Earth Wisdom
little lessons from nature
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The Earth can teach us so many things if our way of living slows down enough to allow us to observe, notice, and form relationships with the other-than-human beings that live beside us. To live intimately with the land, plants, trees, animals, and more that are everywhere present around us means to form friendships and loving relationships embracing the role of both steward and student.
As the contours of late winter ever so gradually thaw into the first stirrings of spring there is much to see and learn in nature.
The magic of earth wisdom comes not just from the scientific inquiry of learning the identity of trees, plants, etc., but from knowing them so deeply that how they live begins to teach you lessons about how you can best live. This kind of nature-inspired living is wholesome, harmonious, resilient, and adaptive.
The first nugget of earth wisdom that I’ve gathered during this season was taught by the bluebird.
Bluebirds
Bluebirds are special. They are associated with happiness, and that alone makes you feel blessed when they share the land with you. Last week, on a sunny, warmish February day, I glanced out the window to see a bluebird pair house shopping. They won’t actually begin their family for a few months yet, but they were doing their due diligence and checking out all of the birdhouses set up on our property. I watch them do this every year.
He generally lands first on the top of the pole as if to point out a possible domicile for their nest. She arrives, pokes her head in and out a few times, and finally decides to enter. She’s in and out a few times, and then he does the same before they fly off to inspect another option. I watch them do this every year, and every year, they ultimately return to the same favorite nesting box that they have used for many years.
Is it the same pair, or is it their offspring now grown up and returning to the place of the birth? I don’t know for sure, but this has been going on for more than five years.
As I’ve watched the bluebirds and meditated on their househunting ritual I silently ask them what is the wisdom of this behavior.
This is what the bluebirds have taught me.
It is a great virtue to be open to new things, new possibilities, ideas, and beliefs. It’s good to let the mind journey far and wide. However, the thing we most often need is a return to what we have always known. A reaffirmation that where we began is where we need to return to. Going home is healing, like good medicine for the soul.
Blackbirds
Every year in late September, I begin to see great flocks of blackbirds. These are flocks of mixed types of birds. Mostly grackles, but also a fair amount of red- winged blackbirds, some are starlings and a few cow birds are also sometimes mixed in. They stay together all winter and into the early spring. They are raucous; their collective wingbeats are nearly as unnerving as their appearance en-mass perched in bare trees in such numbers as to look like black leaves creating a gloomy canopy. When a river of blackbirds descends on my bird feeders, they will clean them out in no time at all, even if they’ve been freshly filled with pounds of seed. This year, in particular, we have almost daily visits from the blackbird flocks.
Sitting with these noisy, quarrelsome flocks, I’ve been taught a few things.
Here’s what I learned.
Community is important for safety, and survival. Communities need to be founded on some similar defining characteristic yet there can be quite a bit of difference among individuals within the community. Even well founded communities experience conflict and quarrels, and those must be temporary and resolved quickly for the community to provide the maximum benefit to the members. Well organized communities that work for mutual aid can fend off hard times.
The Sun
Each evening, I can watch the sunset from the windows in our kitchen and sunroom. It’s quite a fascinating thing to see it move along the horizon as the wheel of the year turns. At the winter solstice, it was far to the south (left in the photo, likely out of frame in this view.)
When the sun sets directly behind the shed, it will mark Ostara, the vernal equinox. After that, it will continue to travel north, far out of the frame of this photo. Once we reach the summer solstice, it will begin its relentless journey southward, stopping behind the shed at the autumnal equinox until, once again, at the winter solstice, it is setting far to the south.
We’ve lived here for nearly fourteen years, and over that time, I have watched the sun, predictably, eternally, and with a powerful sense of ordained destiny, move back and forth along the horizon.
This yearly movement reminds me of the other great teacher in my life, the Tarot, specifically card number ten in the major arcana, The Wheel of Fortune.
The Wheel of Fortune card is often thought of as representing the vagaries of life. Success, luck, prosperity, and happiness are toppled by the arrival of a crisis that brings loss, poverty, bad luck, and unhappiness, with the Wheel of Fortune turning many times during our lives, and our lives merely the microcosom of the greater fortunes of countries, governments, empires, and civilizations. This is true, but at the heart of the Wheel of Fortune and the Sun is the core concept of movement, cyclical movement. Cyclical movement implies a pattern, and a pattern suggests purpose.
Here’s what I’ve learned from meditating on the course of the Sun over the years…
Change happens. In the short span of our life changes can often seem random, meaningless and cruel. Good fortune can also feel as if it comes out of the blue with no rhyme or reason making repeating that stroke of luck impossible. But the Sun has instructed me otherwise. There is a greater unseen force that ordaines the patterns of prosperity and poverty, peace and war, and there is a time for everything. Spiritual beings oversee and carry out the workings of the universe’s unseen realms and the patterns ordained for our lives. Each movement, each change, each event is overflowing with meaning and purpose. Sometimes we are brought to our extremes, like the Sun at the solstices and sometimes we find the sweet spot, the moments of harmony like at the equinoxes. The important thing to remember is that nothing is meaningless and random, everything even the dark times are ordained and have a purpose for the greater good of your soul.
Skunk Cabbage
One of the very first native plants to emerge in early spring in my neck of the woods is skunk cabbage. It grows in soggy wet soils along creeks and streams and on the margins of inland wetlands. Its pungent fragrance is reminiscent of rotting flesh. This putrid perfume attracts flies, which are needed to pollinate the skunk cabbage.
Other than its smelly odor, the skunk cabbage is a wonderful plant. It’s quite good looking, emerging as tightly bundled bright green leaves, which turn a mottled purple. Skunk cabbage doesn’t have traditional petals but rather a spathe that acts like a hood around the flower. They’re rather alien-looking despite being a native plant, but so are many other plants in the arum family, like jack-in-the-pulpit.
Skunk cabbage often emerges when there is still snow on the ground. To adapt to this, they have the ability to heat up their flowers up to 20⁰F warmer than the surrounding air temperature, a process known as thermogenesis. This allows the spathes to melt the snow that is covering the ground.
After years of tramping along creek beds and stream banks in the later winter woods and observing skunk cabbage I’ve finally sat down long enough to listen to them.
Here’s what I discovered…
Sometimes things stink in the beginning. A new exercise routine feels exhausting. You’re incompetant at a new skill you’re trying to learn. A new creative project is a mess of missteps and bad choices until you hone your vision. In the early stages, before you have a firm grasp on what you’re doing and where you’re going with something, and those around you are critical and don’t believe you will ever make anything of this new venture you need to make your own heat. You must find the internal motivation and determination to deal with the stink so that the pollination, fruiting and flowering of your idea can flourish.
Now it’s your turn. What lessons have you learned from mother earth and her children. What earth wisdom have have you discovered? Sahre you insights and experiences learning from the earth.
The comments section is a safe and welcoming space to share your insights and experiences.
Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read them all and try to respond to each one.
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