Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature

Buck Butler for The New York Times

David Haskell in in Sewanee, Tenn., on the Domain of the University of the South.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest “mandala,” as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in