Connecting with Nature…

It is difficult to explain the exact feeling that I had when I started to reconnect with nature and how it allowed me to open up to unconditional love. I studied the traditional practices of the Nez Perce tribes that used to inhabit the land I now call home. When I chose Chief Joseph, a great chief of the Nez Perce, as my light figure, I began a deep dive into what made him loyal and unconditional. While I don’t know this for certain becuase I never had the opportunity to meet him, I do suspect that his people’s traditional ways of living and being with the earth greatly impacted the man he was. The Nez Perce see themself as belonging to the land they were born to. They see the earth as their mother and feel a deep sense of interconnectedness with the land, nature, and each other. I have always appreciated using nature to make me feel good and do outdoor activities such as rafting, skiing, camping, climbing, and hiking. But I spent a lot of time connecting with nature and the earth below me this winter and spring and really appreciating it not for what it gives me but for what it is on its own. By asking myself how I could embrace a similar kind of relationship with the land around me, I also found a newfound sense of interconnectedness. I could now see how others feel unconditional love. Because I am the same as the person sitting next to me in a cafe, the same as a fireweed plant on the side of a dusty summer road, the same as the sun when it hits the mountain tops and turns a special color of pink and the same a shell as it comes sliding over the sand. We are all the same.