Muir Woods

Recently I spent some time in Muir Woods, a national monument of ancient coastal redwood trees near the San Francisco Bay area.  For reasons I could not understand immediately, being with the trees made me feel overwhelmingly tender and reverent.  At some point, I wound up sitting with my back against an opening in the trunk of one of these giant trees.  Pressing myself into the base of this tree, I eventually had something like a conversation with it.  Over time, I've decided that this conversation is something I want to keep sharing with others:

It's more than beloved

The heartbeat of the earth is my own

This is the planet of contrast

Where love and beauty can pierce our ideas of separateness

And return us back to belonging 

Here, we get to both love and be this planet

In fact, it's possible that there are no mistakes

There's certainly no one to blame 

For the contrast in our own experience

We may choose to teach the ego to submit to this Unity

And even in times of great pain and discomfort 

There is a space of awareness that can care about this too,

Thus returning us to the kingdom of grace

By means of our own awakened hearts.

(- from my 'conversation' with the spirit of Muir Woods).