A note from Erin:
Hello, beautiful human,
A teacher of mine used to say “Increasing complexity requires deeper roots,” and wow, how about the complexity these days? It seems to me we need to tend our deep roots. To have a tap root down deep, burrowed into what really matters, tapped into our sane, soulful, adult selves, even as our branches may be shaken by the winds of change. To have our roots tucked gently into the ancient vows that are buried deep in our hearts. To root into our sense of humor and a sense of workability, into a felt relationship with the living land beneath our feet, to root in reverent noticing of the beautiful entanglement with so many other lives. I’m appreciating my human neighbors as well as the hummingbirds, squirrels, roses, vultures, lemon balm, doves, bees, butterflies, mullein, maple tree, squash plants, mountain creeks, and oh, the mountains themselves. It helps so much, doesn’t it, to remember to drop into the deeper currents of being that exist way down beneath the chop at the surface? And into those relationships that remind us of our connectedness and our sanity? I hope you have many ways to root into the depths. As the quote from Francis Weller states: Never doubt that each of us is essential to the welfare of the village. Everyone is a vector. Choose what you spread.
Everything Carl and I offer is an attempt to spread mindful and embodied presence, warm-hearted compassion, authentic humanity, reverence for beauty, and the reminder that we can always begin again. It’s an attempt to invite us to continue, even against the odds, to deepen our intimacy with life through direct, felt experience; through honoring gratitude and grief, and an invitation to keep holding the vision in our hearts of a more sane, safe, equitable, generous, beautiful, thriving world. Whether through meditation, movement, grief and praise practice, poetry, somatic practices, or deep ecology and The Work that Reconnects, we hope to send ripples of steady lovingkindness and blow seeds of possibility into the world.
What are you hoping to spread?
I’d love to share with you today a few offerings that may offer support during these tumultuous times. I’ll also share a few resources you might find nourishing.
May your roots be deep and may you feel well nourished by the beauty of the world in the midst of it all.
As my dear friend Brooke McNamara writes in one of her gorgeous poems,
“The Best Dream
You right now
waking up
to play the part
of love’s guts.”
May we all enact the dream.
With rooted love,
Erin
