It’s the strangest thing, finding your way in the world, and I’ve written before about the many circular or dead-end paths encountered on this journey of self-discovery.
During early sessions of studying Kung Fu (in my late 20s), I couldn’t get my head around the feeling I was a blackboard being wiped clean in order for a new text to be written across me. I didn’t then have the self-knowing to understand this was not the kind of teaching I needed.
Yoga has been a different, gentler, path because, after going to various classes, I chose self-directed learning. But still there was this feeling that yoga was pulling me into myself and out of connection with the natural world.
When we were in Spain I finished a yoga session then sat in the yellow dust looking out across farmlands, listening to the pigs squealing in the barn below. I moved to sit with a tree for comfort. The tree told me to go back and do yoga. I felt puzzled, but did so. Still that exchange remains with me, because it felt like a rebuff rather than supportive direction.
I spent yesterday with the first trees, the first forest, I fully connected with. I pee’d in two different places – this is one of the ways in which trees can know us – and returned to thinking about why I’ve followed intuition to quit yoga (& meditation).
I can only speak from my experience, I can only tell you what is right for this being called Sophie, but yoga feels very much a source of wisdom and knowledge created in a time and place not of now.
Now I need to allow heart and mind to weave into the forest, seep down into the earth, or precipitate like water; I need the wisdom of the trees to write itself into my very bones and I can’t do that when another school of thought is, like a murmuration of starlings, already residing there shouting its name over & over.
I’ve written in the past about being apprenticed to the trees, that I am working to hear & translate their wisdom so that it roots through every word I write, every breath taken, but, like the growth of a forest, it’s a slow, lengthy, circular process of allowing the ecosystem of the internal landscape to be rewilded, and that means clearing space.
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