In early April, I had the honor of being on a team with 2 other awesome women. Our task was to facilitate an amazing Wild Women’s Weekend at Wilderness Awareness School for a group of 25 women from various walks of life. We all left transformed, empowered, enriched with the aliveness that comes from deep community, outdoor play, movement with and through the landscape, animal games, learning and tasting wild edible plants, finding cougar tracks, swinging sticks, singing and building fires in the rain. This weekend we learned skills, shared stories and as we explored the forest around us, we entered gateways of enchantment, gathering wonder and beauty through our pores and muscles.
I shared my passions of the way of YAY and Play, of Earthgym and using simple Earth tools like sticks and stones to move and receive from the forest’s magic and wisdom whisperings. We practiced using our bodies as instruments – tuning and toning our muscles to muse the myths from the lands. As we listen, and let the forest move us, the Earth song rises through our feet and expresses through and in us. …This is what we mean when we say, “Follow your feet and the Earth will teach.” What will she teach you? I have no idea, as it is different for each of us.
But as we listen, move and muse, as our heart is wide open in awe and beauty, the Earth song rises in our bones. We begin to be aware. We begin to care. And we begin to share. How do we live our wild, open, vital, creative, good life? How do we embody the joy and aliveness we constantly see and feel in Nature?
We are Nature and must return to Nature often. Mother Earth will teach us and show us. It just takes us showing up and participating….we must follow our feet and the Earth will teach….
This weekend was the first time I’ve ever shared “Rooted Branch” form with a group of people. My two favorite Earth tools are sticks and stones. In training with sticks, we do “open branch form” with both ends of the staff off the ground, “planted branch form” with one end firmly planted in the earth, and “rooted branch form” is playing in the trees themselves. This weekend, after exploring open and planted branch, I took our group on a wonder wander to a most magical forest fairy ballroom of effervescent, verdant moss-covered vine leaf maple trees. The trees are huge, and gorgeously green as their limbs stretch out and over the forest floor.
I introduced rooted branch form as a way of dancing with trees – a moving meditation that is tactile and sensory. I demonstrated leaning into, hanging from, breathing into the trees, dancing between the branches, always having a part of my body touching and leaning into the tree and network of trees. It is much like contact improv dance, but is in the forest. And I find this rooted branch form, is so nourishing, enlivening and grounding to my senses. For the women who weren’t dancers in my group, I shared it as a moving meditation — being with our trees through our senses, our bodies, our breath and touch. As one of my meditation teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh has said, “when you walk, walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”…and so we kissed and hugged the trees with our hands, awareness, bodies and being. It was so beautiful to move through the forest and see all these “nymphs” moving with the trees. As they moved “with the trees”, they in a sense “became the trees”.
To conclude our rooted branch explorations, I sent out a raven call to bring us back together and Raven in the trees called back.
