nature spirit

The more fresh air I breathe, the more balanced I am.

The more I listen to the trees, my hand against the bark, the more I understand about being alive.

Years ago, someone asked, Do you feel you are of this earth or do you feel you are a visitor here?

I am a visitor.

This earth is magical, mysterious, so deeply beautiful.

She is alive; she hums.

She holds me in her grassy arms, her watery depths.

I don’t feel I am of the earth, but neither do I believe the earth created for me.

We exist here together.

When I think about my foundation, my spiritual roots, the beginning of me, my authentic self - my mind immediately takes me to my childhood back yard. We lived in out in the country - in a subdivision surrounded by farmland.

Just across the back fence, there was a grapevine swing. Carefully, I climbed over barbed wire to get to it.

There was a large tree on our side of the fence and next to it, a green wooden picnic table. I draped blankets across it to create a shady sanctuary underneath.

I had friends in the neighborhood, but mostly I liked to be by myself. The friends liked games, but I preferred sitting and listening to nature. I liked to lie back and stare at the sky, watching as the clouds spoke to me in symbols until I felt like I was being hurled off the planet and had to grab fistfuls of grass to stay grounded.

I filled acorn caps with water, left gifts for the fairies and the gnomes, believing in them whole-heartedly and longing to catch a glimpse of them with my naked human eye.

I liked to walk down by the creek and skip smooth stones across the water, cattails brushing against my legs.

This is where I knew the divine.

This is where I communed with the sacred.

This is where I knew what was true.

If reality had no hold on me and money was no issue, I would live in a small house with a large deck in a hidden corner of Laurel Canyon still holding to its wild bohemian roots, or in a purple house with a cupola down a winding road near the rocky shore where the Lizard Tail sways in the breeze, or in a dome in the desert near Joshua Tree, or somewhere deep in an old growth forest in a house made of stained glass and moss.

My bathtub would be outdoors, shaded by willow and honeysuckle, surrounded by crystals that glisten in the sun.

My church would be a chapel of my own design, where beeswax candles burn day and night; an easel in a treehouse; my own bare feet against the ground, and the animals, both wild and tame, who visit me - coyotes who run across my deck at night, foxes wearing flower crowns, crows who exchanged shiny gifts with me, dogs and cats who sleep by my fireplace, hummingbirds who land in my hair.

I hear people say the universe is doing this or sending that, but I don’t perceive the universe this way. The universe is not the creator; the universe is the environment in which I exist - a beautiful, amazing, fertile environment.

I do not believe the universe seeks to harm or sustain me.

The universe is dancing its dance and I am dancing my dance and we weave in and out of one another.

We are the creation.

But I do believe the divine speaks to me through nature, through feathers dropped on to my path and birds that build nests on my windowsill and the fragrance of roses and frankincense.

And I do believe the movement of the moon and the stars provides an energetic map that I can read to access ancient wisdom.

I believe that when I tilt my face toward the sun it is love that fills me, nourishing my cells, and when I step out into the yard at night and the moon illuminates my skin, my blood remembers something, my heart becomes a night blooming garden.

It is when I am in nature that I am most in the presence of the Beloved and the Beloved is in the presence of me.

Some cast their eyes on the next life and hope for mansions and streets paved of gold.

They imagine Heaven as a continuation of the society and culture we’ve invented here only shinier and bigger.

But I hope for clear streams and oceans, mountains and lavender, a little house shaped like a mushroom glowing from within with amber light, rain that soaks us to the bone followed by golden sunshine, dragonflies that speak a language we can understand, bowls of cherries and birch trees that sing in unison.

I don’t need mansions or society.

I hope to slip out of this culture like a garment that’s been worn too tight.

Give me flowers and bumble bees, astral harmonics - the Beloved holding me in their gaze as I hold them in mine.