Connection
Born of forests and hills, medicine weeds, flowing rivers and starry nights. Wilds story pulses through our human skin, bone and blood
Hello Lovelies,
THANK YOU for opening this email and being part of our community.
Over where I am, it has rained non stop, and the smell of geosmin and petrichor is warm and wet on the air.
I have thought a lot about soil recently as the spring days grow, as I find myself looking at all the new shoots peaking out from their dark soft home, a home created by the insects, the fungi, the bacteria, the worms, the mole and the sweet decay of what’s gone by.
The more I watch the incredible and beautifully medicine full transformation, the more I cannot help but be drawn to the human story too, because for me, nature is like looking into a mirror.
We are born and shaped out of wildness, sculpted and formed with the mineral rich clay, the oceans water and the dust of stars.
Born of forests and hills, medicine weeds, flowing rivers and starry nights. Wilds story pulses through our human skin, bone and blood, it is scribed into our dna, woven into our cells. We have journeyed for millions of years with the wild inside and around us, its story shaping our evolution.
We are, just like all flora, fungi and fauna, earthly beings, born from the body of wild.
Animal in body, animal in spirit, earth in mind and in soul.
The same elements as every natural thing you have ever touched, breathed us into being. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus make up most of of our bodies and potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium make up the rest, we share 97 percent of our atoms in common with the rest of the galaxy.
Calcium runs through our bones, iron pulses in our veins, carbon resides in our muscles and nitrogen in our brains. The earth wove you from their body, shaped you from the energy of the universe itself.
The landscape and its creatures, are not just a pretty scene, it is kith and kin, it is family. Can you start to see the family resemblance?
Our skin, and the forest floor, are not unalike. We imagine our skin to be a barrier to the outside world, but in actual fact our skin is much more like a forest floor than we realise. We have microscopic mites living on our face in their hundreds or thousands, living, communing, laying eggs, resting and dying. The resident microbes in our bodies, outnumber our human cells ten to one. They are intricate networks that intertwine, influencing our health and wellbeing through their ecological processes. Inside of us, they are involved in the working of our immune system, our gut brain health, protection against harmful organisms and also our mental health.
Sink a little further below our surface skin and you come to the nervous system that like mycelium, connects in strands and threads, communicating between the different parts of our bodies.
Helping the whole system know when something is struggling, when parts of us need more help or energy or holding, just as it is with a forest.
And sink even further into the heart of us, into the depths of our soil and you find our soul. Just like the dark fertile soil, our souls hold the calling, the ability and the ancient longing to grow, transform, alchemise and form medicine, wild flowers and forests from our unique centre, bringing who we are into the light of the world so we may touch this world with our presence. We are beautifully wild beings.
The soil, when not hindered by concrete, chemicals or taming, allowed to mingle and be touched and influenced by the diverse community, can grow into all sorts of manifestations, all of them beautiful.
As it is with our own selves, when we open our wild to what is good and warm and enlivening in the world, rather than what acts as concrete, taming and toxidity to our wild, we too can grow beauty and magnificence.
“Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.”
― Jay Griffiths
I often wonder what it would be like if nature became sickened and stopped listening to the wild inside, just like so many of us humans have.
What if bee stopped listening to the vibration of pollen for it had learnt to mistrust its nature, what os rose didn’t bloom having grown ashamed of their shape, what is bird didn’t sing for it felt unworthy, what if primrose didn’t arrive in spring mistrusting their inner knowing for growth, what if bluebells didn’t flower for they compared themselves to others shape too often, what if dandelion stopped trying to create health within the concrete due to listening to the voices that called it a weed, what if all of nature stopped listening, feeling and being guided by their wild within, we would live in a grey and troubled world. Yet this is exactly what we humans do, the one part of the wild web of life that has lost trust in their wild inner knowing and guidance.
We have been taught to mistrust ourselves, to not believe in our own voice and feelings, to tame, form and shrink ourselves for others approval. Inside us, just as in all wild ones, is a desire to thrive, to grow medicine to bring our uniqueness into our lives and into the world. If we listen well, under the learnt behaviours and beliefs is a wild one deeply in love with this life, with us and our growth. We need to remember how to listen and be guided by that integrity, by those longings.
Wild is an always shifting, changing transforming environment, it is the conditions for maximum life. And this is what we are made of too, a desire, a skill, an ability to alchemise and grow. I have come to believe, the wild inside us, will always pull us through if we remember to listen and believe.
We are, just as the earth is, always becoming, and that becoming will pull us through if we believe in who we are becoming and if it is grown from our hearts and our integrity.
We must tend to our becoming as we would a flower bed, believe in who we are becoming, listen to who we are becoming, witness our becoming, and send love to our are becoming.
For it is a beautiful and tender thing, deserving of care, nourishment and respect.
Poem
Let the grass spring up tall, let its roots sing
And the seeds begin their scattering.
Let the noise of the mower be banished, hurrah!
Let the path become where I choose to walk, and not otherwise established.
Let the goldfinches be furnished their humble dinner.
Let the sparrows determine their homes in security.
Let the honeysuckle reach as high as my window, that it may look in.
Let the mice fill their barns with sufficiency.
Let anything created,
that wants to creep or leap forward, be able to do so.
Let the grasshopper have gliding space.
Let the noise of the mower be banished, yes, yes.
'On Not Mowing the Lawn'
by Mary Oliver, From her book of poems "Blue Horses"
Things of interest
How do we tap back into living by our inner compass after living by consensus and following outer voices for so long?
Lewis Hamilton on why you should stop chasing societies definition of success.
It was very lovely to have been part of our last online gathering, and so heartful to meet those who came.
The date for the next online gathering is -
Sunday the 16th April at 4.00pm UK time.
An email will arrive next week, with a description of how the time will be held and a link to it for all paid subscribers. -
Thank you so much for being here and for reading.
Much wild beauty and spring unfurlings to you
Brigit x
Thank you dear Anna for your beautiful words and all the medicine that hou share! 💕✨🙏 It gives me hope, it brings forth tears, it opens my view and educates me, it strengthens me, warms my heart and gives me more of that wonderful wildness which I hope that I can pass on to other as I transform and alchemise. Love and light to you, Frieda 💕✨💕
Wow, breathtakingly beautiful writing Brigit that opened and deepened my heart into the very mud and soil of the sacred earth. Thank you for unlocking the wild in me 🌿💚