GREEN NEWS & VIEWS
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FINALLY… REFLECT and REARRANGE: Transform Your Jour- ney into Something You Can Share I was born to the wild. I come from the wild. I can’t tell if my blood is in the trees or if the trees are in my blood. ―Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree Mindful writing grows you taller — mind, body and spirit — creating a resource for sharing your wisdom with a world that will be better by creating community with mindful writers and with the natural world. This process should warm your blood, and help you find that wild part of yourself that Suzanne Simard celebrates in her stories of ancient forests. All the writing you’ve created and the resulting relationship with your tree can become the foundation for that wild and connective wisdom. Take time to read and reread your journal entries, as mindfully as you wrote them. Appreciate your journey, your words, your sketches if you drew some, your insights. Again, leave your editor behind! This is a moment of celebration and reflection, not a project to be perfected or corrected. As you review your journey, gradually you’ll feel your way into an idea that will shape your journey into something you can share. Allow that idea to write itself into whatever form it wants. You can share the results with someone you care for, or publish with the goal it might help others appreciate the bridge you’ve built with your tree and its grove. It’s up to you. You’ve written like a tree. Take the last step: write a prayer, an essay, a poem, a short story, a letter, a fairy tale (whatever your natural writ - ing genre might be) to make a creative capstone to your experience with this being who is now well-known to you, maybe even a part of your family. Share like a tree. Trees communicate with each other, from root and leaf. They give and take from the world around them. They have a cycle of learning and teaching, healing and thriving. So do you. What have you discov- ered? Who might benefit from your discovery? You can even start by reading it to your tree, if that feels good. Then find a way to bring that piece of writing to your fellow humans. After all, why build a bridge if you’re the only person who travels across it? The land is the real teacher. All we need as students is mindfulness. ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass Writing is a form of mindfulness. What we write about becomes part of our consciousness. When we share our writing with others, we con- nect our consciousness with theirs. Through this process, writing with the patience and companionship of a tree, you will move into a new way of being and knowing. You’ll build a surprising community. We humans are so wise and foolish, so expansive and linear, so cre- ative and stubborn, all at the same time. Consciously writing towards connection with nature transforms our human-centered disconnec- tion from the non-human beings around us. This mindful process can be healing and revitalizing, moving us from loneliness to community, isolation to connection. Writing, story- telling, and creativity can build bridges in the most unexpected places, across languages and ways of being that seem profoundly different or even strange at first. Those bridges can make the world a better place. Those bridges will bring us home. The forest is calling. Grab your notebook and a pen. Let’s go! Carol Burbank is a writer, writing coach, editor, educator and gardener. For the past year, she has been building a relationship with a beech tree in the forest behind the Storyweaving Retreat Center in Fort Washington, MD. She is currently complet - ing an essay inspired by that friend beech, who has taught her new ways of being at home in the world. www.storyweaving.com; cburbank@storyweaving.com
Readings by Frances Intuitive Tarot www.readingsbyfrances.com readingsbyfrances@gmail.com
PATHWAYS—Summer 26—57
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