The Plants are leading a revolution

The plants are leading a revolution.

A revolution that is bringing us back to our bodies and to the body of the Earth.

A revolution that is bringing us down to our knees in humility and place and belonging.

Here, in the dirt, on Earth. Where we find ourselves utterly human and deeply a part of Nature.

I speak often about how the plants have been some of my wisest teachers over the years.

That they’ve helped usher me through healing after healing, taking me across thresholds, through gateways, deepening me into my own experience of myself, and step by step, reweaving me back into the experience of belonging, both in my body and on the Earth.

Plants are voices of the wider Earth body.

They are some of the most generous and loudest voices that call out to us in their knowing, reaching for our hands to gently redirect us on a more connected, sustainable, truthful path.

The path of the heart.

The path of awakening to the wonder, awe, and beauty of our life.

The path of awakening to the yearnings of our soul.

Sometimes I wonder how it is possible that the plants love us so much. They show up, time and time again, to help us in our most devastatingly shameful places. They know us in our darkest spaces. And they love us still. As grandparents do.

As our elders and our ancestors, they operate from a place of inter-being. A place that never questions our co-creation; that we’re in it together. A place whose backdrop is endless love.

Part of the epidemic of loneliness that is plaguing our culture today derives from being cut off from the Earth community. And cut off from the plants, who have been our friends, allies, and teachers for millennia.

We miss the plants. And they miss us too.

I’m thrilled each time a student of mine has a plant encounter that reawakens their bodily and ancestral remembrance. That brings them back into dialogue with the living world.

Each time, no matter what the experience, alongside of it is a sense that they are not alone. That they have been found.

Retrieved from an unmoored experience they didn’t even quite know they were having. But the plant becomes an anchor back into a rightful place amongst the other beings of this natural world.

Autumn and Spring, transitional moments of the year, can feel unmooring for folks as we move from one season to the next. Swimming in the unpredictable, and sometimes stormy, Autumn waters, the darkness can be intense. And coming out of tender Winter hibernation into the pressure of movement and action can also intense and ungrounding.

Without our Earthly anchors that tie us to our spiritual connection and place here, we can become tossed in gusts of anxiety, fear, loneliness, or grief.

Its remedy is anchoring down and into the vastly magical and wise web of Life that moves through the Earth. The plants can be the gatekeepers for us to move into connection with this web. And truly desire to take on this role.

So this season, befriend a plant.

Just one is enough. It could be the tree in your yard, or an herb you hear about in passing that lights something up inside of you.

Spend as much time as you can in their presence, and just listen.