Remembering Our Nature
This essay was co-created by Jennifer Sabatier, Amy Lyles, and The Mercy Trees
This viral pandemic has many of us beside ourselves with what to do with our time. The slower pace or screeching halt has jolted us from our desk chairs, driver seats, and rat-race run. Our lists are shorter, scattered, or do not matter. The world around us has gone quiet and still. The hierarchies that structured our systems a month or so ago now offer false comfort and rules that no longer make sense. In the midst of a world of chaos, we are also beginning to hear whispers, calling us back into our own remembering.
Understandably so, some of us are still attempting to recreate the buzz and hum of our pre-pandemic ways, turning on screens, tranquilizing ourselves binge watching and video-game playing drowning out the sound of our inner knowing. If we are lucky enough to still have employment, we can take our anxieties and uncertainties into our work-from-home offices where we Zoom and telecommute our workday betraying the truth of the planet in crisis. We find ways to stay busy to forget the loss, fear, and grief.
It is not time to forget any longer. The sands of time are running out for us to remember who we are.
Going out into nature again, we still hesitate to belong to what is our inheritance. We are accustomed to taking, using, and wanting natural resources solely for our species’ benefit. We have forgotten the relationship mercifully waiting for us among the trees, grasses, air, stones, animals, birds, and insects. It is waiting for us, asking for us to participate, and calling us home.
We must begin to engage with nature in a conversation and exchange that is mutual. We have been talking too much and turning our backs for so long. It is time to listen, for a long, long, long time. We have missed so many stories being told in the tree tops, caves, creeks, and mountains. Listening is how we can begin to remember who we are and take our proper place in the natural world. This is how we belong again.
When we listen deeply with the longing that hangs heavy upon our hearts, we will remember how to co-create with the rest of the natural world. We will remember the muthos that connects to our ethos, that makes us whole. Inviting the natural world into our lives awakens our own nature.
Exploring, making contact with the landscapes of the planet where we all live in together is an opportunity to not just look, but really see, feel, hear, smell, and taste the sweetness of what we have been missing for too many generations.
New rituals and rites of passage are part of our innate creative contribution. Now that we are living isolated from the human contact we took for granted, we are finding new ways to meet our need for connection.
The Mercy Tree project is an opening into the opportunity to reclaim our place in nature, co-create with all that is Divine, and remember the rituals that heal. During this time of great change, this project invites all of us to co-create new rituals and practices that bring connection, healing, and celebration.
As we step out our doors, and touch the dirt where we stand, we make contact. When we breathe deeply, and find ourselves fully present, we connect to that moment, the grit between our fingers, the sweet smell of decay, and the knowing we are here.
