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Nature Leaves Clues

Life Really Does Conspire to Help You

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me.”

~Emily Brontë

In Cherokee lore, Great Thunder has two sons, the Thunder Boys, who dress in lightning and rainbows. Prayers to them bring rain and other blessings (and sometimes mischief). Spirituality and everyday life are braided together; the physical world and spiritual worlds are one and the same.

“Fire was the medium of transformation, turning offerings into gifts for spiritual intercessors,” writes Peter Nabokov in his book Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places. Fire was cleansing, illuminating, the great giver of gifts. For some native tribes, those gifts came via steam from the fire used in the sweat lodge ceremony. Mother Earth’s “womb” was a place to heal, hope, give thanks, prepare for war, bring questions, and receive visions.

Creatives have long looked to nature for awe and inspiration, seeking mystical messages or signs of support, otherworldly confirmation. Some writers flee to the sea to cure writer’s block, find a-has in the crack of summer lightning, or see poetry within the colors of a rainbow in the calm after a storm. My friend Thomas One Wolf bowed to the four directions while singing his prayers to the Great Grand Mother and Grand Father. For this part of my journey, I took my directives from the sky.

May this chapter allow magic to inform everything you do, its inspiration energizing all you hold dear in writing and life.

Every living thing in our forest in New Mexico—human, animal, plant—was on edge. It had been an eerie year without rainfall, a record of frightening proportions. With fires a constant threat, our “enchanted” state felt hexed. Even Governor Bill Richardson called on his citizens to pray for rain and asked all Pueblos across New Mexico to organize emergency Rain Dances.

“Disconnection from deep knowing is the road away from Nature,” Thomas said. We would go toward knowing—into the lodge to pray and listen.

Jesse, Tosh, and I walked through the thirsty trees in bright sun to the Inepi lodge, where Thomas One Wolf, Grampa Pete Concha, and neighbors had gathered to lend their voices to the collective invocation. I opened the flap to the dark circular womb, knowing prayers were readily answered here.

The steam hit my face with a blast, but the fragrance of lavender and sweetgrass transported me like a portal to a scented utopia. Thomas offered his prayers in his native Suquamish and sprinkled herbs on the heated rocks, sparks popping like aromatic fireflies.

Toward the end of the forty-five-minute ceremony, our ears were stunned by a loud CRASH in the distance. Could that be . . . thunder?! Another boom followed.

“Listen to the thunder voices,” Thomas said.

Then, the liquid music our ears had been aching for: Pelting rain!

The dozen of us knee-to-knee inside the circle all hooted and hollered at once.

“It wasn’t even cloudy when we got in here!” our neighbor Dallas said, throwing open the flap to reveal the entire length of the sky roiling with inky charcoal clouds unleashing their lifeblood on parched soil. Joyous laughter and tears erupted from the lot of us.

“That’s unbelievable, Mommy,” Tosh said.

“I know, babe. Magic, huh?”

“The Great Grand Mother has heard our prayers,” Thomas said.

The vibe indeed felt charged; if there was ever a time to ask for guidance, this was it.

“Grand Father, Earth Mother, how can I be of service?” I whispered. Thunder vibrated the ground beneath us, and nature continued her sound and light show. With each full-throated crash beyond our blanketed walls, I felt as if I was being commanded to follow an order. But what?

Dallas dropped the flap closed and we resumed our ceremony. Thomas sang his ancestral songs, and, in a flash, I had a vision—a full-bodied, sweeping picture show on the screen of my mind. It was even more dramatic than the only other waking vision I’d ever had—where I’d seen my dog-walking business, back when I didn’t know that was a thing. That had turned out pretty great, as visions go.

Boom! Crash! I saw unknown faces. Friendships far into the future with bestselling authors and friendly media. Influence and good works. Books and more books—way past Lives Charmed. Environmental titles. Whoa! There are others?

Patricia Cornwell

There are only two words that will define what you’re asked of while you’re here. Just two words: Be willing. Just be willing [when] it picks you—whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

I’ll tell you my little quick, weird story: I remember being twelve, and my mom was walking me through a shopping mall in North Carolina. As we passed a bookstore, I looked, and I had this vision that the window was filled with books that had my name on them. I thought, That’s really weird. That’s really strange. I wasn’t even interested in doing that. I wanted to be a tennis player.

I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t say anything about it, but I never, never forgot.

