Here is a daily practice for connecting your purpose with the web of life.
Begin by sending your energetic roots deep into the earth and ground yourself. Bring your awareness to your heart, take a few deep breaths through the center of your chest, and reach your arms toward divine light.
Now, ask spirit what work is being called through you today. This will be your true work, not mundane tasks or chores on your to do list, but something deeper and more meaningful. This will be work that energizes you, satisfies your spirit, lifts you and others up.
Now, with your voice, using drums, rattles, bowls, or other sound instruments, describe the work you are called to do. Speak, sing, let your body and the space around you be filled with the vibrations of the sound your create as you lift your voice to the heavens.
Let the sound of your voice rise up and join with the web of life. You are sending the frequency of your wishes and dreams, your unique offerings into the universe.
The frequencies you create rise up and join with the web of life, affecting the vast network of energetic filaments in unique patterns and ripples. As you do this practice, you are creating and inviting new possibilities, healing rifts in the fabric of life, focusing your mind body spirit and emotions on the work that only you can offer, creating new connections in the web of life.
As you send your hopes intentions and dreams into the web of life and receive guidance from spirit, you strengthen build and rebuild the network connecting all living beings.
One day as a child you woke up to the awareness and consciousness of yourself as an individual human being – that you have a body, that you breathe, your heart beats, you can move and speak and think and act with free will. You realized that you seem to be separate from those around you.
You spent some years early on learning how to master and live in your body. Perhaps it was an adjustment for your spirit, learning to live within the limitations of the physical world.
Newborn
Somehow beyond your conscious awareness, you spirit ended up inhabiting a body at this time in the history of our planet. You ended up in this place. It was no accident!
You as an individual may not yet know the larger meaning of your own life or how it fits in with the larger patterns and connections between events and peoples and living creatures, the land and oceans, the big picture of life on Earth.
Know this: The web of life is the big picture, the universal pattern composed of infinite smaller patterns and connections that interweave, interact, and overlap with each other creating an achingly beautiful tapestry of the whole.
Even if you consciously did not choose this particular life or the conditions of your life, you have been blessed with a span of years to live.
Spring Tree
You have been given the opportunity to experience joy and laughter, to know grief and heartache, to heal from grief and heartache, to seek and maintain connection with others, to learn about love, to experience growing older, to become a grandparent one day perhaps, to develop your talents, to do those things that satisfy your soul.
All that you do with kindness and good intentions blesses and strengthens the web of life.
Think of your life as a gift – the greatest gift you did not ask for. You are here now, so make the most of it!
Messages given by spirit ring true to heart and mind, resonate deep within the human heart. Spirit speaks in symbol and metaphor. Spirit communicates with you when you ask for guidance. Spirit reveals how all beings depend on each other.
Spirit heals, it does not judge or curse. Spirit reveals oneness and belonging, not division and separation.
Spirit selects no enemies, no villains, no fall guys, deems no one less worthy than another.
Grasshopper and purple cone flower
Spirit knows and sees the wholeness of all that is. Each living being is accounted for in the web of life, each blade of grass. Spirit does not focus on flaws or faults or rain punishment upon those deemed unworthy by human decree and practice.
Spirit reweaves the tapestry of life when it becomes worn, torn or ripped by those who separate themselves from the fundamental truth of all existence, We are All One
I am filled with gratitude for the long and beautiful life I lived under the sky, rooted to the Earth in this place.
I remember the first burst of life within me. I felt the swelling of my tiny fluff encased seed, resting in the mud, taking on moisture and warmth many decades ago.
Cottonwood seeds
My embryonic roots slowly unrolling as has been the pattern for all those who came before me for the entire history of this Earth. My roots obeying the ancient call to life, pushing my seed open, surprisingly strong, beginning to grasp the soil to reach downward as if pulled by a magnetic force, to draw in nourishment, and sustain my life, to hold me here.
Now my tightly folded seed leaves, pale from their time in the dark enclosed seed space soak in the first particle of sunlight through the crack in the seed casing. They reach out as though starved for light and unfold and harden and reach upward and multiply under the sun’s life giving love, with nourishment and moisture from my roots.
This is how my life began, dear ones. The ancient will to live and survive and thrive on this planet was encoded in my seed as it is in all living beings – those that move freely about and those rooted to the Earth.
Grandmother Cottonwood, winter
What love, what gratitude I feel for the magnificent web that connect us all in the never ending dance of life on this planet.
Here are several humble and easy tips from GCW based on her tree wisdom and observations of humans during her long life.
Tip #1: Spend time in nature every day to renew your relationship with with the web of life. In nature, you can release human caused worries, tensions, anxieties and find the peace and calm at your center.
Here you can walk and move your body freely. You can swing your arms, you can run, you can sing to your heart’s content. You can catch a snowflake on your tongue. You can climb or lean against a friendly tree. You can sit on a rock and soak in the sun, observing the life surrounding you and the beating heart within you.
Everything you experience in nature can be seen as a mirror of your inner self and you can learn from this; the dark forests, rolling prairies, deeply rooted grasses, feathered creatures of the air and treetops, grazing animals, fur bearers, scampering tree dwellers, the moods of weather and sky, the quality of light, industrious insects, magnificent spreading trees, tangled undergrowth, flowing streams, silver ponds, changing seasons…
Nature places no demands on you, makes no judgments about you, has no agenda for you to follow. Here you can be yourself. Here you can reconnect with the carefree and happy child within you.
Grandmother Cottonwood, winter
Tip #2: Hug a tree now and then. If you are tuned into your body in a sensitive way, you will notice a change in your energy as you hug a tree. You might also notice the energy of the tree. It may feel loving, welcoming, vital, peaceful, calm, patient. As you hug one of our representatives, you connect to the grounded earthy energy of the tree, and that will energize you!
