“a pattern of Her pattern” (b.brownlie)

“For me we are the skin of Earth/Gaia. We literally sprouted from Her body…and are a pattern of Her pattern. To look out at the animate earth around us, is to look into a mirror”

my dear friend Becky sent this to me this morning in response to my beginning attempts at an elevator speech of WHY I am so drawn to this Animas Institute work….

In my search for the words, for the understanding of what is calling to me, I have found the help of others words as I so often do. Yesterday I had a talk with Wren Bear as well which also helped to illuminate and clarify this calling:

what if i allow myself to be more sensitive? The facet of the self that I most identify with is the North, the Nurturing Generative Adult., I am very good at getting things done, at being responsible, but am I good at nurturing myself, at nurturing and being truly nurtured by the world? I am not seeking to change myself or dismiss aspects of myself but to tend to aspects of myself that might be hiding, might have been left long ago in my childhood closet?

I am my relationships; my relationship to my work, to myself, to those i love, to other beings, to place, to this earth…

soul is not just a place “inside” of us but instead a place we inhabit, the relationships we tend

PRACTICE ~ continue to visit the west pasture next door, the big, wide open grasslands that remind me of my childhood and even my ancestral homelands. and visit the shallows, the seasonal creek found down amongst the big firs, cedars, hawthornes and big leaf maples. i will find there a one i have visited before, a grandmother maple…visit this being, offer something to her, words, touch, a gift, mirror back to her with and without words. allow myself to be nurtured and cared for by this one, this wild, old being who has been protected in this place longer that i have been alive most likely. this is a new relationship to help me to learn this aspect of my wild indigenous self.

what more have i not tended?

words found through others that are helping me to understand…

“Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her. She is like the needle of the compass pointing to the North, which is most useful….when you know how to navigate.” ~ C.G. Jung

….”Sometimes…

…I look out at everything

growing so wild

and faithfully beneath

the sky 

and wonder

why we are the one

terrible

part of creation

privileged

to refuse our flowering….

~ David Whyte, from “The Sun”

I am looking to fully live my multifaceted, wild psyche, committing myself to the largest story I am capable of living, serving something bigger than myself….daring to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor my kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape myself into perhaps, a student of the visionary, with the artistry and the energy to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.