“Wilderness helps us preserve our capacity for wonder – the power to feel, if not to see, the miracles of life, of beauty, and of harmony around us.”
-William O. Douglas
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
-William Shakespeare
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
-Muhammad Ali
Matt Licata’s words resonated with me today…
“Turn into the ocean of your unlived life, and bring the warmth of awareness into the hidden places inside you. Behold the forms of love as they reconfigure, and open to the unmet feelings, the disowned longings, and the split-off pieces you have lost contact with. Dare to see that they do not mean you harm, but have come longing for integration. There are jewels concealed in the forgotten pathways, awaiting discovery, filled with energy and information for the journey ahead.
But the substance which shapes these pathways is of the unknown, and is unbearably creative. It was never going to turn out the way you thought. Rather than seeing this as a mistake or cosmic error, you can find rest here. It is not the rest of the mind where everything is resolved, but the rest of the heart where everything is held and metabolized in wholeness. Love will never be pinned down or worked out. It is just too wild for all that.
If we do not meet, hold, and integrate the heartbreak, the fear, the rage, and the entirety of our essence vulnerability – if we do not provide sanctuary for the aliveness of the somatic world – we will inevitably place this burden on the others in our lives, to care for it on our behalf. While others can help us along the way, they cannot take care of this sacred material for us. For this is their gift to us.
It is an act of love to remove this burden from our lovers, our friends, and our families. And to take experiential, full-spectrum responsibility for its holding and its care. As we integrate the arising narrative, emotions, feelings, and sensations within the spaciousness of awareness, we become open, warm, transparent vessels for love to come alive here, and to seed this world with its qualities.
You need not postpone being fully here for another moment. This moment is the perfect place to begin.”
Oh yes please! On this vernal equinox (the earliest since 1896!), the earth’s readiness to awaken from a rich quiet into a bursting celebration of life is apparent. Today, the night and day have equal measure. But from here, each day is expanded in the light to allow growth deep down into the roots, and upward into new heights.
May it be so with you too, as the sun crosses into our northern hemisphere, may your growth deepen and your expansion blossom into new heights!
Allow yourself to be wildly feverish with Spring!
“It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
-Mark Twain
Never yet was a springtime, when the buds forgot to bloom.
—Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
“In an unhurried way, allow your feet to wander.Shinrin-yoku is not about exercise.It is not about hurry. It is about being alive in all your sensesand trusting that the forestand other landscapes upon which you wander hold somethinggood for you.”
Something hidden…go and find it!Go and look behind the ranges.Something lost behind the ranges.Lost, and waiting for you.Go!”-Kipling
What if the land actually loves humans?What if it needs us?As our species evolved with all other species
in an interdependent dance,a long ceremony of mutuality,
each of us bound by invisible threadswithin a vast web of interdependence?
If this is the way of things,
then does it not make sense that the land needs us?Come to it ready to invite its gifts.
Speak to it; let it know what you need.Listen;
let it whisper its medicine.
“There’s a voice that doesn’t use words.
Listen.”
-Rumi
“Wilderness is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit”
-Edward Abbey
“Thousands of tired nerve-shaken over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is gong home, that wilderness is a necessity”
-John Muir
I hope you can take time to savor these sumptuous words from Matt Licata, and absorb with wonder this new winter day…
“On this new winter day, it is so easy to take for granted that tomorrow will come – that another opportunity will be given to witness a sunrise, to breathe into the heart, to be astonished at the crystals in the newly fallen snow, to share a moment of attuned connection with the bunnies on our morning walk.
But another part of us knows it is so fragile here, so tenuous, and that this opening into life will not be here for much longer. Recognizing this, let us surrender the dream of postponement by doing whatever we can to help others, by being fully here and entering into the dark and into the light with them, no longer apologizing for our uniqueness, our sensitivity, and the gifts of our embodied vulnerability.
At the end of this life – which is sure to come much sooner than we’d like – it is unlikely we’ll ask if we accomplished the tasks on our to-do lists, completed some mythical journey of ‘awakening,’ perfected ourselves, ‘healed’ our past, played it safe, got all of our ‘needs’ met, made it big, ‘manifested’ everything we wanted, or achieved all of our goals.
Inside these hearts there may be only one burning question: how well did I love?
Did I pause each day to behold the wonder of just one unfolding here and now moment? Was I willing to take a risk, to feel more, to care so deeply about this life, to let another matter, and to honor *this* very experience, exactly as it has been given?
Did I stay close with the mysterious movement of both sweet and fierce grace as it took form as the others in my life, and as the wisdom flow of feeling, of emotion, and of sensation in this body? Was I willing to fall in love, to truly fall in love with this life, exactly as it is? Was I willing to provide a home, a sanctuary, and safe passage for all of me, an environment of wholeness and integration to dance, rest, and play in?
Was I willing to set aside the unending need to make this moment different?
What is it that remains unlived… for you? How have you been holding back? What are you waiting for? What are the feelings you must re-embody to in order to fully come alive here?
The bounty and the harvest of this world is upon you. It is always already here, erupting in the here and now, and is not waiting. The spell of the ‘next moment’ has been broken.
I hope I make it all the way through this sweetest of ever winter days, but if for some reason I do not, this would have been enough. I have been given so much more than enough.”
-Matt Licata
“As you move through these changing times… be easy on yourself and be easy on one another. You are at the beginning of something new. You are learning a new way of being. You will find that you are working less in the yang modes that you are used to.
You will stop working so hard at getting from point A to point B the way you have in the past, but instead, will spend more time experiencing yourself in the whole, and your place in it.
Instead of traveling to a goal out there, you will voyage deeper into yourself. Your mother’s grandmother knew how to do this. Your ancestors from long ago knew how to do this. They knew the power of the feminine principle… and because you carry their DNA in your body, this wisdom and this way of being is within you.
Call on it. Call it up. Invite your ancestors in. As the yang based habits and the decaying institutions on our planet begin to crumble, look up. A breeze is stirring. Feel the sun on your wings.”
-Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers
“And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter.
It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.”
-Rumi
The peace and quiet that is winter, allows the deeper recesses of ourselves to be wholly alive, riotous even!
Exploring the inner spaces is never ending…
