The King and the Queen Must Wed the Land
Welcome to the first episode of the Summer 2024 season of A Wild New Work! In this season, we’ll be exploring how to communicate with the Earth.
In today’s episode, we’re looking at a pre-Christian Celtic ritual in which the land and the people were brought into intimate partnership. We’ll explore how our own modern lives could change if we were sovereign and in committed relationships with the enspirited lands we inhabit.
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Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today. Hi, friend, and welcome. This is the first episode in the summer 2024 season. This will be a slightly shorter season, but no less rich than usual, I hope. The season's topic is Communicating with the Earth. I felt really clear about that, and all three of my guests that will follow today's episode are people who just kind of happened into my life, and they're all amazing.
They're all writers, they're all, um, older women, and they're all people who have really deep, long standing connections with their place, and it just kind of felt like this was the natural area to focus for this season is on our relationship. to the earth and communicating with the earth. And I know that so many of you are out in wild spaces this summer or are shifting your pace of life in accordance to this season.
Maybe work or school is changing in terms of your daily flow and the way that you move in your life. And I want to enhance your time at this point in the cycle of the season. I want to enhance any time you spend engaging with the Earth, um, or with the summer season. Today, the sun is in the sign of Cancer, so we're still in the early summer period, and Cancer is a water sign.
It's corresponding to the chariot card in the tarot. It's symbolized by the crab, and You can go to Episode 70 for a lot more about this, but the crab is this incredible teacher of transformation. The crab molts regularly, and they are well equipped to do so. They have a special seam on their back that is sturdy, but ready to break when they are ready to move out of their smaller shell and into a larger one.
And that's a It's a really just amazing process to learn about, and we can learn from the crab, and we can also look around us at this time where we might see fruits ripening around us, flowers blooming, vegetables coming from what was once a green stalk and a small flower. There are beings all around us that are transforming from flower to fruit, that are blooming.
And so it's a period when our inner reality, the inner work that we've done, needs to become our outer reality as well. Our inner body, our inner life, has become too large or has changed shape enough that we need a different outer shell. We need our outer life to look different in order to support that inner growth.
If we don't do this, then just like the crab, we will stagnate. We'll die. We won't grow. Molting is a necessary process for these beings. Blooming and fruiting is a necessary process for so many plants around us at this time. And at this point in the growth cycle, in this early summer period, there are many plants and beings who have ended their growth cycle, who have died and are already composting into the earth.
And that's all well and good and beautiful. There's no specific timeline we have to be on. And there may be other ways that you're, blooming in your life that might not feel as obvious or don't feel quite in your outer consciousness yet. So I really trust your own inner cycles. It's possible that you were an early spring bloom, you were the daffodil or the tulip, and you're on a different cycle right now.
But if you would like to attune to the season around you at this time, you may notice that there are aspects of your inner life that want to take up more space in your outer life. It could be that you've embraced a new identity, like let's say that you were, you know, you ready to commit to your identity as an artist and what that means for you.
And it may be that that identity has grown in you enough that you're ready to create a studio for yourself, or you're ready to get a different kind of notebook, or you're ready to dress differently. differently. Or it could be that you've been doing a lot of healing in your inner life, in your psyche, and that it's going to change how you want to relate to your home.
Maybe your home wants to be different. Maybe the way that you relate to others is going to change. You may have different boundaries or different ways that you want to be in intimacy with others. And so, There's this invitation to grow the inner work and let it become so big and so vibrant that your outer life is ready to reflect more of that in this time.
The summer season always has echoes for me of the winter season. They are companions of one another, they're twins. In each of these seasons, summer and winter, the activity slows down. The risks are here in both seasons. There's the risk of extreme heat in the summer, extreme cold in the winter, where winter might be fallow and empty, and so we're still inside of that type of environment.
In the summer, we might find stillness in the fullness of these days and the brightness in their thick heat. There's a presence here. It's not this emptiness of winter. Neither is good or bad. But the way that we relate to them is similar. We want to relate with care. We want to be judicious with our resources.
We don't want to waste a bunch of energy. You know, sprinting through on a hot day. We want to be close to the cool water. We want to go at a pace that is safe and healthy. We want to find those sources of heat or coolness that we need. We might need to rest more than we do in the spring or the fall. Your rest in the summer may look different, will look different.
different than it does in the winter, it might not be that you want to be curled up on the couch with a book at 7 p. m. You may want to be on a slow walk at 9 p. m. taking in that long light. So really just trusting where you are in this cycle. And considering the fact that the animals and plants around us are not, most of them are not storing food at this time, there's a lot of food right now, there's a lot of light for the plants, there's a lot of, you know, nectar for the pollinators, there's a lot of food for the animals hopefully in their ecosystem, but they don't take, they're not like hoarding the extra, trying to hold it all for the The autumn or the fall.
