A mountain homecoming song
The sun is shining on a tree coverd mountain (the bottom is shaded). The sky is blue with a few white clouds, and more mountain peaks can be seen in the distance.
I’m writing to you from the other side of a week spent in Colorado, much of it up in the mountains, right outside the small town of Estes Park. For a few shimmering days, I gathered with other Forest Therapy guides for an immersion in practice, in community, in the magic and the everydayness of living in this world.
This is the land I was born to, and time in the foothills and mountains of Colorado were some of the sweetest for me there. I left Colorado years ago for lots of reasons (as so many of us leave our original homes). Since then, I’ve had a complicated relationship with this place. But over the last few years, I’ve started to see its beauty again. I remember looking west from my father’s hospital room (the last room he’d ever live in) and in those heartbreaking times, I felt the blessing of the greybluebrowngreen giants. They offered comfort and spaciousness when I so desperately needed it. More recently, I visited the Flatirons outside Boulder, and I was stunned. Had they always been this present, this alive, this demanding of attention?
This time, I headed further up into the mountains. For a few days, I lived surrounded by tall peaks, elk, deer, wild turkey, magpies, aspen, ponderosa pine, doug fir, sweet streams and rushing rivers, clouds, sun, rain, and the call of an owl every night around 2am.
I stepped over a threshold there, and lived mostly in liminality. I was in an in-between place - one rich with meaning, import, and possibility. I’m still making sense of what I heard, saw, and felt there - the connections and intertwines between all of us: human, and Other Than. What has been reaffirmed for me though is that this practice - the simple practice of slowing down for a moment, turning away from the insistent machines that surround us, and toward the living world - is vitally important.
During our time in the mountains, we created a home for our raw, true, Nature Weirdo selves. We created community with our hands, hearts, voices, gentle and sometimes searching glances, and deep listening.
What I want to know is: how do we all make time and space to lay our bodies on the ground, embrace the trees, step into running water, and feel the wind move across our faces? How do we pay close attention to the elk’s call, the hoot of an owl, the magpie swooping overhead? And what about weaving community with other humans - offering and receiving space for joy, grief, learning, missteps, tenderness, song, laughter, stories?
What I want in my bones, sinew, tendons, muscles, blood, and spirit is more of this - for all beings. I want to co-create with you (and with the mycelium and chickadees and mullein) places where our whole selves are loved up, delighted in, embraced - in all our weirdness and brokenness and tenderness and scratchiness and neediness and dearness.
I want the song the water, or the earth, or your own precious heart teaches you to be shared, and then sung right back to you -
voices braiding together to create something
new and old and warm - shining, delicate, strong.
What I want for you and for all beings is a Homecoming - I want you to be sung back home, and held there with a fierce and tender love. Let’s create that together, can we?
