Walking In the Way of Beauty

The Monarch Effect

“There’s a sunrise and a sunset every day.

You can choose to be there for it.

You can put yourself in the way of beauty.”

Reese Witherspoon (playing Cheryl Strayed) in “Wild”

September is here and it’s a beautiful transition month to imagine and allow things to take shape in your life.

Today’s piece reveals our often misunderstood and unanswered secret longing to be alone in the beauty of nature and our deep longing to connect with others to help us go the distance and reach new heights.

Wild geese know the imperative and benefits of being with others. Every fall we hear them honking overhead in an aerodynamic V-formation and it’s hard not to look up at the incredible sight. Their honking has a purpose. Scientists believe that their honking is to maintain the integrity of their flock, and to co-ordinate position shifts with the V-formation in which they fly.  It can take a lot of energy for them to encourage one another from behind, but their honking their position is a trade-off that helps them save energy because the V-formation makes flight less energetically costly for the entire flock.   

Rumi wisely left us instructions to “seek those who fan your flame”. When you join a community of those who are willing to take flight to see their own beauty in growth you can support each other in your transformation and do things that may never have been possible on your own.

Nature can be breathtaking, but starting over is another way to put ourselves in the way of beauty.

The beauty of becoming.

“What you seek is seeking you.”

Rumi

I recently met a group of women who are not afraid of their wonder and are willing to try a new path. Last weekend I attended a gathering of 20 amazing women run by a fellow reader of “the Field”, my business mentor and friend Amanda Wilson-Ciocci the founder of Monarch Business Academy (MBA) which is a transformational experience that gives heart centred entrepreneurs a safe space to build, grow, and launch their online business.  

What I love most about Amanda is her giant caring heart, her business savvy, her infectious positive energy, and her ability to bring passionate businesswomen together to help support one another through their growing pains and to celebrate their successes. Every year she runs a special retreat for everyone to connect over a few nights and days in a gorgeous natural setting and this year’s in Tiny, Ontario near Thunder Beach was no disappointment.

Business hot seats and soul-expanding group activities were bookended with a lot of free time which was perfect because it seems one of the top secret reasons we don’t tell our families why we go to these retreats is because we also crave being alone.

We love our families but for many of us that have recently endured the “bending over” stage of parenting marked by our badly stained shirts and feeling engulfed, even just the drive there can feel blissful. I can distinctly remember being so tired when our kids were young that when traffic came to a halt one day because of lane closures on the DVP in Toronto, with the kids strapped into their boosters I redirected all of our eyes to the big yellow construction trucks outside and we watched mesmerized as they painted beautiful giant white chevrons on the asphalt beside us. I fantasized about how great it would be to have a T-Shirt with the chevron sign so I could silently plead for a bit more space to manoeuvre.

But we don’t need to have children to feel this, it’s a universal desire and I’m curious why we all have so much trouble asking for it whether from our family, from work or our friends and something I also clearly didn’t know how to do twenty years ago when I needed it most.

Another reason people attend Amanda’s Academy is because they feel called to begin again. To have a fresh start in their careers and to fulfill their dreams with a business and life that aligns with their gifts. To enjoy the freedom and flexibility with their life and work schedules and to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible. I can see now why geese honk from behind, having others at your back is like a powerful tail wind pushing you from behind and an energizing feeling that pulls you forward to see the incredible view and what is possible for all of us when we work together.

When I was struggling with depression it felt like an impenetrable darkness had settled in on me like a cocoon I just couldn’t shake. I isolated myself from others.

I had no money or means for therapy or rehab so I followed my instincts to spend time in the mountains. Looking back the irony was not lost on me that the area I healed in is called The Blue Mountains.

My healing journey involved solo hiking and running on the Bruce Trail with our golden retriever Molly as often as I could. That was around 2012-2014. With the kids we built a mountain bike trail from right behind our home and connected it to the Bruce. This is our dog Molly on our homemade trail about 100 meters from our home….