We're not at that point. They can't keep, you know, a tomato fresh for months on end. They're here to enjoy it right now. They're here to enjoy the enoughness and we don't have to hoard either. We can enjoy the enoughness. We can enjoy the extra. We don't have to push and try to store away. This is an excellent time to reclaim your right to just enjoy.
Enjoy the deliciousness that is here to be in it and to savor it and appreciate it. And capitalism is really good at interrupting that natural desire to just be in the enoughness and not have to hoard or store away. And so as much as you can sort of come back into your naturalness, appreciating how much is here, appreciating what.
is growing around you, what's available at the farmer's market, and just really savoring that can sort of bring you online into this moment in the cycle of the seasons in a different way. So in today's episode, I want to cover a little bit about Cancer and the Chariot and the process of transformation.
I want to share some of what I have learned, especially in the last year, about relating to the Earth. And I want to talk about some old Celtic traditions of ceremonial marriage to the land and what that idea, that practice, might have to show us today. So this was a long preamble, but that's what we're gonna cover.
And I just have a couple of announcements before we do that. The first is that I have a new class up on my website that's just available for you anytime to, to use. And it's called fruition, expand your options and make fruitful choices. And it's an updated version of a class I taught live for the summer solstice.
and it's really bringing the medicine of late spring, early summer to the fore. And it's there to support you in recalibrating your growth and really steeping yourself in all of the options that are available to you right now. And then supporting you in making a choice that feels really juicy and sweet and fresh to you so that you can learn how to be in your own growth cycle in a good healthy way.
aligned, congruent way. So if you feel like you need that, it's available to you. It's 22 and you can find it at a wild new work. com shop. The other thing is that our land based gatherings called Rise Up Rooted, and these I'm doing with my friends Heather Dorfman and Megan Hain. We have our next gathering on July 20th, which is a Saturday, and we'll spend a couple of hours out on Oak Island here near Portland, and we're going to be working with the idea of sacred yearnings and adolescents, and what did you carry with you as an adolescent that you Maybe didn't get recognized as giftedness in your community.
What yearnings did you have at that point in your life that are still alive for you now? And how do they want to take shape and be of service to the village and to the earth and the part of this place that you inhabit? And so we'd love to have you if you're local, um, to that gathering in Portland. And then Also semi local, about an hour outside of Portland, we're doing an overnight camping trip in August, where we will do some bigger, deeper ritual of stepping into the role of the Mother Tree in your life and in your community.
And you don't have to have joined us for gatherings before, but this will be a, you know, 24 hour plus plunge and, uh, surrendering into where your life wants to flow right now and I'm really excited for both of these gatherings and you can learn more about that at awildnewwork. com slash rise up rooted and I'll put that in the show notes.
I also want to say thank you so much to those of you contributing financially to the show, especially John and CA. Thank you so much for your recent contributions. And, uh, they just mean so much. Your kind words and the money that you chip in, they really help make this work sustainable for me. So thank you, thank you.
And thank you to all of you who just share the show with your beloveds who subscribe or rate it on Apple or Spotify, who share it to your networks. It's all just so beautiful and helpful and I'm so appreciative. With that, I'm going to take us to our opening invocation and we'll dive in. So wherever you are, you might just settle into your seat, or your body if you're standing, or the car if you're moving.
Whatever you're doing, just settling into where you are right now. This is your life. This is happening. This is it. This is your life. Here it is, and I'm honored to be on this journey with you in this small way. And so if you need a deep breath, I would take one now. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet.
May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook, and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Okay, so let's talk about transformation a little bit more before we dive in. So again, the transformation of the early spring period is really about inner growth becoming so large or sturdy that it begins to bump up against the outer reality and something needs to change. So it's the crab whose soft body inside is getting too big for its shell anymore.
It's the blossom that is no longer satisfied just being a blossom, but is ready to transform into something else. It's often something that is larger and more expansive, more intricate, perhaps than the blossom itself. So it could be that for you right now, who you are. is ready for a new life to fit into, maybe not the entire life itself, but aspects of your life may be ready to shift or expand or be more spacious.
