Oh, this living in nature!
 
There’s this romantic view that nature is all flowers and fairies and field mice sipping nettle tea out of acorn cups.
 
I’d like to say, nature isn’t like that at all.
 
Out here where I live: mostly forest and field, surrounded by more forest and field, there’s a lot of nature all the time, and it demands respect.
 
The other night, we drove back late from picking my daughter up from a choir concert. It was after eleven by the time we reached the old ranch gate.
 
There, in the tall grasses just 15 feet away, stood two young deer, their eyes blinking red in the car lights, and their ears looking very much too big for their bodies. They stood in full attention, quivering and electric, as the car crunched on the gravel.
 
I rolled the car window down to speak to them, thoughts of joy and love in my mind: the night sky, bright with stars. The spring breeze. The waving grasses. Everything, so soft and lovely. It was nature: idyllic, peaceful, gentle.
 
And then in one great blurring moment, a bobcat sprang from the grasses.
 
He was a big cat, 80 pounds or more, with markings that glinted in the headlights. He leapt toward the deer in the space of one second, and we saw his powerful body rolling, springing, bursting from hidden crouch to full extension, as the deer bolted, the bobcat hunted.
 
It all happened in one second, maybe two.
 
We sat in the car with the window rolled down, the night air filling our lungs as we  tried to catch our breath.
 
Nature. It’s always surprising. You think it’s one way, then you get out in it and you find it’s not that way at all.
 
It’s much bigger than we think.
It’s much stronger.
 
Our place in the world, when we’re in nature.
We’re not as important as we think.

If you’re sensitive by nature… if you’re the kind of person who feels everything all the time… it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
 
This is how it is for most of us who are intuitives, healers, empaths, seekers, mystics, creatives… all of us who live off the grid, so to speak, of the mainstream.
 
There’s nothing wrong with living authentically, with being who you really are.
 
In fact, this is a sublime way to live!
 
Yet when you find yourself continually putting your empathic self out there into the mainstream world with all its rough edges, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
 
The thing is: not everybody feels everything all the time.
 
Most of the good people of the world go about their business without this profound sensitivity and awareness of every little thing.
 
They don’t feel all the energy.
They don’t feel everyone’s emotions.
They don’t instantly know everyone’s stories.
They don’t sense spirits.
They don’t have enter other dimensions.
They don’t hear the whisperings of the Universe.
 
Many of the good people of the world simply aren’t conscious yet; they haven’t woken up.
 
Instead, they’re running on the fumes of distractions that make them forget who they really are: the “to do” list, the schedule, the goal, the ambition, the drama, the wound, the rage, all making it impossible for them to notice what’s happening all around them.
 
For you, empath, it’s different.
 
You feel it all
You know it all.
There’s no way to turn it off.
 
When you’ve had just a little too much of this everything-all-at-once, when you’re experiencing a little bit of empathic overwhelm, I invite you to….
 
Excuse yourself from all the energy.
Take a break from all the emotions.
Retreat from the swirl of everyone else’s stuff.
 
The world will most definitely wait.  
 
And in the meantime, as you gather your beautiful sensitive self back into your true Self, understand that it’s a gift to be an empath, to feel it all.
 
It’s a gift of consciousness.
Celebrate this. 

This summer, my youngest daughter is working as camp counselor
 
She’s gone ten weeks, living in the Oregon woods June through August.
 
That means that for the first time in decades, I’ll be without kids.
 
When I was young, I was in a very great hurry to get going in my life and experience all things adult and independent!
 
So I took on kid raising pretty early on.
 
My path was that of the Householder: I didn’t have the years of travel or world exploration that many did. Instead, I spent my early adulthood raising one, two, three, four kids, with all the learning and growing that being a mother provides.
 
Now… that long, full, rich passage is over.
 
My older kids have headed out into the world, my youngest will go soon, and I’m already in transition.
 
Many of you have made or are making this transition, and you know the story:
 
After years of driving a car full of other people, suddenly it’s just you. After years of having a schedule dictated by early school mornings and late afternoon activities,  by lunch packing and dinner making and grocery shopping and laundry doing, suddenly your schedule is opens up.
 
The house, once so noisy, chaotic and full, now seems quiet as a church.
 
It’s a funny thing… when we’re in the midst of our own childhood, we think it’s going to last forever… we might even daydream about when we can leave and get started with our lives.
 
When we’re in the midst of the Householder path, raising kids from birth to adult, , we know it won’t last forever. Yet when we’re in the eye of the storm, it sure feels like it.
 
It can take us by surprise, to realize that both of these passages: being a child, and raising children, will end.
 
