I came in hoping for a feeling of space and hope around the natural world but instead left with a clearer understanding of a core part of myself that I had lost sight of. This insight has unlocked for me a new way of thinking about current challenges I am facing in my life. So I do have more clarity and a feeling of space and hope but at a much deeper level that I was expecting. ( K.H. Sydney)
So what is Nature Conversations all about?
You know how your heart lifts with the blue of the sky, your self expands with an open horizon where you feel the rising tide of longing for that unknown distant shore? You know how things in the landscape speak to your imagination, the sway of the tree invites you to bend into more flow and flex? The rise of the mountain calls you to solidity? The leap of the whale invites you to break beyond limits? This is nature in conversation with the deepest part of ourselves, the part of us that is always connected into a landscape that is communicatively alive.
We’ve evolved with the blue of the sky, the beckoning horizon. We’ve evolved to have beauty and difference arrest us. We evolved within stories and myths that orient us to landscape and other beings. Our imaginal world is alive with symbols that speak to us.
Slowing down, lessening the grip of the chattering mind, we listen in, look in a way that marries our inner and outer sight. We relax into our body, open to all our senses and look for a symmetry, a correspondence, between what we see in the outer world and what stirs the tidal movement of our soul. We speak to ourselves as if we are that entity, that being, with its voice, as we imagine it to be. At some point we find ourselves speaking into our own longing, harvesting the insights from that encounter.
Here’s what another of our participants had to say
I so enjoyed your ‘Conversations with Nature’ Session. I’m glad I trusted my intuition…It was soul nourishing. I gained so much from my conversation with Nature and experienced a great sense of connection. You held the space with the lightness of a feather and the depth of an ocean and I felt a great sense of calm after the event. I would really encourage people to attend when you do it again. (L.S. Victoria)
Another of my teacher and guides, poet David Whyte, talks about how our true nature, our essential identity, is conversational.
“The ability to open up a pathway between this inner world of origin and the outer world of the-to-be-discovered, from my experience, is found in creating our identities as more of a frontier conversation”.
Each of us makes ourselves in conversation with both the human and more than human world. We’re continually co-creating our identities through the conversations we engage. Stepping into our conversational identity we can practice living on an emergent edge dropping conversations that don’t bring us, or others, alive. In that opening we can listen to invitations from our bodies, psyches and the symbolic world of the imaginal. We can feel the expanse of the beckoning sky, sink into the intimacy of an ocean holding our becoming, find our solidity with that tree who calls us to tap the deep roots of our natural genealogy.
What if we lived this way, more attuned to a conversational identity, an alive reciprocity between our inner and outer world? How much richer would life be?
If you’d like to join a Nature Conversation journey, or like to know more, contact caresse@wicked-elephants.coop, and become more connected and alive.
