There is a story I’ve been carrying, a memory, its journey to land fully in me still somewhere between the ineffable and the utterable. I have shared pieces, with a kindred spirit I knew would appreciate its tenderness and on the podcast Nine Keys: Death Midwifery Conversations and Mediations with Narinder Bazen because I knew she, too, would find resonance, honor the gift that blessed me.
And even though there is a part of me now that urges restraint, knows not all experiences are meant for consumption by others, I keep thinking of this particular moment as Earth Day approaches.
The story could be this simple: Woman goes to the desert, hugs a Joshua tree and has her heart blown open. As someone who regularly hugs and communes with trees, directing praises and songs their way, this perhaps is not surprising. But I’ve been thinking of this in the larger context of remembrance and listening, of how in the noise and freneticism of modern living, we have forgotten and lost the ways of being in deep attunement with nature. Of honoring what it is to be a relative of tree and flower and fauna. Of touching into the very marrow of our own Earth body, knowing we are inseparable from this teeming, living world that offers us her daily, unconditional support.
Earlier this month, I traveled to Joshua Tree National Park with friends after spending time in Baja California Sur, Mexico (a story for another time as I journeyed once more to visit the grey whales whose potent medicine has been with me since 2022). I admit I’ve never had the desire to spend time in this vast desert wilderness. And on the day of my enchantment with one of the strange, twisted and spiky beings which gave the park its name, I’d almost opted out of our hike, tired of being on-the-go and feeling my introvert’s pull to disengage from constant company. But I was persuaded and found myself falling more under the spell of these stunning lands as we hiked to one of its mountain peaks.
We were making our way back to the parking lot when my friends stopped to take a group photo in front of a Joshua tree. As as I had been lingering behind, I gave into the impulse to wrap my arms around the tree, resting my head in a nook between branches. I remained there for long minutes, even when I was called to join the group, as a deep quiet settled over me.
A stillness so profound, it transported me beyond the chatter of my friends, the occasional call of crows, the bright sun blazing down on the distinctive landscape stretching endlessly around me. Here, it was just me and tree. Two bodies feeling the hum and heart of each other.
And from this space, a welling began. Slow at first but then becoming a great pouring and radiating outward filled completely with love. I felt, with unshakable certainty, this tree’s love for me. True and enduring and coursing through me like a current. As I received this love, I knew it was receiving mine, too. That somehow in this seemingly ordinary moment, we remembered each other, finding that language, wordless though it may have been, with which we once all spoke to our more-than-human kin.
I began to weep silent tears, letting myself be held by the tree as my arms cradled its rough, cork-like bark. The more I cried, the more sweeping this love and the more expansive I felt.
When I finally left my perch to join my friends for a photo, swiping quickly at my eyes, I said nothing of my experience, though I’d delayed my part in the photo-taking by announcing “I’m communing with the tree,” when first asked.
Before we continued on with our hike, I spent a few more moments, hand pressed to the trunk, expressing my gratitude for this devoted exchange. But this heightened, enlivened state stayed with me as I trailed behind, eyes watering once more, pledging an exuberant gratitude to the rocks and boulders, shrubs and trees, Earth and sky and every creature beneath and in-between. My love had no bounds and I could not stop myself from singing and speaking from its largesse. From knowing this enchanted reciprocity, this primordial breathing together as the kind of healing that only happens in relationship with the Earth.
In her interview with land alchemist Maryam Hasnaa for CIIS Public Programs, Layla K. Feghali, a Plantcestral + Ancestral Re-membrance practitioner, said:
“One of the most powerful things about plants and about being on a path of connection and kinship with plants is that they kind of automatically bring you back into your sensory body because that’s the language that we’re able to speak and understand and also to receive and exchange medicine with them through…It is a returning to our first language, our first way of knowing, our first way of being… and also this sensual beauty and pleasure and depth and possibility that exists in being in multi-sensory conversation with our existence.”
I have had many memorable, heart-opening moments in my life but in recent years, the most powerful have all been in relationship to the natural world. I think there is a hunger for this language among us, even if we may not be aware of it. A nagging if dulled awareness that our life force is being siphoned by these trappings of speed and productivity that dictate so much of our everyday.
And there is grief here. Unconscious perhaps, but this rupture from the intimate conversations we were made to have with the living world around us, this misalignment of our natural rhythms with machines is a sorrow that lives in our bodies.
