Stillness Found in Nature: A Mystic's Path From Farm to Prayer

Some spiritual teachers find stillness on a meditation cushion. John Butler found it by way of a carpenter's workbench, a kitchen run on tender care, a boarding-school chapel, and a mountainside in Peru where, he says, a small inner voice told him to "make whole, be whole." In the first part of a 2016 Conscious TV interview with host Iain McNay, recorded not in London but inside All Saints Church in Bakewell, Derbyshire, the author of Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment and Mystic Approaches reflects on a life that moved from farming and social idealism through years of depression and hopelessness toward a steady daily practice of prayer. McNay notes that Butler comes to the church at five every morning for two hours of meditation and prayer, and returns for two or three more in the afternoon. The conversation is slow, unhurried, and full of the kind of plain-spoken wisdom that rewards a second listen.

Where does a contemplative life begin: with attention?

Butler's first answer goes back to his father, a quiet man and landscape artist who worked with his hands. "He taught me to observe nature," Butler says, "to see the beauty of what was in front of me, nothing elaborate, just the hedges, the trees, the grass, to notice the sky." His father was also a serious carpenter, and the lessons he gave his son at the bench were about attention as much as technique. Pay attention. Keep your eye on what you're doing. Listen to the saw, watch its movement, watch the hammer so the nail goes in straight.

[2:00] Butler's own reflection is what makes this worth lingering over. Those two lessons, he says, "are 100% giving attention and observing what was around me," and they have "stood me in good stead all my life." He calls these qualities "probably quite rare these days," and he is not being nostalgic for its own sake. The practice he describes later in the interview, sitting for hours in silence, is attention of exactly the same kind, simply turned inward and held for longer. A carpenter listening to a saw and a mystic listening to the quiet of a church are doing, in Butler's account, the same thing.

What did a Russian heart and a boarding school teach a child about refuge?

Butler's mother was Russian, and he describes her as the emotional center of the household. "What I got from Mom," he says, "was a Russian heart, and Russian hearts just spill out all over the place." He was told as a child that he wore his heart on his sleeve, and people laughed at him for it, but he came to see it as one of the best things he was given. The whole household, he says, "shone with that tender loving care." The table, the mending, the washing up were, in his telling, works of art done with love, and that idea of work done wholeheartedly runs through everything he later says about devotion.

[3:37] The gentleness of that home made the next step harder. At seven, Butler was sent to boarding school, a shock after a childhood spent in deep country with nature and animals as his companions. "For the first time in my life I knew what it was to feel isolated and lonely," he says. What saved him was a combination of place and posture. The school sat in a rural setting with large gardens where he could walk alone, and at bedtime he would bury his head in his hands, close his eyes, and say a small prayer: God bless Mommy and Daddy and my sister and our dog. "What a haven of home and security that was for me."

"It seems even at an early age you had a way of going inside and finding somewhere that you could rest."

Iain McNay, in the interview, to John Butler (Conscious TV, 2016)

Butler's answer is the key to the rest of the conversation. Inside or outside, he says, the refuge is the same: stillness and quietness. "You look at a tree, you put your arms around a tree and you're held in stillness, in quietness, in that reassurance of simply being itself." The contrast, he suggests, is with "the noise and the agitation that you get from most people." For Butler, stillness is not something produced by technique. It is something you are held by, if you are willing to be still enough to notice.

Why did a young man set out to find the infinite?

McNay pushes back gently on the book's subtitle idea of "discovering stillness," and Butler's reply is one of the clearest statements of his motive. He does not claim, he says, to know what God is. "Nobody knows what God is." What he does recognize is a longing that runs through all of us: "one longs for the unlimited, for freedom, and for love." In worldly experience, though, all of these things are finite. "You go out, you discover freedom, go on climb a mountain, but then you've got to come home again. Love is wonderful in its flowering, but sooner or later it says no, it has an end."