I believe everything is about physics, even things that seem “magical.” Energy fields are drawn together. The thought in physics these days is that there is no beginning or end to space or time. As Einstein said, without time, everything would happen at once. I don’t think we really know what “reality” is. That’s why storytellers, people like all of us, quite frankly, are so important because we help define what life is and who we are and what we should become. Otherwise, you’ve got no GPS.

Was I seeing something that was going to happen in the future, or had it already happened in a universe where there’s no beginning and no end? I do think we are “picked” [to do things] for reasons. And if we’re willing to do them, it’s the way it ought to be. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy or happy. But at least for me, there’s an inner peace that I’m doing the best I can at what I think I’m supposed to do.

A dirt path unfurled, with forest on either side. As I began walking forward in my mind’s eye, I could see that this was a journey of service, one on which I’d only started. The path won’t be easy, I heard. I cringed. When had it ever been? I didn’t have to take the challenge, the voice informed me. There’d be no penalty. Oh, but yes there would be, if only to my heart. Then a pang of worry hit. What if I didn’t have the resources? The road ahead felt L O N G. But a sense of calm came over me. Mom would be my standard- and light-bearer. She would give me the courage she didn’t have; I would help her complete what she’d regretted not doing.

“I wasted my life,” she’d said on her deathbed. The hell you did, Mom.

My vision shifted to the perspective of the smallest creatures outside of the Inepi. Of how terrifyingly real the dangers of the land and sky had become for them. At least with this rain, I for once wouldn’t have to fill the water bowls sprinkled throughout our property that the chipmunks and birds and God knows who else had come to depend on.

Jane Goodall

The most intense experiences I’ve had in nature have been quite unexpected. They’ve come sometimes when I’m alone, once when I was with chimpanzees. Suddenly, it’s as though you are no longer yourself. You’re not there. You are not present, and you feel nature in a completely different way. There’s no way I can explain it; it’s just being there without self. And it makes everything seem different. Then you come back to Earth and it’s a very, very strange feeling. I’ve written about it, in Reason for Hope.

A fly once settled on me. I looked at it, and I thought, It’s a fly. Then I thought about how we love to label things. I started looking at it as this extraordinary little living being—it was the most exquisite colors. I’ve never seen another fly like it. It was almost as though it was sent to teach me something. Taking away labels enables you to see something for what it truly is—its being-ness. But we do characterize: “That’s a fly, that’s a wasp, that’s a mammal, that’s a butterfly, that’s a bison,” instead of just feeling their being-ness.

As the storm ebbed and we left the Inepi lodge for our cabins, my feet felt heavy, but my spirit light. I would stay on this writing and tree-hugging journey for life. I had my marching orders—sort of—as mystical as they were practical.

Bronwyn Saglimbeni

I’d been doing PR for many years in San Francisco, where I lived. I was so burned out. I hated it. I’d been thinking about going to graduate school, about moving to DC or New York, but I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself. I spent the afternoon in the park staring at the clouds, watching leaves blow in the breeze, filling up and tuning in, trying to hear my heart.

That night I had a dream. In it, I was looking at a wall covered in cursive handwriting. As I leaned in to see what the writing was about—and I can still see it as clear as day—it was the story of my life. It was like somebody had been watching everything. Every inch of my life was recorded in such loving, tender observations on this huge wall. My heart was exploding, and I thought, Oh my God, I’ve never been alone. I’ve never been alone! It was so beautiful. Then, I got to this one section of the wall that said: “Don’t go anywhere. You are exactly where I want you.”

I thought, Well, I’m not moving to DC or New York. I’m going to stay in San Francisco. I just surrendered and decided to listen to spirit, God, the Universe, whatever. I will absolutely follow Your lead and do whatever the next step is.

Within a year and a half, I met the man I would marry and have three kids with, my beloved Sal. A year later, I started my own business that’s brought me so much joy. I think, sweet Jesus, had I not put myself in nature and had that dream, I might have gotten some degree I really didn’t want. It was one of those moments where I thought, Oh, thank God mine aren’t the only oars in the water.

Martha Beck

At a time when everything in my life was falling apart—my body, my finances, my family—I got onto a plane and sat down in a window seat. The shades were down to keep the Arizona heat out of the plane. Sitting there with nothing to do, overwhelmed by panic and sorrow, I rummaged in my travel backpack for gum and found a little meditation book someone had given me on a previous trip.

