[kelly-taylor-russell]

Hello everyone – I’m sincerely enjoying and feeling very connected to so much of what everyone has written. Thank you for sharing your stories. Here is mine…

Until recently – the last couple of years – I was never a person that felt a need to get out in nature. I moved to Colorado from the middle of Illinois in 2005 to go to graduate school for counseling. The mountains intimidated me. I didn’t understand rivers. I come from wide open spaces and still lakes in the summers; from Great Lakes where you can see for miles and miles. Grand mountains blocking the sunset and fast-moving water slipping by were just too much. But I began to develop my relationship with them on hikes and wanders and camping trips. I dove in deep in 2006 for my first vision fast – 4 days and nights in the woods of New Mexico with no tent, no food, no people except the women scattered around the forest that I could only hear. It was terrifying and profound. I realized how much I’d been missing. How my lifelong quest for personal growth was a mostly intellectual affair. How there was a whole other huge world out there that could support, inspire, and move my stagnant depression, anxiety, and insecurity. I am still and will always be forever grateful for those evening thunderstorms, the sky, the trees, and the ancestors and women who held that space for me. I am still opening little packages of wonder and insight from that adventure 13 years ago.

Fast forward through the rest of grad school, two children, financial struggle and multiple jobs and continuing to build my relationship with the natural world around me. Introducing my children to it was my inspiration to get out, but this didn’t happen very much. It wasn’t until I was facing difficult choices around my health that I entered into a divine relationship with nature that has transformed my life in the last two years. My experience of “nature-connection” is partly what Steven Harper wrote, ““When we are truly willing to step into the looking glass of nature and contact wilderness, we uncover a wisdom much larger than our small everyday selves.” By allowing myself to be held, reflected, humbled by, and in reciprocity with the wilderness around me, I was and continue to find ways to tap into that vast, timeless, compassionate, and unapologetic energy and wisdom within and all around me. Having this support helped me navigate my health challenges and inspired me to be able to bring this access to others. In my day-to-day life, this nature connection lives in my body as a felt sense of being tethered to a central channel in myself while feeling a great sense of expansion from that place. From this place, I can accommodate anything and I experience a sense of flow. When I lose that feeling of the channel or the expansion, I know it’s time to reconnect with the wild one within me; whether on a hike, in my yard, walking my dog, or in my dreams. This connection has been healing for me in so many ways – it gives a context and meaning to feelings of depression, anxiety, or difficulty in my relationships. It feeds me and thus feeds my children, my partner, my community and our planet. I cannot be without this now that I’ve felt it. It is my medicine and I believe it is the medicine the world needs in order to transform and survive.

The challenges I face in finding this connection live within my mind – those parts of myself that insist on keeping me safe and small, protected and defended. It is when my ego insists on production, consumption, victim mentality, and more that I lose this connection. I honor so deeply the unending support of our bountiful earth, as well as the work I’ve been exposed to, that supports me in transmuting my old ways – from childhood, from trauma, from our patriarchal, racist, and capitalist society – into ways that honor my ancestors, my body, my family and the earth.

[kelly-taylor-russell]

Jane – I really appreciate the acknowledgment in your stories about the different ways of connecting with nature. That deep, inextricable sense of connection you experienced seems like one of the reasons your trip to NC was different than anything before. I wonder if you had glimpses of that before. Is it the reciprocity that helps us really connect? I wonder about how we, as humans, can engage with “nature” so much, but not really feel in relationship or a part of it. Does giving thanks and acknowledging the beings we are with as people create this shift? Thanks for your share…really thought-provoking for me.