that what's important is getting stuff done: achievements, building stuff, bigger cities, economies are supposed to grow without limits, that if you even suggest that there ought to be a steady-state economy, that's a heresy.
We grow up with these ideas where we've just gotten more off to ourselves with the stuff that we build and the stuff that we make and the stuff that we do — is what our lives become wrapped around. And therefore it becomes what we're most comfortable with.
So with a lot of things, if you're not familiar with it, if it's strange to you, if it seems foreign, then it might be a bit scary. And so the more we get wrapped up into those, the things that I mentioned, maybe the less welcoming nature seems to be.
And once that happens, it's like me and the spiders. I've decided that I'm afraid of them, and so I could have a perfectly good encounter that doesn't hurt me with a spider, and I come away afraid because I'm afraid of spiders.
So If someone feels that nature is foreign and strange and just, I don't belong there, then being there initially might feel uncomfortable, just because it's foreign, where with a little time, with the right frame of reference it might become wonderful.
In a sort of related note, I do a lot of presentations to kids with reptiles, including snakes, always talking about our native snakes as wildlife. Not as something, in other words — there's no showing off and I encourage kids: it's really important not to show off with snakes.
And when I brought a snake, I always ask people if you don't want me to get close to you with the snake, I will not, so just let me know. Basically, create a safe environment and then when the snake comes out, even the kids who have said, ‘Oh, no, I don't want you getting close to me with the snake’ are usually right up there with the others, wanting to touch it, wanting to see it up close. Once you're there, once you experience it, once you find that it's not foreign and dangerous, it's fine. And I think that could happen with nature as well.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: The term mindfulness is used quite a bit in social media. Social media influencers seem to have latched onto this term. What does mindfulness mean to you?

MICHAEL SMITH: I agree with you that that does come up all the time and people, and it may or may not mean what mindfulness really is.
Mindfulness is really a special way of paying attention to things on purpose and without judgment and as a practice that you do more than once. If you sit somewhere and just open yourself to what's around you and because our brains are great at generating thoughts, that's what we always do. So what you do when you have thoughts is just let it go, just let it float away. Come back to your present moment awareness. And so you're paying attention in the present moment, non judgmentally. And that's really what mindfulness is. It certainly has a prominent place in Buddhism, but it's not a religious practice, per se.
You can do it quite secularly. It doesn't involve having, first of all, it doesn't involve chanting something or having to do it in some the kind of context that we think of as secular, formal meditation. You can certainly formally meditate, but you can also practice mindfulness sitting beside a stream somewhere, just being aware of everything and not getting caught up in your thoughts.
I'll give one other example that I think helps illustrate it. We often get caught up in what we would refer to as autopilot, right? So in the book, I talk about a couple of examples on the beach. One of which is a woman walking down the seashore, and she's paying attention to everything around her.
She's aware of the sun, warm on her skin. She may be glad she's got a hat on but she doesn't get caught up in thinking about hats and sunscreen and getting all carried away with her thoughts. She comes back to what's around me, the sun, the calls of gulls, the sound of waves coming up on the shore, how the sand feels under her feet, the packed sand near the water as opposed to the loose sand in the dunes — she’s just aware of all of those things and not really getting caught up in thinking.
And that would be an example of mindfulness where another person walking along maybe has been in a meeting earlier in the day. It didn't go all that well. Maybe the food wasn't all that great. He's thinking about if I had it to do over again, I'd pick a different restaurant. He's thinking about how the meeting went and what he's going to do tonight. And he's basically on autopilot. And autopilot is like what we do when we're driving and we get there and we couldn't even tell anybody how we got there. We weren't really paying attention. The part of our mind that is able to sort of automatically drive the car safely just took care of that while we were thinking about tomorrow or yesterday or whatever.
So mindfulness is about being in the present and letting all that other stuff go and just being in the present.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: I think, in contrast to mindfulness, especially, say, in nature, might be the person who's got to take a picture of everything that seems to be photogenic.

MICHAEL SMITH: Yeah that's — I'm glad you brought that up. I've talked about that and I always think about myself and all my friends. So I started out with an interest in herpetology, as I mentioned, and lots of my time in the field was searching out stuff, wanting to take photos and wanting to turn rocks or logs over and find stuff, and we keep count of how many species have we seen. So we're all caught up in all of that stuff, not really very mindful, and the more I discovered how to just be out there, mindfully, the better that felt.
But citizen scientistry and people who are interested in the scientific side of natural history, I have a lot of respect for that, and I think that certainly has a place. But I agree that's not really the same thing as mindfulness.
So when I was out with a friend, I got to thinking about them as hummingbirds because flitting around, finding things to take photos of, seeing lots of things, sipping the nectar of all these things to photograph, not really stopping very long and really the nature they see is through the gadgets, through the cameras and all of that which I think is wonderful, but I wound up sitting on a log watching butterflies and just taking in the whole place, which is different. And that is more like mindfulness. And my thought is those of us who like to document things and take photos and all might be out for a while taking some photos and then stop and sit for a while and maybe write in a journal or just sit and notice what's around us for a while without taking any photos, without even worrying so wait, which subspecies is that? Is that the the eastern subspecies or the western?
Just let all that go. And just notice what you're experiencing, including things that you might smell, what you hear, the breeze through trees, all of that total experience. Just let that be what we're focused on, and that's a good experience.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: Your book is written about mindfulness in Texas nature, and so often people from other parts of the country complain that all they see is flatness — Texas is just flat. There's nothing remarkable about Texas, except perhaps the heat.

