Hallo beautiful living men and women,
Here’s my podcast this week on clearing The Way – it relates to how we navigate these times from a place of connectedness and wholeness, and how Nature can help us do that.
click here to visit my blog and hear the podcast on opening new paths
There’s a sacred site that’s special to me, nearby Guardia, but accessible (until now) only by a drive of a few kilometres, and then a steep hike up a rocky hill.
There’s a huge stone in the shape of a lioness’s head and upper torso, and a beautiful wild spring. From what I know of local history, this was a place in which both religious and natural wise mystics (called janare or strege, which like ‘witch’, tend to have a negative connotation) would dance together.
I’ve talked about this place before on my podcast: the water source there in particular (you can hear a podcast around the importance of harvesting wild water – here), the beautiful old trees around the site, the views all around, the atmosphere and the power of the light and the landscape…
I found the beginnings of a path some years ago, and had walked it with friends who love the wild woods, sitting with our tea and biccies, enjoying the ambience… We’d chatted about trying to connect up the path again.
The idea sat quietly in me for a while, as our dreams of visions sometimes do, waiting for the right moment. I was afraid of stepping onto someone’s land, or meeting angry sheepdogs, or something – and held back because of feeling it’d be too big a job on my own to delve into the undergrowth.
But it called and called to me, and recently I felt an urge that simply had to be responded to with an action: being told to go and open this Way. I asked couple of close friends to join me, and we started out with saws and forbice, and my friend’s elderly dog to keep us on track.
It took a few hours, chopping back brambles and hawthorns, clambering along narrow animal trails that traversed the steep hill, finding the less effortful way around a huge limestone boulder… we stepped up out of a clay-muddy wood into the field by La Leonessa.
The sense of energy freed up is enormous; this potential sentiero, that had been asking to be reopened – reconnecting with these natural woodlands, when most other walks near the town go through cultivated land, or places where folks hunt a lot – the sense of having a place to worship nature uninhibited – the exercise on multiple levels – the bright air washing our systems clean.
It is so awe-inspiring to think of the healers who have walked a similar route before us, and who might have planted the apple trees, the sacred hawthorns, the wise oaks.
Feeling the transmission of the journey on foot, each time I walk it; it’s transformative. I feel answers coming where before there were the walls of a terrorised mind. I feel old wisdom that wanted to come through me as a child but was beaten out of me, stirring and opening the gates of my senses. It feels Right, in an atmosphere of everything-out-of-kilter, where all that was solid is being pulled out from under us.
The fears that held me back for years from opening this path, seem silly now. And this reminds me that all new paths feel impossible, or we find reasons to not take them… and we stay in the very same rhythms and patterns our whole existence, having essentially the same experience, and very little growth.
These times ask us all to be a wee bit braver than usual, and to step into a new track, a new way of being, a new paradigm that wants and needs us to walk it.
EVERYTHING that we do in the world is metaphor that echoes out from us doing it: everything has a power of meaning – or not. The more consciously we participate in everything that we’re doing, seeking the meaning and the rippling positive effect of it, the more we actively listen to and act on signs; the more the Universe sings back to us. Our dance with Life was NEVER meant to be this torturously empty, constructed-manipulated monstrosity that we perceive to be ‘normal’. If we look for the signs, Life is in everything, waiting to be activated.
So much love, and blessed days to you,
PATREON – where I share everything
MUSELETTER – linked to my Art Of Life podcast: occasional sharings on how we actually free ourselves mentally, bodily, energetically and practically, from all that holds us back in this modern life
INSTAGRAM – temporary: focussed on the sale of the Arthouse
MY MAGICAL ARTHOUSE – the House For Sale Guardia website; my beautiful Italian home is on the market
MEWE – a non-censoring platform similar to the unmentionable F***book