The Non-Ordinary – Part VI: Connecting With Place – Forest

The Soul's Mirror

There are places that have an innate sense of the ancient, of the universal, of symbol that speaks a language in every age, every era throughout the world. These archetypal places, mountains, deserts, caves impart something to us beyond the relief from hectic city life and beyond the pleasure of recreation.

Earth is the womb of birthing. And it is the ultimate hearth we must come home to. Regardless of the religious framework we move in or if we move in none at all, the story of humans circling back home has as its kernel the impeccable cycles of Earth. The story calls us to relationship with the Earth and reveals an indebtedness we cannot escape.

In his book, Soulcraft:Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, Bill Plotkin explains how we find that many times our soul, the essence of our true self, is mirrored in the characteristics of the earth, “the essence of courage, love, sacrifice, desire, faith, belonging – all the possibilities of our own humanness in their primary and most vital forms.” Even our unique individuality can be recognized in specific manifestations in nature according to Plotkin.

The characteristic of mystery found in forest settings hints at intrigue and at the same time the strength of sheer presence invokes reassurance. It’s this tension of opposites that mirrors what I so often sense within myself, the unknown in juxtaposition with the proven path.

The story of the forest, a multiplicity of trees, is also very much the story of the individual tree. For me, this is where I see myself mirrored in the most clearly articulated way. I feel myself rooted and rooting into the soil of life. Here I learn to love the mystery of moist, damp soil, the underground, the unseen nurturer that constantly nourishes from root to trunk, to branch and leaf, to fruit and flower, to seed and back to soil again. Here I find the cycles of life that sustain the core of who I am, that unspoken and unspeakable self, and who she is becoming.

This is why the forest is a sacred place for me, mirroring the human parts of me that I so soon forget. And I am reminded also that I am not alone, the sacred gathering of individual expressions becomes a forest, one voice in communicating place.

Nowhere have I sensed this more profoundly then in the forest of the Giant Sequoias, breathing in the atmosphere of filtered light, drinking in the silence, absorbing the kinship offered there, nature’s invitation, these gifts do not leave me.

When I was a little girl trees became close friends, the grafted fruit tree by the picket fence and swinging gate in my Grandfather’s back yard, the giant oak in my Aunt Irene’s front yard whose branches stretched from street to roof top in a sheltering canopy, the orange grove trees stretching for acres behind Uncle Doc’s red, barn-like house…oh yes, trees were my friends.

And they remained my friends as I stepped out my front door in Silverado Canyon in the forest in Southern California to hike up a crevice to my favorite boulder, to sit in silence and become more of who I was meant to be – and later in my life as I arrived to work early each morning to spend time in the orange grove, quietly starting my day with the scent of sweet life in my nostrils – and later living on the east coast, after a long day at work, following the railroad tracks to my favorite spot among the birch trees to sit and write some poetry, trying to express something inexpressible.

The place of forest has marked me.

What Place do you feel kinship with?

Writing Prompt for the Week: The Soul Mirrored in Nature