I opened the book to a random page and found instructions for a visualization to use in hard times. The first step was to close my eyes and imagine a circle of light around me. It sounded pretty generic, but it couldn’t hurt. I did it. The next step was to imagine that the light around me was my favorite color. But I love ALL the colors, I thought. So, I imagined a rainbow around me. Then the plane took off. As we rose through a layer of clouds, I felt a sudden urge to open the window shade. What I saw through the window was a rare weather phenomenon known as a “glory,” where the shadow of a plane is surrounded by a huge, circular rainbow.

Following my vision in Thomas’s Inepi, I was more committed to writing than ever. But conflicting rejection letters from publishers who’d seen Lives Charmed left me scratching my head. The names in the book were cutting-edge. The names were old news. My writing was fresh and unique. My writing didn’t offer anything new. The green angle was important. The green angle wasn’t sexy. (That last one came from the boss of an editor who’d dreamed about dolphins jumping over her head and found my proposal on her desk the following morning, a picture of a dolphin jumping over Wyland’s head inside. She loved it. Her boss did not.)

If only I had the energy and know-how to self-publish. But I knew I didn’t have it in me. I would hold out for my team, my people.

But one afternoon, the weight of swimming with my stories in a darkened sea while securing the pages from getting wet threatened to drown me. I was at the desk of my trailer office, head in hands, when Carol called.

“Oh, honey, you’ve got to be delirious by now,” she said. “You’ve been through seven zombie apocalypses, crawled out of the grave, and put your intestines back in your body seventeen times. Your dream with your nine-month publishing goal was over six years ago, and you’re still up every night with freezing fingers. I’m so proud of you. I really believe you’re almost there.”

What would I do without my little sister? Lose my mind, that’s what.

Driving back home, nearly asleep at the wheel and with tears rolling down my cheeks, I prayed aloud:

“God, please! I know this book was Your idea. You’re the one who gave me the dream. The people I’m meeting, the things I’m learning are the greatest gift. I would write all day long for free. But writers need readers, and I can’t reach them without a publisher. I don’t know what else to do. Am I wrong to believe I can earn a living doing the work I love most in all the world? If not, I need Your help!” My hands gripped the wheel as my pickup thump, thump, thumped over the hardened dirt ridges on our irritatingly long road.

Thomas One Wolf’s words rang out in my mind:

“If you pay enough attention, all of nature will conspire to help you and show you the way. She brought you here, and She knows who you are. A mother takes care of her children, especially those who show her great kindness.” In regular instances, Thomas’s logic here would make zero sense to me, with violence aimed at environmental activists worldwide top of mind. But not now. Faith was all I had. My singular focus was as urgent as a wildfire.

ALL OF NATURE!

I looked up at the peak of Wind Mountain and felt an overpowering urge to pull over. I got out of my truck, left the door ajar with the engine running, and fell to my hands and knees, laying my forehead on the warm powdery clay as Thomas had shown me to do.

“Grandfather, Earth Mother, I come to You, Your humble daughter. Thank You for this good way and this good day. Please, I need Your help. I’m bone tired. I will do whatever it takes to hold on. But I need a sign. Pretend I’m a five-year-old and spell out Your answer so that I understand. Please, God, who will publish this book?”

I looked up, scanned the bright blue sky, and sighed. Anything? Please? Give me the slightest clue to go on—a bird, a dust devil, a cloud animal—I’ll figure out what it means when I see it.

Nothing.

I waited.

Suddenly, and without a trace of a discernible breeze, every visible white puffy cloud in a primarily cloudless blue sky—from east, west, north, and south—began moving toward the others as if in time-lapse photography. Unblinking, I watched stupefied as the small puffs merged into one massive clump cloud, like a ball of Play-Doh, before being flattened with a rolling pin on a bright cerulean table. Then, unbelievably, in a flash, my clump cloud sped into two skyscraper-sized, soaring thin white letters—distinct, clean, and as perfectly formed as if on a license plate: H C.

There wasn’t so much as a wisp of a cloud left anywhere on the horizon. And, no, in case you’re wondering, I’ve never done a single hallucinogen in my life.

“HarperCollins!” I squealed as I dropped back to the ground in shocked humility. HarperCollins was famous for publishing wildly popular spiritual titles. The Universe was more magical than I could fathom!

I hoisted my teary, giddy self back into my truck and drove home, overflowing with gratitude. There was nothing to do now but keep my eyes down and fingers moving as I anticipated the happy call from my agent.

