Stillness Speaks Book Previews

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: Can a Quiet Moment in Nature Be a Gift?

by Sanjiv Manifest | Oct 8, 2025

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: “… Drink your tea slowly and reverently… Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life …” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Indeed! … Thay is simply reminding us how to live every moment. Not unlike Alan Watts uncompromising reminder that: “… There never was anything else except the present. Never will be. Life is always present …”

Or Eckhart Tolle’s exhortation: “… This one moment, now, is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it’s always Now …”

Or another quote of Thay’s that underscores the same: “… Your true home is in the here and the now. It is not limited by time, space, nationality, or race… It is something you can touch and live in every moment …”

Of course, countless teachers have expressed the same in their own unique ways … but all are simply underscoring that …

Presence is less an idea than a way of meeting what is already here! In our hurried pace of modern life this meeting may not be conscious … but we can make it so …

Tracy Cochran writes from that ground in her book: Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself. Her pages keep dissolving the gap between “practice” and life-as-lived: night streets and kitchens, a line at the museum, the hush of trees, the breath that remembers itself.

She braids lived stories with small, trustworthy practices so attention grows from contact, not concepts. The arc of the book moves through body, heart, and mind as complementary doors—sensing weight and breath; softening around emotion without being swept away; discovering a clear, quiet attention that doesn’t need to fix what it notices. Silence, stillness, and solitude in these pages aren’t escapes; they’re companions that make contact more honest.

Tracy emphasizes that presence isn’t performance; it’s the felt willingness to be here. Again and again, her stories circle a single gesture: letting experience be received. From that receiving, clarity and kindness aren’t manufactured; they show themselves. She touches on some “cousin” ideas—quiet, abiding, clear seeing, letting be—but always returns to ordinary life as the field of awakening.

So, today, with this post, we begin a three-part preview of Presence—three small, story-led moments that sketch her book’s primary gestures of presence: receiving without judgment – a quiet, bodily allowing … when words wait – speechless or letting language rise from attention … opening to a shared world – participation or the felt reciprocity of receiving/giving.

Cochran’s voice is steady and warm. She trusts small scenes to carry large truths: standing by a tree; sitting with a crowd when the voice won’t come; walking a chaotic road to find unforced kindness. Read this way, presence is not a technique but a homecoming—the body, the breath, the world arriving as themselves.

The excerpt we offer is small on purpose: a single meeting, nothing to prove. If Thay calls us back to our true home here, and Tolle reminds us it is now, Cochran shows how to arrive—one unhurried moment at a time.

This excerpt is a quiet encounter that turns toward receiving without judgment: breath, bark, light; the body remembering how to let the world arrive.

This post is part of our ongoing Shambhala Publications series that offers substantive previews of selections from Shambhala Publications new and classic titles …

All italicized text here is adapted from Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran, © Tracy Cochran. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.

Tracy Cochran’s Presence: Butternut Goddess

“… an attention that was not thinking but seeing without judgment, receiving what arises the way that the butternut tree received me …”

In his instructions to those who wish to awaken, the Buddha encouraged them to go off by themselves and sit at the base of a tree, abiding peacefully away from the cares of the world. This detail is often treated as a relic from an ancient time when people spent more time outdoors. But I think it is a rich and relevant detail, since a tree sheltered and supported the Buddha during his awakening. According to legend it even burst into bloom to celebrate the event. And his instinct to take refuge under a tree was rooted in his own childhood memory. Once, the man who would become the Awakened One reached a point where he felt utterly desolate and lost. All his strenuous efforts to find liberation had led nowhere, it seemed to him, and he gave up, splitting off from his yogi friends, who considered him a quitter and a failure. The Buddha agreed and let go completely.

In the midst of this letting go, while lying on a riverbank, a heap of rags and bones, in the ashes of his dreams and aspirations, the Buddha remembered sitting under a rose apple tree as a little boy. That long-ago child wasn’t doing or being anyone in particular. As his father and other men in the village plowed the fields as part of a planting festival, the little boy savored the joy and freedom of being completely alone in nature. The Buddha remembered that he had a body and a heart and an attention that was not thinking but seeing without judgment, receiving what arises the way that the butternut tree received me.

Our bodies, our portion of nature, resonate with nature. We can’t help but see and sense and smell and breathe in life. When we go off by ourselves in nature or in some other quiet place, our hearts remember that life is a gift that is constantly being offered to us. We remember that we are not just a story in our head, urgent and dire as that story may seem. We are not just our painful self-judgments or dark thoughts. We are also part of a greater life and supported by larger benign forces. We tend to discover this when we let go and are like children, seemingly playing at life.

The butternut tree does not have one gender, growing male and female blooms—the female flower yields the nut. Yet my particular tree was maternal, as strange as this would have sounded to me as a child: a tree like my mother at her motherly best. Not every tree struck me as feminine—or masculine, for that matter—but that slender butternut played the role of Goddess of Compassion, holding me in her calm embrace, inviting me to explore my life, assuring me that I was a child of nature.

~ Tracy Cochran

Stay tuned for … next in this series : when words wait (speechless) …

All italicized text here is adapted from Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself by Tracy Cochran, © Tracy Cochran. Reprinted in arrangement with the publisher Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO.

You can purchase the book at Shambhala Publications or Amazon.