One of the hardest and most beautiful things in my human experience is being an empath. Reality can’t lie when you feel it through paper-thin skin. The wind changes and it speaks through me; the tree shifts and I notice.
When you feel the felt sense of the world, those whom hearts beat like drums making inaudible noises, but also those whom sap rushes through their veins, those whose whispers are shared through mycelium roots, and the tender plants whose essential-oil secretions speak through the winds are all audible. It’s impossible to not know how conscious, ancient, and wise the unspoken world remains to be when nature speaks tepidly present without sound.
I often wonder why no one else can hear these voices.
When one leaves their heart’s consciousness and lives in their minds, adapting to the mechanistic and capitalistic framework of society, it can be easy to forget that the world breathes too.
And from this space of seeing everything without a heartbeat as “dead” or “not alive,” one forgets we are in an active relationship with the world around us and doesn’t question what learning to have an active relationship with nature looks like.
From a mechanistic lens, one is stripped of the opportunity to see nature as a teacher or friend.
The heartbreaking void of too many not seeing nature as a highly developed consciousness to learn from, revere, and cultivate fierce tender care for seems to leave a cold and tinny echo throughout the modern capitalistic world.
From this void, clearcutting a forest becomes economically strategic instead of innately understood as the murder of an ancient and essential ecosystem.
Even further, the killing of our teachers: the trees, plants, birds, bugs, and animals that move in symbiotic patterns through these spaces—reminding us what is sustainable and balanced when we so often fall out of balance as humans—is erased.
We are not just clearcutting our forest: we are clearcutting the spaces that hold the medicine, wisdom, and complex systems that can bring us as a society back into balance and remembering.
When something is viewed as “not alive” it is “not connected.” So why would it matter if something is removed?
These are the sentences that make my heart ache and the fierce ocean of my heart wash from my eyes in confusion of the collective psychosis that has blinded so many to nature’s divinity and foundational importance.
My wish for this column is for it to be an explorative space for our minds to soften and our hearts to question, for the wind to feel a bit more alive, and a place where invitations to root deeper into the self and untangle our minds are also invitations to question deeper our relationship with what surrounds us.
As a herbalist, an artist, an animist, and a believer that everything is my teacher, I share here the wanderings of my heart so that maybe we can question reality a bit deeper as a collective, and in this wandering discover that life may be a bit more magical and nuanced than we were previously taught to question.