I’ll be honest with you. I can’t be sure, exactly, of how I found myself here immersed in the weavings of biology and spirituality. What I do know is that it is the forest - my hometown forest - that awakened me from my slumber and brought me into a deeper knowing of that which is alive in our world; and, that which is alive within our very own beings.

It happened amidst my own deep descent - dropping down out of the stories that had been programmed within me, and freefalling through the vast unknowns; it’s here, wrestling my own demons and battling my way through a great unknown, that I found it.

It’s here that I found it, at last! Solid ground - as I walked (or, in my case, often ran) my backyard trails on the land that had finally successfully called me back home.

My home lands calling me back home - after nearly a decade away, off spending one long year after the next trapped in a life I’d been told was important. All-the-while, I’d been hearing the whisperings of the ponderosas calling me home; day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year...

It’s here, at last answering their call, that I, myself, could finally wake up.

It’s here, working hand-in-hand with the forests I now know so well, that we get to come together as one to continue to wake up.

Waking up. From what, exactly?

Isn’t that the big question! What are we awakening to as we step onto this new Embodied Path of Collective Healing (a path, of which, I often use the phrasing “embodied spirituality”).

Awakening - it threatens to invoke states of bright and shining endless joy and bliss; that which captures our egoic minds and reeks of b.s. as it offers far-off potential for those with the dedication - across lifetimes - to one day finally achieve that enlightened state of endless sunshine.

Hmmm... I don’t about you; but, for me, I exist on Planet Earth - where the sun rises and then sets. Light fills us, and we are then filled with darkness.

We feel pain, and it brings forth suffering.

We feel pain, and it brings forth suffering. But then, we get to go outside and dance among green oceans of wildflowers amidst clear flowing streams that drop into waterfalls and we are allowed to let our hearts and minds open up to the great joy and splendor of it all!

In other words, here on Planet Earth, the time is ripe to be immersed in all of it. The light and the dark. The joy and the pain.

Maybe, one day, we get to awaken to an ever-shining enlightenment.

But that, I believe, is not a task for this time.

No, here and now, we get to learn to be in all of it.