"I talk with trees and the forest wildlife, and the stones show me the way…"
~Carl Jung; Red Book; Page 227
Try seeing instead of looking, hearing instead of listening, being touched instead of touching… clouds and wind, grass and river…experience the ground coming up to meet you in addition to your feet touching the ground, the earth…What is nature and earth interested in presenting to you? Visit the world around you on its own terms when going out, let it all come up to meet you, greet you, touch you, speak to you---speak through you! Don’t worry about why or how, just be curious about who and what is here when you stand and move with earth in this way. Just be with what is here. Experience…and engage.
Nature questing is essentially a somatic means of healing, learning, expanding consciousness—and therefor growing. It is doing something with and about your longing, your grief and your joy. Doing something about your soul. The body knows, produces, and holds more knowledge than we are willing to grant it most of the time. When we engage the body of earth and body of self with a desire to access this knowledge, we engage the realm of synchronicity, where the veil is dropped between the worlds that divide us: we feel and see a meaningful connection between self and other, how we feel and how we act, between nature of the world and nature of myself.
A form of freedom and personal truth is offered in nature when we go out this way that we can carry back to community, to our working class work-a-day ego and persona. Nature questing’s gift is a body of knowledge (and a body in knowledge—of soul) that we can carry back in mind for greater clarity, vision, wellness and creativity in our lives.
*More of my work with soma, psyche and nature at Soul and Stream
