Here we breathe: on the wake of Hunter’s Moon. Here we ground: on a growing blanket of leaves. Here we belong: as the night’s embrace draws us into her darkening chambers for the starlit, dreaming half of the year.

It is a precious thing to be in a sentient body with our uniquely human ways of experiencing the shifting humours of the world.

So, let’s take a moment here to rejoice in this gift and feel into our embodied experience of this particular seasonal moment. Over the past few days, what have you felt, experienced, smelled, touched, tasted, that has imprinted the season into your body and soul?

How does the poetry of the sky that breathes us, the land that sustains us, the waters that trickle down our skin and quench our thirst, shape the poetry of our ‘being human’? When I’m outside, I like to imagine my whole sentient self as a sponge that can absorb the moods of the season – I surrender myself to the elements and weather patterns so they may seed the deep grounds of my imagination. I know these seeds will then take root and grow into the living images that shape my sense of self and guide my life.

What we choose to expose ourselves to and take-in consciously is no small thing.

There is something very grounding, enlivening, and healing when we open ourselves up ever more deeply to the impressions and influences of the natural world. We reconnect to embodied experiences of wholeness.

 

“To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness.”

– Gary Snyder

 

Of course we did, of course we are emanations of this living force and inseparable from it. And yet, we all know too well this amnesia that we struggle with daily, this illusion of separation from nature (even our own nature), this forgetting and being hijacked by our disembodied thoughts and circular patterns of rumination that seem to pull us away from Earth’s holding. Even so, our capacity to think and differentiate and see things as separate is also a gift, and now is the time to bring ourselves back into the whole: to remember our way back home.

Remembering is sacred work: as we feel the seasonal movement dancing not only around us but also within us, we call ourselves back, sing ourselves back, into the world.

Each act of noticing, each act of devoted attention to this living, breathing world, stitches us into Place, into here and now. What do our senses tell us about the seasonal shift taking place within and around us now? How might the natural world be expressing in colour and gesture the subtle movements that are also present in both our psyche and physiology at this time? What of this downward pull of sap and dropping of leaves, the longer nights and hooting owls, the puddles forming, the morning mist and fog horns, the gathering of raptors as they take to the sky for their southward journey to warmer climes, the harvesting of apples that have fallen on cool, damp soil…

While we follow an arrow-like arch of development, we are also deeply cyclical creatures; and while we have our own things that we’re going through, cadenced by our personal rhythm, we are also touched and textured by the natural world that breathes and grows us, that holds and supports us, that shapes and stretches us.

I notice how at any moment of the day, I can be lost in my thoughts and no longer present to the world. And still, the path back into presence is an open invitation, always available: to stop, breathe, feel, touch, linger, relish, be.

I find there is a beautiful simplicity to this slowing down, this reverent taking-in and feeling the Other within myself, this soft touching of the world through all of my senses and allowing myself to be touched by bee, leaf, salt and flame…

The wild world in its movements and rhythms is an embodiment of wholeness. Over decades of learning to be in right relationship with this one, I am continually awed at how turning towards the Land, the elements, the Earth, helps me to embrace and experience the full breath of our humanity – our multifaceted feelings, our paradoxes, our complexities, our still ungraspable stirrings.

It’s all there in the natural world. It’s all there: there is no “away”, there is no exile.

We may have moments of finding our sadness sung back in the sound of whale song and through deep bass-notes of the dark, fluid belly of the ocean. We may long for our trembling heart to feel grounded by Earth’s steady heartbeat. We may offer our voice and gesture to the incantations held by the breeze breathing between branches, as the poetry between human voice and windy breath is revealed in a moment of grace.

 

The earth protects us, nurture us, tells us about the shape of our heart,
and we in kind are called to do the same for the earth.

~ Roerden, 2001, Lessons of the wild.

 

This human heart, these human eyes, made of all things Earth and Cosmos. What would it be like to feel that we wholly belong?

How might it feel to truly experience a sense of belonging, to feel that our breathing beings are part and parcel of this breathing Earth?

Living into this question shapes a path as we struggle with the layers of societal constructs that harm our basic relationship to ourselves, to others, to this living world. Living into this question turns us towards the world, towards each other, towards ourselves – with love, curiosity, attention, respect, and reverence.

As I feel the sound of rain, sense the ground receiving my weight, or roll the wax of honeycomb under my tongue, the lines from Antonio Machado’s poem come to mind: “You walking, your footprints are the road, and nothing else, There is no road, walker, You make the road by walking. By walking you make the road”.

By tasting, by touching, by lingering, by smelling, by praising the world through our attention and offering our breath in gratitude, we create the path of our belonging, one step at a time.

With beauty blessings of honey fall,
Brooke