“All our wisdom is stored in the trees.” – Santosh Kalwar
This past Sunday afternoon, I was fortunate to take a little time on a forest path near to my home. Truly unstructured windows of solo time feel like a luxury somedays, but I keep striving for enough reduction in other areas of my life (unbusying myself, buying less, exiting spaces that aren’t aligned) to allow myself enough of it to sustain me. When I sat on the hill near my current home to be among the trees while I watched the winter solstice sunset, I wondered what message they had for me.
What I received in my heart is that the trees speak of open-hearted forgiveness, unending reciprocity, interdependent necessity, and the dynamic practice of reaching while rooting. The evergreens remind us of cyclical life through every season, that the parts of us that need rest and compost are vital to integration, that the pace of nature invites a slowing down, and that showing up to our lives exactly as we truly are, is precisely who we are meant to be. The wisdom of their deeply rooted, mycorrhizal network understands that what is best for us is in resonance with what is best for the collective, and vice versa.
They remind me that wisdom is a whole body, interconnected experience and that giving all that we can without hesitation is a practice that we as humankind are called to return to. We are being called to abandon what we see as progress and to return to our embodied nature. May we know oneness, wonder, and grace. Allow us to understand ourselves as a part of the inherently beautiful fabric of this realm, and to mirror our appreciation for that beauty back with loving care and attention. My prayer for this coming rotation and the return of the light is that we remember who we are at our core and strive to live with integrity. Through the grief and pain that will inevitably keep coming, may our strength be in our soft, open-heartedness, and may we remain open to all the hopeful, imaginal possibilities, too.
Upcoming events:
Mindful Movement in the UUFM Sanctuary, Mondays at 11am in January
https://uufm.breezechms.com/form/06c0e932
