Day 23: Healing Ground
- Jay Berghuis
- Sep 17, 2024
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 19, 2024
My bones already feel lighter and more solid.
This is healing ground.
I arrived back yesterday to one of my/our most sacred places. Rocky Mountain Ecodharma has been the land I’ve been called to work from as a soul guide and retreat leader since 2019. What a joy to be bumped down the gravel path in my wheelchair and heaved up by strong Uli onto the one level which will be home for the next six days.
WOW – we made it ! Well done, bones. Thank you all, my community of love, who have helped me get here. It would have been impossible without you. Because I’m unable to get to either my office or my home, because of stairs, all my packing was done over face time. Imagine! “No, not those pink socks - the ones with octopus on them! … Yes – slightly to the right, yes - that box of wool and the carton of masks hiding on the left side of my bookcase.” … Oh sorry – I forgot some stuff – here’s another list …” So much preparatory work being kindly done for me for days on end. …. And as I gratefully accepted over 200 photocopies made for me at Fed Ex: “Uh-oh … oops - this was not the doc I meant!”
Laughter is the best medicine for weary souls!
Here I am in the awesome beauty of this pristine wilderness of the Indian Peaks. Land that is loved and had been well-tended for centuries. Land of the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, and the Ute – who were brutally ejected from their summer hones. Yet, still, the ancient ones sing in the aspens and the glacial creek.
As I roll my way out onto the deck, I tearfully speak to the moose and the wildlife. “I can’t come out to see you this year, please come close and show yourselves to me.” A few hours later at sunset while my co-guide Jade and I met, across her shoulder I saw moose and we celebrated our joy.
“After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”
Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
When did you last bask in the ‘extravagance gesture’ of creation?
Look around you now – it’s everywhere!
How might taking more time cooling your eyes and your brain outdoors be a salve to the pressures and stressors of this hot world we live in?
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