I was in such a bad place I couldn’t focus or read much that was traditional self-help, it all felt like bullshit to me at this stage. I had never felt worse so I was obviously missing something. So I did the only thing I could, I flung myself outside onto the trails. I did have a couple of therapy sessions in the city and I remember my therapist saying I’m pretty sure they all love to say….”Nona you can’t go around the mountain, you need to go through it”. So I stayed on the mountain until I did.

One day as I was hiking I was thinking about a dream I had - it was so vivid and recurring, in the dream I was falling. I was processing through the sadness and grief and the hike that particular day in the rain and the wind I cried. Hard. That night I had another dream and it felt like I was still falling but this time it was back towards myself it was so real that I felt it in my bones.

I am living proof that hiking alone is a primal way to process our feelings.

“I go to the forest when I need to find gentleness. Trees are forgiving. They wrap around each other. They cocoon us in a calm foliaged quietness.”

Sarah Wilson

I love how details and timeline of our lives are interwoven. Looking back it all started when we were given a wedding gift in 1997 that planted the seed...

Scott and I lived in London and Toronto for about 15 years and raised our kids in Leaside, but our tree-planting friend Chris Roberts who is a very talented artist had gifted us with this beautiful oil painting called “Bruce Trail” long before either of us had ever even stood foot on it. To be honest, I had never even heard of it when he gave it to us.

With this touching inscription on the back…

“To Nona and Scott on your wedding day. May your trunks be distinct and your root masses completely entangled.”

Love, Stomach (his tree planting nickname:)

What was magical about this gift wasn’t fully realized until we moved into our log chalet on the mountain 18 or so years later and we realized that this painting could easily have been from a photo taken the backwoods about 100 meters from our house. I can remember shouting and running through the house with the painting in my hands looking for Scott with an astonished… “OMG YOUR’RE NEVER GOING TO BELIEVE IT…CHECK THIS OUT!!!”.

The oddest thing is that we JUST recently ran into Chris in Nottawa at the General Store where we stopped for lunch when he was pulling out and he drove by us slowly, then rolled down his driver’s side window, stopped and said hesitantly as if trying to decipher if these two grey haired fifty something year olds were his old youthful friends from tree-planting…. “Scott and Nona, is that you?”. He was smiling slyly and wearing cool sunglasses and his hair had greyed so it took us a minute to recognize him and then it was like no time had passed.

We’ve since migrated down into the Town of Collingwood for our kids to go to school in the district, but every Friday morning before work we have a date on Blue Mountain to ski or a hike on the Bruce Trail.

This whole area feels like home to us now.

It seems like we all make several moves in our lives, but it’s always nice to go back to the special places where we have felt most at home. My dear old friend’s father recently turned 80 and he lives in Ontario, but visited the place he grew up in the Wild West in Alberta one more time and it was fun to see him riding the range like a young cowboy again on Facebook.

Nostalgia is an interesting word too. It’s a Greek word and it means homesick. We all long for home even if we don’t realize it.

Have you ever heard of the word “Solistalgia?”

It’s a kind of home sickness you have when you are STILL at home. It was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005 in reference to the environmental changes that we find distressing, climate change events like flooding, volcanic eruptions, drought, and destructive mining techniques.

We’re home AND we’re still homesick.

It’s like being in our bodies AND feeling lost.

It seems that more and more of us are feeling solistalgia. We’re becoming homesick for nature. I can remember as a young girl crying in school one day when they showed us a video of an oil slick and the birds covered in black sludge struggling to survive and flopping around. For me, it started that day.

I can’t imagine a single one of us unaffected any more.

The sound and the smell of all of the wildfires here in Canada scorching over 100,000 square km’s of our beautiful forests is deeply affecting us. I feel it when I watch the news. Did anyone else see this video on IG? The Planet isn't in danger. We are. In a nutshell it’s a quick overview of the damage to cities around the world this week and clipped together like this it is almost unbelievable. Our homes are being flooded and the effects of climate change are being felt from Hong Kong and India to Spain and Guatemala. Even here at home as I type our son Charlie is at University in Halifax with no power and the tornado they call Lee is hammering the entire East Coast.

Some of us have been encouraged to stop watching the news, because it feels like the bad news 24/7. But this past week is a reality check for all of us to wake up and begin to take our heads out of the sand and WATCH the news again to inform ourselves on the bigger picture of the world so we can find our way forward together.

