Nature

… we become the reality of the body we are designed to be: solid as mountain, fluid as river, spacious as sky. This is the magic of being a human creature in a material form on the planet Earth, being born over and over, becoming native once again.

–JAMIE McHUGH

My friend Denise and I are just back from an Embody Nature retreat at Sea Ranch in Northern California with Jamie McHugh of Somatic Expression. I have worked with Jamie before and now want you to meet him too. (Everybody.)

Jamie is a creative and expressive teacher with a seemingly inexhaustible bag of tricks. He’s also funny and deeply caring. He was doing this work long before “rewilding,” “ecotherapy” or “forest bathing” were a thing. 

Look up his online classes – affordable, accessible, and life changing in a sneaky, everyday kind of way. His voice will take you right into the living experience of your embodied soul.

I’ve been noticing in me lately, still, after all these years, the tendency to commodify “nature.” 

As in, WIFM (what’s in it for me)? 

• Is this a good trail to hike? 
• is this water warm enough to swim in? 
• where are those dolphins? 
• i need some healing. 
• And oh no, not the wind again and why all these clouds?

But last week: every day, we spent hours on end outdoors in the raw, intense, breathtakingly gorgeous environment up the California coast. 

Moving, witnessing, mirroring, sounding. Enveloped in the soft blanket of fog, pierced by sunlight dancing on the waves, held by the deep stillness of the redwood grove and the light of the full moon spilling on the dark water: so much deep rest, relaxation, regeneration.

An incredible medicine for all the heartbreak and terror of what is going on on our planet: to dip directly into its wild beauty and allow my body to remember my kinship with the body of the earth, sea, forest and sky.

The experience felt generous and spacious, including both the kind of inner nurturing that slows down time and the wild participation in the elemental realm of wind, rock, grass, pelican, redwood tree that gives each being the time to reveal itself in the vastness of space.

I used to scoff at yet another Mary Oliver poem someone would read about the miracles of the natural world.

May I be forgiven.

On that beach, every day, over and over, I found myself at the very heart of the world, forever and always already dissolved into the translucence of elemental belonging. Not even belonging but simply being one expression of the beyond-human community, filled with the sky, kissed by the wind, coming home with salt in my hair and sand in my ears.

I look forward to meeting you there, at the heart of what’s real, sometime soon!

Zuza

Here’s a good one from, you know, Mary Oliver.

I Worried
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

PS. See the movie Returning Home and also Breath Made Visible about Anna Halprin who started all this. Read Thomas Berry. Go for a walk around the block and actually see, smell, taste, hear, touch something. Let it touch you all the way to where the living body is in empathic communion with the living, breathing earth.