Nature is always hinting at us.
… over and over again.
And suddently we take the hint.
~ Robert Frost ~

Over and over again, what draws my attention is witnessing the life force of other beings, some of whom are human, in relation to the life force in me. This connective tissue is a powerful new story carried by a relational worldview.

Somatic signals tweet a message to my brain that says “Pay attention. There’s something here to notice.” So I watch and listen – often over a period of years. I take pictures, some photographic, some mental, of what stops me in my tracks. I send out threads of acknowledgement to the matrix of sentience that surrounds us all. And then I tell about it.

In the particular lies the universal.

~ James Joyce

This is the territory of inner landscape, rarely given voice by the dominant mindset that is guided by a worldview of separation. In my personal experience, however, this witnessing has been a portal to knowing my true nature, within wider Nature, through a worldview of belonging. Stories such as:

the epic determination of a lone arbutus limb, striving for continued life under poor conditions;

the maternal guidance of a grizzly bear mom, navigating her cubs through risky waters;

the multicontextual influences that nourish a spectacular field of daisies and buttercups;

and the extraordinary living-dying experience of a dear friend’s passage through terminal illness.

After all, the human soul has an innate connection to nature and an intrinsic concern for the entire planet as well as the cosmos.

~ Michael Meade

Nature. Is. Everywhere.

The language and constructs of a reductionist mindset have brought us, and much of the living Earth, to this precipice of overlapping crises. Doing more of the same can’t make things better if our human view of the world remains locked in old patterns of meaning. In my experience, what is helpful now is to stay in the present moment by immersing ourselves in practices that reveal entirely new patterns of meaning – together, in community.

The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.

~ Donna Haraway

Nora Bateson’s Warm Data labs inspire new patterns of meaning through community interaction with engaging questions:

“Information that does not take into account the full scope of interrelationality in a system is likely to inspire misguided decision-making, which compounds already “wicked” problems. Warm Data is not meant to replace or in any way diminish other data, but rather it is meant to keep data of certain sorts “warm” — with a nest of relations intact.” ~Nora Bateson

Creative Silence Council,outlined on this website, invites fresh meaning to move in sacred space:

“Inspired by the rich possibilities generated when people come together in sacred space, Creative Silence Council opens a field of coherence – within ourselves, within the group, and with wider Nature; where the unseen can emerge and the unspoken be heard. ” ~ Val Murray & Samar Zebian

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An end note of beauty

“The world is the sound of tree shapes decoded in a bat’s brain. The world is electric fields flexing in the mind of a shark. The world is a landscape of scents, recalled by a wolf like an old friend. The world is a mosaic of temperature shifts on the tip of a python’s snout.” ~ THE CRYPTONATURALIST

And an evocative definition of “nature” (Nature), to which we belong

NATURE: FROM THE LATIN NĀTŪRA, MEANING CONDITIONS OF BIRTH, QUALITY, CHARACTER, NATURAL ORDER, WORLD, EQUIVALENT TO  NĀT(US), “TO BE BORN”:ALSO REFERS TO “THE ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF SOMETHING“, AS IN, THE NATURE OF WATER IS TO FLOW.