Tenalach (Irish)– used to describe a relationship one has with the land, air, and water, a deep connection that allows one to literally hear the Earth sing.

Redwood National Forest, CA (10.29.13)

I have had a lower back problem for a while, and it has gotten worse in the last ten days.

For the last two mornings I was inspired to get out of bed and stand on the bedroom floor– meditating in the standing position– before doing anything else. My back is the most painful at this time.

I breathed through my feet and connected with Mother Earth, drawing her energy up my body while breathing consciously. Through a detailed, inwardly guided process, I felt my light body merging with the spirit of the forest and I experienced that the forest spirit healed areas in my light body. I spent 40 minutes on this yesterday and maybe 20 minutes today. I was guided to move in certain dance-like ways and also to make certain sounds. It reminded me of dances and chants of indigenous cultures, but I was not imitating them. Today I was approached by two beings that are in my drawing series called “Entering the Void with the Eyes Open”– Bear, and also a forest woman being that I don’t have a name for. At the end, of these meditations, my pain was significantly diminished, and I could move and walk without pain.

This morning, at the end of the meditation, I did the Inka Medicine Wheel breathing exercises that bring the heavens and Mother Earth together within me. It was perfect and beautiful.

I see that my “sacred ritual artwork” is feeding my coming into “ayni,” or right relationship with nature. My current drawing series involves connecting with the forest spirit and the series before that contains beings that are now coming to me.

I am ever so grateful for these experiences.

If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted like trees.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

http://cryptik.squarespace.com/home/the-consciousness-of-trees.html

Now I know why I have been grieving so much for the tree close to our house that has been cut down. What I have sensed as the Forest Spirit is “explained” by this scientist.

Walk around like a leaf, know you could tumble any second, then decide what to do with your time.

–Naomi Shihab Nye, The Art of Disappearing.

(Thanks to Angela Loyd for the quote.)

The True Self is the seer,
observing all that can be known
and all that remains unknowable…
the visible and invisible worlds.

— Alberto Villoldo

Sacred Cave (Uxmal, Yucatan)

We must suppose that we go deep within ourselves, deeper and deeper into our most hidden self. There in our innermost being, in the very core of ourselves, we will find a place where there is peace, stillness, and above all, love.

After having found the place, we must imagine that we are seated there, immersed into, surrounded by the Love of God. We are in deepest peace … All of us is there, physical body and all; nothing is outside, not even a fingertip, not even the tiniest hair. Our whole being is connected with the Love of God.

Nothing will remain.

—Irina Tweedie, “Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master,” (California: The Golden Sufi Center, 2006)