Having Carol’s support and seeing the magical dance of those clouds combined with the utter absurdity of getting those up/down rejection letters had flipped a switch for me. Screw it! It’s all subjective. It’s all opinion. I will bring forth my vision; write the book I want to read. My publisher—HARPER FREAKING COLLINS—will share my mission, period.

Rhonda Britten

I worked for a brilliant man, Paul, ramping up his public relations yet somehow began running his entire business. Due to my new role, I found myself listening to him as he rambled on one bright sunny morning in Los Angeles.

That’s when it happened: something so unexpected, so otherworldly, I had to call it a miracle.

I noticed a big fluffy white cloud appeared on the ceiling of his condo. I remember just staring at it for a second shocked that a cloud was inside his house.

A thick book loaded with thousands of pages appeared to pop out of the cloud. The book opened, and the pages flipped furiously as if the wind was whipping through them. In that instant, I knew all the answers to all the questions I’d ever asked.

“Now, you must go and share this with others,” I heard. The book slammed shut, and as quickly as it had appeared, it and the cloud had vanished.

Paul was still talking, oblivious to the cloud. I turned around to see who could have possibly been the recipient of the download—the book, the pages, the answers, the call. It couldn’t have been for me! I was an orphan who dabbled in suicide attempts, drank herself silly for years, ended up arrested and in jail after three DUIs. There was no way. I must have seen it by accident!

Within twenty-four hours, I was in front of my minister, explaining how the vision couldn’t have been for me. And if it was, I had to finish those lousy three credits I’d left undone in college so I could get my bachelor’s. If I even thought I was supposed to listen to the cloud, well, then I also had to get my master’s and a PhD. Then, I would write a book, I said. I mean, who would listen to me without a PhD and a book?

Reverend Joan Steadman interrupted my chorus of “I can’ts” and said, “If you got the call, you’re ready.”

I reiterated why I could never be worthy of the cloud, the book, the pages, the answers, the call.

“If you got the call, you’re ready,” she repeated.

It was a painstaking six months of back and forth. Should I? No way. Really? Me? But then, one day, I decided to believe what I’d seen. I wrote my first book, Fearless Living, which contained many of the answers I received. Not all. But some.

Two days later, my agent called.

“You have a book deal!” Dan said.

“Whaaaat? Really?! Who with?” I asked, a huge smile overtaking my face. Of course, I knew the answer.

“Health Communications,” he said.

Wait—what? Huh? Nooooo! Not HarperCollins? Who is this Health Communications? I love health. I’m a freak for health. But not for a publishing house!

“Is this Health Communications any good?” I asked, not downplaying my disappointment in the slightest. This can’t be! What about the clouds? How could I have been so wrong?

“They’re the publishers of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books,” Dan cooed. “Huge sellers, Linda.” I looked across the room at my bookshelf, the one holding two Chicken Soup titles.

Whoa . . . I had an offer from an honest-to-God publishing company that moved millions of books! Okay. This was really happening—the phone call I’d hoped for and rehearsed more than any phone call of my life. And . . . Oh. Oh? Ohhhhhhh! Holy guacamole . . . I looked down at the initials I’d just scribbled on the pad in front of me. Health Communications. There it was: an H and a C! But they’re the wrong H and C. I looked out the window. I’d read enough spiritual books and been to enough seminars and listened to enough preacher-speakers to know that a more extensive plan could be at work here (and that, apparently, God and Mother Earth knew how to spell).

“See! You really do have God’s phone number,” Dad said when I called with the news. Didn’t we all? How did we forget so easily? The evidence was all around.

Martha Beck

For us to not destroy the ecosystems for which our lives depend, humans must go through some sort of personal and individual transformation, which will then sort of fractalize into a different way of living in the world. Adam, my son with Down syndrome, was one year old, and I’d been doing speech therapy with him. I knew he’d never speak clearly—he didn’t say a word the first four years of his life—but I worked with him desperately hard, almost out of guilt, because I had this feeling he’d never speak. Before falling asleep next to him, I said, “Just tell me why you’re even here.” I wanted to understand the point of someone who may never speak or think with this blighted life, which I thought he would have.

I had a dream I was in a room with a young man who gave me a piece of paper. On it was moving images of animals. I didn’t know it, but all were African animals. There were penguins, which threw me off because I’d never been to Africa, and I didn’t realize there were penguins in Africa. But I knew I was talking to my son’s spirit.

