It’s before dawn on Sunday morning and the house is quiet. The faint smell of smoke from the forest fires in the distance has finally arrived.
The record fires we are experiencing in Canada’s effects are being felt in the United States brought to mind the growth process of one of my favorite trees, the giants of our forests: the sequoia (also known as the Sierra Redwood).
Some of these beauties live and grow for 3,000 years which makes me wonder what these silent seers have experienced observing so many generations of our ancestors living out their lives under their canopies. I can imagine an early settler or a native family leaning against the base of the trunk to rest or to seek shade from the hot sun or look up between the branches at the view of the same stars and constellations that we still see today.
Next week I’ll be starting a special summer series to do a deep dive into better understanding our own “growth rings” and true nature to help you experience the most majestic and fully expressed version of yourself in this lifetime. To be deeply rooted here on the earth and reach upwards towards the heavens to actualize your highest human potential.
But first, what do forest fires have to do with any of this?
What I have found incredible about these sequoia trees is that they are born of fire.
Without the heat from a fire, they cannot reproduce.
There are three things fire does to help them grow:
It punches a hole in the forest allowing more light and water for the seedlings.
It heats the cones high up in the Sequoia trees without harming the trees so the green cones can open up and eventually will cause them to rain the seeds on the ground below.
It clears away all the leaves and debris that have built up on the ground. They need to be on the bare minimum soil in order to germinate well.
Winter storms bring a blanket of snow and the spring sun melts to create the perfect wet and warm seeds to help the seedlings take root and sprout. New life among the ashes and the seedlings become the full-growth forests we see today and some of them tower over 300 feet tall.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this…
This species of tree needs fire to open its cones to let the light in for its growth.
It’s hard not to notice not the parallels with our own human experience.
I thought it was also remarkable that 98% of the seedlings die in their first year.
Sometimes it seems like the natural world provides all the metaphors that the soul needs for its growth and for us to better understand ourselves and to have our true nature revealed to us.
Our personal fires and life challenges are a brilliant tailor-made curriculum to help us grow into the fullness of who we really are. Without them, like the pine cones, we just don’t crack open enough to let the light in for our own becoming.
We can remain closed up, tight as a bud like a young green cone. It can sometimes feel like 98% of our own dreams and resolutions can fall away like those seedlings die off in their first year before they ever take root.
In a balanced climate, we can use our fires like slow burns to bring new life and transform. We can germinate our deepest desires once we burn away the surface desires that can keep us distracted and busy toiling for decades and without challenges we may never really feel the inner shift that we’re here to experience as humans.
To have a hole punched in our lives, an opening for a clean slate and a fresh start is something available to ALL of us when things begin to feel unbearably hot for us and burn off what is unnecessary on the surface of things that clutter up our experience.
The good news is that you are right where you need to be for what is about to come next. The benefit of the fires in your life may not be apparent just yet, but someday you’ll be able to look back and see for yourself the perfection of ALL of it.
It’s a bit like dendrochronology (dating tree rings). You can see the exact year of the different atmospheric conditions during different periods of your life like growth phases.
Our lives are like raw material or timber (unprocessed wood) and can be molded with our minds into whatever we can imagine we’d like to create. Interesting to note that it was Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) that was the first person to mention that tree rings form annually and even their thickness and color are determined by the conditions under which they have grown.
The same is true of our lives.
Last week I wrote about skydiving and how it seemed to offer a life-affirming experience similar to the spiritual awakening available to all of us. I drew a parallel to how fully living our lives by simply following the cosmic crumbs to what we are pulled towards can stretch us or challenge us to help us have our own realizations and to see things from new perspectives.
This week we can begin to really take in that it’s from our own personal fires that our minds are forged to create the forests we experience.
No matter what the adversity, the loss, or what you are currently facing based on what you have knowingly created (or subconsciously miscreated) with your own powerful mind there is a way out.
Once we’re willing to accept and surrender to what is and evacuate, then anything is possible.
It boggles my mind to think of our interconnectedness with trees. The simple fact that what they breathe out, we breathe in and what we breathe out, they breathe in a beautiful dance supporting an entire life ecosystem makes me feel so deeply grateful. Trees have been quietly supporting all of us in unseen ways and for me, such an integral part of life.
I met some fantastic people including my best friend and husband Scott tree planting, we gave out seedlings at our wedding officially twenty-six years ago on July 12th. A hometown girlfriend recently told me that her parents planted theirs and it’s growing so tall that they have given it a name (the Nona tree:). They even inspired the name of my growing ministry: “Tree Line” with the simple intention to help anyone that may feel a bit lost in the dark woods of life to help them rise up above their personal narratives way above the tree line to see things in new ways and to help transform their experience of life. To find peace and freedom in the life they have despite any darkness they seem to be experiencing.
I recently read that the severity of the fires caused by our climate crisis is upping the stakes and threatening the species, so we are proactively wrapping the base of the trees in fireproof blankets to try to save them. They reminded me of the thermal blankets they hand out at the finish line of most marathons like the one Scott is wearing in the photo above.
I may not be able to singlehandedly save anyone, but I’d like to think of this summer series as being a big warm hug like the protective blankets that you can take with you always to cover your exposed base when things get too hot for comfort. To help guide you towards remembering who you really are so you can have a new experience of life and see the possibilities that otherwise may have been missed.
You’ll have a view of things from the tree top of your life to make some subtle shifts that can make all the difference to help balance your own ecosystem.
We’ll also examine the subject of prosperity and abundance so if you’re currently experiencing a lack in ANY area of your life that is keeping you from your dreams then stay tuned, this one is for you!!
The word prosperity literally means an attitude of hope. We use the word in our culture interchangeably to describe abundance and wealth is grounded in the ideals of moving forward in life with hope. It’s not a condition we experience, but the attitude with which we live that helps us feel whole.
Psychologist Rollo May calls the truly prosperous person the “fully functioning person”. By this fall you will be fully cooked and ready to reap a fall harvest of any possible imaginings you have for your life and any way that you can give yourself most fully to the world, your gifts, and support others and your family.
So many of us value money and “stuff” in a way that keeps it just out of our reach and you’ll soon see that the goal should never be to make money or acquire things, that is where so many of us go wrong with our fancy vision boards and affirmations.
We can achieve the consciousness needed and mindset and the substance will flow forth when and as needed naturally as an expression of this amazing experience of life.
The fires will burn and the rains will come and as Henry David Thoreau so eloquently put it:
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
I often need to remind myself that this is as much for me as it is for you because it’s so easy to forget and to feel like we are living at the effect of random events and circumstances that you are a living magnet constantly drawing the people, the circumstances, and the financial conditions TO us, by us.
We can relax, shift, and by simply understanding our true nature have faith in the cosmic process that will unfold in us as the life force unfolds in the sequoia tree which does not need to force or toil.
We can even learn to see the fires in our lives in a new light and allow ourselves to fall into the abundant Universal flow in practical ways by experiencing inner direction and our own creativity.
I’ve learned the hard way through getting burned time and again that prosperity is not just having things, it’s the consciousness that attracts ALL the things we’re experiencing.
I’m excited to share everything that has been helpful to me so that you will be wrapped in it too when things warm up and you need it the most.
Holy smokes the air is thick today but I’m so grateful to be reminded of what is possible for all of us after the burn.
With love,
Nona
LOVE reading ALL of your words, the messages underneath them and how they resonate so deeply. Thank you for doing what you do in this world🦋