Deedra’s Reviews > Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit > Status Update

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.