ELIZABETH DENLEY is currently living in the Central Highlands of Victoria in Australia, surrounded by natural forest. Why is this experience of living so close to Nature worth sharing? It has reawakened a more natural wild intelligence in her, the wild intelligence she remembers from childhood, which offers solutions to the current crises humanity faces.
The stillness of the predawn is mystical. Stars start to fade as colors gently emerge, the dawn erupting into a genesis of gratitude. Tangerine peeps through the eastern canopy, kookaburras light the world with their laughter, and the various levels of awakening find their counterpoint.
It rained during the night, so eucalypt fragrance is heady in the cold air. The majestic stringy bark gums sing their morning serenade, with their many shades of grey, green, honey, apricot, and new reddish leaves high above. These sentinels are home to a myriad of insects, birds and mammals in a vertical ecosystem that connects Cosmos and Earth.
Outside the back window of the cottage, a gray kangaroo leans against a big old tree stump scratching his shoulder, his comical movements bringing the first smile of the morning. The stump he leans against is alive, despite being all that’s left of a grandmother tree that fell many months ago during a massive storm. She continues to be fed and cared for by her surrounding siblings and offspring.
The consciousness of trees is so evident here. They move with the sun and respond to the weather, to music, to human emotions. They create beautiful atmospheres, just as they did for our ancestors when sacred groves were our first temples, celebrating the joy of nature. The biologist David Haskell expresses it well: “To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.”
The swamp wallabies in the orchard turn as the cottage door opens, their velvety ears up and twitching. Six tiny ducklings and their parents waddle and chat near the vegetable garden, arriving early to hang around for the daily avian restaurant to start. After the chickens are fed, the wild ducks take their turn, then currawongs and magpies, crimson rosellas, and later in the day the local gang of choughs and the many small birds that clean up the final remains of breakfast. Sometimes the sulphur-crested cockatoos bring cacophony with their larrikin antics.
The damp grassy earth molds to the soles of my feet like well-worn shoes as I venture out, the sounds, colors, smells, tastes, and feelings familiar and grounding. As a teenager, I travelled the world, searching for life’s treasure. As an adult, I have lived a nomadic existence across several continents while raising a family and working. As a mystic, I have travelled beyond the physical plane into realms where place is in consequential. And now the spiral of life has brought me back to this country, a dear old friend, alive and welcoming. The earth, water, plants, animals, stars, people and vibrations are woven into the intimacy of kinship. The flow of connection pulsates at all levels.
The trees were my healers when I was a small child. Reaching for that same healing, my breath tunes to the heartbeat of the majestic sentinels that ring the orchard, and my footsteps sync to their rhythm. Further down the hill there is a natural grove, so I sit on the leaf litter against a middle-sized trunk. The width is just right – not too wide, not too narrow – so that the energy gushing up through the roots and trunk into my back is the correct dose. The gentle embrace binds like the gravity that binds planets and stars, a soft force, a connecting force, a motherly force.
Space and stillness are an antidote to endless activity. There is time to notice things. The photons awaken to their morning dance as the sun warms the clear sky to blue. They have natural intelligence, wild intelligence. So do the trees. So does the Earth. So do we. As children we used it without thinking, sensing changes in the weather and wild life before they happened. As ants announced the rain and birds announced predators, we readily joined the conversation. This forest retreat is an opportunity to rekindle that naturalness.
The noise of a kookaburra alighting on the nearby fence wire draws my attention. His eyes are fixated on something below, but it is the fence line that triggers thoughts about the crazy notions surrounding our ownership of land. Ownership entitles us to do whatever we want, not only with the land itself, but also with the living creatures and resources existing on it. In a world view of kinship, ownership of anything living – including rivers, plants, animals and the Earth – is slavery.
Trees welcome us, water welcomes us, country welcomes us, giving and giving. We depend upon them for our very existence, yet we continue to pollute and rape them. I am not against human progress, as long as we are not greedy, possessive, or dominating. As small children we were in love and wonder with the world. Sitting here, that love and wonder is rekindled.
The family in the main homestead is stirring, and the radio news echoes across the valley. COP27 is happening in Egypt, the Russian-Ukraine war has taken another turn, the Yemeni war enters its eighth year with refugees continuing to flee for their lives, floods wash away whole communities in Australia, and we are stunned by the death of Perth schoolboy Cassius Turvey in a racially-fueled murder. Humans can be brutal as well as sublime.
Familiar structures and traditions are falling apart, and we swing between hope and despair within the space of a single day with tales of loneliness, anxiety, depression, addiction, social injustice, prejudice, fake news, polarization, environmental destruction, climate change, and more Covid. The sheer mythological scale of our crisis demands optimism, a window of opportunity to do something extraordinary. A sense of potential, a paradigm shift, as chaos is reined in with new vision and energy.
The gentle embrace binds like the gravity that binds planets and stars,
a soft
force, a connecting force, a motherly force.
