In the mornings I go out to a little cabin in the woods to contemplate and experience a little mindfulness the easy way: by sitting, noticing my breathing, and trying to find a little stillness.

And when I say ‘the easy way’, it’s really not always that easy. Some mornings my mind is like an amusement park; I sit there for 20 or 30 or 40 minutes without a single space between my thoughts. They just roll on, a nonsensically random action-thriller-romance-comedy movie without a pause button. In fact, it’s a rare event that my thoughts leave me for long enough for me to claim I spent more time in stillness than in mental acrobatics.

That’s why they call it a practice, I suppose. We have to keep practicing, because stillness—that serene space between thoughts—is often hard to come by. We have to keep practicing, because we were born with brains that like to keep busy, and minds that love being still.

After a particularly long sit this morning, I opened my eyes to find a meditative face in a tree looking back at me. I sit in this same spot almost every morning, and this morning was the first time I noticed this face, this reflection of the sitter in the cabin, grounded, still, silent. Solid.

I stared back at my new friend, thinking of the symbolism it represented, and noticed a flicker just above it. A squirrel was darting about, jumping from branch to branch in its frantic preparation for winter. And then I saw another! Two jumpy squirrels, another perfect reflection of my mind.

I am that face in the tree. I am those squirrels. And the scene outside my window is incomplete without them both.