Solistalgia also comes in milder versions from our daily lives. I feel it when I see all the development happening in our area and some of the devastating implications for the local forests, rivers and water systems.

It’s going to happen across the road from us a giant gorgeous old magical tree stand. I know it’s going to be hard to watch. This path I was just walking on this morning with our dog is going to be completely bulldozed…

It will be hard to watch and hear the bulldozers move in, because we grieve about what we love.

When we love something we’ll all want to do something to save that thing we love.

One thing I do remember reading when I was having a really hard time was Nan Shepard’s book: “The Living Mountain”. I was so moved by her lifetime quest to meditate on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us that I did the only thing I could.

What she did.

I hiked.

Nan was a naturalist and one of the University's first female graduates. Her face can even be seen on Royal Bank of Scotland five-pound notes. She had an impact on everyone that has been touched by her work.

Like the landscape of our own lives, Nan encountered a world on the mountains in Scotland that can both be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Reading her work and how she saw nature changed how I perceived it. Instead of being lost inside my mind and pain my mind began to search for treasures IN nature and eventually I found what I was looking for.

Freedom.

Not by focusing on my mind and my body or my pain, in leaving it for something more true. It’s only when we transcend or when we are on the outside that we can even begin to be creatively question or criticize what we are choosing to dwell on inside ourselves.

“When walking for many hours on a mountain the body deepens into a fulfilled trance, the senses keyed. I have discovered most nearly what is it to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.”

Nan Sheppard

There was something profoundly healing and available whenever I showed up in those wooded trails and heard the river flowing behind our home to get out of my head in “into the mountain”.

Here is one of my favourite sections of the trail, I’d often stop there and just stand in the canopy of tall trees like it was a cathedral with those tall trunks reaching up to heaven and openly weep at the beauty when the beams of lights would shine on me. I starting seeking peace of mind on the trails like my one wild and precious life depended on it.

It felt like I was continuously being pulled back towards the trails.

This was back before we realized that trees could communicate through their root systems or mycelium and before forest bathing was a thing in the West. The Japanese believe that when you connect with nature you open doors of communication with everything you see. That nature mirrors us and we learn about ourselves through nature.

Nietzsche loved walking and claimed it was when he got his best ideas. Participants in a Stanford University study showed an 81% increase in divergent thinking. Walking allows the brain to wander, and “opens up the free flow of ideas”.  (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014)

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

Frederick Nietzsche (188

Can it really be that simple?

Can you just walk OUT your front door and allow things to unfurl as they will?

YES.

I’m proof that it works.

If I’m being honest, going outside was the last thing I wanted to do. It felt like a really bad idea to lace up and go outside when I had pain in my hips (this was before they were replaced) and I wanted to stay inside the climate control in my cozy soft pants. It’s no wonder so many of us scroll, binge-watch, drink, smoke weed, watch reality television or buy stuff to feel better.

WHAT DOES fill me with wonder is the part of us decides not to.

To quit.

Or to make a big lasting change.

Is that grace? I believe it is.

I was met half way. I know this may sound corny, but I’m not sure how to say it any other way, it felt like I was carried the rest of the way. I wasn’t doing the healing but I was being healed by nature, slowly but surely. I was also surrounded by a loving family that never knew and the few friends I hadn’t pushed away, but I still felt lonely and depressed so it was hard not to imagine that I was the problem. I was convinced and convicted that there was something wrong with me.

I see now from farther way or above the tree line, that life can feel like that at different times for all of us and it can be amplified in our bodies and can manifest as disease. It’s a nebulous feeling, a disconnection that can present to us as loneliness even when we are surrounded by people.

We’re all feeling to some degree according to research and it seems to be getting worse. In the 1980s 20% of us reported feeling lonely and now it’s 50-60% depending on the study.

In 2018 the British Parliament even appointed a “Loneliness Minister” after Britain became ranked as the loneliness capital of Europe with their inhabitants being the least likely to know their neighbours or have strong friendships in the entire European Union.

