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Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Friday, November 17, 2017

Frankincense

(journal entry a few days ago)

I bring in frankincense to these sacred dark early mornings as a gift to myself,
but—more importantly—
as a way to open up a path to something unseen and divine outside of and within me.

It is a conduit: all that smoke rising up in curls and crooked pathways. Infusing the air, but also the soul, with
awakening
beauty
a sense of excitement even amidst a deepening calm.
Settling to roots.
Open to a miracle.
And nothing shy of pure abiding in the unknown of the next second.
A reminder to Now: to be without agenda, only with presence.
Over and over.
One breath to the next.

This is how we can do it—this life with its precarious instability that we mistakenly see as “stability”; but then we
protest beg whine cry
when life does what it naturally is wont to do by its very nature and physics of aliveness:
it shifts.
We call it “change” and we make it utterly solid:
steel, cement—locked and impenetrable.

But even if we softened our idea about change to
“solid as a rock”
we’d be better for it—for at least rocks have the spark within (thanks, Charles Simic)
and the divinity of being natural (not human-constructed).

So here I sit as my pen flows my lifeblood onto the page.

And I am made more whole this morning. Again.




All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2017 JenniferJWilhoit/TEALarbor stories. AllRightsReserved."