What nurtures

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Early in the summer I was with friends at their cottage, and we’d been talking about the element of EARTH.

It’s the element I’m supposed to be engaging with this year, in the round the wheel / elements & directions / shamanic cycle work I’ve been doing, one year at a time. The first year was the basic foundation, the next year was the direction of the East / the element of Fire / and the Joy Child. This year is the year of the West / of Earth / of Stone People / and of the Nurturing Parent.

And frankly, it’s been a bit of a challenge. Like, Fire, I get it, am totally fascinated by if somewhat afraid of…

Water I love love love and could be in all day long …

But Earth? What the heck is Earth about??? How do you immerse yourself in / fall in love with / be fascinated by Earth? It seems so… kind of… inert.

One of the other shamanic teachers I used to have focused a lot on the direction of the West as the place of Dreams and the place of Death. And this year of connecting with the West and the Earth started with the death of the cat, so that felt rather on-brand.

But I figured surely there must be a whole bunch more positive stuff to pay attention to, and presumably learn from, I just don’t really get it yet…

The earth builds us, cell by cell. Earth is the ground beneath our feet and the soil into which we plunge our hands. This is our physicality and our grounding.

~ Manda Scott

Anyways, there up at the cottage early in the summer, my friend, a Virgo (an Earth sign) wanted me to see the local Mother Tree – the massive old source tree in the forest system near their place –

Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the glue that holds the forest together. Through their huge photosynthetic capacity, they provide food for the whole soil web of life. They keep carbon in the soil and aboveground, and they keep the water flowing.

~ Suzanne Simard

Thinking about Mother Trees reminded me that the other concept bundled into our project of connecting to the West, and to Earth, is the concept of the Nurturing Parent. And I started thinking about Earth – the planet and the soil and the capacity for everything to grow, as being a place of nourishment, of nurturance.

Earth represents the gift of life. Earth refers to the body of the planet Earth, the human body and Nature herself. It refers to what we make of it: our health, wealth, security, grounding, solidity, and stability.

~ The Four Winds

Later in the summer I was out in BC where nature is just off the charts, and we were in this place called Cathedral Grove, where they helpfully point out for you things like “nurse logs”.

When a tree falls to the ground, we may see only its death, but this death is the beginning of new life and the natural cycle of a forest…”

Further West, out in Tofino, as far West as you can go, where you sit and stare at the vast power of the Pacific Ocean, one of my BC friends gave me a little Earth gift to help me along my voyage…

On the back of the card, it says:

Earth Spirit represents the all-encompassing circles of life, the end of one journey is the beginning of the next. Life is a series of many infinite circular experiences – before, during, and after your existence.

~ Roy Henry Vickers & Lizzie Snow

Bit by bit the whole thing was starting to come together for me – the sense of death as being within the cycle of life in a very organic way, and of the element of Earth as being the rich and nourishing container for the movement through these cycles.

Still later in the summer I was up near Owen Sound (yes, I did make a point of jumping on every chance that appeared to get out of town and enjoy summertime and nature and friends I don’t see often enough…) and I was staying in a little cabin by the river. Each morning I’d get up early with the sunrise and walk down to river, my bare feet delighting in the cold dewy grass of early morning and the soft tender nurturing feeling of grass and earth underneath my feet.

Where I live is all concrete with flourishes of steel, so neither earth nor grass nor even natural stones are easily found, and the more organic rhythms of growth and decay are hard to remember amongst the domineering rhythm of a city ever hungry to keep building infrastructure …

I thought of my first night of initiation into this year, and of the tree down by our rather urban beach that seemed to reach and reach down down down into the Earth to get just enough nutrition from which to eek out a life –

How vivid a contrast between the lives of all these trees in different soils, different environments, different levels / qualities of nourishment. The hard scrabble tree barely surviving versus the towering giants of BC, or even a massive Mother Tree in a proper forest in rural Québec. What a strong image of what Nurturing is and does.