Loneliness is contagious. We are 50% MORE likely to feel it if we live in close proximity to others that feel it and it kills twice as many of us as obesity. I read research that said that smoking 15 cigarettes is a healthier option for us than living alone.

Chances are some of you reading this post feel it too.

“Loneliness is a popular place.”

Olivia Laing

Even Millennials who are socially more connected to others feel it more than any of us.

And yet, the paradox today is what some of us felt on the weekend Monarch retreat. The deeper unseen or admitted truth…that WE SEEK togetherness AND we crave aloneness.

My husband and son just drove off to Toronto for two nights and left me alone with the dog. I adore them and of course, I’m going to miss them but after researching this piece a part of me also feels elated to have some time to myself. I went hiking yesterday with Gracie and spent time looking to nature and surprisingly saw this incredible school of fish just a 5 min walk from our house and just stood and watched them flop around in the water…

This week I learned that many species of fishes school together, allowing them to effectively appear comparable to a large animal, a behaviour which is said to discourage predators. They explain that individual fish have a lesser chance of being eaten by a predator when in a school then when they are alone.

That is the power of being a part of a larger like minded group, herd or a gang to bike alongside the highway, launch a business or recover from an addiction.

Left alone to our own devices and minds we are more vulnerable and can’t even experience or question our own thinking.

But like us, you also often see fish on their own. They both seek the strength of the school when they are vulnerable and when it’s time to spawn or do what they instinctually came here to do AND be on their own to do their fishy thing.

We are the same. The Peer Research Center says that 85% of adults seek more alone time.

I discovered one International travel agency reporting that half of their new bookings are solo travellers.

In Japan, it’s so hard to do. I discovered that a growing number of people who are “car share” users don’t actually DRIVE the car they’ve booked, they get them to SIT in them alone! That made me laugh out loud and feel better because the struggle is REAL!

So then, why do so many of us also FREAK OUT at the idea of being alone?

Going to a movie or a restaurant alone feels weird and most of us won’t do it. In fact, if I see someone sitting in public by themselves, in a coffee shop just sitting alone and not staring at a phone or a laptop we would probably catch ourselves wondering if something is wrong with them, but maybe we’re wrong and something is very RIGHT.

The University of Harvard has even done studies showing that the majority of us would rather be electrocuted than left alone with our thoughts for as little as 15 minutes. We would rather break the monotony with no phone or internet to self-administer a painful jolt.

Covid aside, we are still feeling lonely it’s much more of a deeper and nuanced disconnection.

So WHAT are we lonely from?

“A newborn cries as the cord is severed, seeming to extinguish memory of the miraculous. Thus we are condemned to stagger rootless upon the earth in search for our fingerprint on the cosmos.”

Patti Smith

I know I’ve said this before but I’ll keep saying it over and over until more of us feel it in our bones. There is a part of us that knows how precious life really is. The deep meaning can be so elusive that we’ll spend our lives seeking it.

The memory of the miraculous.

The something more beautiful beneath the surface of our daily lives.

The unseen. The Source of our being.

God by any other name.

Here is one of the greatest human paradoxes…

Our loneliness can best be cured with aloneness to experience the miraculous. The forgetting that makes us feel this longing for a more meaningful connection to each other and life.

“I’m lonelier in my real life than I am out here.”

Cheryl Strayed

Our unfathomable disconnection and sadness will dissipate if we get ourselves into nature and the very NUB of our itch comes from our inability to connect to others in a meaningful authentic way, to life and to ourselves.

We are experiencing what social scientists and psychologists are calling “moral loneliness”. It’s when the supply chord to our ability to care or do the right thing for the greater good has been severed.

This plays out in all kinds of ways but corrupt leaders, manipulative marketing and sales, fake news, clickbait and even our trusted clergy covering up horrific crimes have not helped matters.

It seems like we’ve had a SOUL level of disassociation from our own values system.

“The sorrow of the world comes from the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit”.

Thomas Aquinas

The Greeks had a name for it: Acedia.

Defined as a spiritual apathy or sloth. A basic lack of caring. A F*ck IT zeitgeist. Maybe this numb despair that has quashed our ability to care was best illustrated on the back of Melania Trump’s notorious jacket….

If you recall it says… “I really don’t care. Do you?”

