Come As You Are – Non secular Media Weblog

By Glenda Goodrich, writer of Solo Passage

One factor we people all appear to have in widespread is the longing to be seen and accepted for who we’re. We need to be appreciated with out having to be extra like this or much less like that. For me, nature is one place the place I really feel one-hundred % approval and recognition with out having to show something.  I used to be reminded of this lesson this previous 12 months once I went on my fifteenth wilderness imaginative and prescient quest within the Modoc Nationwide Forest of Northern California. 

The wilderness quest, additionally known as a imaginative and prescient quest or a imaginative and prescient quick, is an historical pan-cultural initiation ceremony of passage that encourages an awakening of 1’s personal indigenous knowledge, private imaginative and prescient, and objective on Earth. I’ve quested alone the wilderness for over twenty years—in California, Oregon, and Washington State, to locations like Demise Valley, the Inyo, the Modoc, the Cascade-Siskiyou Nationwide Monument, and the North Cascades. Every time, I’ve gone into the wild searching for one thing particular and are available out with an surprising treasure. 

The expertise on my fifteenth wilderness quest within the Modoc turned out to be an anomaly from my earlier experiences and an actual eye-opener for me. I went out with a gaggle of eight girls, however the quest included the standard 4 days and nights of fasting and praying alone at a solo energy web site with none distractions.  Twenty-three years in the past, on my first quest in Demise Valley, I had carried a forty-pound backpack out to a distant web site and spent my solo time with no tent and no meals. However this 12 months, at age seventy-one, issues had modified. I may not carry a backpack out to a separate web site, so I stayed in my base camp web site. My physique may not tolerate 4 days of fasting, so I introduced meals. I may not sleep on the bottom with out getting a horrible backache, so I introduced a giant tent that I may rise up in and a cot to sleep on. 

I used to be stunned and reassured to find that bringing meals and a snug set-up didn’t preserve me from what I had come to the Modoc for. Every day I settled increasingly more into experiencing what nature provided. I awoke at dawn and went to mattress at sundown. My days had been crammed with the songs of meadowlarks, quail, mourning doves, glints, and chickadees. The moonless nights had been showered with billions of stars that beckoned from the sky like mysterious voices from past. Although I had my automotive proper there with me, I may flip my again on it and face the entire expanse of the Modoc forest. I mirrored on my life, wrote in my journal, created artwork, took walks, and regarded for indicators and symbols from nature identical to I had on all my different wilderness quests. I thought of what I wanted to let go of and what I wished to welcome in throughout my seventy-first 12 months on the planet. By the tip of my four-day solo time I felt whole peace and contentment—and renewed compassion for my getting old physique. 

Individuals who learn my e book typically inform me that in the event that they had been twenty years youthful and in higher form, they’d like to exit on a wilderness imaginative and prescient quest. Effectively, guess what? You don’t need to be in your twenties, thirties, or forties to get on the market and expertise a nature quest. Nor do you need to be a brilliant athlete or a wilderness survival skilled.  So long as you deliver an open coronary heart and a listening ear to the expertise, anybody can profit from the therapeutic and restorative powers of the pure world.

The peace of nature is accessible to all of us if we let go of any preconceived notions of how we’re imagined to be or what it means to spend time in nature. Exit right into a backyard or a metropolis park, sit quietly beneath a tree, and see the small print on the bark and leaves. Breathe within the nonjudgmental acceptance that bushes supply. Ask them your gritty, nagging, private questions, then hear for solutions. 

As circumstances in life change, we will adapt and alter, identical to nature does. We will mirror her resilience. Nature doesn’t decide. Nature doesn’t anticipate you to be any method apart from how you might be. She simply exists on the market, ready to welcome you dwelling.