If you find that you're feeling a lot of tension right now, if it feels like there's an inner truth or inner desire that needs to be fed that's at odds with your outer reality, that's not a problem. I'm not saying that it's comfortable. By no means would I argue that this feels comfortable, but it is natural.
There are these points in the cycle of our lives and in the seasons when the inner and the outer are sort of at odds and something needs to shift, and it's not really the inner that's reality. It's the outer one that needs to shift. So again, that might be new ways of moving in the world, new ways of adorning yourself, or dressing, or new identities you take on, or your physical space needing to change, your car needing an update, or some care.
And this is a beautiful, deeply personal process for each of us, but I think the best part of it is when our own individual transformations support or quicken cultural transformations as well. And they almost always inevitably do if they are true to us and deep enough. And I have no doubt that you are doing this already, that you know how to do this, that you can do this.
But there are some sort of new agey traps. in this area of life and study. There's a lot of weird new agey language around up leveling in your life or manifestation, and these are just new twists on very old ideas of extraction and individualism and human supremacy, where our personal process is meant to just benefit you.
us, and maybe we call it ancestral healing, and it's supposed to, you know, also benefit the people who came before. But you can tell the difference between someone who's doing their work on behalf of the collective and someone who's doing their work just for them. And I don't want to bring a bunch of judgment here, but I do really have an allergy to that kind of approach where it's just about us, and I have been there myself, and it's easy to fall into that trap.
But a good indicator that your soulful work is truly soulful is that it has a healing resonance with the world around you in some way. So if you were, um, In my earlier example, if you were embodying the identity of an artist, and that felt really true to you, and that was what your soul needed to grow into at this time, I believe that you would naturally create a studio that felt Thanks.
inviting and harmonious and safe and beneficial to the more than human beings around you. You might bring in some plants. You might put a bird feeder outside your window. You might, um, just clear the space and allow any stagnant energy to sort of move through. It's not that our soulful work has to be directly related to the collective in some way.
I don't mean like you have to work for a non profit in order to be doing your soulful work. But it does need to be in a larger conversation than just your own lived experience, or your own immediate family, or your own ancestral line. And we don't need to overthink this, but I just want to sort of caution us or say at the outset that there's some, like, very odd spiritual ideas out there that are just essentially, like, patriarchy and individualism in a different cloak.
If we look out to the natural world, we can see that a flower that blooms, blooms for itself, but its blooming is a great gift to the land around it. A young deer that grazes the grass is grazing and eating for itself, it is feeding itself, but it's also keeping the grass healthy. at bay and keeping the ecosystem balanced.
Even so called villains in the ecosystem, like a black widow spider or rattlesnakes, they enhance the ecosystem. They are important. So your own blooming, your own outgrowth and transformation at this time is meant to do the same. If it's only stilted. It'll just be like a few bitter cherries on your tree.
And I want better than that for you. So. Again, your transformation will look different than anyone else's, and it comes around regularly. Every year, certainly in early summer, but all throughout the year, we're invited to shed and rebirth and try again and be in different relationship with the world around us.
So your blooming can look many different. ways, but if it feels like a coming into yourself, if that blooming is humble, if it puts you into greater intimacy with the natural world around you, not just human culture, you're doing great. And you can go deeper by just staying close to what feels really natural to you, what feels joyful and beautiful to you.
It feels good to hang a plant and give it water. It feels good to feed the birds or the squirrels. It feels good to, Create a space and a life that is full of other sweet living creatures and create that diversity right around you. That's so joyful and you can just follow that and trust that you are innately good, that your presence is life enhancing, and it's just that we have sort of become inhabited by some very weird cultural notions that have been handed down through systems of oppression.
So we just want to be aware of those. So what kind of cultural transformation do we need right now? We need a lot, but a huge, if not primary one, I think, is to become people who know how to work with the rhythms of the natural world. Um, and I'm going to talk a little bit about, um, how we can help people who understand their place in this web of life, who enhance life, like all of us once did, and like Indigenous people around the world still do.
We are in dire need of people and cultures where We can be active in the world, working with it, shaping it, healing it, but very humbly, in accordance with the Earth's larger cycles, respecting her limits, living more simply, letting the land be wild, letting us be wild, eating differently, letting go of what causes Harm and the only way that we can get there, the only way that we can do this personal transformation and the collective transformation that can follow is if we become people who deeply love this place.
And the only way that we can fall into love with this place is by having a relationship with it. By knowing and communicating with the part of the earth that we inhabit. This time last year, I was about to get on a plane to go to England for a wilderness vigil in the Dartmoor Forest in southwestern England.