Some criticized her publicly for her brazen insensitivity in wearing this Zara jacket, but it’s not just her, teens everywhere have been supporting the same T-shirts with similar sayings ever sine and they are definitely not being ironic.

They’re being serious.

When we can’t fight or flee anymore what do our bodies do?

They freeze. They shut down.

Our lives are so far removed from the miraculous that we feel numb.

I hate to be a Debbie downer here today, but IF we continue on this path we will have to face our collective demise. Is this really how we all want to live? It’s not our nature to be so disconnected. It’s time for us to WAKE up. The world needs your ability to walk to have some forward movement and momentum to do what needs to be done.

How DO we do this?

We can start by even just temporarily taking the focus off of our personal issues and getting our fine behinds out into nature by ourselves, getting quiet and simply listen for what is imprinted in our minds to do next after nature works its magic on us and helps us get deeper beneath the fog of our surface thoughts that distract us from our essence.

To follow our knowing. If it feels foreign, then let me just remind you that our ancestors all emerged in nature.

Our brains didn’t even evolve until we stood upright and started to walk so just doing it is how it’s done. We can simply decide right now and choose and get back into the rhythms and patterns of nature to evolve some more.

Nature is how we learn about our own true nature. The flood of recent books on the shelves about our natural rhythms and cycles with the the moon, the tides and stars is not a coincidence. It’s a response to the ancient practices we’ve disconnected from.

Still not convinced?

Many famous others before us laced up their hiking shoes. Nietzsche and Jung did it in the Swiss Alps.

Luminaries like Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Virginia Woolf, Mary Oliver, Earnest Hemingway, Charles Dickens, Henry Miller, and Albert Einstein have written eloquently about the benefits of taking in the natural world. Most of them who were authors have said that most of their best writing was done away from the typewriter and other people.

Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerburg are infamous for taking walking meetings.

Stanford published a study that says we’re 60% more creative and we reduce our broodiness when we’re walking than when we’re standing still. And it increases further when we are walking near trees.

Walking has been publicly reported by famous creatives like Henry James, Jack London, Darwin, Nietzsche, Tchaikovsky, Whitman, and Kant to cure bipolar disease.

Beethoven had manic episodes and would take to the woodlands around Vienna.

Dickens would sometimes walk all day and night to sort out his thoughts.

Buddha became enlightened under a Bodhi tree.

Sir Isaac Newton formulated his theory of gravity by watching the fall of an apple from a tree.

“Solvitur ambulando”.

Saint Augustine

(translation: It is solved by walking)

These brilliant and creative human beings just like every single one of you reading dialled in their focus and become a notorious genius at what they did by using nature to help them get out of their own way and to listen to their intuition.

Hiking has proven to be the best anti-depressant to me and best of all with no ability to under or overdose and only positive side effects.

Frederick Law Olmsted, the 19th-century architect of many great American parks, captured the experience well:

Nature employs the mind without fatigue and yet enlivens it. Tranquilizes it and enlivens it. And thus, through the influences of the mind over body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.

What are the benefits we can measure?

According to research: lower blood pressure, heart rate, and stress; improved mood and immune function; better sleep; and increased creativity.

There are surprising ancillary social and financial benefits, too. When we’re walking we’re not consuming. There are no billboards in the woods, we’re not caught in an algorithm or being targeted and trapped or compelled by artificial intelligence. There is no wafting Cinnabon smell enticing us towards the food court.

It’s free of charge.

Did you know that walking is also deviant behaviour?

Martin Luther King led many when he marched on Washington and so have millions of others in protest of civil rights, black lives matter, environmental groups, Sexual freedom, women’s rights, and the #MeToo movement. Walking can bring us together when outside forces try to tear us further apart.

Gandhi walked 18 km a day in protest of British rule.

I can also be a moving experience. Pilgrims from around the world walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain. It’s well known that more times than not, when people finally arrive at the Cathedral, they break down and cry.

It can help us get to the very edge of our insides and the eternal mystery of life. Jesus walked in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. The number 40 biblically signifies new life, new growth, transformation. He walked. And walked. As did John the Baptiste, St. Paul, St. Francis of Assisi and usually walked in the “wrong part of town” to share the ecstasy they felt about God that they had to share with everyone outside of the belonging system. Challenging others and Empire by foot.