It makes sense then that attuning our bodies to the Earth is the way to metabolize that grief. That leaning against a tree, lying on the grass, sitting on a rock, engaging with plants and flowers and waterways with reverence can reawaken a sense of belonging in us as we tap into this sadness and emptiness. It is also through such communion that we can allow ourselves, as soul activist and psychotherapist Francis Weller says, “to hear the sounds of the Earth crying in our own body.” To register all that is being lost to climate change, war and the exploitation of natural resources and allow our grief to penetrate our numbness, overwhelm, our sense of hopelessness. To feel our grief so our hearts can also soften into co-existing reservoirs of love.
The world needs our affection, wants our faithful listening. And in cultivating such attention, in entering and staying in conversation with the non-human, we activate a flow of love and respect that is medicine for these perilous times.
Mythologist and storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw has said:
“We need now urgently a counter-desecration phrasebook that would comprehend the world, a glossary of enchantment, which would allow nature to talk back and allow us to listen.”
I think it’s the listening so many of us miss when we’re admiring the natural beauty around us. We observe without bringing our full bodies, our full senses to the moment. But maybe this listening could save us, or at least help return us to the internal fullness that used to exist where so much anxiety, despair, loneliness and depression now lie.
It doesn’t take much. You don’t have to walk through the woods with praise songs falling from your lips, as I often do. You don’t have to shout “I love you!” or “You’re so magnificent!” as I did winding my way out of Joshua Tree National Park that day. You can join my friend Amy for her tree communion meditations, offered virtually, or my friend Meghan for her Earth Yoga series if you live in the Philly area. But perhaps the simplest start is to sit beneath your favorite tree or body of water or anywhere in nature that brings you solace, helps disarmour the rigidities of modern life. And begin to listen with all of your senses for the dream, the reminder, the hope, the love that our Great Mother wants to move through you. Offering an invitation that will deepen in mutual blessing and care every time you return.
UPCOMING EVENTS
The Five Gates of Grief
Salt Trails, the collective I co-founded to offer community grief rituals, and Threshold Collective have teamed up to collaborate on an immersive art and ritual experience around grief and loss funded through an Art + Change Grant by the Leeway Foundation. “The Five Gates of Grief,” running April 28-30, at the Maas Building in Kensington, will bring together artists across multiple disciplines for a dynamic interpretation of psychotherapist and soul activist Francis Weller’s framework for the losses we carry collectively and individually.
The opening of this collaborative, culture-shifting event on April 28 takes place on the 3rd Annual Grief-in-Public Day, a day aimed at raising awareness of the global grief crisis by creating affirming community spaces to welcome expressions of grief.
The Five Gates of Grief, as presented in Weller’s seminal book, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow,” invite an expansive lens to view the experiences of loss we all journey through: Everything We Love We Lose; The Places That Have Not Known Love; The Sorrows of the World; What We Expected We Did Not Receive; and Ancestral Grief.
In this multidisciplinary experience, Philadelphia artists Samantha Rise and Bennett Kuhn, Joshua Marquez, Dwight Dunston, Lauren Silverand Jordan Deal will invite audiences to experience each gate through installations combining visual art, sound, movement, group interaction and performance. Salt Trails’ own Rev. Rhetta Morgan will take us through a joy portal on opening night, following the artists’ activation of their gates.
The interactive exhibit will open on Sunday, April 28, from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Maas Building and also be open to the public from 4-7 p.m. April 29 and 30 for a self-guided experience.
All are welcome to attend this free event.
Seeds of Hope: A Journey Through Grief and Loss
I will be co-facilitating this four-week FREE series for BIPOC women with grief therapist and artist Julie Rainbow as part of our participation in Faith Matters Network’s Wisdom Learning Journey cohort. Seeds of Hope will offer a nurturing, nonjudgmental community healing space in Philadelphia, inviting grievers to explore their landscapes of loss through practices in cultivating compassion and tending to beauty, creative expression, time in nature, ritual and embodied movement — all in the healing container of community. . We will be joined on May 4th by Carol Hunter of The Seed Planter Group for horticultural therapy and tea making and on June 8 by Michelle Mahan of Root: A life’s movement conscious dance experience.
Participants must be available to attend all four sessions. Register here.
Writing the Broken Heart is back
Join me for four weeks of exploring our personal and collective losses through writing.
Each session will include a selection of poems that explore a particular facet of grief with opportunities to write in response to the poems. (No poetry writing experience required, as this is not about writing poems necessarily, though past students have, but using the poems as a doorway to access our own emotional landscape).
All that’s needed is your willing heart and gentle curiosity.
Learn more and register here