Suddenly, we are no longer taken care of by others.
Suddenly, we are no longer taking care of others.
 
Not everyone has children, or has this particular passage of empty nest.
 
But everyone experiences transitions, the times when one thing changes to another, and you see it coming, and then it does come, and suddenly everything is different and never, ever to be the same.
 
Breathe. Trust. Breathe some more. 

This morning, at about 4 a.m., I was awakened from a very deep and mystical dream to hear the explosive sound of breaking branches.
 
This wasn’t a small branch, dead wood suddenly tossed down by the wind.

This was big branch, the enormous, shuddering creaking of major limb or even whole trunk, cracking apart from itself and crashing down into the woods.

For a brief moment, after the booming crash, there was silence. In fact, in that silence, as I groggily tried to orient myself to what was going on, I wondered if I was dreaming.

But then instantly, the chatter and screams of all kinds of birds: either heralding the shift in the forest hierarchy, or misplaced from their home, crying in confusion that they had been uprooted.
 
Changes in our lives sometimes seem to happen this way. One minute we’re asleep, or lost in dreams or daydreams or distractions, and then CRACK, there is a shift in the field, a tree is down, a major limb is lost and all around us the beep of birds goes off like a car alarm that won’t quit.

This particular breaking branch, fallen tree, wasn’t too near. From the sounds of it, perhaps a hundred feet away. I walked out into the woods this morning to find it, but everything was a green tangle I would guess as I walk further into the ferny glades, the break will reveal itself.
 
The break didn’t affect me too much… or did it? We live in a unified field. A tree one hundred feet away that breaks at 4:00 am, unexpectedly, out of the blue… this was a wakeup for me, literally. And whenever there is a literal wakeup, there is also a spiritual one.
 
We don’t always understand these signs of nature. I don’t understand yet, what the breaking branch means; I don’t understand what part of my life it applies to, what message I mean to receive, what I meant to understand.
 
What I think now, is that I am guided to understand that things happen all around us, even when we sleep. We’re part of the energy of everything. My own waking up, in shock, on alert, when the tree broke, and my own waking up further with the birds calling… I remember that I am a part of this forest too.

Even 100 feet away, in a house, in a bed; I am still part of this forest, I am still part of this unified field, I am still part of this nature community that surrounds me.
 
The unified field contains us all: all soul, all time, all space, all matter. What affects one, affects One. Even a breaking tree, affects the field around it. 

​I live above a bend in Oregon’s Willamette River; from my front window I can see the long stretch of river where two eagles have nested in the tall trees for a decades, and then the slow leisurely bend where the river sails past parallel to the house.
 
The Willamette is not especially friendly in the winter: it’s a wide, turgid river that runs very fast and high in the fall, winter and spring.
 
But in the summer, when the river is gentle and the sun is warm, the Willamette becomes home to to canoeists, kayakers, the occasssional skidoo, and sometimes plucky inner tubers.

What’s interesting to notice, is that what I see from my vantage point, is not at all what it feels like to be on the river, on a lazy summer day.
 
When you view the river from above, it’s flat and serene: a plane of reflection that mirrors the evergreens and maples along the shore.  On the water, the boaters or inner tubers look like tiny black spots, like logs or branches in the water, and you can see that they’re making good time, flowing swiftly downstream.

When you’re on the river, however, it’s a whole different experience. For one thing, there are the birds: hawks and osprey and eagles soaring over like it’s a bird highway, swooping down for fish, and often fighting each other for the catch mid air.
 
On the river, the banks are wide: head out to the middle, away from the brackish underground trees and roots, and you realize how wide the river really is, and how fast the current is going.
 
In a canoe, it’s wobbly and precarious. In a kayak, fairly exhilarating. But in an inner tube, there is both the sense of vulnerability, and the cognizance that without a paddle or other way of pushing down stream, you’re going to be on the water a long, long time.
 
When you look with binoculars on the river, you can see that most inner tubists come prepared: hats, sunscreen, snacks, beer. They’re in for the duration… a long, lazy after noon of four or six hours on the water.
 
The discrepancy: of what it looks like from above, and what it looks like on the water, is striking.

IT’s the same way the Universe might see us, the big picture of this human life, moving all so quickly in the Flow. Whereas for us, with our drama and our emotion and the moment to moment of daily life, it appears like time is moving so slowly, like we have all the time in the world.
 
We’re on the river, birth to death. The thing is: from one perspective, we disappear 'round the bend in the blink of the eye. From another perspective, we're right there in the water, legs dangling in the current, eagles overhead, lazing down the river with all the time we could ever need.