Today, we’re looking at the grasslands. We’re also drawing inspiration about what it is to live with reverence from the Prairie Dog, a creature of the grasslands:
“Every day the prairie dogs emerge from their dens before dawn. They press their hands together as if in prayer, and stand and watch the sunrise for twenty or thirty minutes at a time. In the evening, they turn toward the setting sun and again press their paws together, as in utter stillness they watch the light fade and night descend.
“Author Terry Tempest Williams spent a summer observing the rituals of a small community of Utah prairie dogs, creatures of the grasslands. As she grew to understand them, they appeared to her to hold a reverence for their place in the world that we, in our fractured lives, have lost. Williams asks, ‘What do they know that we have forgotten?'”
[From “Reclaiming the Wild Soul” White Cloud Press, October 2014]
How do you show reverence for your place in the world? What is it that you have forgotten? What is it that you long to remember about your connection to the Earth?
Today I head off to attend my brother’s memorial. He died in December and the loss I feel is profound and still barely navigable. But I am comforted by seeing the signs of spring burst around me, irrepressible. I know this is part of my own nature, the ability to come back from the darkness. So today, I chose a short excerpt from the chapter on “Resilience” in the grasslands. (The photo was taken by my husband when we were hiking in Yorkshire)
“The day comes when something rises in you out of winter’s earth. Grass, stalk, leaf unfurl beneath a lemon sun. The juice and joy of the world revisit you. Imagination stirs; a poem arises. The great greening of the soul begins.
“Youthful, playful, pushy, green has no patience with restraint. It bursts on the scene and spreads over the land, freely and fully. It is the way you feel when you’re in love. It springs in you, beats in your blood, streams through your veins. It is experienced in sap, and sass, and gusto. You could no more stop it than a field can resist the greening of spring.
“Green is the dominant color of flora and fauna and all that is most resilient in you. It is the ever-flowing expression of imagination. It is the creative energy released at the beginning of the Universe that streams through the sun to Earth to be captured by plants. It is the food we eat, the fuel that fires us, the spark that drives us.”
[From “Reclaiming the Wild Soul,” White Cloud Press, October 2014]
How do you experience your inner resilience?
