Romancing Nature
Her wrath is ferocious.
Her love and sustenance unconditional.
She is decisive, knowing exactly Her needs, and perseveres to ensure they’re met.
She is predictable, yet mysterious.
Rhythm is critical to Her, as is chaos.
She thrives in darkness. She thrives in light.
She is warm and expressive. She is cool and intentional.
Healthy masculinity and femininity are harmonized within Her.
The stars remind Her of Her destiny, and She dances with the stars in gratitude,
receiving the potent insemination of Life Force, and manifesting with its magic.
Kingdoms and precise ecosystems of purpose-filled creations rely upon Her wisdom.
Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Ether blend in perfect proportion within every element of Her.
As that within Her becomes imbalanced, Her wisdom and actions return Her to balance.
She is forever wild, despite many efforts to tame Her.
She is generative and destructive.
She can heal, and She can plague.
She is a midwife of birth, and of death.
She is a teacher, guide, and mentor.
She is adaptable, always learning and evolving.
She is friend and enemy.
She is family and stranger.
She longs to be seen, heard, felt, spoken to, and experienced.
She is me. She is you.
She is a Great Lover.
She is Nature.
Nature, My First Teacher
From as early as I can remember, Nature has been my medicine, my lover, my religion, my teacher, and my muse.
Even in my betrayals of Her, I’ve always been welcomed back into Nature’s arms.
I had a favorite Beech tree whose branches I climbed and enjoyed as “uneven bars” to practice my gymnastics as a kid. I’m not quite sure where the bravery came from to do such acrobatics so high above the ground!
Ted Andrews, author of Nature Speak, indicates that it is believed that a prayer spoken under the Beech goes directly to Heaven. I found this shocking because there came a time in my teen years when I became angry, feeling as if the many prayers I spoke in the branches of the Beech were never answered.
I prayed for a better relationship with my mother, to feel her love and to stop feeling so inadequate in her eyes. Of course that was my teenaged self who had no idea how to be myself, and relied heavily upon the validation of others while buying into my often ungrounded assessments of what others thought of me.
Nonetheless, perfectionism was my mother’s way of controlling a life she felt she had no control over, often expressed in the form of significant criticism and judgement toward others, including me and my siblings.
My “Mother Beech” was my place of solace and peace, a place I could climb to freedom to be me, and feel loved just as I was.
Beech knows how to use the past to transmute the present into a new future. My past, along with those prayers in the Beech tree, was teaching me the importance of the Great Mother. My prayers were answered in my finding the gift of Mother Nature and Her enduring love and healing, even to heal my relationship with my mother many years later.
Beech is considered the “tree of discovery of lost wisdom” according to Andrews. Beech energy awakens new expressions of old knowledge, generates tolerance, and aligns one with their Higher Self. She also teaches us to soften being overly critical.
Laural Virtues Wauters of TreeSpiritWisdom.com states that “Beech encourages us to step into our true power as a person of integrity, truth and wisdom.”
When I read what Andrews and Wauters had to say about Mother Beech, I wept. I realized what a gift I’d been given, right in my childhood back yard, to guide me onto the path that my Soul came here to follow.
Even my astrological chart speaks of work for me to do via writing, speaking, teaching, and of course the expression of the Sacred Feminine, all of which Beech supports.
Mother Beech and Nature were my first mentors on this path of women’s empowerment and awakening inner wisdom that I love so much.
How has Nature been a teacher or guide for you?
Laws of Nature
While Nature has always been my “happy place,” amongst the trees, streams, birds and stars, I’ve come to believe that Her magic also helped to create a certain amount of idealism within me.
Idealism can be great for encouraging us to strive for a better world. However, idealism can also be crippling in that it often comes with expectations that aren’t always possible in the timing or ways in which we want them to be fulfilled.
My inner idealist with high expectations could never understand why life wasn’t easier. I had so many questions:
- Why can’t I attract what I long for in life?
- Why do I feel so torn apart within, struggling to know what to trust or do?
