Church Of Trees And Seas
Wound Care And Dressing Changes
Dear Ones,
Hi Sapiens. Early blossoms. Modern relational madness navigators. What co-insightful times!
Beloved Thay reminds us that hate is suffering overflowing. Hatred and greed are primal symptoms of suffering and fear. Flawed survivor responses.
May we find ways to alleviate suffering.
The refrains of autumn comfort me. A reliable season of subtractions. Turnovers. I love this time of the year for personal Earth marinations. I drove 1426 miles with the camper Juneau#2 just now. From town to city to raging sea. Into the great red wilds. Slept under a canopy of thousand-year-old trees. A security blanket of stars. Cold forest therapy.
HEALING WOUND GARDEN
What does heal a wound mean anyway? To cure? To pay attention to? To alleviate? Healing is also constant wound care and dressing changes.
Some of our wounds completely heal and resolve.
Some of our wounds are like “non-healing ulcers.”
I am starting to think healing means tending to. That is what it means for me at least. For you, it may look different.
Healing is an action word. A present moment word. Not a past word like healed.
Healing is constant movement like flow of a river.
Healing is attention of present moments.
***NESSA TIP*** Attention to wound care requires many interventions and Internal Family System (IFS) therapy is one of them. IFS is intuitive and offers simple techniques for many. It may or may not work for you but may be worth a try. This technique helps me be vulnerable and stay open/true to all my parts warts and all.
CITY LIMITS
My city quota was met recently. Withnessing and witnessing pathologies of modernity. What an odyssey for my pastoral heart. Phew! I am not an urbanite. Plus, I meant it when I said I want out from the center of [human] sickness. I was in the “healthcare” frontlines of this human mess for 20 long years. Corporate rot.
I struggle inside the bowels of modernity. Too much disease burden. It is loud for me in there. Consumption cities.
Good news is I grew a hair taller in the city discomfort. Many of us know by now that there is no growth in comfort. Ours is a comfort crisis. Era of arrested development.
***NESSA TIP*** I ponder the question of why I love travel so much aside from the experience of new food, people, and cultures. I noted it is also because of the cultivation of present-moment experiences. The here and now times. The freedom of unbound choices. So I infuse that love into my non-traveling living moments. Life feels like always traveling.
SONOMA COAST
AVENUE OF THE GIANTS
I kept on further north to enter the castle of Redwood Giants. Some of the tallest trees in the world. Tree souls. Perfect antidote for my human trauma. I wanted to see how they reach such great heights. Firsthand grace. Towering reminders for days I forget how small I am.
Thanks to raindrops, human beings were not on or in this Avenue of the Giants. My offerings of tobacco, rose, and sweet grass were well-received. What gracious tree hosts and hostesses.
SCARS OF MY HAPPINESS:
Tap the heart below to show me kindness. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to each other.
May We Move Through What Arises With Grace.
May All Beings Find Peace.
For a free 30 min curiosity zoom call, click on calender link here or reply to this email.
Nessa (born at 333 ppm)
A Brave and Startling Truth by Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
Nessa- We are possible indeed. Butterscotch rock is forever. Soul charging is its role. A great piece!
Great essay and photos, Nessa. I was there 14 years ago, and the memory of the majestic redwoods in or on the ground is as vivid today as it was standing so small among them! What wonderful perspective.