Walking is also radical.

In 2019 more than 160 countries joined Greta Thunberg to walk in a global climate strike. Children skipped school from Sydney to Seoul, Cape Town to Canada, en masse to demand action on climate change. I started tearing up just choosing photos because there were so many and it made me feel hopeful how awake this youngest generation has already become.

They DO care. They aren’t numb.

This is a perfect example of the Monarch Effect in action.

Small actions by individuals adding up to a great change.

A young Swedish girl skips school and makes a sign that said SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE and plunks herself outside the Swedish Parliament building in her little yellow rain jacket.

She loved nature and when she was 8 she was so pained by climate change and that none of the adults where doing anything that she stopped speaking for some time. But it wasn’t until she was 15 that she acted.

First simply by sitting.

And then walking.

She did what she could, from where she was with what she had (the courage to skip school and a black sharpie and white bristol board) and one short year later this happened…

Photos printed in the New York Times from around the world

If any of you ever wondered if the simple act of walking has the power to change anything in your own life after today I hope you will reconsider the possibility.

To be honest, for the longest time I had trouble believing that walking was enough exercise and I still do. It’s so deeply engrained in us that we need to do more.

I miss running but walking is what has been most healing and has allowed me forward with my life, it has helped me slow everything down, even my mind and taking action for my health towards a kind of freedom, forgiveness, and a morality I never expected. I even surprised myself when I made peace and forgave the people that don’t pick up their dog’s poop on our walking trail near the elementary school. I never believed that day would come, I felt some serious trail rage in the spring when the snow melted and there was an icy minefield to negotiate.

Walking works its magic and somehow gives us the emotional space to see right from wrong but not to judge, just act. To bend over and pick it up ourselves with love.

“Problems don’t stay problems, they turn into something else.”

Reese Witherspoon in the movie “Wild” hiking the Pacific Coast Trail

The rhythm of walking puts our brain into Theta waves affecting our spatial positioning (activating our intuition) and steering our body to more loving and less fearful thoughts.

During early forest bathing experiments, physician Qing Li found that after a couple of hours in the woods, blood pressure went down an average of five points. The effects didn’t end once people left the trees; stress hormones were measurably lower for a week. After three days with two hours of forest bathing, markers of immune health showed improvement that lasted a week.

And, of course, almost all the people said they just felt better.

When walking rates and green spaces go up in big cities, murder rates go down.

Bullies in some school boards are being bused out into nature camps to rehabilitate and it’s working.

WALKING IN NATURE MAKES US NICER PEOPLE.

When we even just SEE green grass or trees at a distance from our hospital rooms we heal faster with fewer complications.

I could go on, and on but the science is clear and I’m sure you get the drift that spending time in nature aligns us to our true nature.

“The human being is, relatively speaking, the most bungled of all the animals, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts.”

Nietzsche -late 1800s.

I love that Amanda has named her company after one of THE most incredible tiny creatures. The butterfly has been a symbol of transformation, hope and faith for thousands of years. It’s also a symbol of rebirth, since it goes through so many life cycles including liquifying into imaginal cells. It’s demonstration from larva to caterpillar to crysallis and finally to a beautiful, flying butterfly.

We can do as the Monarchs and transform, be re-born and find our way home simply by following what is deepest in us. It’s hard not to touch on the transformative journey and life cycle of a butterfly when we consider what it means to start over again or make a change in our own lives.

At this time of year, there are few migrations as iconic as the monarch butterflies' annual flight from North America to Central Mexico and back each fall and spring. Taking to the skies by the millions, braving storms, drought, predators, and human made barriers to make the 3500 kilometre journey each year.

I’m not sure what is up with me and cartoons lately, but these made me smile.

Maybe it’s to butter you up to tell you the news. First the bad news, then then good.

The bad news is that we’ve put the Monarch’s future in a precarious position.