- Why does it bother me so much when others are in a bad mood?
- Why does everything feel so overwhelming and chaotic?
- Why do others seem to have it so much easier than I do?
- Why do certain things keep happening to me?
- Why do some people seem to always get away with unkindness and hurt?
- Why can’t I seem to make things happen when I want them to?
- Why can’t things just stay the way I want them to?
After all, in Nature, everything seemed to work out, be in balance, and be so clear. But in my life, not so much.
Because I could see the perfection in Nature, even if I didn’t fully understand it, something deep inside of me was striving to see the same perfection in my life and in the world at large. I now see that it was my love for and connection with Nature that was the driving force for my entire journey through life.
Nature is the Soul of Life, and I believe it is the Laws of Nature and Her many gifts of deep wisdom that guide us on our own unique Soul’s journey.
I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t in some way nourished by Nature. Even the biggest lover of city life appreciates the magic and beauty of Nature.
What if Nature is the greatest teacher of human beings?
I’ve always believed we are Nature, and not separate from Her. Therefore, all that exists within Nature exists within us and vice versa. So why was I filled with all of these challenges? Why didn’t I see or feel the perfection within myself that I saw in Nature?
In my years of striving for this perfection, I went down many paths, seeking guidance in religion, philosophy, Indigenous wisdom traditions, countless authors on spirituality and human development, yoga, meditation, and more.
What I finally came to see is that while indeed we are Nature, what makes human beings unique is that we have free will. We are the only kingdom in the Natural World that has this gift, and this is also what distinguishes us from the animal kingdom.
With our free will, we can discern, decide, reason, and assess. With this freedom, we can move with/toward our True Nature, or away from it.
I was not living in my True Nature when I was young. I was too caught up in the stories within my mind, consumed by my personal feelings, and not behaving in alignment with my Truth.
My tree climbing days with Mother Beech were immature and unaware. While each of us has our own unique Soul’s journey, the journey of the Soul moves through similar stages of human development and unfolding throughout all of our lives.
Our Soul’s journey is a journey to our True Nature.
We cannot arrive at our True Nature without honoring the Laws of Nature.
I was not going to attract what I longed for without aligning my own inner vibration in such a way that attraction was possible.
I was going to feel torn apart within until I could reconcile polarity within myself.
Until I could honor the oneness of all things, I couldn’t learn how to be less impacted by the moods and energies of those around me.
I needed to create rhythm in my life and generate a correspondence to peace and tranquility that I longed for in order to move beyond the feelings of constant overwhelm.
Only in understanding relativity could I come to appreciate that my perception of others and myself was not usually true, and that there was so much more that I needed to understand in order to have a more complete picture.
When I could understand cause and effect, I was much better able to take responsibility for my own life, feel less responsible for the lives of others, and recognize that karma or compensation is at play in all things.
I had to learn that my timing is not always Divine timing, and that all things have a gestation period conceived out of harmonious union of the masculine and feminine.
I learned that only with my intentional and inspired action could things truly change in my life, and that eventually, everything will change, with transmutation being the only constant in life.
All of the “why” questions I was asking ultimately needed to be answered by questions of what, how, when, where and who. These are questions like Who am I? What is mine to do? How can I share my gifts? Where are my gifts needed? etc.
When we live our lives in forgetfulness of the Laws of Nature, we struggle to align with our own True Nature. We wonder why life cannot unfold the way we wish it would, why something seems to be missing no matter how successful we are, and why we feel so “off” within ourselves, and we forget to ask and be willing to dive deeper into other, more important questions.
I continue to weave the Laws of Nature into all of the work that I offer, in addition to the work of my own Soul’s journey. The journey is ever evolving, supporting us to live just as free and perfectly aligned as the trees, streams, birds and stars.
In what ways are you or are you not living in alignment with the Laws of Nature?
Could you use support in doing so? Schedule a free exploratory conversation and let’s see how the Laws of Nature can support you to find your True Nature.
