I snowshoed into the woods today to the spot where a mature sugar maple tree stands sentinel over the path that winds through the wooded ridge above my house. The tree and I were both conceived here on this land, have lived our whole lives in this place, and legged or not, we have both witnessed at least 56 years of its history.  Together we remember things specific and unique to this place. And I now consider that remembering a great privilege, honor and act of silent activism. This place would be here without me and this tree, but in a profoundly spiritual way, I’m understanding as I get older (and as I deepen my practice of energy healing) that it’s important to really see, experience, bond with and recognize the Earth where I live. I am a temporary steward of this patch, and my witnessing it is an act of RE-membering it into being.  The trees and I carry a memory of this particular ridge that no single human still living holds quite like me. It’s not that I’m special or that many people have come and gone from this place, but that my family were farmers, foresters, gardeners, and worked intimately with the land. While those vocations were more common when I was a child, that combination is relatively rare here now.  Those professions, roles, lifestyles…they have a unique relationship with the land. From when I was really small, my parents used words like steward, conservator, observer, guardian, and caretaker to impress upon me relationship with the land.

I remember when this land was marred by overlogging, eroded and scarred. The fields were gouged with skidder tire ruts and eroded by rain to a depth of five feet. As a child I lowered myself down into the ruts to rescue a frog, and from there I peered–on tiptoes–out into the literal ground level of the land. I remember liking the smell of humus, clay and detritus. I remember the feeling of the mud hugging my boots and liking the slippery feeling of waterlogged clay. And I remember even as a child of eleven, picking rocks from the freshly plowed field so we could repopulate it with grass and native plants that would stabilize the soil. I remember raking into smooth ground the bare soil in places the tractor-drawn harrow couldn’t reach. I remember walking beside my father and mother as they sowed seed and prayed, restoring the hay lands and meadows with my family.  I remember in 8th grade doing a science fair project on the conservation work my family was doing and being more interested in that than anything I’d ever learned indoors in school. Growing up here I drank water from cupped hands in streams, laid in the shade under ferns for hours, recklessly poked sap pockets on bark of spruce trees, baked mud pies in the sun on the ledges, and smashed juniper berries between stones, rubbing the fragrant juice on my skin. Spine on the ground in thick moss in the forest, or among the grassy stems of the hay flora and buttercups, I spent hours and hours of my childhood watching the clouds pass by in the sky. I spent days and weeks exploring in a place we called “The Science Museum,” a thick, dim, wet grove of cedars that had an intriguing stillness and life forms found nowhere else on our farm. Bright green moss covered the boulders there, where water trickled musically underground, and the air was electrified with life force and abundance. There’s no doubt those childhood experiences led me to become a plant and soil scientist, herbalist and professional gardener, and now, a facilitator of healing.

Your heart, the land and Nature: A cathedral All of this is to say that this land, like my own heart, is my cathedral.  The land where you are (or any aspect of Nature,) like your heart, can be your cathedral. “Kata” or “cata” meaning “seat” are the etymological roots of the word “cathedral.” When I say your heart and Nature are a cathedral, I mean, quite literally “a wholly place to sit.” Holy, I believe, as in sacred, but wholly, too, as in producing feelings of connectedness, oneness and unity within and all around.Feeling into our individual sacred heart, sitting and observing the heart of Nature, noticing other beings (legged and otherwise) as part of the collective Sacred Heart: all of these are paths to our own self-mastery, enlightenment, acceptance, wisdom and understanding. In turn, our individual practice of harmonizing with Nature supports the same qualities in the collective superorganism we call humanity. Metaphysically, our observations and connections to our heart and the heart of Nature actually shift the entire human collective to a more coherent, unified whole through the phenomena of relational energetics. Now is the time for us to find stillness and renewal in Nature like our life and our future thriving depends on it. Why? The world, its systems, culture, technology the dominant paradigms and institutions of the day…all of this is changing, shifting, maybe crumbling. Our task–as heart-conscious lovers of life and the Earth–is to be the emergence of a new human expression and experience that is more loving, connected, non-hierarchical, just, unified, balanced and harmonious.