We’ve cut down trees and farmed most of the land that they have lost their natural habitat which has resulted in the monarchs’ staggering population decline over the last two decades. The eastern population has plummeted by 84%, and the western population by 99%. In just a decade or two more, they could disappear.

Like many other species, monarchs are now facing an existential threat that is increasing due to climate change—in 2016, Canada officially listed monarchs as an endangered species. Last summer they were classified as “Endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The GOOD NEWS is that unlike other endangered creatures, monarch butterflies have many champions. Scores of committed citizen-scientists, farmers and people like you and I have started doing their part to help the species survive. Scientists have recently pointed to this love, which sometimes borders on obsession, as a likely factor in the monarch’s surging 2019 population.

Because we fight for what we love.

Monarch fever can, fittingly, cause of the “butterfly effect”: at a time when damage to the environment can seem impossible to reverse, the butterflies are a living reminder that even the smallest actions can lead to enormous results.

Climate change can feel impossible for us to solve at the 11th hour. But, the monarchs are proof that small actions can have world-altering results.

That is the takeaway for all of us today.

Just start where you are with what you have.

Walk out your front door with no destination in mind or go a new direction on your dog walk.

See where that leads you next.

This week I’ve been contemplating our long journeys, our climbs and our heartaches. Sometimes it feels like we don’t know where we’re going until we get there. On Friday Scott watched the sunrise and I saw a woman at a distance (we’ve seen often on our walks) named Sara in our community that is an acquaintance and was leading a group of women exercising and I said to him: “I don’t really know her, but I like her. I feel like we’ll be friends someday.” Three guesses who I met on the top of the ski hill yesterday with her dog in the middle of nowhere hiking in a place I rarely go?

When we are connected and we listen to our intuition we’ll be guided. I had the inspired thought at the last minute to change my plans and go to this new place and i did.

Until we feel that inspiration to go somewhere or serve, we can simply move forward on our own two feet.

I feel so much gratitude for where I’ve been and for all of you reading and fanning my flame.

For all of it even the lowest points.

Our lives are mysterious, irrevocable, and sacred.

“If your Nerve, deny you—
Go above your Nerve”

Emily Dickinson (and Cheryl Strayed:)

Bestselling author Cheryl Strayed put herself in the way of truth and beauty in a thoroughly transformative hiking experience that became the magnificent memoir Wild that then became a Major Motion Picture starring Reese Witherspoon.

I recently watched it again for this article so it’s fresh in my mind. “Wild” is the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again. The book detailed her three-month journey on the PCT through California and Oregon, as she grappled with the aftermath of her divorce, a heroin addiction, and the loss of her mother. 

There is a part where she’s remembering the past, she’s sitting in a classroom and the teacher is reading American Poet and essayist Adrianne Rich’s rendition of Marie Curie’s struggles and she says this incredible line: “She died a famous woman denying her wounds. Denying her wounds came from the same source as her power”.

Wow. Goosebumps.

Nan Shepard also said that “to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb the mountain” . To me this means we don’t even need to be like Greta, or Cheryl, or Gandhi. We can simply follow and support our modern prophets and follow people that are leaning a bit more forward than we are like Greta or Marianne Williamson with her politics of love or have sacrificed themselves for the greater good.

We can show up for rallies, sign petitions, plant trees, pollinator flowers and milkweed in our own backyards.

Our assignment is the life we’re in now and as we begin to look up from our social media feeds and get outside we’ll see that beauty is all around.

Lace up your old runners and think of Nan Sheppard, Cheryl Strayed and me smiling and cheering you on as you go out the front door to methodically place one foot in front of the other…

left, right, left, right, left, right…

..take a deep breath of fresh air and lose yourself in the pine trees. Soothe yourself back home with the sound of your breath back into your intuitive wholeness. Awaken to the memory of your power that you may have temporarily forgotten when the umbilical chord was cut, but has been in you all along.

May we all lose ourselves in the wilderness of our lives, but find our own way out of the woods and in the way of beauty.

One step at a time.

Happy trails.

With love,

Rev Nona

ps. A few weeks ago I recommended the Netflix series Live to 100 and we really enjoyed it. I won’t spoil it, but 3 guesses what is the exercise they ALL took part in daily and it’s NOT the gym or running??