MICHAEL SMITH: Which is certainly true.
I actually mention something about that in the chapter about the different ecoregions. Because the plains is where people have that the worst, right? The plains is, a lot of it is flat grassland and and people say it's just, miles and miles of the same old stuff. And what I think is that you have to stop and get out in order to really appreciate it.
If from a car at 60 miles-an-hour, sure not so much, but if you take a walk in those grasslands and you notice the variety of plants growing and the the insects and other small wildlife that you would see, it becomes more of a thing that you notice and understand and appreciate.
Our couple of days at Muleshoe, we saw lots of meadowlarks. We found a horned lark there, and you know, there were birds, but there's also just being in a wide expanse of grass and walking through it.
One of the things that may help is a thing that we talk about in mindfulness called beginner's mind and beginner's mind is when you are seeing something as if for the first time. So someone who's seen a lot of grass and just says, yeah, yeah, just more grass — so what? misses a whole lot.
Whereas if this was the first time I walked through a prairie at Muleshoe and saw the different kinds of grass and the shapes some of them swirled around almost like swirling eddies in a stream — only it's grass — or the tall straight strands and the way things smell — it is like seeing it for the first time and the phrase that you hear and I think from Buddhism is that in the beginner's mind there are many choices, are many options, whereas in the experts mind there are few. And what it's talking about is how when we've seen something a million times, we bring that old experience with us. And we no longer really see what's in front of us right now, because we are so dominated by the baggage of how we've perceived it in the past and what we've done in the past in that situation.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: And in the tall grasslands, I find that it's interesting how if it's a 95-degree day, your head and your shoulders will feel the 95 degrees, but your knees and your ankles will be in a much cooler place.

MICHAEL SMITH: Yes. Yeah, that grasslands are among my favorite places. And one of the visits in the book is to Clymer Meadow in the Blackland Prairie. That was just an incredibly delightful and, and it was so diverse that it might as well have been a rainforest. But yes, the different levels, right? You're up there in the sun, but then lower down there's shade and there's diversity of all kinds of different species.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: And you can see some wildlife just waiting out a hot day under that tall grass, really not experiencing the heat like the rest of us are if we're just walking across a parking lot or separated out from a more natural climate.

MICHAEL SMITH: Yeah, I can be out somewhere on a hot day, even where there's a heat warning, and I guess I don't want to say it like I completely disregard the heat. I'm over 70 and I have to be careful and as all of us do about heat warnings and heat illness, but I can be out somewhere in a hot day and it just it doesn't — there's partly — I'm so caught up in everything else that it's not, my awareness of it is not so much. Plus, we're away a little bit from the heat island of cities, and it's just not quite as hot.

MARSHALL HENSLEY: Read for us a section of the book that you feel encapsulates the mood of your book.

MICHAEL SMITH: Okay, that would probably be up in the Chisos Mountains in the Big Bend along the Lost Mine Trail. It's the same walk that we took that has the cover photo of the book that we took. And I've been up on that trail a number of times and every time is really magical, but this was one of those times.
So what I wrote was:
"Sitting in a quiet spot on the side of the mountain, the world seems nearly to stand still. There is the soothing hum of bees, and butterflies of various colors and patterns visit the flowers and flutter off through the woodland. Mexican jays fuss and call to each other, but the busy activity of all these things just makes the underlying stillness more manifest.
"Here, we can let go of the pace at which our lives move and join the near motionless time scale of weathering granite. We belong to a busy species and quickly fall into rhythms of moving, searching, making and fixing.
"But there is a part of how we are made that listens for things bigger than ourselves and seeks transcendence, mystery and awe. One way to find those things is through stillness and, for a time, joining with the patience and resilience of the mountains."
MARSHALL HINSLEY: And the book by Michael Smith is Mindfulness in Texas Nature with photography by Meghan Cassidy.
Where can you pick up a copy?
MICHAEL SMITH: Hopefully anywhere. You can certainly get it from places like Amazon or other online booksellers. You can certainly get it from the publisher, which is Texas A&M University Press. Hopefully, local booksellers would have copies on hand and certainly you can get it online.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: And what is it that you hope that this book does for each reader?

MICHAEL SMITH: I really do hope that it helps reconnect people. And I know a lot of people who will read it are already pretty well connected. They may already be big fans of being in nature. So if it gives all of us new and deeper ways to be in nature and to experience it a little differently and a little bit more deeply that would be wonderful as well.
One thing that is an extra attraction of the book is Meghan's photos, and she's a really good photographer. So it's not just me out there with my camera. It's really nice photos of lots of places and lots of wildlife in Texas.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: Thank you, Michael.

MICHAEL SMITH: Sure. Very happy to have talked with you about this.

MARSHALL HINSLEY: For the Texas Green Report, I'm Marshall Hinsley.
Discover more about the people who are making Texas a beautiful and more natural state by visiting GreenSourceTexas.org.



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