The dream was about the restoration of the world and animals. Adam told me he isn’t even here for human beings in the way I think of things. He’s really here more for the earth itself, which totally baffled me. At the end of the piece of paper he’d given me, the drawings all turned into a line of text in a language I’d never seen. But I remembered it in English when I woke up. I didn’t dare say it out loud. I didn’t even write it down for many years because it freaked me out. I still worry that people will think it’s bizarre. But the text said this:

“The Earth cries like a child, and the blood of the animals is the blood of innocence. You, having lost your innocence, cannot hear the cries of the blood as it beats in your own ears. It is to answer those cries that I have come as I have come.”

And let me tell you, Adam tells me about the animals in the forest! I put up camera traps around my ranch in California, and he came and told me, “There’s a bear in the forest that wants you to take those down. He says it nearly blinded him last night.”

I went out and got the chip, and it turns out this young black bear had come right up to the camera, and a little red light goes on. You see his nose. And then he puts one eye up, and then the other eye right up to the light and staggers away completely blind.

So, there are ways I can check to see that Adam’s not just blowing smoke. This kid works from a different language.

I bought a pair of boots that weren’t mud-encrusted and went off to meet the wizards Peter Vegso and Gary Seidler, my two publishers at Health Communications, Inc., who’d seen something in me the others hadn’t. They’d driven to Deerfield Beach, Florida, from Toronto in a Volkswagen Beetle following their own marching orders years earlier. Their version of taking on the system from outside of New York was to peddle drug addiction recovery pamphlets until they jump-started the codependency movement with Janet Woititz’s Adult Children of Alcoholics and John Bradshaw’s Bradshaw On: The Family, which popularized terms like “inner child” and “dysfunctional family.” By the time they met Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, the authors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Health Communications, Inc. was facing bankruptcy. But by thinking differently than 144 publishers before them (“no one buys feel-good short stories!”), they took a gamble and won. Theirs was now one of the largest—if not the largest—paperback publishing companies.

If only I could encourage them to change their paper sourcing! One thing at a time, Linda. Remember, it’s a long path.

Tosca Lee

I put off writing Iscariot, my first-person novel about Judas Iscariot, the infamous betrayer of Christ, for a long time out of sheer terror. I was cowed by the amount of work it would take, afraid how the first-person story would be received by savvy readers of historical fiction, students of scripture, and people of faith. I was not a theologian, historian, or religious expert. Just a woman struggling with her own questions and disillusionments, a working author worried about sinking her burgeoning career. But everything in my life—including many people around me—seemed to indicate I should write it anyway.

I compensated by researching full-time for a year and a half. I built a wall of protective knowledge around myself. And then I over-wrote the book by 130,000 words. My first draft was more than nine hundred pages. I had a monster on my hands. Somewhere in all that erudite, intricate detail, I’d lost sight of the most important thing: the human and divine mystery at the heart of the story.

I thought back to my time in Israel where I stood on the shores of Galilee, sat in Capernaum’s synagogue, and explored the theater of history. I had learned so much. But as I entered Jerusalem, I was bereft. Ascending toward the Dome of the Rock that day, steeples and mosques and temples crowding the horizon like so many hands reaching for God, I realized I had not experienced one moment of mystery. I fought back tears on my way up the stairs and distracted myself by stopping to give an old beggar woman a few shekels. The moment I did, she grabbed my hand in both of hers and I nearly fell to my knees. Here was God. And I knew without a doubt I had traveled all the way to Israel just to hold her hand.

In the end, I threw out three theses’ worth of historical detail and returned to mystery and human connection.*

After receiving what resembled a hero’s welcome in the lobby of my publishing house, a swarm of people and their giddy smiles took me on a behind-the-scenes tour of what felt like my personal book/chocolate factory.

“Here’s where Lives Charmed will be printed,” they chimed. “And here’s where your boxes will be stored before being shipped to bookstores around the country.” I was awestruck. With so much of the business of printing now off in China, I’d never expected to see manufacturing controlled from start to finish here in the States.

Next, we filed into six cars to a bountiful feast surrounded by my new publishing family. I now understood why publishers are called “houses.” I felt truly home.

“Our entire team, over twenty people, voted for your proposal in a unanimous vote,” Matthew, my editor, said, beaming at me over his Kung Pao rice. “That’s highly unusual for us. It almost never happens.”

“We see you as our next Chicken Soup for the Soul series,” Gary, the cofounder, added. “We love you.” My advance was teeny—a mere $5,000, which wouldn’t even cover the postage I’d already spent—but my dream had come true! And they were going to hire an expensive top outside publicist to work with their in-house team, adding to the dream.

