When I Am Among the Trees

When I Am Among the Trees -- Mary Oliver



When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

~ Mary Oliver ~

Up Against the Wall

Dear Friends,

These are such turbulent times!

Can we embrace the uncertainty, the challenges and the changes without falling into the fear zone and then staying there? Life oftens gives us more than we expect. Much of what we thought was solid and supportive may fade or disappear. Then we look into our inner selves for the wisdom of creative solutions. Okay, I'll try to be creative even when it feels everything is falling down around me! The drama is so appealing, isn't it!

Breathe and breathe some more. Listen (and not to the fear!) These recent challenges are no more true than the best things that have ever happened to me. There are the drama of life distracting me from trusting what is real within me. Despite my occasional doubt, I know who I am and while what is happening right now is not easy, it also is not that difficult. I have so much- my unique life, my creativity, my friends, family and my community. What am I paying attention to, what is within me or what is without?

Today in a healing session I saw myself standing, banging my head against a wall that I know I have created. I saw how I started out when I was much younger standing up to what didn't serve me but then not being supported. So I acquised who I was for the support I needed and when I finally realized that didn't work anyway, I wanted back my life, my very own being. I wasn't even aware it was possible! Little by little, I started showing up, first in small ways, trying not to alienate the people who did love me but who I hadn't shown who I really was.
This sometimes meant leaving behind an old friend as I struggled toward finding my own voice.
I often pushed away many who would've given me support had I the courage to face and share who I was. The rejection, or the possiblity of it, stung too deeply. It was easier to walk away first than risk it.

So today I saw myself standing in front of a wall. It was the same wall as always, except today it was made of cotton and practically wispy!

The wall of my own disbelief in myself is fading to nothing. It has been alot of smoke and mirrors, tears and fighting for what has been real since the beginning of time. I can stop pushing back, protecting and hiding. I can now remember to listen carefully to the deep soul of my being and to the play of what's happening around me. I have learned to wait for what is real to show itself, which, with patience, it usually does.

It's a funny thing how everything is born out of an opposite and amazing otherness. We have a creation of challenges and connections that we couldn't or at least wouldn't want to live without. There is a play in front of us and within us that contains all we ever need to know about who we are and how we see the world. Can you see the facade of your own beliefs covering the world?

Can you trust who you are, even if you don't have all the answers just yet?
Can you watch your universe unfold in it's own unique birthing process, knowing that newness and birth come after what's called 'transition', not before it?
Can you give up the sense of entitlement enmeshed in the false, illusionary self and instead embrace a simpler,more grounded and more truthful self?

Can you dance with what comes to your door, trusting your realness and not that of the world?

Warmly,
Laurel

Trust the Truth of What You Feel

Dear Friends,

When the glamor fades and the complexity is dissolved, the true, the necessary and the important can come forth. We are all like crows, attracted to 'shiny', and like children, sometimes impressed by big words and bamboozled by complex ideas. Disasters often hide some essential truth in their complexity, yet can also bring to light a deeper truth, as in who your friends really are and what matters most. If we can look beyond, not under the rubble, there is some truth that is trying to be born.

It's more simple than the complexity that's trying to hide it. It's less glamorous than many solutions currently offered.

What lies deeper in our current crisis is how we've allowed others to make money off our needs and wants. Our eyes have been bigger than our stomachs, our wants larger than our pocketbooks. We have trusted in the glamor of credit cards and the complexity of loans to 'make' our lives better when they don't really work. We have believed in a system that says you can just borrow and pay it back later. We have done that and now truth comes, knocks on our door and says now we owe more than we ever realized we would.

We are in an energy crisis. We have been trying to get our energy from something outside of ourselves. We've all been taught this so it's not a crime, just something that maybe we're ready to be done with. Maybe it really is time for a change in how we see ourselves and how we can take responsibility for ourselves in a new world that's different than the old. We are trying to birth a new world and the old one is crumbling down around our ankles, catching many of us with our pants down.

All the energy you will ever need is inside you. We have been taught it's outside of us, in another country even, but it's not. It's in us, in you and in me. We are self generating energy machines and we can learn how to nourish ourselves and not feed off of others.

How to even begin? Trust is what can take us to the truth of what we believe. When we really feel into what we believe, we can parse out the falsities and discard the 'shiny' for a more real perspective. It can feel overwhelming and strange, to trust yourself. Each of us will never know everything, yet we can begin to feel what is right and what is true. I can feel what's right for me. You can feel what's true for you. We can respect our differences and our commonalities. We can come clean about our childish whims and act now with greater compassion and responsibility.

We can step into the now and feel out the truth of what's before us, step by step. There are big problems all around us and fear like a hungry wolf stalks us daily, especially if you listen to the news. Yet what lies deeper is a new world trying to be born in each and every one of us. You are the awakening consciousness of the new world. One breath at a time, one day at a time, one truth at a time. This is the only way it can happen. In you are the keys and the opportunity to be part of the present and thus a path to all our future. It's not going to come from outside of us (even if the aliens land!).
We can do this, I can do this, you can do this.

Listen, it's speaking now, like a whisper in the trees.

Blessings,

Laurel

Please Change Your World

What a bold title today!
The truth is, I can't change your world. My world is full of it's own challenges, it's ups and downs. I am engaged, present to my own process of acceptance or taking action or letting go, whatever is required in the moment.
I'm there with you, in this fullness of life. Yet what your experience is, is of your own making. I can stand beside you yet you are the only one present for your own journey, just as I am for mine.

