I met someone on zoom (which is not at all like meeting them in real life, pre-COVID style) who admitted a similar disdain for Instagram (and social media). I felt joy in this shared sentiment; gratitude for their share. It’s nice to feel connected to each other.
That night I had a dream about a stone couch on the steep side of a mountain. A smooth flow of water started pouring over it after I’d hefted a flat stone with a wedge base over the arm of the couch.
Maybe this dream was saying, “Wren, you’re becoming a couch potato” but I felt the dream contained the power of change. All possibilities are abundant in dreams. Dreams are intuitive and in FLOW and the choices we make in dreams can be Easeful. Liberating. Inspiring.
I woke that same morning singing a song that had become “our song” when I lived near a forest. The trees would remind me of our song and I’d smile and sing the words to the trees in my head. Sometimes I would sing it while only caring about communicating my love for them, not what I sounded like or who might hear me singing with such passion.
It is nice to feel connected to nature.
Here are some of the lyrics I sing (which are a bit different than Creed’s):
There’s a hunger, a longing to escape the life lived when I’m a wake.
So let’s go there, Let’s make our escape, come on, let’s go there
Let’s trust and risk it!
Can you take me higher, to a place where blind men see. Can you take me higher?
To a place with golden trees ……….
I’m writing this post for those trees and for all the trees I’ve ever lived next to, who I have come to know and love. For all the golden light that trees have in abundance —
[and there are also words emerging from the very real, angry part of me, wanting to finish that sentence with — or all the golden light they used to have before massive data centers powering our devices and artifice intelligence began threatening their lives…]
Who’s to say where the source of the tree’s golden light emerges?
Do you have fond memories with trees? With rivers and streams? I wish for you and me and all of us so many of these memories in nature that you and I and we are overflowing with joy. I wish for you and me and all of us deep motivation to stay so connected to nature that you and I and we never have a moment of despair, of isolation or intense fear. I wish for you and I and all of us complete wellness and lasting peace.
[and then here are my grief’s words: What are we doing about these relationships with trees and rivers? Haven’t we all watched their health deteriorate like the health of most of us humans? Like the health of most living beings?]
I ask this not to make any of us more depressed than we already are about what floods our news channels. I ask about your fond memories in order to evoke and invite a deep passion from which shared motivation emerges even digitally, energetically.
Being a passionate person it is alarming to notice how badly I can lose my way. Some days it’s all I can do to be aware of the rage inside me and breathe it smaller, sit with it as best I can.
So I ask myself, again, What are the roots of this anger? Why Is This So? How can I use my WITS? What needs to change?
Of course top on anger’s list is culturally conditioned scarcity economics that leads town and city electeds to succumb to an insane administration dangling buckets of carrots ($) in exchange for their silence as the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of their more melanated neighbors gets assaulted — digitally and physically.
(If this echoes true…) What can we do about this? The most important thing — which is to stay aware of our interior landscape, our energies in motion (emotions), and care so deeply about being safe in the body that we seek this same safety for everyone in our lives and everyone in our region and everyone in our nation, and everyone living and breathing.
One way we can do this together, is to practice being in relationship with the elements. Air, Fire, Earth, Water. How can we take a few moments every day to build these relationships, these foundational life giving elements within us and surrounding us?
Maybe it’s less about what we can change and more about how we can be changed.
One way we can do this is to come together once a month during the ceremony I and a friend hold closest to the full moon (church!) with these elements as a community.
If you are interested in this, please reach out. Share a few thoughts in our contact form. And breathe deeply, love on your daily waters, eat as if you know the land your food was grown in, and keep your inner fires stoked.
We all need each other.