It is a story repeated through out human history. Physicists know the story of entropy all too well – the gradual unravelling leading to collapse and disintegration – and the same laws apply to us. Then, out of the bones and ashes something new emerges, the phoenix rising.
Evolution is built upon long periods of imperceptible change punctuated by sudden quantum leaps of rapid change. We are quantum leaping, so our thinking is shifting. Change starts on the periphery, meeting resistance at first, gaining momentum slowly until it moves mainstream. Disciplines converge. The twentieth century paved the way, with an explosion of science and technology, the contemplative traditions, psychology, the arts, sociology, philosophy, the civil rights movements, the peace movements, the feminist movements, the social and environmental movements, all shifting our awareness. Each contributed, each is a part of the quantum leap from human-centric to inclusiveness.
In the 1930s, the anthropologist Robert Redfield proposed three human worldviews – Indigenous, Eastern, and Western. Each has its own value. After Redfield came other anthropologists who compared those worldviews. Now is the time to integrate them so new solutions emerge. I want to share a personal example of this. I first listened to the poem “Kulila” by Indigenous poet Ali Cobby Eckermann a couple of years back, and it touched me deeply. But at first I could not accept that she asks for every little story to be retold over and over – of past massacres, traumas, and sufferings. It made me uncomfortable because I believed retelling would recreate trauma. But then I listened to her poem again and felt the vibrations in my cells and psyche. Another dimension of storytelling emerged.
Evolution is built upon long periods of imperceptible change
punctuated by sudden
quantum leaps of rapid change.
We are quantum leaping, so our thinking is shifting.
It reminded me of a lifechanging experience forty years earlier, at the Shalako Ceremony in New Mexico. Every year at the winter solstice, the Zuni people come together to tell and enact their history from the beginning of time to the present moment. The shamans chant through the night, and everyone in the pueblo is present, from elders to newborns, some enacting the drama of the various characters in costume, others listening, witnessing. Everything is voiced, everything is integrated. Remembering is a moral imperative to move out of the shadows into the light. Kulila shone light on that awareness.
We have a lot to learn from each other. All three world views agree that change starts with awareness, and all three offer practices to expand awareness. But awareness alone is not enough. After awareness comes response – listening to each other, integrating, so the periphery can move into the mainstream. Only then will we be able to move beyond human-centricity. It was such a leap for humans to transition from an Earth-centric solar system to a Sun-centric solar system. Now it is time to transition from human-centric to inclusive.
After awareness comes response – listening to each other, integrating,
so the
periphery can move into the mainstream.
Only then will we be able
to move beyond human-centricity.
Our current crises are no surprise. We ignored the universal laws that affect our personal lives, our communities, the solar system, the universe itself, and the minutest particles that make up atoms. We are all made up of matter, energy and space. The outward and inward flows of energy exist in our breathing, in the tides, and in the day’s rhythms. The outward-flowing current started with the Big Bang and continues to expand into space. It brings diversity, entropy, action, complexity and restlessness. The inward-flowing current takes us back to the center of time and space, to stability. It is gravitational and connects everything in stillness, simplicity and peace. Each moment in time is a dance between these two currents, and both are needed for balance.
Sometimes the direction shifts dramatically, like the turning of a huge spring tide. Life takes a turn. It is not a conscious choice but an evolutionary imperative. It happens to us. Right now, we are in the middle of a global collective inward shift. Initially the changes may be hidden in gestation, but then they manifest on the periphery, and then they move into the mainstream. The rise of spiritual awareness, sustainable technologies, climate activism, kindness projects, and restorative justice movements are indications of this shift.
When we shine a light on our stories, even when they are tragic, the heart begins to accept. In that alchemy is the freedom of new possibilities and shifting worldviews. Many things cannot be fixed or brought back – cultures, languages, music, art, wisdom, plants, animals, ecosystems, and innocence – yet the tide is turning and flowing in a new direction.
The wheels of change turn slowly, because we cling to old pre-programmed habits and prejudices, even when they are no longer useful. And the clinging is stronger when we are stressed and anxious. Nowadays we accept stress as normal, the signature of our modern urban lifestyle. Try asking everyone in your family to put their mobile phones away for a week and you will discover how addicted we are to stress. Scientists call it the amygdala hijack, and in that hijacked state we defend our own interests and reinforce our ideals. We cling to our limited world view because the prefrontal cortex of the brain can’t function well. We stop thinking wisely. We don’t know how to slow down.
Sitting here, the stringy barks are telling me the same thing: slow down to think, slow down to be healthy and happy, slow down to love, slow down to awaken wild intelligence.
Sitting here, the stringy barks are telling me the same thing:
slow down to think, slow
down to be healthy and happy,
slow down to love, slow down to awaken wild intelligence.
Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
Elizabeth Denley
Elizabeth is the founding editor of Heartfulness Magazine. She is Australian, loves meditating, writing, playing and singing music, gardening, thinking, spending time with her two grown up children, and life in general. She has been a st... Read More