You are the the process itself and only by your own consciousness can the world change. Something is not going to happen to enlighten you. It happens in you because you pay attention, because you care, because you understand that no one else can do this for you in the way and depth you can do it for yourself.

We have all wished otherwise. Please someone take care of us. Our parents, friends, relatives, state, government all turn out to be inadequate, it's true. It's a setup really. Unfair even.

In the end it's you. We grow up and begin to look within. We see how our beliefs and misunderstandings color what we see and feel. We struggle with the alluring demons in our heads that tell us falsehoods and we gather the courage to say no, not now and not ever. We come to terms with our imperfections so we are not just walled off from the truth of our humanness. We accept our dominion over our own lives, weeding out the falsehoods and opening to a deeper sense of our place in the world. We let go and begin to see a new truth, one that includes both our humanity and our innate spirituality.

I love myself so I can now love you. I used to think if I could just love and accept you then I would be alright, that my undisclosed pain would absolve. It didn't work that way for me (let me know if it did for you). My self hatred was so deep and pervasive. I was the one that left the garden of Eden, that left paradise and needed so desperately to go home. It was my fault, there was something wrong with me, driven out of the kingdom for unknown but suspected iniquities. The original sin deal. Sorry it's not true. That lie keeps you small so others can control you. That lie allows you to give your power to others. Either way it's not true. You are meant to have your own life, your own dominion over your world.

We don't know if we even want that. It means taking responsibility for whatever happens within us when it's so easy to blame anything and everything on the outside. Our excuses abound: I'm too busy, worried, broke, inadequate, whatever.
We have been trained to look outside ourselves and for someone else to fix things. Magical thinking. We think that we are powerless to change our world because we have been taught that it's outside ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let's choose to wake up now. "Be the Change". Who you are is your responsibility and your resonance sends a message to everything around you about what you think and feel is true about life. Then that's what you experience. No one else can free you from the lies. Breathe it in and then let it go.

It's all in you.
Inhale and breathe in all the gifts and possibilities of this moment. This is where it starts. Now. Now is here, feel it, embrace it. This is what we have. The fullness begins here, the acceptance starts here, the recognition begins here. Let the lies go and allow yourself to be present. Your life begins anew right now. This is your life, don't be afraid that there's nothing here for you. Allow it to unfold in it's depths and simplicity. Trust life and trust yourself, it's all in you.

Blessings,
Laurel

Forgiveness

The trees tell me they are in a constant state of total acceptance of all that is. From this place of awareness, forgiveness is unneccessary. Oh to be so free from judgement!
Life has it’s conditions, this is always the case. We have basic needs of survival, for food, shelter and protecting our children until they’re grown. We can offer a homeless person five dollars or even twenty, but we might not invite them home. Life is conditional. A mouse may choose to go on living, would rather not be a meal for someone else if he can help it, yet someday he might be that meal. We all make choices to continue living, just as what ate the mouse did. Our life is an amazing gift and we own the rights to care for it.
Acceptance takes us to another level of care. We can accept a homeless person’s right to be and choices she makes. We can offer compassion for those choices, out of respect, not guilt. We would not think of uprooting a tree growing on a windsweept cliff, judging it a poor choice of this tree. We might even admire it’s tenacity to handle such adversity. There is a randomness in nature that fits a perfect bell curve, we too are part of that.
Acceptance is a big goal. Most of the time we look at it as something we offer the external world, yet it truly begins in how we treat ourselves. Our humaness is not always easy to be with. An ideal is held in our minds eye and we strive to meet it. We fail, beat ourselves up and sometimes give up, locking into a pattern of stubborness that protects us but does not serve us. We hold up our imperfections to others and suggest that we can’t do anything about them. We wallow in being stuck, judge ourselves incapable, and deny responsiblity. We are more than this.
Today consider looking at some aspect of yourself that you don’t like. Maybe not the biggest, toughest thing. Pick something small and maybe concrete, a little habit of picking at your cuticles, or judging a particular type of person, anything really. Then hold that part of yourself as human, not perfect but okay. Hold yourself in compassion for this little fault, for this small imperfect part of you that is oh so human. Open your heart to forgiving yourself for this and allow your love to embrace it as you would a small immature child. This is a part of you, allow it. It’s okay to be an imperfect human. Allow your heart to nourish this part also, not just the parts you like.
This is how we begin to open to a new level of awareness, in just small steps as this. This is what is held in our ’shadow’ side; the parts of ourself we don’t want to see and face. You have probably tried the ‘all is love and light’ path and sensed that it’s not taking you where you want to go. Light does not exist without the darkness. They balance each other and teach humanity how to achieve balance also. Think of the darkness as moving the light forward. When we feel or see that disliked part of ourselves, we finally have the opportunity to take action.
We can choose to ignore it thus causing it to be projected outside of ourselves (hence our troubled relationships) or we can begin to befriend what we don’t like. In quantum physics the observer changes the observed. We can begin to heal ourselves by sitting in acceptance of what’s not so nice. This is challenging of course, yet now is a good time to start. In wanting our world to be filled with peace and light, we can create it by taking in vs projecting out what we don’t like. In loving what is, we absorb and transform our personal darkness into light and sadness into joy.
We have perfected the pushing away of what is not good and it hasn’t worked. Now we can begin to be present for ourselves in a new way that heals us. This builds trust and awareness, and awareness opens new dimensions of reality, allowing new depth and meaning to nourish our hearts.
Blessings,
Laurel