This will be the first of four journal/creative projects. Its intention is to be

This will be the first of four journal/creative projects. Its intention is to begin to re-inhabit nature in a more relational way that was once common place to our descendants. Some would say this ancestral knowing still resides in our bones. Please find a place out-of-doors that is surrounded more by natural environments than human-made ones. Perhaps it will be the same place each time. Let it be a place that you feel safe and comforted in and that provides a more open vulnerable place within yourself. These “journal entries” can later be worded through personal reflections, a poem/song or wordless through some creative medium that came through your experience out on the land. If you choose to do an artistic venture like working with clay or paints, to express your experience, please upload pictures of your creation and then include a description of what the experience was like for you. Journal Entry/Creative Project #1 Wild Geese by Mary Oliver You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Watch: https://aeon.co/videos/aristotle-was-wrong-and-so-are-we-there-are-far-more-than-five-senses https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_pluznick_you_smell_with_your_body_not_just_your_nose Read: https://mindfulnessexercises.com/how-to-practice-mindfulness-in-nature/ Some of us may be familiar with mindfulness exercises to help regulate the nervous system. In this exercise experience yourself through all of your senses. Let the landscape around you penetrate you in a more visceral way. See if you can touch deeper into what Mary Oliver’s poem expresses letting “ the soft animal of your body love what it loves”. Give yourself at least 30 minutes (more is better) to really settle into your surroundings. Then write or create something out of your experience. Postive or “negative”.