Tip #3: Root to the Earth. You’re in a body and thus you belong here. You are meant to live fully in your body, not spending the majority of your time in your mind. If you do, eventually you will crash like a weak rooted tree in a high wind. To root yourself, visualize sending your energetic roots deep into the earth so you are anchored to the soil and bedrock. Now you can pull Earth energy into your body through your roots and know that you belong here.
Tip #4: Reach to the Light. Take up your allotted space in the canopy, so to speak. Soak in life giving energy that is your birthright and grow toward the sunlight. A tree will never turn away from the light, but grow always toward it, reaching and reaching and soaking in as much as possible every day of the growing season.
Grandmother Cottonwood
If you are alive and reading this, you are in your growing season. Make the most of it! Claim the light that is yours without apology.
If others are overshadowing you, find safe ways to find the light that is yours. You might start small and build on your successes over time.
When you are rooted and reaching to the light, when you spend time in nature, when you hug a tree now and then, you fully alive in body, mind and spirit. You are free! You are participating in full spectrum of human possibilities from the earthy to the sublime.
In this way, you connect and know your oneness with the web of life.
Dear friends, thank you for your patience while I paused my blog due to an illness in the family. My family member is doing well. We’re back now. Many blessings, Betty
Now, in the words of GCW:
If I could weep, I would not weep, for our Earth and her many inhabitants have survived upheaval, turmoil, danger, disease, war, plague, drought, famine, violence, death and destruction over the eons life on this planet has existed.
Beneath the fear, the terror, the hate and destruction seen in current events, beneath the profound deprivation visited upon so many families lies the spirit, untouched by death and destruction, enduring, gaining in wisdom from lifetime to lifetime. Unbreakable, unshakeable.
At the heart of your spirit lies peace.
GCW in Midwinter
At the heart of your spirit lies a loving and profound silence in which all things are possible.
At the heart of your spirit lies the unfolding of love, the love that carries us from lifetime to lifetime with joyful anticipation, that permeates the billions of living beings on Earth, that infuses the cells and DNA of all living things.
The very web of life is composed of the energy of this love. All spirits are joined as one in this magnificent web.
When times are difficult, when you feel fear, when all you’ve known is breaking apart, tune into your spirit for the wide angle view. Like a soaring bird, your spirit will help you rise up and see your life, your family, your community, the events of the day from 1000 feet up.
When you are able to gain this spirit perspective you can feel the temporariness of fearful and dangerous events, the immensity of peace and love surrounding and permeating this world, this universe.
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.
The collective dreaming of all living creatures here creates the Earth we see and experience.
What Earth do you dream of? You can help create the world you wish to see through your dreaming and visualization, your intentions joined with the dreams of many others.
Amazing spider web
Earth’s regenerative power and potential lies in her seeds, roots, her living soil, her atmosphere, her myriad living creatures of all descriptions. It lies in the human will to live, survive, thrive and endure, the ability to envision a hopeful and healthy future.
All is in constant motion, constant change – birth, growth, blossoming, setting fruit, waxing, waning, decline, death, rebirth, growth.
All Earths creatures together are one living organism. It will not do for one part of the whole to do battle with another for that would be to declare war against oneself.
We can dream ourselves a renewed Earth, restored to balance and harmony, restored to wholeness with compassion for all.
When our Earth is in balance the web of life sustains itself.
Let yourself be changed by this light with higher healthier vibrations, greater wisdom, stronger energy and personal power, new insights into your life, less judgment about what is, a higher level of well being and flow, more room in your heart for the giving and receiving of love, a greater capacity for unconditional love.
Yellow swallowtail butterfly on wild bergamot
Become one with the light, dissolve into it, let it heal and move you.
For today, stand tall and do what source calls you to do, those activities that satisfy your soul. Your calling from spirit fits in with the great pattern of life on earth and the grand design of the universe.
You are capable of this, you are called to the work that you know as your purpose. The vibrations you offer in carrying out your purpose are required in the great symphony of life on Earth.
Bumble bee on purple coneflower
Excuses do not become you. Make up your mind, set your intention and do the work that is drawn through you!
Let your vibrations be clear, let them be strong and powerful, let them emanate from you without reserve. When this is so, you are a sun, you radiate a quiet grace, an inner power.
You doing the work you are called to do creates the future, weaves the web of life.
In my new state of expansion, I feel a freedom like I imagined flying would be, soaring like the turkey vultures that inhabit the wooded valley I once called home. Lighter than air. Free from gravity.
Soaring Turkey Vultures
My new perspective and existence as spirit gives me exquisite sensitivity to the frequencies and vibrations, the interconnected web of energy in all things. I feel the vibrations of the humble earthworm, the microscopic bacteria in the soil that endow fertility, the shy and gliding snakes winding their way through the prairie grasses, belly to belly with our Earth, tasting and smelling the rich soil, the dancing stream, rippling in the sunlight, flowing steadily without resistance to the river.
Prairie grasses
I see the empty place in the canopy where I once stood. I grew tall and spread my limbs wide. I felt joyful to live in my beloved home. Once upon a time…
Now I see that other trees and rooted beings will soon shoot up and claim the sunny space I left behind. taking their place in the canopy. They will soak in the sunshine, draw up moisture from the soil, spread their limbs wide. They will endure lightning, high winds, rain storms, freezing cold, wilting heat. They will thrive and survive through adversity, through lean years and fat years.
They will grow as I did, reaching to the light, sending down roots without resistance. Expanding year by year. Loving life!
Ask Grandmother Cottonwood 