Thank goodness for the friends who enabled the many summer adventures out in these variations on Canadian natural splendour, where it was a whole lot easier to really connect with Earth, and with this concept of Nurturance while being out exploring nature, and talking to my really very knowledgeable and, ahem, very very nurturing friends…

…the Earth element symbolizes the link to our collective past, our connection to the planet, and our inescapable bond with every life form. The Earth element nurtures, it protects. The Earth element is the womb from which all life comes. From plants, to plankton, to eagles, to grasshoppers, all life began in the Earth and in caves, where life was protected from the sun’s radiation and life forms began to evolve and emerge.

~ Omar Rosales

And you, Dear Reader? What nurtures you?

Nothing gold can stay

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Robert Frost

My dad spoke this entire poem aloud as we sat at the exit of the rehab hospital, looking out the window at the emergence of spring, waiting for the ride to get him home.

When I made a crack about “nothing gold can stay” being perhaps not the most uplifting of lines, he came back with “assumptions about Frost being a sunny, feel-good poet” being off base and the like – the sharp engagement with language and writing and expression was clearly intact. So good to know after some 6 weeks of hospital turmoil.

The rehab hospital offered some particularly fine moments – taking dad out for walks through the verdant Willowdale grounds as spring sprung. I downloaded an app of bird song, just to know who exactly was singing so brightly as we wandered from one corner of the gardens to another. There were robins of course, the occasional jay, a waxwing, and several variations on sparrows – the prettiest being the Song Sparrow as opposed to the House Sparrow or the Common Sparrow. But one day there was a fleeting moment of Goldfinch… oh, what a magical name. Must be the gold reference.

In the mornings before heading up to the hospital, I started a practice of sitting on the benches facing the lake and doing 10 minutes or so of meditation.

I have an app for that too, don’t ya know. So I sit there with my headphones on and do my best to clear the mind.

The guided meditations in my app do your basic bringing attention to the breath, but they have a few other tricks to help with the incessant Thinking Thinking Thinking of the brain. My favourite so far is to “become aware of the sounds” that are all around you. Recognize that you cannot stop the hearing of the sounds, that there is a part of you hearing the sounds – your consciousness – and your consciousness is hearing sounds whether you will it to or not. And then be in touch with that part of yourself that is simply hearing sounds and simply carries on breathing all day long. Something that is always there no matter what thought is going on in your mind.

For some reason I see this “consciousness” thing, this place that is somewhere behind and beyond the Thinking Mind, as a kind of vagus nerve shape…

Vagus Nerve illustration

…something that includes and yet is deeper and more extensive than the brain.

I dunno – maybe this image will change over time as I do more meditation, we’ll see.

But there is something about the realizing that sound is happening all around all the time whether or not you are paying attention to it, and using that as a way past the thinking that works better for me than trying a similar thing with the visual world. I guess I’m so visually oriented that analysis jumps in very quickly. As soon as I open my eyes my mind starts in with the ideas: “Would this scene before me make a compelling image?” ” “Is this interesting to look at or not so much?”

Anyways, dad went home that day from the rehab hospital and was home for a few weeks before he ended up in yet another emergency department, and was then admitted to hospital again, and is now in “transitional care”. A bit of a holding zone while he builds his strength again and we work on a more sustainable plan.

Meanwhile, on a weekend getaway to a friend’s cottage, I pulled out the birdsong app, and was brought back into the joy of birds… Hello!!!

So many different birds outside of the city!!!

Yes, plenty of robins and jays, but then there was an Eastern Phoebe! A Northern Flicker! And when I thought I was hearing the Northern Flicker again, no, no, turns out that was a Yellow-Bottomed Warbler!!! Such a world of variety.

And so many elaborate swirling marks when their calls are expressed as waveforms –

Well, I soon realized that the birdsong app, as fun and charming as it is, is also a way of being in that very analytical part of the brain, of not relaxing back into a more experiential way of being in the moment.

And I have to say, I do find water – and the glittering play of light on water – a kind of short cut to clearing the mind and simply being. Being in the present moment.

Nothing gold can stay.