Status Updates From Rooted: Life at the Crossro...

1. Listen for the Wild Summons
2. Walk a New Way
3. Decommodify the Forest
4. Sometimes, Go Alone
5. Step Into the Fruitful Darkness
6. Lift Up Our Animal Kindred
7. Speak in Truth
8. Go to the Trees
9. Contribute Your Verse
10. Return, Return, Return

All shall be well, in whatever tangled, unknowable, difficult, beautiful way that wellness unfolds. Our lives are irrevocably entwined with this unfurling. Though we can't know exactly where we are going, or what will happen, still we journey together by choice and in grace, foot by foot, upon our troubled and beloved earth.

My idea of immortality was that we live afterward in the memory of those whose lives we have touched and in our accomplishments during life. -Dorthy Freeman

"May the lord bless you and keep you, while we are absent from one another." - Dorthy Freeman writing to Rachel Carson.

...Over the years, the tree will sink further until she becomes earth, and the young she has suckled upon her body will continue to grow higher and more fruitful, spreading their own seeds and, eventually, their own bodies, upon this forest ground. Life, death, and life again.

She has lain here for a decade, maybe longer. Yet she is not dead. Western redcedars become the most fertile of mother logs, their layered, ochre wood-bodies easy purchase for mosses, ferns, huckleberries, and tiny faerie versions of western hemlock. Her presence here as simultaneous tree, truck, soil, and seed delimits the duality of past and future...

There remain places in the remote wilderness where no human has ever set foot, yet there is no place on earth untouched by human presence. The activities of our households - the way we eat, clothe, and warm ourselves, the way we move about, the way we dispose of our shocking accumulation of waste - bind us biologically and spiritually in ecostystemic relationships far beyond our doorstep, into the farthest reaches.

Living is itself a creative act, and the art of living matters in all spheres.

We know now that there are ten thousand things and more, some of them simple, some of them things we have never done before, some of them barely possible, every one of them indispensable, all of them requiring our attention, our service, our love, our action. An endless, sacred litany. Nothing can be removed from the list. Every countless thing is essential.

When you are at a loss, put your ear to the forest floor, or the bark of a tree, or tilt it towards the clouds. See what wordless language points you along your path.

Keep field guides everywhere. And topographical maps. Read them like novels, like holy text, like poems. Learn the names of new-to-you wild beings or landmarks in your home region, then create your own living names for these same things. Respect Indigenous names. Listen for the earth to whisper a new name for yourself, and tell it to everyone or to no one.

By denying that birds and other animals have their own styles of speech, by insisting that the river has no real voice and the ground itself is mute, we stifle our direct experience. We cut ourselves off from that which supports and sustains it. We then wonder why we are so often unable to communicate, even among ourselves.

The vast majority of official species names in North America were made up by white, English-speaking, male scientists or explorers, claiming to have discovered organisms well known by people who had lived among these organisms for thousands of years and had already worthily named them.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wizdom in tree roots: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power.

Abracadabra is from the Hebrew-Aramaic lineage, murky but traceable. What we say is what we bring into being. The way we speak shapes our perceptions, our actions, and ultimately the outcome we seek.

Folk tales from around the world tell us that the animals communicate with each other in a language unknown to men and women - or else in a language that used to be known to us, but is now lost. Those stories also tell of human beings who understand the speech of animals. Some are born with the ability...[or as a gift from the animals themselves, a reward for a great act of kindness.]

There is only one way to find intimacy with the wild ones among us. We can, of course, plod along the sidewalk or run up a trail or glance up from our desk and, in a chance instant, spot a gull or warbler or even a coyote. But if we want to make regular observation and deepen our understanding, then we must be present, and we must be still. And then more still.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it. - Jane Hirshfield

....Psychic layers shed and wring and replaced by a deepened sense of my inner being, of my place on earth, of interflow, of my simultaneous aloneness and enfoldment in the natural world. A crazy hermit's laughter. Good crazy.

I've been through the cycle enough times to know what happens after the period of tears, the downward spiral, and the temptation to flee. After there is nothing. A quite mind. Darkness that reveals starlight, a blanket of strange comfort. Birdsong that is bright and vivid and speaks my truest name. Every cell of my body sensing and unbound by the flimsy husk of skin....

Maybe we're afraid of solitude because it threatens us with boredom or an anxiety that can lead to difficult truths, unfinished emotional business, and the show side of human nature. - Phycologist Bill Plotkin

Humans have evolved into what they are today after the passage of 6 to 7 million years...less than 0.01% of our species' history has been spent in modern surroundings. Humans have spent over 99.99% of their time living in the natural environment...modern humans are responding to the evolutionary sudden immersion in artificial and urbanized environments by operating in a 'stress state'. - Professor Yoshifumi Miyazaki

Your feet bring your private clay to touch with the ancient, mother clay from which you first emerged. The ground of remembrance - we belong to this earth that cradles our beginning and our end, clay upon clay. Barefootedness can be an honoring of one's own closeness to the cycles of nature, the inevitable interweaving of soil and self. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

And if I am very quiet and still, and let my feet stand solid upon the earth, I can feel what I have come to call beneathness. For the soil is alive and writhing beyond my sight - roots, mycelia, decomposers, bacteria, protozoa, worms, grubs, beetles - beyond counting, beyond knowing. The living and the dead brushed together to create the quietest symphony of sound and activity. Holy ground.