And this was a vigil led by the school of, the West Country School of Myth, which was founded by Martin Shaw. And so I, um. Traveled from Portland to England, stayed a night outside of London, took the train down to Devon, and met up with my group. And I want to say a big shout out to Sonia and Tara, if you're listening, my fellow Vigilers, hello.
Six of us convened and we went into the woods in the Dartmoor Forest and we had about a day and a half of prep at base camp and there was preparation that happened before I left, of course, but we had about a day and a half with our guides and then when we were ready each of us went out alone to a spot and for four days I fasted, I didn't eat, I had water, I had no fire, I slept under a tarp in a sleeping bag on the ground, and I listened.
I had a journal, but nothing else, and the point was to just listen and pay attention, to be shown things. to be in a different kind of conversation than I had ever been in, in my life. And there were a few rituals and practices throughout the four days I was out there alone, but it was a lot of just paying attention and dealing with what came up and being in conversation, really.
And in spite of the hunger, which I kind of, I don't know where I heard this, but I, I feel like I heard before I left that, you know, by day two or three, like, you just don't feel hungry anymore, and that's not true. I felt hungry the entire time. Um, but beneath the hunger and the rain, I got soaked on my hike out to my spot and had no way to warm back up.
It poured all the first day, most of the second day. In spite of the rain, I was still hungry. The wind, the sadness of missing my children, my spouse, having no way to contact them, the loneliness, the fear, I had never slept outside without a tent before in a different enchanted place. Under all of those things, which were challenging, of course, but under all of that, I felt so much love.
I felt so loved and welcomed in this place where I was a stranger. I had just arrived. I felt love for that place from myself. I felt so much love for all who inhabited that place, even, you know, the ticks that got under my layers or the eyelid and was sucking my blood. I felt a love for all of it, and I felt loved in return.
I felt this deep desire to recognize the relationship I was actually in with this earth. That became really clear right away. It was that we are each stitched in already, already in relationship with this earth. The earth, the inhabitants of the land around us, they are aware of us. They are aware of our presence and they are fundamentally alive and recognize our aliveness.
The earth is She is aware. She is ensouled. She is alive. Nature is soul. And those barriers between us and the natural world, those really, uh, withered and fell away in this wilderness vigil experience for me. I would have a thought or I would say something aloud and a creature would appear in response.
Or I would have a dream and wake up to find an aspect of that dream alive right in front of me. I would become aware of things I wasn't previously aware of. My psyche sort of opened up and was inhabited or inhabited the land itself, and this is a phenomenon that our Indigenous ancestors would have been much more familiar with, which Indigenous people all over the world never lost touch with.
We are part of a vast conversation, whether we're aware of it or not. And Whether we do a Wilderness Vigil or a Vision Quest or do any sort of practice that sort of breaks down those psychic barriers between us and the world, whether or not we do any of that, there is still this invitation to become, to be in a different conversation with this place, with the, the world.
The soul of the world all around us. And so many people feel trapped inside of conversations that they don't want to be in. And these conversations are very dry. They're barren. They might have a texture of depth or excitement, but to me they've never had the same resonance that being in intimate conversation with the earth has had, whether it's conversations about family trauma or in competition with our peers or conversations about our finances or capitalism or our to do lists, those sort of mundane.
Dominant culture, entrenched kinds of conversations are sometimes necessary and they're just part of life, but without the deeper hydration of a conversation with the vastness of the seen and unseen world around us, the more than human world around us, We dry out so quickly, and we already came into this earth, you know, the culture was already quite dry here, at least in the West, in dominant white supremacist culture.
But we need that hydration again, and hydration can be found in the land and in the soul. That's where it is. I'm not saying that's the only place it lives, but that's where I, that's where I would like to reside and stay very close to. The night before we left for our vigil, one of our guides, Tina Burchill, quoted something that Martin Shaw had written, and I can't remember the context or the full extent of the quote, but there was one line that fell so heavy into my psyche, it just like landed, and it was, The king and the queen must wed the land.
The king and the queen must wed the land. And I took this line into my Vigil and I worked with it and it has been working me in the past year of integration. And in this year, I was asked by our guides, not everyone was asked, not just me, but we were asked not to talk about the deeper workings of our Vigil experience so that they could really settle and anchor inside of us.
And I've been grateful for that. I didn't like it at first, but in the last year, it has been so helpful to not speak about it. And I have, in this past year, really been wrestling with that statement. The king and the queen must wed the land, and I've explored it, and I want to share just a few of my learnings about it with you today, and I'll put some resources in the show notes as well if you'd like to go deeper with this idea.
