Healing for the Earth Day 9, Every Word You Say Creates. What Are You Creating?

Dear Earthlings,

How you all doing out there on the big blue marble? It's still spinning isn't it?  And it's beautiful!

It's Day 9 of Healing for the Earth. I ended my evening tonight with a meditation in silence with 8 people on Zoom and then a drumming session with my amazing Hawaiian healer friend Kau'i Auwae and her son Elijah. Kau'i played the deer drum, I played the elk drum and Elijah played the singing bowl. We played online for about an hour.

We didn't use words, we used instruments to speak for us. Instruments carry a vibration, just as words do. The vibration of music or chanting is so powerful. It can lift the spirit. That's what we were doing tonight. We were lifting the Spirit.

There are so many words flying around these days. Not all of them carry a high vibration. Many of the collective words these days carry a low tone or low vibration. There is an atmosphere of fear and fear for the whole is not helpful and can be very destructive to a person and the world. Fear has its place, but unless you are running from wolves in this very moment, it's not helpful.

Today, after our drumming session, Kau'i drew a card from her Hawaiian card deck and shared it with me. Here's what it said in both Hawaiian and English:

Aia i ka 'olelo no ke ola,
Aia i ka 'olelo no ka make.

In the word there is life,
In the word there is death.

And here is the message from the card deck:

"This is an ancient Hawaiian saying. It encompasses the understanding that we are powerful creators. As spirit beings living here in the material plane, we bring the creative energy of Spirit to life in the linear world. And we do that through words.

Every word you say, everything you think—creates. The thoughts you hold inside, and the words you put out, are life giving or death dealing.There's no in between. All your words either feed the pono and create a life of connection, or they feed the pilikia and create disconnection from Spirit."

So with all that's swirling around out there in the world, what are you choosing to collectively create? Love or Fear?

With each word, feel how it vibrates in your body. When you speak, do you feel anxious, nervous, judgmental or scared? How can you tune into the vibration of love?

Today, connecting to my body and spirit helped me tune into the vibration of love. I have been staying away from the news. I'm aware of it, but I can feel that it has the tone of fear. I'm consciously choosing to tune into a different vibration.

Every word creates. What your read, what you think, what you hear. It creates. What are you choosing to tune into? What are you choosing to create?

Mahalo Kau'i and Elijah for your gifts today. They are very precious, just like both of you!

Hello Darkness, Hello Light

Dear Earthlings,

I was alone in the house organizing a few of my boxes of things, when everything went dark and silent. I stepped out of the bedroom and felt along the wall to the living room where I knew I had a candle and lighter. The wind was howling outside and it must have blown the power out. I stepped out on the deck and could see swirls of snow spin on the golf course like mini tornadoes. I was aware that it was getting colder inside the house. I found other candles and lit them. Eventually, I found a flashlight.

The strangest thing was that as I was going through a box of my writing, I found a loose piece of paper with a dream written on it about the end of the world. Every night I've been dreaming these dreams again. I see buildings falling down and water flooding streets. Somehow I'm able to just observe it all, as if I'm watching a movie. I see it happening, but I'm strangely not affected by it. Instead of jumping into the swirl of chaos and panic with everyone else, I stand a distance back and observe. Somehow, in my observing of the chaos, I get answers and solutions, but they hard to put into words because they come from the dream realm.

I know that I'm meant to be out here. In the dark last night, I felt I should be scared, but I wasn't. Instead, I felt a kind of returning. We have lost connection to the darkness. We depend so much on light. Without electricity to fuel our devices and appliances, we are lost.

In the darkness, with just a candle, I felt a deep connection to the wild world outside. Just before dawn, before the power went out, five deer walked in a single-file line past my bedroom window. They seemed to glide with extreme grace, ears twitching with alertness.

These animals bring me to the answers. This is native land. What's the point of being out here if I don't take time to tune in.

I could not walk yesterday in the blizzard-like winds. I watched the snow rapidly accumulate outside the living room window. By the late afternoon, the snow was blowing sideways towards the window and then the wind would shift and it would blow in another direction. After the power went out, I gathered candles, a flash light, warm clothes, a down comforter and hunkered down in the living room near the gas fireplace.

Around 11pm, the power was restored and I returned to the bedroom.

