What is your community made up of? What and whom comprise your personal ecology of life-supportive relationships?

When I first made my home in Pemberton, in my early twenties, I doubled down on this physical community. I felt the shallowness of my transplanted roots, and I see now, that much of what motivated me, was the desire to send down a tap root, the way a tree does. While a root ball will eventually spread out to a width up to 38 times the trunk diameter, the tree seedling starts first with a thick tap root that grows down down down, to anchor the tree in the ground, and establish its stability. Once anchored, the tap root stops growing and the energy shifts to sending roots out horizontally.

This idea of ANCHOR, THEN REACH, echoes what I recently learned in yoga teacher training… which turned decades of striving on its head, by reminding me that the final form, hands flat on the ground in a standing forward bend, for example, is simply the effect of a biomechanical movement that you’re trying to strengthen (ie an effective hinge at the hips.) It looks like its the goal, to press your hands flat on the ground and show off your incredibly flexible hamstrings, but it’s not. Stability, then an open upper body with diaphragm stacked to allow the flow of breath, is first priority. Then, we can express ourselves into a shape, whatever that shape might take, given the current conditions of our bodies and minds and breath. Our culture is so full of encouragement to reach, overreach, strive, hustle, perfect… so oriented to the superficial, the apparent result, that we can really get tricked up, or damaged, or caught way out of balance, chasing after the wrong thing – just an effect.

The world feels very unstable and disorienting these days, and when we don’t attend to our own grounding and stability, I think we can be easily manipulated by the promise of certain outcomes… (cue the dangerous rhetoric that gets certain types of politicians elected ie “kick out the immigrants and you’ll enjoy safety and prosperity” “keep someone else down, so that you can rise” etc etc.)

So let us return to the tap root. Send an energetic connection down into the earth beneath your feet, the good ground that supports us. And from stability, from the connection, from the wiggle of your toes and the awareness of what is here to support us, then we can reach up and out and around.

Pauline Leitch is a friend from my personal ecosystem of support, who nourishes my roots through regular online chats, after we connected in a learning circle around Active Hope. Her inspiration, her offering to host that learning circle, led directly to my offering of a similar thing here in Pemberton, the Active Hope Climate Squad, and so, when she offered a poem to share, “but maybe it doesn’t count because I’m not a local, which is fine,” my first thought was, “but you are here. Because you’re part of me.” And so this idea of her not being a member of the community here, or of my community, didn’t make sense. She took up the invitation I put out on The Wellness Almanac in May to spend the 30 days of June acknowledging the land, even through the hospitalization and passing of her father. She has generously shared her photos with me, to use in my journalling classes/slide decks. She is an artist and a writer, a mother, partner, dog mama, a runner and a Park Run host. She has been my virtual connection to long lost ancestors, wandering through graveyards while on her holidays, because we discovered she was vacationing at a place where my people hailed from. And she has a poem to offer into our global gathering of Secret Poetry Appreciators.

Celebrate

If I could teach you to wake each morning and give thanks for the rising of the sun, and with it, a new dawn, a fresh beginning, another day,

If I could teach you to lay down each night with gratitude for the moon, that ball, or part thereof, of beauty, that graces the night sky, that pulls the tides and reflects the sun back to us in the depths of darkness,

If I could teach you to catch with awe and wonder a hundred different moments in between, a smile, a touch, a flower, the rain…

“Wake up and smell the coffee!” they proclaim.

Yes, and also feel the warmth of the mug in your hands, watch the steam in its twirling, swirling dance, rising upwards to caress the skin upon your face, taste the subtleties of flavour and sense the lives of the sowers, the harvesters, the packers, add in the fire of the sun and the sound of drops of water that fell upon each leaf…

Each leaf, that breathes in our out-breath and breathes out our in.

To marvel at your mind, your brain your body and how quickly it responds without conscious thought if I were to ask you all to..

blink.

To find something each day that makes you laugh, a song that compels you to dance, to follow the urge to run and skip if you are able, to close your eyes and to simply picture it, if you are not.

If I could teach you to be joyfully curious, the way a child is, or the way my dog spends hours watching the bees, then you would learn to see each day as a multitude of moments waiting for you to notice them, your senses sharpened anticipating their next meal.

For these are food for the soul, and ours to feast upon.

And if, one day, in addition to all of this, it was also your birthday, the day upon which you entered into this magical world and took your first breath of the air gifted to us by the trees, and found yourself born into a place where there was no-one else quite like you, anywhere, then that, would surely be something worth celebrating.

by Pauline Leitch