As technology and modern experience becomes more abstract and impersonal, Nature remains connective, coherent, expansive and deeply personal A few years ago, I realized something was really missing from my life: doing nothing in Nature. After decades of working physically and mentally hard, I kept having flashbacks of laying in the hayfield with timothy grass and daisies waving around me, on my own and at peace. I started taking a “day of solitude” every week. One day I mindlessly scribbled the word “stillness” in the snow and that message from my unconscious bodymind changed my life.  The idea of not DOing anything, but to BEing stillness seemed radical, restful and necessary.  I don’t need to list the things or the elements of our modern lifestyles that prevent us from rewilding ourselves, but if you ask me, that’s the call of our times. To denature the boxes we inherited that serve as spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, and cultural constructs (read: limitations) and to RE-Nature ourselves in alignment with the heart of the Earth herself.  We are RE-membering her and ourselves into more fullness of being, and now is the moment we claim Her as a heart-conscious, benevolent planet…one human heart at a time. Why your heart matters There’s a lot moving through me—through all of us humans and indeed the whole world, right now—and I crave restoration through delicious solitude into the woods to move deeper into greater harmony and alignment with my beingness and authentic nature. Quantum physics is showing that this is a participatory universe and that whatever has our attention has our creative energy. That means that whatever we are paying attention to, we are expanding, propagating, contributing to, co-creating more of, etc.  When we restore and harmonize with Nature, we are making the world a more peaceful place, one heart at a time. The more we assign personal meaning to this, practice it and share the wisdom we derive from it with hearts who are open to receiving, a ripple becomes a wave, and a wave becomes an entire movement in consciousness. And just like that! Your individual acts of restoration, renewal, alignment, rewilding, coherence, rest, wisdom-seeking, intentionality…your participation as an individual being the emergence—and mine too—we willfully create a new expression, embody a new frequency of a more heart-conscious humanity. It’s so important to realize that this movement is happening as energy first in you and me, then it becomes matter.  1. Decide: We decide we want to thrive 2. Choose: We create experiences that allow us to embody harmony, balance, joy, gratitude, wisdom, etc. (We go into the forest, ocean, lake, grasslands, firesides, circles, concerts, dance events, etc.) 3. Be: Our spiritual-mental-emotional-physical constellation of consciousness that we call “our body” feels better, lighter, freer, clearer, more connected, etc. 4. Influence: And more coherent, “authentically me” energy that vibrates out from us into space and supports us and the life around us. Nature always offers personalized lessons Making contact with the maple tree today, I feel its flaky, aged bark pressed into my coat as the snowflakes drift down in slow motion, gathering on my eyelashes in the cold. I lean in for the lesson of the day.  Magically somehow the curves of the tree embrace perfectly the curves of my own back, and as I rest comfortably against the rigid tissues of her in deep winter. I tune in to the subtle vibrations of my own spine and feeling with my whole body, I offer gratitude, respect, humility, and reciprocity as I connect with the tree. The maple, she offers me the message that to grow is to stretch beyond what’s comfortable for good reason, that the purpose of life is for me to store in my “rings” my memories as wisdom. She offers a certainty that wisdom is treasure that journeys forth for my soul, and for all souls who wish to co-create on this journey of creating a more loving humanity and Earth as a benevolent planet in this magnificent multiverse. She tells me that in her rings she records the history of the forest from her unique and ever-changing points-of-view. She remembers the feathers of every bird that has ever nested in her, the hum of the bee wings as they pass by and snapping of twigs under the deer hooves as they forage nearby. She remembers the feeling of owls and their young who have lived in her cavities. She’s recorded the ice storms, the sweet wind of spring, the moonlight, the dancing light of autumn in her red leaves. And when she passes back into the Earth, the record of all that will lovingly feed information into the soil minerals, who will hold that memory of her life here for posterity and eternity. And she remembers me…as a child, as a younger woman. She remembers me last year, last month, and as I am today. We stand here, together, the tree and me, gazing into the open door that is our future, unknown, but heart-felt. Nature is calling me, you and Us to rest in her Sacred Heart and RE-member ourself We don’t need an entire forest to connect…just a tree, a sunny window to peer out, a bouquet of flowers, a bird-feeder to invite life into our space. How might you answer the call?