Tag: Eco-Spirituality
What We Hold in Our Hands

What We Hold in Our Hands

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Most everyone I know is struggling with the state of the world, especially the deconstruction of the country I call home. Add to that the Climate Crisis, which is not only being ignored but worsened by the current administration, and species extinction occurring at an alarming rate, desecration of oceans, lands, national parks, national forests…there’s no need to expand the list because if we are paying attention, we know. Oh….how painfully we know.

With some of my friends, we’ve collectively pondered, “How do we maintain our joy? How do we maintain our sanity seeing the things we hold most sacred destroyed by an administration that has one goal and that is to elevate itself above everything and everyone and fill their coffers with money. It’s challenging to maintain balance and to even breathe when every peek into social media or a news feed exposes another crime against humanity, against Nature.

But….I think I might have discovered a way to help maintain balance within myself. Two things happened recently that have shifted my concept of how to practice self-care while staying informed.

First, I watched a short video by Ron Griswell and the basic message was “My joy isn’t separate from my resistance. It’s the core of it.” My joy is the greatest resistance. Nobody can take that from me! If they do, I’m giving them power over me and that’s just not going to happen. Our minds can be our greatest strength (or our biggest downfall).

Second, I listened to a podcast with Parker Palmer and Carrier Newcomer with their guest, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. She talked about the death of her son by suicide and how she holds her grief as sacred while at the same time holding space for beauty. She presented the idea of holding grief, rage, anger…whatever is ‘eating’ at us in one hand and sitting with that while simultaneously holding beauty and love in our other hand. Rather than denying our rage, our anger, our grief keep it in our hand, hold it. Acknowledge it. And then hold what brings us joy and beauty in the other. 

This brought a solution to a visceral level for me where I could sit with all of my emotions and allow each one to be honored. By doing this practice, I’m not denying any feeling. I’m not gaslighting myself into thinking everything will be okay. I don’t think everything is okay. In fact, everything is far from being okay. But I also think there are things that are right…like practicing compassion towards others, opening our hearts to the people and places and creatures we love. Why do we think we can only feel one way or the other?

For everyone suffering anxiety, grief, anger, rage right now about the state of the world, know that holding our joy and love is the core of our resistance to the meanness and destruction happening all around us. We don’t have to dismiss one feeling to have another. The key is to welcome them all and create a loving space for all emotions to have a home within us. We are, after all, multi-faceted gems of light at our core. So let us be a lighthouse and shine.

Curacao
Home Within

Home Within

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Have you ever visited a place and it immediately felt like home? A place like this stirs us to feel peaceful, grounded, at home within ourselves. There are a many places that have felt that way to me but a few stand out. Diving in Bonaire…being underwater, relaxed with the local sea turtle population gliding through clear, salty water is one place. Another place is the west coast of Ireland…a place where I felt so truly grounded into who I am, I considered moving there. And then there is the Smoky Mountains, specifically the upper elevation fir and spruce forests. This love for the Smokies started when I was a kid.

Yesterday, I was hiking through one of my favorite forests in the Smokies and stopped to breathe in the delightful aroma of the fir trees. Steam was rising from the mossy earth and birds were singing. The crisp air was warmed by sunlight filtering through evergreen branches. I was home, in every sense of what that means. I felt totally present. My heart was filled and poured love into the forest, just as it poured its essence into me. My bones vibrated to the harmony around me.

Several years ago, when I was trying to find a home as I moved back to Western North Carolina, I was frustrated. I’d been looking for over a year and nothing was manifesting. On one house hunting trip, as I was driving up from Alabama, I got to the intersection in Dillsboro where you go left toward Cherokee or right toward Asheville. I literally stopped in ‘Y’  intersection and heard this question: Where have you always wanted to live? My answer? Near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That moment shifted my search. Soon after that I finally found ‘the place.’ It wasn’t until I moved in and the trees shed their leaves that I realized the long view from my home was the ridgeline of the national park. And within minutes I can be in the forests that bring such joy to me.

I feel lucky to live in one of the places that helps me feel at home within myself. But truthfully, there are many places that have helped me find my way back to myself. I am grateful for them all.
Decluttered

Decluttered

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Last Tuesday I was walking down Alum Cave trail from the summit of Mount LeConte. It was my second day of summiting the mountain and the fourth day of hiking over a five-day weekend. I was feeling clear, balanced, grounded, a bit tired, and interestingly…decluttered.

It suddenly struck me, on that beautiful trail, that there were no signs, no billboards, no modern-day clutter on that trail…on any trail in the Smokies. Rather than be bombarded with mental clutter advertising ridiculous possessions none of us even need, Nature offers plants and trees and rocks and vistas and moving water and sky and wildlife—something we are part of, instead of an artificial world of gadgets that utilize resources that will be forgotten within weeks or less and tossed in the trash.

I gained clarity on that hike. I don’t just hike the trails to be in Nature, I hike to escape an increasingly chaotic materialistic fake world that is soul-sucking. I go into Nature to be renewed, restored, and decluttered.

