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One of my favorite places on our farm is not the high knoll with its 360-degree view, or the pond with its shimmering mirror of fall leaves, or the wooded hill with its huge white oaks.

I love all these places. Love to find the different shades of light filtering over them through each season. Love the air that stirs the orchard grass, the energy demanded to know these places and the liveliness given in return.

I keep returning most often, though, to the small valley behind our house, what we call the North Valley. At first this place appears unremarkable; the line fence runs down its middle, separating grazing Angus on our neighbor's pasture from young hardwoods on our side.

Around the rim of the whole hollow lays a long string of maple, locust and pine trees, spires in a blue-domed cathedral. There are no grand views, no water, no old-growth forest, just some cows and scrubby, briar-patched land. But I keep returning.

Even after years of living here, it takes me awhile to articulate why the North Valley draws me.

Then one evening, as I hiked the long, grassy road, I cupped my hands, as if taking a drink from a spring and realized this shape, this bowl of two hands, is also the shape of this land. If you hike into it from the west, you come to the last upper reaches of the valley, and suddenly the land holds you.

When I finally understood this particular beauty, I walked like this, my hands mirroring the terrain, cupping the air, praying even, while all around the valley cupped me.

I smiled in a quiet glee.

I'm guessing something like this quiet glee is what has fueled the Zen Buddhist tradition for more than 2,500 years. In this belief, one of the most common hand positions used while meditating is called the cosmic mudra.

I asked a friend, Ellen Birx, for insight on this.

Besides being a professor of nursing at Radford University, Ellen also is a practicing Zen teacher. She told me that cosmic mudra is "a traditional hand position handed down from generation to generation associated with the gathering of energy and being collected rather than scattered and distracted."

Further reading echoed her words and also illustrated how you hold the hands, one cupping the other, thumbs touching to form an "O." And though this shape of the hands doesn't quite mirror the shape of North Valley, the idea of focusing, of collecting oneself, embodies that centering, that feeling I encounter every time I hike this one hollow.

Zen Mountain Monastery offers this explanation on its Web site: "The great Master Dogen said, 'To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.' To be enlightened by the ten thousand things is to recognize the unity of the self and the ten thousand things."

So, there is no self and only one self, the self of all this world that includes the small self of my body walking through it.

In fall and winter, when I teach a full day, I often don't arrive home until 7 p.m., the sun already set, stars already dotting the dark sky.

But I need exercise, so after a quick supper, the dogs and I head out into the dark. I usually don't carry a flashlight, instead preferring to use my other senses, to find the beauty of the night on its own terms.

Or as Wendell Berry writes in his poem "To Know the Dark": "To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. / To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, / and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, / and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

I wanted to find this blooming and singing, but even without light, I still took a long while to focus on the larger self that is not in my head, to find instead of thoughts of work, these "dark feet and dark wings."

I hiked a big two-mile loop, following our farm roads through what we call the Deep Woods, down Pretty Valley and along Big Branch. This stream is my halfway mark, and if I'm still thinking on my inner worries, I know to stop here for a moment and focus on its water, breathe out smaller troubles of this smaller self and listen to the larger world.

Then I turned from the stream and journeyed the last stretch that takes me up North Valley. Another half-mile and I entered the upper rim, this bowl of the self.

Even in darkness, I could see outlines of the land, the tree-lined rim, the long valley I entered. A lone locust tree stands at the very top of this hollow, and in the pitch blackness of a cloudy night, I could still see its silhouette from far away as I walked to it, touched it and said hello.

Then I turned for home, even though I was already there.