Compassion and Re-Membering

A winter day at the pond.

As I walk to the spot where I take my monthly photo for this offering, I’m often thinking about what I’m going to write about. I had a few ideas rolling around but then when I arrived they were instantly overcome by sadness. Dog poop bags and empty alcohol bottles were front and centre enshrined in the ice of the pond.

A while ago my mind would have wandered to so many angry and frustrated places…. “What’s wrong with people, who would do this?”, but today my mind just went right to a place of understanding in my heart.

I listened to a meditation last week with a wonderful group of women that talked about the sacred wound - the wound of separation - that all humans carry. As I looked at the bottle and other objects in the water, I couldn't be angry, I just thought, “how do we heal this?”. This wound of separation has all of us at some point just not caring about others, about Earth, and even about ourselves. It is leading us all down a very painful path in many different ways.

How do we heal this wound of separation? I don’t have any easy or step by step answers for this. As often is the case, answers to big questions can feel vague and nebulous, but also quite simple at the same time. Remember. Re-member. Remember that this planet we live on is our home, it is our life source, our caretaker, our anchor. Remember that we are made of it, we return to it, it becomes us, we will all someday become it. Re-member - rejoin Earth as a member of its family and the family of all things as the stewards we were meant to be.

Much of humanity feels so lost to me right now, but a beautiful thing about being lost is that in a space of not knowing, we are invited into curiosity and creativity to find our way back to one another. It is up to each of us to decide to accept this invitation or not. We all have the capacity to look within and without, to hear the birds of spring call to us to come into community and to hear the longing of our souls call back.

Over the next month, with the coming of spring, I encourage you all to take moments to listen to the sounds around you, to re-member with nature. What is calling your heart, what are you being called to feel? Instead of turning away from difficult questions, answers, and feelings - which we instinctually do - try feeling some it, just even a little and see where it takes you. Not for the sake of arriving at any conclusion or sense of ok-ness, but simply for the sake of feeling and being, and maybe touching a corner of remembering where you are from so that you may once again reach out to yourself and the world around you with less superiority and/or apathy, and more compassion and inspiration.

As always here are a few places that I have been gathering inspiration from:

Poem - Invitation by Mary Oliver

Website - The Work that Reconnects by Joanna Macy

Wild At Heart,

Dana