Nature Will Shake You Free

If you let her.

I have always turned to nature to show me the way, to set me in the right direction– toward a deeper inner true north that somehow settles me back into myself.

Without fail, (though often without the comforting immediacy I love), nature helps me shake loose some closeted part of my consciousness that’s prevented me from seeing what I need to move forward.

I always seem to forget that when I go into nature looking for answers, she will not simply hand me a clearly printed map of how to get wherever I’m trying to go.

There is no… turn left at the big gnarly career decision.

Keep straight till you hit the ginormous opportunity and stop. It will look like wet bark but there is golden honey behind it.

It never seems to happen like that with nature or my dreams!

What I really get?

Something irritatingly obtuse. That is, until I take the time to explore it.

Here’s an example. Quick backstory.

A robin made her nest this spring atop a fence of euonymus outside my study. The nest is invisible from the ground, visible form my first floor study and her blue eggs can be seen clearly from our son Finn’s bedroom window on the second floor.

I had a dream that I was shaking the fence hard. I did not know why but when I looked up I saw that three of the four eggs had fallen out. I was extremely upset with myself. Could not imagine why I had done such a thing.

The next day Finn came down and said three of the eggs were gone.

Only one was left. No shells. No baby chicks. I was decimated.

I was crushed for the mama robin. But I was troubled too because the nest had never seemed safe to me. Too visible to predators flying above and too accessible to critters crawling ground.

Plus, my dream made me feel somehow complicit.

I walked around for a few days feeling grief, irrational guilt and a tremendous weightiness. Then, the robin abandoned her nest altogether, the one egg was cracked open. No chick.

After a few days, when the loss energy inside the empty nest had dissipated for me, I asked nature, or spirit or whatever energy I believe engages in these dialogues why this had happened and what my dream had to do with it.

Nature always works in metaphor, at least for me.

I knew it had no relationship to my physical home or our children. But it wasn’t until listening… beyond my mind’s big important theories, that it came clear.

The communication was this:

The nest was built in an unsafe place. No babies could have survived there.

A part of you needed to shake loose those eggs to show the other part of you, who would NEVER abandon a nest, that there is a time to move on from what can no longer support life.

It was not about my position but rather the creative babies I have tried to birth within its nest. So clear. So soul-level settling, despite the echo of what they may mean for where these ideas will need to go.

Nature tunes me back in to MY nature.

To what my heart and spirit know but my mind cannot accept. The metaphors and messages I find there peacefully deconstruct the stories and opinions and belief systems I have erected to protect my fears.

Paul Coelho wrote in The Alchemist:

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

The part that took me a while to get is the ‘you’ to which he refers is not the ego you and not the thinking ‘you’, but rather the heart and soul ‘you’.

Sometimes the dialogue requires active participation but sometimes it is simple and pure, intuitive, primal and beyond human explanation.

The way your child hugs you or your beloved pet sits beside your feet.

I was reminded of this elegant simplicity this morning in reading a poem by Denise Levertov caked “A Reward”.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled

to leave the house and search for what

might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,

I stood by the shore waiting.

I had walked in the silent woods:

the trees withdrew into their secrets.

Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk

over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.

Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies

afloat on their element as I was not

on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.

But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again

to linger, to look North before nightfall-the expanse

of calm, of calming water, last wafts

of rose in the few high clouds.

And was rewarded:

the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying

widewinged toward me, settled

just offshore on his post,

took up his vigil.

If you ask

why this cleared a fog from my spirit,

I have no answer.