If you have paid any attention to the news in recent weeks, you’ll know that there are two big Ps dominating the headlines.
In this blog, I do not frequently mention major events in the world (particularly news items). Why? Because this blog’s focus is on the inner/outer landscape – our relationship to the world, primarily the natural world. I am passionate about how we make sense of our inner lives, our selves, in relation to flora and fauna, landscapes and climate, seas and seasons and soils.
I tend to write about qualities of living that put us in closer touch with the essence of being, of being present: gratitude, blessing, grief, courage, vulnerability and fear, triumph, and depth of moments. Literally, touching the bare ground outside our homes.
And, I think we humans spend an inordinate amount of time focused on our own species: wiles and ways, rifts and repair, necessities and extravagances, materialism and mannerism.
In short, I’m trying to tip the balance a bit. To offer to the world practices, ideas, beauty that help us refocus ourselves – resituate ourselves in right size – with the rest of Earth’s biota. I want us to recollect ourselves in curls of holy smoke, unfurling like fern fronds in natural rhythms.
So when I write that there are three Ps, I do literally mean the two big ones in the headlines…people afraid:
P#1: that their choice won’t win or their choice won’t even be given a chance, that their views won’t count, that their safety and values won't be protected. All of these are real concerns, no matter where you draw the lines around yourself.
P#2: that health and wellbeing are at stake, that our loved ones and ourselves will not be spared, that it’s all much too “close to home” for comfort, that panic and hoarding will protect us. All of these are real concerns, no matter where you draw the lines around yourself.
But the third P (P#3) I want to remember (and to share with you) is actually a series of words:
Peace,
Perspective,
Presence,
Possibility (as in “hope”),
Prayer,
Potency (as in “gratitude”),
Potential (as in “goodness”),
Purity (as in “heartfelt”),
Passion (as in “joyfulness”),
Pursuit (as in “healthy”),
Persistence (as in “fortitude”),
Patience,
Playfulness,
Praise (as in “reverent glee and appreciation”)
I will be the first to admit that I can get bowled over and run down by the headlines - by a world tipped so far out of synch: so polarized, so imperfect, so complexly messy, so delineated, so fundamentalist – that it seems un-right-able for anyone.
My hiking and bells friend can attest to just how long I spent working through fear (to get to any version of P#3 that might help me shift), as we sped along muddy, lichen-filled forest trails early one morning this week.
But this short list of Ps can save us (the one P that represents many optimistic antidotes to the pains we suffer and inflict every day).
Choosing a “good medicine” P is not a denial of honest-to-god crisis, injustice, strife in the outer world; but making a choice does have the power to touch our inner world so that we can respond, adjust, shift, and move with graceful purpose through the moments that are the gifts of being alive. Here. Today.
I send right now to you and your loved ones so many blessings for peace, health, beauty.
All blog images created & photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted. Please circulate images with photo credit: "©2020 Jennifer J. Wilhoit/TEALarbor stories. All Rights Reserved."
