Running Wild
Why does my blood run wild?
I heard this question posed by Clemson University professor, Drew Lanham on the On Being podcast yesterday. The question rang bells in my ear because for the last few months I’ve been thinking about a question that was sparked during a discussion with one of my mentors.
How have I been raised by place?
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Connecticut. Behind my house was a small patch of protected woodlands. I spent almost all my outside time playing in those woods. I remember my mom teaching me the names of trees. There was the large beech tree with leaves the size of a man’s hand, the white bark birch trees dotting the landscape, the enormous two-trunk oak tree that supported our backyard tire swing, and the crab apple tree that allowed us to climb it’s branches… When I think back to being a kid, I see and feel a deep connection to trees, and in more recent years, this kinship has resurfaced.
Now, in middle age, my playground is Magic Tree Sanctuary and my tree friends are an ancient hollow oak known as the Hobbit tree, an enormous poplar tree named Josephine, a cucumber tree with a trunk that looks like an elephant’s leg, and too many more to name here...
The threads of place are there in my being and I’d wager a bet they are there for you, too.
How have you been raised by place?
What places stir deep connection in you?
What is your soul yearning for that may be mirrored in places you are drawn to?
We can even take this one level deeper than just thinking about the places of our childhood and how they shaped who we are today.
Our connection to place, to land, to nature is our birthright.
You don’t have to have been raised in the country to have this connection. You could have grown up in a skyscraper in the heart of the concrete jungle known as New York City. It doesn’t matter. It’s there, deep within.
For hundreds of thousands of years, our species lived in deep connection with nature---the land, the seasons, and other life forms. This connection is encoded in our DNA, the same way we were designed to eat and drink. We were designed to be in connection with nature and our being is nourished from the human-nature relationship.
Restoring this connection is the work of forest therapy.
And as some may think, it’s not some new age trend. It’s actually a continuation of what our ancestors knew and experienced.
Living apart from the land is not natural. A bond with nature is inherent in each and every one of us but in recent times, it has become frayed.
We need to remember where we came from. We need to remember our sacred nature connection. We need to remember we are all interconnected.
Our health and the planet’s health need us to remember now more than ever.
When we remember, we experience a sense of “coming home” and belonging, our hearts open, and we recognize our conjoined destiny with the planet.
What happens to the planet happens to us because we are nature.
If you would like to have the experience of remembering, I invite you to join me on an upcoming forest therapy walk. The initial 2021 event schedule is out and there will be dates added shortly. You can view the schedule here.
And if a group walk doesn’t sound appealing, I also offer 1:1 sessions for you, or you with a small group of your friends. Contact me and we can set it up.
I’d be honored to journey down the path to remembering with you.
Forest Love,
Julie
If we fully understood and held in our awareness the depth of our interconnection, how much more respect and reverence and care would we give to the oceans, skies, and forests? - Mark Coleman