There are times in life when humans who live through freezing winters must walk on ice. It cannot be avoided.
To walk safely on the ice, total awareness is required in the present moment. Each movement and each step forward much be considered, balance maintained.
Those who have no choice but to walk on ice must have an eye for the safest places to place their feet. These are the spots that will provide the most traction. This knowledge and body wisdom is based on a lifetime of walking on ice.
GCW and Icy Path
Sometimes the path ahead is clear for easy walking without the walker having to consider each step. Then once again there may be packed snow or glassy ice patches on the path. It is beautiful, yet potentially dangerous.
You who walk on ice must know when to walk flat footed, when to shuffle, when to stride forward without planning your every step. Thoughts of fear or anger will deflect your attention and bring you down.
Such is life in a human body, dear ones. Sometimes you will have to carefully pick and choose your steps, slowly making progress through the dangerous places, finding traction, trusting the Earth will support you.
You must do your part as well and listen to the wisdom of your body, earned through many years of experience walking on ice.
A new day lightens the sky in the east. This is life giving you another opportunity to start fresh. Life allows you the time to reevaluate and renew your life, to grow into the person your spirit calls you to become.
Nature’s rhythms show that you can begin again after setbacks and illness, after disappointments and sorrows. Spring follows winter without fail. The moon cycles through her phases each month. Storms roar through the valley pushing much old growth to the ground, leaving food and light for new life to reach to the sun.
A tree cut off at the ground will sent up suckers reaching for the light. Tender new grass appears after a prairie fire. Green shoots of crocus push through the melting snow in March. The world greens and leafs out finally after a hard winter softens into a joyful spring.
You too after the fires, storms or winters of life have passed may send forth green shoots, leaves, and blossoms and renew yourself. This may look and feel like new energy flowing through your veins, new ideas and creative projects, new vibrancy, a renewed sense of humor and playfulness…passion for life.
The sun will rise again and you will have another day to move toward becoming who you are at the level of your soul, to choose a new thought that supports you in place of the old stale thoughts, to choose a different pattern of being, to tune yourself to a more pleasant feeling, to take the first small step to realizing your dreams.
Of course, patience is your friend as these changes take time and attention and perseverance. Trust and give yourself the grace to accept yourself as you are while at the same time moving toward the new way of being that you desire.
Open your heart to this most amazing gift of a new day.
Yes, dear ones, I return to a favorite theme. I speak of grounding once more because it is so vital to your well-being!
When your body and mind are exhausted, when you feel as though you can’t take another step, when you are depleted, shaky or frantic, recharge your power supply by reconnecting with Mother Earth.
Plug in and let her entrain your energy to her heartbeat, the rhythm of our planet, to the reality of her loving support.
When you are ungrounded you may seem to float away like an untethered space walker. Humans ungrounded deplete themselves and try to compensate for a lack of Earth energy, try to find a power supply elsewhere – food, drink, drugs…?
When you are grounded, you are filled with Earth energy pulled in from the chakras at the soles of your feet. This energy rises up within your body to anchor and root you to your home. This is mother Earth’s way of telling you – you belong here, this is your home.
Rediscover your power supply in the most simple and natural way.
Walk stand or sit with your bare feet on the earth, on grass a beach, in mud or soil. Lay under a tree. Hug a tree and lean there for a few moments. Visualize yourself as a tree and send your roots deep into the Earth. Gently massage your feet. Walk in nature. Rub the soles of your feet with a stainless steel spoon.
As you are here in a body, you are meant to live fully within the parameters and limitations, joys sorrows and challenges of this physical existence. Getting grounded will help you be here now and experience the fullness of life.
Practice simple grounding daily and recharge your batteries. Live in your body. Live more fully as you are meant to.
Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.
Dear friends, I feel a great heaviness in this world right now.
I can feel the vibrations of your tension, the tightening of your shoulders and throat, the churning in your gut, the stress, the weight of worry many are feeling right now in this time of uncertainty.
For those who are worried, frightened – lean against me and those of my kind, the extended family of trees. Enter into our friendly energy, rest your weight on us, we will support and calm you, help you know what is real and solid and true.
Grandmother Cottonwood
Tune yourselves to our quiet and subtle frequency. Listen with your whole body and heart, your wise self.
We will help you know you are not alone, that life goes on, that you are safe in this moment.
Know this. All trees and the collective spirits of nature – animal and plant, insect, reptile, amphibian, all angelic beings, your human ancestors who have crossed to the light, all spirits or land air and sea, of heaven and Earth, of the Universe are with you always.
Male Cardinal in winter
Please call on us for advice, kindness, companionship, spiritual nourishment, comfort. You are not alone. You are surrounded by love.
Tune into our quiet and loving voices to steady and calm your anxious minds.
When you come back to your roots, you rediscover your true self. The soul of you, the deep center of you that knows your purpose here, that knows and accepts the truth of you you are.
You were born with this wisdom, you knew your spiritual roots as a child. Can you remember?
When you live from your true self, your roots nourish you and connect you to the Earth, your home and your spirit. The roots of your true self are roots of integrity, of self respect, of knowing who you are.
Only humans can choose to appear as something they’re not, to misunderstand and cut off their connection to spirit, to disconnect from their true selves.
Then you are like a tree without roots, vulnerable to storms, high winds, and stress, weaker than you might be, disconnected from your strength and source of nourishment.
Uprooted Cottonwood tree
Dear ones, if you have become disconnected from your wise self, you can renew yourself and regain wholeness. The damage is not permanent, you can regenerate your life and regain your power.
You are flexible and resilient. You are a survivor! Send you roots deep and reach to the light!
When you feel distraught, take a moment, bring your awareness to your heart and breathe. Let your breath soothe you.
