Ways we can give back to the plants and beings we live amongst or visit. We are indeed guests, family, friends, and caregivers.
This post overlaps with my last one on how we can engage nature in less expected ways and what we can do to enjoy ourselves. However, this post is more oriented to how we can lovingly give back to lands and beings as they are often so generous.
Plants, rocks, and trees are so alive and so giving! They each embody their own energies and ways of being. And they know they are part of interconnections that ripple so they often enjoy sharing for the benefit of you, us, and all. They often simply exist without judgement so they are wonderful beings to share yourself with and receive non-verbal heart-oriented input from. There are meditations and books on and intuitive ways of going about these heart bonds and most of them point to quieting down and opening to what is felt or known beyond mental cognition. Feel free to translate an experience or communication mentally afterward (or during if not too distracting)! Perhaps how to hear and feel non-verbal beings and understand if they are wanting to directly relate is another post in itself that I can share sometime. For now, trust that you can connect and find that balance of respectfully doing nothing and something.
I will note that amidst loving, high frequency, and caring beings, I have also met some feisty, energetically aggressive (as a communication of space needs), and even pretentiously royal beings existing within or as trees — even these ways of being can invite us to look at how we want to relate to and respect them, other humans, ourselves, and all who exist. As we connect let us consensually listen, talk, eat, heart-bond, and touch! Let us remember ways of co-existing that can be but are not solely within logic, material, or even restricted sense-based notions. Let some of the unseen, unfelt, unheard, and unknown from them, us, and all emerge in our relationships with one another. Let us know our earth friends as conduits of vast and web-like knowing. Let us give back as we share home. <3 Here are some suggestions about how to relate, share, and give. These ideas are in no particular order, are playing within the practical and the ethereal and energetic, and will resonate or call to you in different ways at various times in your life.
So many kind, aware, and symbiotically enlivening ways of relating, thanking, and co-existing. 😊💚🌱 Feel free to name more!
Notice the sunlight and shadows shifting on terrain and those plant, insect, tree, rock and animal beings both large and little
Listen to their voice with your heart, intuition or any of the claires such as clairsentience, clairvoyance, claircognizance, clairaudience — in a way the claires are basically sensitive energetic extensions of our senses that exist beyond but trace back to material forms such as our eyes, ears, and nose and these claires can be cultivated
Drum or whistle and enter a soft trance where the non-verbal and non-linear are a bit more at the fore — autistics, hsp people, healers, and others may naturally love this
Share water, even if just a sip
Sing whatever comes
Dance knowing that the earth revels in our authentic expressions
Hum inviting regulation for you and them
Play, imagine, or make believe — allowing uplifting and connected joy
Laugh and allow spontaneity
Cry and let yourself be cleansed and also witnessed
Say hello and receive whatever is spoken back
Listen to leaves quake and the breeze move
Watch swaying movements of everyone around
Listen for wisdom shares from years of stillness and slowness amidst movement
Slow down and breathe to snail speed, plant speed, rock speed
Plant a companion plant pal
Climb someone, a rock or tree, if mutually desired
Hug them if you are both pulled to that — you can listen or feel for a repel or magnetism, watch for a color vibrancy (+) or dulling (-), or another sense of alive positivity and “yes”
Meditate with one another
Thankfully gather their fruit and share it
Whisper your secrets and get curious about the history they have witnessed
Notice and feel textures, lines, patterns in bark, needles, petals, foliage
Observe colors of those near and how they feel to you
Touch with the intention of sending healing energy to wounded beings or cut branches
Breath in and out deeply and intentionally with gratitude and acknowledgement of exchange in that
Give gratitude for your, your loved one’s, or your domestic animal’s plant based food or clothing
Spend time with the essential oil or flower essence of someone you’d like near
Recognize the spirit or essence of a plant, herb, mushroom, or medicine you have engaged in the past who is still with you energetically and supportively now
Send difficult personal and collective energies that are no longer serving into the earth to act as compost, nutrients, and transmuted benefit rather than stagnation
Add physical compost material to garden spaces
Plant or toss seeds
Enjoy locally sourced farm veggies
Embrace natural dyes and cloth at times
Walk lightly, slowly, or bare foot — a bit more in tune with your body, place, impact, and all your buddies present
Prawl and look or smell around like a coyote, wolf, or cougar practicing acknowledging the web of life that land carries from a new vantage point
Pee and moisturize wild soil
Engage chemical free grey water systems
Learn who you have an affinity to and spend time with them
Learn names or likes of beings you have an affinity with
See or feel what your friend’s sight or life might be like, engage your empathy and imagination
Learn who also lives symbiotically with these ones
Paint or draw your nature companions
Write poetry about what you hear from them
Notice who calls to you and which way or direction you’d like to orient when wandering or hiking
Witness birds enjoy shrubs’ berries
Get naked like the trees, both emotionally and physically, drop the social role (perhaps in privacy)
Calmly experience yourself as a guest to a place as you watch a deer or herbivore eat or bees, ants or butterflies move about
Internally or externally speak thanks to your company for their presence, witnessing, or listening as you would to a friend, family member, or lover
Do a ritual thanking the elements and all of life for their existence and support of our collective
Capture honest, inspiring, and surprising pictures of you and those around (the micro and the vast)
Pick up trash and feel how a place shifts
Engage the five commonly spoken of senses — smell a Pondersa or eat an edible berry as a practice in mutual embodiment and exchange
Hold reverence and care for the death and life in a burned area
Encourage or listen to a loved human one the way you just felt enlivened by the land you were with
<3 Jai
“Instead of hypnotizing yourself into believing that the world of concepts is reality, you hypnotize yourself into believing that the world of feelings – of magic – is reality. The only difference between these two equally valid points of view is that from one of them plants talk to you, and from the other they don’t.” Bob Makransky
“To cultivate a sense of the many senses needed to sense the many things–versus to cultivate a way to parse the world into sensible objects…the ability to see and the graceful inability not to see…” Cody-Rose Clevidence