That observation carries a sharp implication. Happiness, love, and freedom all come and go, and the restlessness that follows is the nature of the finite. Butler admits that when he was young, he simply wanted the thing that did not end. He half-jokes that he was "perhaps just greedy." McNay responds that this kind of greed is really a commitment to find something otherwise, and Butler agrees: "That's the motivation, isn't it." It is a useful reframing. What looks like appetite can be, from another angle, a precise recognition that ordinary satisfactions are never complete.

What happened on the mountainside in Peru?

The road to that recognition was not a straight one. Butler was an army officer on national service, worked in the family business, and was shaped by the postwar idealism of the early 1960s, when charities such as Oxfam were just beginning. He had always wanted to be a farmer; farming, he says, was in him "since my first breath." In 1963 he set out with a friend for Bolivia, where grants of a thousand hectares were being offered to new settlers who would grow food for the hungry. The friend stayed behind in England, and Butler went to Peru, where a Peruvian girl's father invited him to work. He ended up as a volunteer agriculturist in the mountains.

[10:46] His assessment of that year is characteristically modest: he "learned probably the greatest lesson of my life." He describes planting trees on eroded hillsides only to watch local sheep and goats eat them down, and sitting on the mountain one day feeling low. Out of that discouragement came a voice, which he remembers as saying to him, "make whole, be whole." He admits he hardly understood it then. He had read a little about meditation without really grasping it, and he saw himself as a mixed-up young man trying to help people who were, in his words, older and wiser than himself and more able to live. He realized he had to do something about his own confusion first.

This is the hinge of the interview. The young idealist who wanted to make the world better discovers that the world's wounds cannot be healed from a position of inner division. Wholeness, in this telling, begins inside the person doing the helping.

What does discovering stillness mean once you've found it?

The published description of this upload, which draws on Butler's own writing, offers a sharper frame for what he means by stillness. Its central claim is that "realisation is not a personal attainment," and that it "usually comes at times of deep prayer or quietness when the mind is clear of personal me." That idea deflates the usual spiritual ambition. Stillness is not a trophy one earns; it is what remains when the self-referential chatter quiets down enough for something else to be noticed.

The description is also honest about cost. Butler's path, it notes, "was not always an easy path," and he went through periods of depression and hopelessness. The stillness he describes did not arrive as a clean victory. It came through long stretches of struggle, the kind that many seekers quietly keep to themselves.

Butler's own self-description, also drawn from the published description, is disarmingly plain: "I'm just a quiet old man of regular habits, going up and down the hill to church each day, sitting on a bench when the weather is warm. I don't speak much. Adventures are inside." The line is worth reading closely. The ordinary routine is not a retreat from life; it is the form his life takes now.

Why does longing bring its own reward?

One of the most striking lines in the published material reads: "Total longing brings its own reward but all feelings of achievement disappear." This is the paradox that threads Butler's story together. The desire for the unlimited, which once looked like greed, becomes the very thing that carries a person toward stillness. Achievement does not last, because it belongs to the finite world. Longing, held with enough purity, points past it.

The same material describes the difficulty of returning from that clarity: "once known, however, any return to ordinary worldly ways only seems to emphasise its loss." Anyone who has come home from a retreat, a walk in the hills, or a moment of unexpected peace will recognize the feeling. The task Butler describes is not to escape the world but to hold the knowledge of stillness while living in it, and to let grace, which the published passage calls "Heavenly Grace," instruct, inspire, and save us "from drowning in the world."

Part one of the interview ends where Butler's story is still unfolding. The father who taught him to watch the saw, the mother whose heart spilled over, the boy in the chapel with his head bowed, the young man on the Peruvian slope: each left a thread that leads to the old man on the bench in Bakewell, saying very little, and still, in his own word, on an adventure inside.

Where to go from here

Watch the full Conscious TV interview to hear Butler's voice, pauses, and laughter in his own words. If the ideas in this piece speak to you, the best place to begin is his own writing: Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment and Mystic Approaches, both described in the video. For more of his work and background, the link in the published description is spiritualunfoldment.co.uk. Then try the simplest of Butler's lessons: pick one ordinary task, such as washing a cup or sawing a board, and give it your full attention, watching and listening as his father taught him to do.