(This is a piece written this summer yet never posted that I came across today. It was medicine for my own spirit as I've allowed myself to become scattered and busy. May we return to our bodies as well as Mother Earths. In joy, Dawn)
I visited Cheekwood one evening this summer for a quiet evening, only to discover it was family night. Children gathered around the train exhibit while others watched a nearby puppet show.
I settled in by a stream above a beautiful wooden sculpture* floating in two small ponds below. The falling water drowned out the voices atop the hill until a few bites into my meal the puppet show and my quiet ended.
Dozens of squealing children descended onto the area. Many took off their shoes and waded into the stream beside me. I was surrounded and stunned. My quiet evening was disrupted by children acting as if they had never seen water.
I eventually walked along the hillside where there were more children exuberantly playing in the fern-lined stream.
It seemed many of these children had never experienced water in nature, water flowing like the country streams to which I was accustomed at their age, streams filled with crawfish, tadpoles and pebbles etched with fossils.
I reveled in watching these children, yet wondered how many of them will become businesspeople and bankers whose livelihoods will revolve around using Earth? Will they recall their joy in the stream? Will they remain aware of their relatedness to Earth or will they exploit Earth for financial gain thus forgetting nature is the source of material goods? How soon will these children replace the joy of play with the adrenaline and pressure of competition?
Early on we unconsciously trade our connection with Nature and the spirit of embodied play for an attitude of controlling nature, our bodies and spirits while ignoring their interrelatedness.
How does this disconnection occur?
When young, we’re embodied living life through experience. Our educational and social systems based on competition, hierarchy and control, birth the disconnect. Separation is furthered in our families and in business models, through technology and entertainment.
We have lost the way of embodied experience and relationship with ourselves, one another and Earth. Addiction, depression, anxiety, debt and violence are symptoms of this disconnect.
The children in the stream hold the medicine we need. The joy in connecting with Nature is part of the remedy to remembering we are each players in life’s stream. As adults our capacities may be diminished by training or trauma, but we are still spirit in body walking Earth’s body.
If we remembered the joy of being in our bodies and appreciated the precious gift of life, family disputes, political posturing and wars would cease. Doctors, therapists, lawyers, hospitals and prisons would see a drastic decline in clientele.
Our capacity to experience life deeply and begin reconnecting within and without awaits discovery like the children did that evening discovering the stream. It’s as near as allowing your experience to be stirred right now by the fireflies light, the wren’s song, making music with blades of grass or imagining the cool water of the stream.
This is the world we’re here to build, a world in which we live in relationship with ourselves, one another and the Earth.
Imagine the Shift!
-Dawn, The Good News Muse, 2 Sept. 2011 dawn@imaginetheshift.com
* The beautiful floating wooden sculpture is one piece in a double installation called "Double Heliotrope" on display at Cheekwood until October 31st and created by British artist and Vanderbilt art and philosophy professor, David Wood. For more info click here: Cheekwood and thank you, David Wood !
No comments:
Post a Comment