I awoke when light began to stream in through the blinds. It was quiet outside. I did not hear wind. I got up and made myself some tea and returned to the bedroom to get dressed. I bundled up in a long down jacket, scarf, hat and gloves before leaving the house.

I walked along the property line of Graysmarsh farm towards Graysmarsh Beach. All of a sudden I began to hear trumpets. I thought I was going crazy. The sun was hitting the snow and making everything extremely bright. Through a gap in the trees that created a boundary around the farm, I saw huge white swans, that I later learned were trumpeter swans, flying in circles above the fields of snow on the farm. They literally sounded like trumpets.

It was beautiful and heavenly. The image of huge white swans above bright, white snow making the most angelic sound touched me to my core and opened my heart. I don't know the language of these animals I see, but I often times I feel like I do. They all call me to slow down and tune in. Maybe that is the answer.

People talk of darkness and it is there. I don't watch the news out here and I've stopped Facebook for awhile. I want my media to come from nature. It's been speaking for a long time.

I feel every moment I'm able to step lightly on the Earth and listen, it's another moment of awakening to a world that has always been there for us and only asks us to listen.

Crashing and Burning at The End of The World

Dear fellow Earthlings,

While I sit on a log on Dungeness Spit in the Pacific Northwest, with 40 mile an hour winds whipping at my face and waves crashing on the shore, I'm thinking about Australia burning. Just the other day a friend said on a blog post she shared with me said,
"THE WORLD IS GOING CRAZY!"

It's a very strange feeling to be way out here where nearly a dozen deer come to my window and graze on the grass each day. These docile, gentle beings remind me that there is still softness in the world, while in other parts there is FIRE burning all around!

As I see my Australian friends' pictures from their backyards of air that is thick with gray smoke and hear them speak about itchy throats and teary eyes, I feel hopeless. I am here in the Pacific Northwest in winter where it mostly rains. However, I have strong memories of the fires that blazed through our own forests all the way down to the California coast the past several summers. I remember sitting at Carkeek Park looking at a couple sitting on a log in the haze and a man in the distance wading up to his waist in Puget Sound. He looked like he was baptizing himself for the end of times.

What are we to do?

And now there is talk of war. Facebook, news and social media sites are buzzing with opinions and theories and fear and anger and...

I have to turn it off.

Throwing my own energy into the fire will only stir it up even more.

The way inside is very subtle. I find it in the forest next to two huge cedar trees with bark graying from the dampness of the air. They are like very old, wise grandfathers. They must be more than 200 years old. Their top branches sway in the wind, but they are grounded with deep roots that I imagine reach the core of he Earth. They call me to stand still and listen. I breathe in the air and raise my hands over head for a minute and then bring them down to hold my heart in gratitude for being with these elders.

I tread further down the moist, pine-needled path to the ocean that roars with tsunami-like waves. They crash through my chest and blow me wide open so that all of the molecules that make up who I am are now blowing in the wind across the Sound and when I sit down on a log with the wind whipping at my face, those same molecules come back into place as if the log were a buoy pulling everything back to its center.

Crashing, Crashing....the waves are relentless in their fury. Fallen trees that are now logs riding the waves come barreling on to the shore. Even the seagulls hunker down behind old stumps and sticks in the sand. Walking down the spit was easy, but when I turn around to walk back to the forest, every inch of me has to fight the wind. I cover my face with my scarf and pull my hat down so I only have a tiny window for my eyes which are shut tight and wet with salty tears.

When I reach the upward slope back to the forest from the Sound, I lift my gaze past the waves and I almost detect a calm smoothness out between the Spit and the land mass on the other side. And then my mind imagines sitting on the bottom of the ocean with the sea creatures there. All of the bottom fish barely moving while so much activity happens on the surface.

 If it is the end of the world as we know it, I don't want to be crashing and burning and fighting and fearing. I don't want to add fuel to the fire. I don't want to predict, judge, criticize, hypothesize  or even proselytize.

The only thing I can do now is look up when I hear the piercing shrill of an eagle overhead. He swoops down and lands right on a high branch of a cedar tree above me. When he lands, he does not move, but stares with that all-knowing gaze that actually brings me a deep peace for the moment.