Are You Ready for the Country

The plant spirit told him “We can do nothing unless we are asked.”   Cavon remarked, “Leave it to a plant to come up with the understatement of the millennium.”  - Plant Spirit Medicine

Are you noisy with quiet times?  — Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic

Looking back at the threads of your life can be interesting.  But it can also be used medicinally.   I have seen variations of using this energetic approach and I am sure that there are many more that I have never heard of.  EFT’s Peace Procedure does this through acupressure.  The Awareness Techniques essentially does that but goes beyond the constraints of just this lifetime.   Recapitulation must work similarly as your move through your past history and allow the emotional charge to be released.  The Presence Process is similar. 

But as I was sitting in the gardens late this evening I got a rush and then my life growing up in the country came to the forefront.  I grew up in the backwoods of Missouri (from about 4 until I went to high school) and Oklahoma (high school) for most of my early life.  I remember the first place we lived was in Skunk Holler.   Later we moved to a 70-acre farm.  The last place was a 10 acre plot of land.   In all cases, the land abutted stretches of woods that ran through all of the lands.  I used to have a lot of imaginary adventures walking out in those woods for hours.  So for me living in the middle of woods and streams was just natural (I didn’t intend that pun). 

I have to admit that I don’t have an experience of awe being on the land.  I think part of that is that it is imprinted in me as the way things are.  I have probably had more awe experiences with the constructed environment. At the same time, when I moved to larger towns and cities, I enjoyed walking through the streets with similar satisfaction.  I have always seemed to have some sort of equanimity running through me around my environment.   Actually living where I do surrounded by beautiful land and trees and water (although still inside the City of Portland) I do get to experience a vastly different energetic atmosphere than I did in Dallas, for example.  I don’t doubt that and if I had my preferences, I would always live surrounded trees, rocks, water. 

The peace that is inherent where the earth is allowed to be undoubtedly reinforced the peace, the Still Mountain, that predominates my Design. “You can take the boy out of the country, but it is hell getting all the country out of the boy.”  I can live with that.