Have you ever, like me, had a problem that was just to big for you to cope with on your own and you didn’t want to burden friends and family with it, so you headed out into nature to wait for answers/solutions to arrive?
Nature doesn’t judge, listens how I need to be listened to, and she reminds me how I was before the world started to un-shape me. She’s the perfect backdrop for processing problems and querying questions. For remembering that perfection does exist, in form and content.
I’ve learnt many a thing from her, in her various guises. Waiting in the Mexican tropical dry forest for the rain to come, so I could start my fieldwork, she taught me that I could turn my waiting from a fallow to a highly productive period, amplifying the depth of my understanding of what I had come to study. In the same Mexican forest, once the rains had arrived, torrentially, she taught me the value of paying attention to the pathway, to lead us back through floodwaters to safety, this lesson then allowing me to navigate us out of trouble, just before Hurricane Isis made land.
During that hurricane, in the days before mobile phones and news delivered instantly to us, she taught me to follow my instincts, to make a run for it as fast as we could, as we saw the black cloud approaching, unusually, terrifyingly, fast for a simple rainstorm. We arrived to the concrete hut just in time before the 250mph winds laid waste to our home from home. When we emerged to assess the damage, she taught me to be careful, very careful, because rage can kill. I’d survive, many times, as a result of that lesson.
Walking through the forests of home, the old English woodlands of my childhood, she was a balm for my soul. Seeing the myriad of interactions in the ecosystems, she taught me about interconnectedness and about being tolerant of everyone’s place in the multiple webs we form part of. The ancient woodland up in the hills of Derbyshire taught me that the supernatural does exist, that we shouldn’t be scared of it and that there are things way beyond our capacity for knowing. When my grandparents and Dad died, and as they visited me in different guises, I have thanked that ancient forest, time and again, for those lessons. They allowed me to hear the comforts of my ancestors.
Walking through the tropical forest just outside my current home, she’s seen me cry and heard me scream many a time and has offered me many a new lesson. About how new growth inevitably follows storms - “life will always find a way”, she whispers - and hanging on, patiently, because “sometimes life takes a path we don’t want to take, but we must trust that something greater than us is in control” (she comforted). She also taught me about abundance - seed upon seed on the palms - showing me that even though my world was reduced to scarcity, it would be repopulated, would grow abundant again. She gave me faith, grew my mustard seed to the size of those palms.
If I have a problem that’s bigger than I can cope with, I go out into nature, take the problem with me, keep my eyes and ears open for messages (sometimes I’ll see something that decodes my mess and sometimes a message will arrive aurally, as I walk along). Being mindful of the fact that nature is a great listener, is a great healer, I now confidently know she will deliver what I need to hear, exactly when I’m ready to hear it.
I’m interested to know whether you have any similar experiences? Knowledge, ways forward, solutions downloaded instantly, as you walk along through nature?