I can't say where Martin Shaw pulled the idea from, but in my research and my learning about this, there are, in many traditions, earth based traditions, a, an idea of people in their own sovereignty. making a commitment or honoring the intimate relationship they have with the land. And one of those traditions can be found in the pre Christian Celtic tradition, which Um, uh, So, um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, The people who inhabited the earth were in deep relationship with her.
There was tremendous respect for the feminine and the necessary energies that the earth would offer and offered the people. And like many settled societies, they developed some hierarchy, which we won't get into today, but just stay with me. And they were led by chieftains or queen, queens or kings, most often kings.
The king or the chief's role was not dominance at all costs. It wasn't the rulership that we might have in mind today, but their role was to be a caretaker of the people, which included the caretaking and respect for the land, because the Celtic peoples knew that you can't separate the well being of the people from the well being of the land.
This is something we have forgotten and to make this concept real, Before a new chieftain or a king or a queen was given the crown, there would need to be a ceremonial marriage between the king and the goddess or the land. And there's a term for this, which I'm sure I will mispronounce, but I'm going to call it banais righi, B A N A I S, R I G H I, and this can be translated as the wedding feast of kingship.
And in that ritual, the king would be wed to the land, married, devoted, in service to, in intimate partnership with. And if he went astray, if he mistreated the land, mistreated the goddess, the people would suffer. There would be landslides, floods, crop failure, drought, etc. So, the king and the queen must wed the land.
What might this mean for us, who are not chieftains or kings or queens in a literal sense? We can see the ripple effects of a culture that lost its way and let, let that marriage really go to shambles. Capitalism and dominant culture keeps us very mobile. It destroys the earth that we are wed to. It destroys our relationship to that earth by forcing people to move away from land out of fear for their lives, either through war or global development that forces people into urban centers to work for a wage, it keeps us in an adolescent place in our lives where it's very difficult for many of us to become that king or that queen, that sovereign, that chief or chieftain. And So, the invitation here first might be to develop our own sovereignty. And again, this happens in concert with the land, because we can look out and see that the land is sovereign.
It has a will of its own. It is wild and alive, like we want to be, like we are, like we want to be more of. And so, Becoming sovereign in your own life requires a relationship with the earth, because if it doesn't, then we become authoritarian. We become the monarchs that we see in modern culture today, who have no relationship, no commitment to or devotion to the land or the goddess or mother that is the Earth. And so many people who may not be the king or queen in their own life have come to believe that their relationship to the Earth can be something that's forgotten, just sort of displaced, or it doesn't matter, it has no bearing on their modern troubles or their lives. Or they might be led to believe that they're only, they're My role with the earth is to try to be a nice person or like recycle, you know, or enjoy your garden or go hiking and there's nothing wrong with that.
That's all so beautiful, but it's a different texture to marry the land. It's a different texture to have a ceremonial ritualized relationship with this place that we inhabit that binds us forever across time and space. Thanks. In a way that enables us to really fall in love with this place or that comes from love with this place, it's different to relate to where we live as if it's our beloved.
You know, what changes when we are tapped into an undercurrent of care and belonging? The transformations that we need personally and collectively are entangled with the Earth and her needs. We cannot separate them. And I know that many of you are really ready for something deeper than normal self care, or tweaks to your schedule, or productivity hacks.
And all of those can be so helpful. I love those. But This cancer season, this summer, when the sun is in the sign of the great mother of cancer, the crab, when the rivers are full and flowing, when the days are long, when you are out there anyway, with your body and your sovereign self, can you be open to a different way of relating to this life and to this place that you're in?
And if the idea of coming into your own sovereignty And then devoting yourself to the land makes you feel something. If that idea, that line sparks anything in you, it is a call worth listening to. Absolutely. Because what grows out of you, out of your life, when you are in love, is a lot different than what grows out of guilt, or obligation, or overwhelm, or stress.
What happens when we are in love with the land that we inhabit? We want to take care of it. We want to enjoy it. We want to learn from it. We want to mirror it. What happens when we are in love with this life itself? I'm trying to talk about all of this and our little pet bunny, Buzz, is like running around doing his little jumps and binkies like he really likes this topic or something.
He's just, just being a little distracting right now, but if you could imagine a really cute, loppy eared, brown and black bunny. big bunny running around. Um, he's here with me. So, so in terms of relating to the land differently, I know for me at least a lot of barriers can come up to this. It can feel like, um, I don't know how to do that.