While social media can be helpful and connect people, these days it seems only to create more chaos within us and divide us even more. So, unplugging on the trail is a big part of why I hike. Of course, I can do that every day as I attempt to declutter my mind by limiting time on social media and taking Nature breaks during my work days.

During these times of intense collapse and renewal…and yes, it’s happening at the same time…what are you doing to declutter your mind and heart? Find what works for you and make it a daily practice. And maybe turn your attention to the renewal part of the world stage and focus on what you want to create. When we declutter, we create more space to live in a more harmonious world. Let’s built that world together.
Precious Earth

Precious Earth

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Imagine our Sun, in about 5 billion years, expanding into a red giant star. After it uses the hydrogen at its core, it will swell dramatically and engulf Mercury, Venus, and most likely Earth. Before then, the Sun will brighten gradually at about 1% every 100 million years. This will make Earth’s surface too hot for liquid water within 1 to 1.5 billion years. Imagine this, if only for a moment. The unimageable beauty here….lost.

That’s what I think of, what my heart aches about. It’s long after everyone I know dies and most likely long after humans exterminate ourselves from our toxic ways…emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual toxicity. But the mountains, oceans, wildlife, plant life…unimaginable loss of beauty.

With this ending of life as we know it a billion years or 365,242,500,000 days away, it makes everything here so much more precious, so sacred. And yet, since 1760, when the Industrial Revolution began, 266 years ago, we have systematically destroyed entire ecosystems. Between 1500 and 2004, 784 species have been listed as extinct. Over 160 species were declared extinct between 2010 and 2019. 2024-Slender-billed Curlew; 2023 eight different species of honeycreeper birds and eight different species of freshwater mussels. In 2020 31 species were declared extinct in a single update including several freshwater fish species and the Splendid Poison Frog. 2011…the Western Black Rhinoceros. The list goes on….

So, in other words, humans are doing quite a fine job of destroying life on Earth long before the Sun vaporizes all water on the planet. In fact, we have been speeding up the process by shifting from traditional energy to burning fossil fuels and creating massive deforestation, both of which release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. Since 1850, this has increased atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 419 ppm, causing a rise in temperature. This creates climate instability which intensifies weather events such as droughts, wildfires, and floods. It’s estimated that switching from human and animal power to fossil-fueled machines established a 50 times faster rate of warming compared to previous natural variations.

Since I documented the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster  from April 2010 to April 2011, I have been keenly aware of the damage humans do to our planet. I felt shame at being part of a species that in its greed for more, more, more is destroying such a precious jewel of a planet—a rare place that we take for granted every single day.

Sunset Gulf Shores, Alabama 2014 with iPhone

It’s beyond my capacity to understand how humans, as a collective, can create so much destruction and not understand the consequences of our actions. Many of us are awake to the reality of how every action we takes has an effect, for good or bad. But the rape and pillage of Earth continues. More! More! More! is our chant and as more species are lost, more catastrophic weather events occur, more deforestation occurs, we are truly creating what we focus on. Though perhaps not the ‘more’ we wish for.

I didn’t intend to write a depressing essay on the death of Earth. My intention was to write something that somehow illustrates the depth of love I have for this planet and all life here. And yet, to do that, I must share what is at stake: beauty so profound, life so sacred, that even with astronomical observations over the past 100 years, we have found nothing like it within or outside of our solar system. That’s not to say it’s not out there somewhere. But so far, life as we know it exists here. Now. The depth of grief I have over our collective destruction of it is immeasurable. 

But when I journey into the grief, I find a depth of love and appreciation so profound, it lifts me into ecstasy. I remember looking a baby humpback whale in its massive eye as it swam past with its mother. I remember a sea turtle and I diving together, sharing a morning swim in Bonaire…a sea lion and I exchanging acrobatic play in the Sea of Cortez…a deer emerging from the forest, walking up to me, and licking my hand while gazing into my eyes…a juvenile manatee chewing my hair while its mother took my hand with her flippers and placed it on her heart…a baby manatee resting its head in my hand as tears of love filled my mask (and roll down my face as I remember now)…a spotted dolphin pushing against my body to help me keep up with the pod…fog hovering over the creek as sunlight created a golden color that transformed the world….a double rainbow filled with golden light that caused me to stop my car and dance along the side of the road with joy….the aurora as it illuminated the sky in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and caused me to laugh hysterically at midnight as the wind carried my voice up the mountain at Kuwohi…the bear emerging from the steep bank with his 350+ pounds and allowing me the grace to back up and allow him to cross my pass as my knees knocked…the snowfall in Canyon de Chelly that transformed a hike down the trail into a magic so powerful it forever changed me…the birth of my daughter that showed me what love truly is…all of these moments of beauty and countless more, come from an appreciation of beauty, a realization of how rare and unique life is and a willingness to feel the grief and choose love. Choose life. And do whatever I can to raise awareness of beauty and how freaking lucky we are to live on a planet that is a precious, rare jewel in the Cosmos.