I couldn’t believe how the energy had shifted, and I wanted to keep the momentum moving. I racked my brain trying to come up with a way to show these folks the depth of my gratitude. I called Arnold Palmer’s assistant, and he had Arnie personalize a photo for the office, which got rave reviews. Next, I framed collages for much of my team, complete with photos, funny handwritten notes, and signatures from many of the celebrities highlighted in the book. One by one, the thank-you letters arrived. Never, ever, they reported, had they received such a cherished gift from any author. The next time I visited, I saw my collages hung on office wall after office wall.

True believers fill history with tales of their best prayer practices. Did I get an answer so clear from those clouds because I’d had such total faith that I would? Benjamin Franklin said, “Work as if you were to live a hundred years, pray as if you were to die tomorrow.” I suppose my begging-on-hands-and-knees prayer was a die-tomorrow prayer. You could argue the same about Jesse’s “go-fuck-yourself” prayer from chapter eight. We certainly didn’t phone those in. I was, however, relieved that our family had graduated beyond the F-bomb variety.

As we’ve discussed, writers are empathetic. Highly sensitive. We perceive things others don’t. Sure, some are highly insensitive. Clouds, what clouds? (Don’t try to change those folks, by the way. I’ve tried.) We are who we are, and everyone has their unique stories to tell.

When poet and highly sensitive creative Joy Harjo was on my podcast, she mentioned living in New Mexico during the years I’d lived there. Talk about receiving gifts out of nowhere! I’d been wanting to be sure I’d remembered Bill Richardson’s statewide call to pray for rain accurately and had been doing exhaustive online searches but had come up with nothing. Joy had named her daughter Rainy Dawn; maybe she could provide the confirmation I needed?

“I do remember when that happened!” Joy said. “Anyone that’s lived in New Mexico, and I’ve lived there most of my life, knows that when the Pueblo people dance for rain, well, here come the clouds! It’s communication. It’s about developing that kind of communication. It means that you have a respectful relationship. And like a relationship with anyone, you must build that relationship. You can’t just assume it, because with every relationship comes responsibilities.”

The pandemic had just begun when Joy and I did our interview. Thomas and Grampa Pete were gone by then, and I was so sad that I couldn’t call them and ask their take on the pandemic—remembering all the times they’d told me their prophecies, about the dark times coming to our physical and political worlds.

I had a sense that Joy, who’s been communicating with Mother Nature and reading Her cues since birth, would have a fascinating take on Covid-19. Did she ever.

Joy Harjo

We all needed to stop. A lot of us had the sense we were working towards this, but we didn’t know exactly what form it would take. We knew it would be something related to the earth’s body. We were getting the messages very clearly. We have been getting the messages very clearly for a long time. That it came this way was a surprising vehicle for the stoppage, but it’s what we needed.

The first time I went to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, where my grandfather and many other relatives fought against Andrew Jackson and the illegal move where there was a massacre, I got bronchitis. I had never had bronchitis before or since. Since then, I’ve almost died twice from pneumonia. The lungs are major processors of grief. Maybe what’s happening here [with COVID-19] is that we’re processing our own grief. Certainly, we have grief as a nation. We have grief in this country, in the history of this country. But we also have grief as citizens of this Earth body. If you think of every human being bearing a set of lungs (or one lung for some people), maybe what we are here to do for the earth is to help clean the earth. Maybe our lungs, all working together, are helping the earth’s grieving?

I’m getting older, and the people that I always went to for the answers with a capital A or for insight, for that deeply spiritual insight you won’t find in books or anywhere else, they’re all gone. But their insight is still here; they planted it. It’s available, but again. Like communicating with the spirits who bring rain, there’s a relationship that must be cultivated.

Whether you’re highly sensitive or not, I believe now more than ever that we must take the time to, as Joy Harjo noted, “form a relationship” with nature. To hear Her messages, for us, and about what She needs—for both our sakes. It’s enlightening to pay attention to the world around you and to cultivate a more direct connection with forces and guides seen and unseen.

My cinematic vision in the Inepi that stormy day was true to life. My path would be a long one. Only now are some of the details I saw that day finally coming to pass. But like any worthwhile journey, there were joyous wins along the way—events that would make every bit of doubt and effort worth it a hundred times over.

__________________

*Fun fact: Iscariot won Christian Book of the Year in fiction the following year.