There is something that happens when you walk into a space, a garden, a hillside, a park, even a room, and you let it be what it actually is before you decide what you think about it. Most of us do not do this. We arrive with a framework already running: what this place is supposed to look like, what it means, what it reminds us of, what it needs to be for us. We see that instead of what is there. The framework is not wrong, it simply is not reception. Full reception leads to true perception. That is a simple sequence and worth sitting with, because it describes something genuinely rare. The capacity to allow what is actually present to arrive, before the interpretation, before the categorization, before the preference.This is one of the most powerful things a person can develop. And it is the foundation of every genuine relationship with land, with plants, with any living system. What you receive, when you allow full reception, is something that has always been there, waiting to be seen as it actually is. Hold that lightly and see what it opens.

Most parks, even the carefully designed ones, even those put together with real intention, are collections of plants that have no particular relationship with each other. Curated for aesthetics or maintenance schedules, not for what they do for one another. What the natural world does instead is something else entirely. Plants in genuine, healthy relationship, what permaculture calls a guild, live in co-creation together bringing each other into health and fullness in ways that isolated planting cannot. One fixes nitrogen, one draws up minerals from depth, one provides canopy that modulates temperature and moisture for everything below it. They are a united system, generating resilience that no individual plant could generate alone. Permaculture observes and replicates this. But the observation is not modern, the name is. Indigenous land managers knew these relationships. The land was not left to go its own way and then admired from a respectful distance. It was read, and worked with, in ways that required paying close attention to what each element was doing for the others. That comprehension is the capacity to read a living system and work with its intelligence rather than against it... is, I think, the oldest form of knowledge there is. It did not originate in a textbook. It originated in someone standing still long enough to actually perceive what was happening. What plant relationships have you noticed in the land around you? Even in a small space, the guilds are there if you look.

We romanticize the tipi and the yurt the same way we romanticize the idea that nature is somewhere else ~ somewhere you have to pack for and drive to. I have lived in both a tipi & a yurt, and what I can tell you is that they are genuinely difficult to manage day to day. That is not the thing people tend to say about them. The duality we have built that nature is the wild unmanaged thing you go find versus the ordinary world you live in, is not actually describing reality. It is describing a projection. You are nature. The raccoon on the fence line is nature. The manicured yard is nature. The plant coming through the sidewalk crack is nature. The potted herbs on the apartment balcony are nature. None of that is a consolation prize for not having access to wilderness. It is the actual world. What I've observed is that people get stuck waiting for the right context ~ the acreage, the rural address, the aesthetic of wild land. As if the relationship with nature requires a stage set before it can begin. It does not. It requires attention to what is already here. What is the nature you are actually living in right now, as in what is present where you are?

Depending on your perspective it can be hard to take flight Depending on the tracks your following it may be a long trip You can even be on the right track, but if you don’t move,the train will still run you over ~Open your eyes, and see. Open your mouths, and speak ~ Open your hearts, and unite with love for each other, remembering “You don’t owe people an apology when ya wear your brave heart inside out ~ For you’re a beautiful force of nature with your head high and your hair let down ~ Keep running with a free spirit ~ Rattle the cage of the ones that fear it”* Cuz ~ you know ~ that the highest technology in the universe is Consciousness ~ and the frequency of Love braids all the atoms in our Universe ~ together, creating this material worldwe are walking ~ through, causing our recognition of the divinity, luminosity and ~ power within us. Now we cannot help but live authentic lives ~ filled with potential, appreciation, fulfillment, and grace. Now we ~ bring to the forefront, a new self-actualizing social synergy, ~ which is the heart of a loving, co-creative society laughing and ~ dancing with, and within, all of Creation ~ We are crossing the bridge, join us. *Gratitude to Rachael Lampa’s “The Wild Ones”

The discovery and/or remembering of whatever you wish to call it, “ones work” or your “spiritual gift”, can toss us into a very vulnerable state. In the context of this “discovering” or listening to the Spirit within, that the experience of abundance and love will find fertile ground within us.