“And into the woods I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” -John Muir
I am such a mind-heavy person. Even as a child I lived in my head. More so than other children. Chasing stories. Chasing fears. Observing, logging, sponging, analyzing.
How old was I before I learned how to breathe? Not just take in oxygen but BREATHE? My twenties? My thirties? No one taught us how to meditate when I was a child. This is new knowledge—a new process. To push out the noise and find stillness. To connect with my body. (I have a body??) To like my body. To welcome the quiet. In the space after trauma, quiet is threatening, and you have to learn to accept it and trust it. After a lifetime of internal trauma, quiet is foreign. I usually don’t even recognize it’s missing. Anxiety is my baseline. So I have to learn; I have to learn. I have to breathe. I have to… be.
And do you know who the best teacher is? Trees. Trees and light and water and hammocks and hiking. And if I’m indoors it’s poetry and piano and fresh fruit and yoga and showers and combing my hair and journaling and study and things that I have been drawn to all along and never knew why they were calling.
It was the calm. I’m listening now. I crave you, soul songs, lead on.
