Respond To Your Indebtedness
Gratefulness Is The Mother of All Virtues
We as a species seem driven by an insatiable need to improve upon things. This inner yearning leaves us with an unquenchable thirst for control. Propelled by this yearning, we do things that fractures our natural wholeness. This break hurts, deeply. Yet, we have largely become accustomed to this pain. We have devised many veils of illusion to make us lulled into a stupor of acceptance regarding our separation from the grace of the wild. This course is for the few who seek to give heart to the job of removing the veils of separation, each described subsequently.
Respond to your indebtedness.
Taking off these veils makes one feel less secure; and that is how it ought to be, for the veils of illusion are a false security. Without them, one can look both beyond and within. These are the two directions of perception one needs to fathom whom one really is—both individual and united. The reward for removing the veils is a return to love: the return to love of the feminine, to the love of nature, and to the love of the mediated presence of the Absolute that is one’s true home.
Perceiving clearly allows one to become wonderfully responsive to one’s place, to be bowled over by the beauty of aliveness, to be inspired by the beauty of the day, and to be awed by the beauty of the night.
We as a species seem driven by an insatiable need to improve upon things, an unquenchable thirst for control that, at great psychic pain, fractures our natural wholeness.
Take off those veils! Hear what the cicadas sing. Hear the wooing of the whip-or-wills. Catch the blowing of dolphins and whales. Listen to everything. In whatever language, it is the same call: “Be here now, be here now.”
Stop trying to control.
When you look at a tree, for example, resist the urge to name it. I think a tree’s slow movements are its resistance to being labeled. Stop naming and be welcome and welcoming. One has to do more than simply feel kindly towards nature. One has to participate in the healing of the world. This cannot happen effectively, however, unless one stops perceiving Nature as something different from one’s self.
When participants engage in HumaNatureConnect Activities a compulsion towards thankfulness arises, gratefulness presents itself, and a sense of duty to serve emerges.
Make constant gratitude towards Nature a given. Come together in your abiding place. Accept your scientific reckoning but do not mask your primal being.
Become the experience. You and whatever you perceive are together nothing but awareness.
Make nothing of it. It just is. Be grateful for it.
You do not have to become a backpacker to be an eartHeart. The “everywhereness of wilderness” makes it possible to show your gratitude in the back country and the back yard.
Nature can be regarded as both a benefactor and as a recipient of your gratitude.