When you feel unsettled, ground yourself by walking barefoot on the Earth, or hugging a tree and come home to nature. Let the sights and sounds, the smells of nature calm you.
When you feel ungrounded, come home to your roots. Plug yourself into Earth energy by hugging a tree or imagining your energetic roots sinking deeply into the Earth.
When you feel exhausted, rest awhile and come home to your inner spirit, the part of you that never tires, that lasts forever, that will never lead you wrong.
When you are worried or anxious, come home to this present moment of your life. Release regrets for the past and worries for the future for several beats of your heart and feel the peace as you breathe in and out.
Come home to your heart and body, to the present moment. In this way, you will live a true and authentic life.
You who are alive at this moment in time, those who are called to live here upon this Earth – You are needed now more than ever to be at the top of your game, to keep yourself clear of emotional clutter and baggage, to be clear and open channels for spirit for the specific gifts and talents you bring to this place and time, the home your spirit has chosen for you.
All who can, this is the time to stand tall in the light of the divine. This is the time to root deeply to our home, the Earth.
Grandmother Cottonwood
This is the time to hold your ground, maintain your light, keep yourselves attuned to the frequencies of life. This is the time to know your truth and live by it.
This is the time to love and cherish every breath, every beat of your heart. This is the time to access the power deep within yourself. This is the time to open to those beloved people in your life and love them with your whole heart, leaving judgment behind.
This life of the spirit is a mystery. There is no beginning, no end. While your spirit inhabits your body, there is only the river of now in which you have the power to act.
Grandmother Cottonwood
It is time to surrender to spirit’s plan for you, to cease any dithering and get to work!
It is time to dedicate yourself to the flow of inspiration and energy that is drawn through your being and create our world anew.
So much has been lost this year, so much destroyed by wild fire, high winds, furious storms, a deadly pandemic. Now it is time to rebuild and create new lives from the ashes.
Grandmother Cottonwood
Will you rebuild on the same models, in the same places with the same materials, the same ideas? Will you stay with what worked in the past?
Take into account all that has changed as you plan to create and rebuild. Sands shift, weather and climate change, fires and winds roar through, people die, babies are born. Rebuild and recreate your new reality that is now.
You are called to embrace the present moment and the coming moment and the next and the next. You are called to be flexible and resilient. You are called to stay relevant to your own life,
You are called to take the time to mourn what has been and let it go, to face the present and future with eyes open. Can you do this with resolve? Can you do this without preconceived notions of what should be?
Where there is destruction and damage in your life can you rebuild, renew, and restore to a newer and better present? When your creations no longer serve you can you let them go with grace, move on, clear out, rebuild life from the ground up, one brick, one stone at a time?
What feels like destruction? Leaving a longtime relationship, moving to a new town, losing a loved one or a job, losing your home, injury, disease, accident …
These destructive events are “back to square one times” in the the constantly unfolding creative process called life. They can create new realities that may usher in fresh new thoughts, feelings, habits, ways of being and relating.
If you are brittle and unyielding, the storms of life may break you. you may find the damage difficult to repair. You may get stuck without a framework for creating a new life from the wreckage of the old.
Grandmother Cottonwood
When you are flexible like the willow tree and bend with life’s high winds, you will build strength needed to weather the inevitable destructive events, earthquakes, volcanoes of life. This flexibility will help you create and invent new ways of living in your present moments.
It is time to create new life affirming ways of being, living, thinking, and relating in the world that is now.
My crown and trunk have been severed and cut up, shredded, hauled away to be burned or used for mulch in someone’s garden … I am only a stump now…
…but my roots still live! New tender green sprouts rise up now, between my thick old bark and what was once my sapwood. Anyone can count the rings now in my exposed heartwood and tell my age.
Grandmother Cottonwood
My little shoots absorb the intense summer sunlight, growing taller each day, shooting up into the sunlit open sky. Trusting life again, fragile, yet stubborn.
I am a survivor!
Dear ones, does new life what to renew itself through you after the storms and traumas you’ve been through? What new growth, new ideas, new energy unfold into your consciousness and begin to move you? What new inner stirrings let you know you are not yet dead, not yet defeated, not yet ready to give up?
Contemplate this question: Is it time to recommit to your life here, to choose this life you’re living once again with full knowledge that life can bring hurt, pain, loss frustration, trauma, injury and also joy, happiness, contentment, blessing, wholeness, bliss, transcendence?
I know that you are stubborn, you endure, you are a survivor. Why do I know this? Because you are here now in a body on our planet Earth at this time. You are meant to be here! Somehow, for reasons we may never know, all living beings have chosen this life even in these difficult times.
Just when you think all is lost, pay attention to your inner world, your spirit and you feel the stirrings of renewed life and unfolding growth inside, the will to live. Give it time to grow stronger, to take root, to gain momentum.
GCW, new growth
You as a human being can choose life again and again throughout your span of years. With all its uncertainty and impermanence, choose life.
You are given a span of time to live and love upon our sweet green planet.
You are given many opportunities to hear and learn from the quiet voices of nature spirits that are everywhere on our Earth.
Locusts buzz. They provide the soundtrack of late summer. Spotlit red bud leaves dance like green hearts in dappled light and shade. All is green and alive.
Red winged blackbird in flight
Birds spread their wings, trees spread their leaves to life.
Yellow swallowtail glides between earth and treetops bringing grace, beauty, awe, and enchantment.
Yellow swallowtail butterfly on zinnia
These winged and leafy messengers from spirit will help guide you, calm you, lighten your heart. They will help you know your rightful place in the great web of life in which all living beings are one.
Learn their language, the quiet whispering of the nature spirits.
Ask Grandmother Cottonwood 