That sounds like a lot of work. I have to get it all right. I don't live in the country or in a wild place. place. I'm in the city where there's a lot of concrete. Um, I might move next year. What's the point of connecting to this place? I just, I totally get all of that, and I encourage you to just start where you are.
Again, this is about an inward sense of love that can be can become so large that it just sort of naturally directs your attention and your energy. It can be, it can be extremely pleasurable and just feel good and natural. Again, it might be just treating your yard with a lot more love. of respect, saying hello to the trees that you walk around every day, learning the names of the rivers around you, learning the indigenous names of the mountains around you, saying hello to them, praying to them, going out and introducing yourself when you're on a hike next, telling the earth or the.
Plants or the fungi and animals that are here, that they are beautiful, how much you love them. Bring them treats. Introduce yourself. Talk to the land about what's going on in your life. Speak commitments to her if you feel ready for that. In doing this, you honor the sovereignty of the land around you and you also become sovereign in your own life.
And in my experience, that has afforded me definitely a different sense of sovereignty in my own life, but also more focus, more courage, a sharper sense of what actually matters, what is actually natural to me, and an openness to living differently in honor of or for the earth, living less comfortably, coming to terms with the idea that I might not have air conditioning all the time in my later years, you know, the way things are going with our power grids and natural resources that, you know, I think we will eventually need to live with a much lighter footprint. It's not even eventually, it's like right now in this, Um, and we can go into that kicking and screaming about how uncomfortable we are and how inconvenient it is to not have, you know, cantaloupe in January, or we can do it out of love.
That I love this place and I know that the way we're living is way too burdensome for this land. And I, um, The more I fall in love with this place, and with life itself, and the natural ways of living, the more willingness I feel to living differently. And as someone who loves to be comfortable, and is like really sensitive to temperature changes, and you know, I like to, I'm still so reliant on the capitalist dominant culture, and that's shifting, I hope, but not very fast.
Cultivating that loving relationship with the land is helping me to come into a different way of being in my life, and it feels a lot better. Lovely. And I just don't think there's any other way into the transformations that we need collectively. And again, your personal transformations this year and next are going to look different from anyone else's, but I do believe that it needs to include your soul and the land, which are almost one in the same, and they are already in relationship with one another.
Your soul is already well aware of the land that you inhabit, and the land that you inhabit is well aware of you and your essence. And there's a quote by Bill Plotkin in his book Soulcraft that I think really gets to the heart of this that I want to read to you. And in this section of his book, he's talking about some sort of art of the artificial barriers that we put up between our soul and the natural world in this culture.
And he writes, quote, “But when we escape beyond these artificial barriers, we discover something astonishing. Nature and soul not only depend on each other, but long for each other and are in the end of the same substance, like twins or trees sharing the same roots. The individual soul is the core of our human nature, the reason for which we were born, the essence of our specific life purpose, and ours alone.
Yet our true nature is at first a mystery to our everyday mind. To recover our inmost secrets, we must venture into the inner slash outer wilderness, where we shall find our essential nature waiting for us.”
So what if that were true? What if the earth is longing for you? What if your soul longs for the wild?
There's just no getting around that truth, I don't think. I think the more and more we're hurling through this collapse or change or whatever it is that we're in right now, and this and these rippling crises around our world, I can't see any better way to To heal and change and become the people that we need to be.
Then bringing our soul into greater contact with the natural world. And again, that doesn't have to look like doing a wilderness vigil or going out and living off the grid. It can look like saying sweet things to your garden. It can look like acknowledging your dependence on this earth. It can look like letting your soul grow as much as it wants to right now in this time and seeing where it wants to lead you.
So this summer, I hope you will get out into some form of wildness or go into your inner wildness and attune your ear to what is there. Listen. Write down the symbols you see or the synchronicities that you experience. Take your worries and your questions out to the rivers. Take your songs, your joy, to the trees.
Bloom in your life and do it for all of us. Be as big as the heat or as big as the wide, slow river right now, these long days. Fall in love. Fall in love with this place and this earth. It loves you already. Let yourself bloom into that. and see where it takes you. That's what I have for you today, my friends.
You might want to drink some water. Thank you so much for being here in this summer season of the show with me. Thank you again to those of you who are supporting the show financially. If this podcast is meaningful to you, and if you have the means, I would so appreciate you chipping in once or monthly.
You can do that at buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. The next episode will be an interview episode coming out July 23rd. I think you're going to love it and I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.