I was in Idyllwild earlier this week, immersing myself in a Me-Treat focused on a meaningful creative project and getting ready for the Some Days, May Flowers Spring Retreat.
Spring has sprung and all I could think as I walked through the enchanted forest was “Goddess Camp.”
Everywhere I looked, I saw whimsy and wonder. Whether it was the tree wearing a lost pair of sunglasses on the trail or the woman who got the vintage “Alice in Wonderland couch” before I could, for the life-sized fairy house in her garden. Or the flowers with the audacity to bloom in so much darkness.
There’s something about it that makes me feel magical. And, also…WILD.
Everything’s blossoming. Parts of us must be too. And, in the forest, leaves and buds unfurl untamed. More seems possible. Hope seems closer. Clarity too.
One of the things I love about meandering through the forest, whether hiking or forest bathing, is the immersive, embodied, all-sensory metaphor.
So often, we think we see the path we thought we were looking for, start to follow it, realize it doesn’t quite look like it’s going where we thought, look around, do it all again. And, when we finally find the one we were looking for, it’s so clear and right.
There are also the paths that look like dead ends or maybe even headed off a ledge, when a curve or a hill shows us a way we couldn’t have imagined.
We wander and, if we pay attention and keep our compass calibrated, we know it when it’s right.
There’s a power in letting ourselves hear that knowing, whichever way it’s leading us, rather than trying to force it or ignore it. And, we can trust it to unfold when it doesn’t seem clear. Yet…
It also struck me that it always looks a little (or a lot) different as we explore, because the forest is always changing. Seasons are always shifting. Things are growing. Others are falling back. The endless cycle that started long before us and will go on long after we are here. We never meet the same forest twice.
Same thing with the creek. Literally, as the water flows, flux is a constant. And, some days, my go-to stepping stones are submerged. But I can trust they will return. And find other ways of traversing in the meantime.
May we all harness the power of spring. The renewal. The reawakening, reimagining activation. Tap into the nature all around us and the nature deep inside. Embrace our wild and believe more is possible.
May we nourish the seeds of a future worthy of the miracle of our being here. The miracle we see in every impossible green shoot and every friendly smile.
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There is space for two additional dreamers to join us for the Some Days, May Flowers Spring Retreat. Invitation to embrace your most powerful wild in the forest that is idyll.
