Sometimes, most especially on a sultry August day, the only sensible thing to do is sit on your porch or deck and breathe. That’s right ... just breathe. One of the definitions of “breathe” (the simple act of inhaling and exhaling air) is “to be alive; to live.” Sometimes we are most alive — most aware — when doing least.

An ancient Chinese sage (perhaps Confucius or maybe Lao-tse?) once admonished his followers to “Study the familiar!” Sages are, of course, always admonishing their followers to do this or that. That is, after all, what they do. But that particular piece of advice has always struck me as being pertinent. When in doubt, one can do worse than simply plop down in a deck chair, breathe, and study the familiar. That’s what I attempted recently during one long and hazy Sunday afternoon.

Our deck overlooks an expanse of yard in which my wife, Elizabeth, has planted various wildflowers and a small creek bordered with shrubs. Beyond the creek lies a small pasture and the flank of a steep, heavily wooded ridge.

As I settled into the task at hand (breathing), the basic integrity and quiet beauty of this everyday landscape reasserted itself. I’d forgotten how nicely the creek bends below the house beneath an overhanging rock and then disappears. Or how the ridgeline overlooking the valley to the east is contoured with dips and rises that are picture perfect.

As I sat there breathing and studying the familiar, I began to hear for the first time in a long while the tinkling, gurgling sounds the creek makes as it tumbles along its stony bed. Each creek has a distinctive voice that we can recognize whenever we pause to truly listen and allow it to speak to us.

After awhile, things I had not noticed became apparent. A queen snake with its brown body and yellow stripes was coiled in the top branches of a tag alder on the far bank not 40 feet from where I sat. It was in plain view. How was it possible that I hadn’t seen the docile little snake previously?

Over the creek, dragonflies carried on their endless territorial skirmishes, reminding one for all the world of World War I fighter planes in miniature as they darted about seeking momentary advantages. Beneath them, where the water was calm, the creek’s placid surface was occasionally dappled with widening rings as minnows arose to feed.

The longer I sat and observed this everyday scene, the more I began to comprehend how much was always going on that I missed because my attention wasn’t focused on the familiar. If I had had a companion on the porch, we’d have been talking. Talking dilutes experience, and the queen snake would in all likelihood not have existed, for us. We’d probably have also missed the comings and goings of the hummingbirds, or at least failed to observe how their wings fan the jewelweed plants on which they were feeding. Often you will notice the jewelweed swaying before you actually spot the little bird.

Most proficient at this gentle-yet difficult-art of close observation of the familiar natural world was the 19th century poet Walt Whitman. His little volume of prose musings titled Specimen Days (1882) is, for me, more appealing than his epic masterpiece Leaves of Grass.

“I write this sitting by the creek watching my two kingfishers at their sundown sport,” wrote Whitman in an entry for a long-ago Aug. 4. “The strong beautiful creatures! Their wings glisten in the slanted sunbeams as they circle and circle around, occasionally dipping and dashing the water, and making long stretches up and down the creek.”

Or this entry: “I write this down in the country again ... seated on a log in the woods, warm, sunny midday. Have been loafing here deep among the trees, shafts of tall pines, oak, hickory, with a thick undergrowth of laurel and grapevines — the ground covered everywhere by debris, dead leaves, breakage, moss — everything solitary, ancient, grim ... I sit and listen to the pine tops sighing above, and to the stillness.”

Whitman was the first great writer who deliberately wrote of American things in the American vernacular. One aspect of his accomplishment was that he patiently taught himself the art of loafing and paying close attention to familiar — not imagined — surroundings, and cataloging what he observed. He perfected the wonderful capacity to simply sit down alone and breathe and let the world as it truly is arise before him out of the stillness. When in doubt some muggy dog day afternoon this month, you could do worse.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.