Lessons From The Land

It’s interesting to see the things that light me up these days. Today mulch put a big smile on my face and turned out to be an exceptional teacher.

And this seems like the perfect way to begin this new blog. My intention is to share the lessons and teachings that I receive from nature and the beautiful five hectare piece of land that I help to steward, in the hope it might inspire others to (re)connect deeply with the land and with nature, which is our natural state and birthright. From my experience, all answers can be found in nature, and all things can be understood, given enough time and presence in nature.

So, back to mulch. Well, really I have to go back a bit further, and talk about the recent loss of our cedar tree.

On Easter Sunday, after a lovely gathering with our local community, my partner, Trev, and I arrived home and decided to take our two dogs to the woods. As we walked up our track we paused at each young tree we had planted along the verge, as we often do, assessing its health, giving encouragement to the few that were struggling, praising the ones that were thriving, noting where we might need to intervene. As we neared the top of the track I felt excitement grow within me as we were nearly at the cedar tree that we planted three years ago to mark the passing of Trev’s mum and I was looking forward to beholding its beauty as, against the odds, it was absolutely thriving after a shaky start and now bigger than me and looking utterly glorious.

But – surreal shock – it wasn’t there! It had been there in the morning, but now there was just a hole in the ground and a strange emptiness in the air. Someone had clearly come along that afternoon while we were out, dug it up and stolen it. We could see the trail of mud and the tyre marks of a car pulling away at high speed after the theft.

We bought this tree a few years ago from some friends, who run a small-scale tree nursery at their home and had just this one lonely cedar in their collection that year. It was a bit of a wonky ‘runt’ and they weren’t sure it would be viable, but we both love the mighty splendour of cedar trees so we thought we’d give it a chance.

Back home, the two of us and the cedar tree shared a sweet little planting ceremony, in honour of Trev’s mum, Bernie, who had passed away not long before. We put the tree in pride of place at the entrance to our track and nurtured it carefully through the hot, dry summers, watching in wonder as it responded to our love and care with gusto.

And now, such a precious, treasured tree to us was gone. It was hard to get our heads around. Who would dig up someone else’s tree? What did it mean?

The loss of the cedar, especially given the sacred meaning of the tree to Trev, knocked us both somewhat. It didn’t help that I’m currently reading ‘The Ringing Cedars’ books, which talk a lot about the sacred medicine and power of the cedar tree. I knew, deep down, that there was a lesson here for us. We consciously live deeply attuned to and in co-creation with our land, so I knew this event was no coincidence.

So, I sat with what was coming up for me. I observed myself fall into the familiar flat sadness of the ‘victim of life’. I felt vulnerability as my confidence that such negative actions were not part of my reality was knocked. I felt a familiar self-beration at my self-perceived ungrounded naivety. I wondered what unconscious part of myself was trying to be made conscious by the mirror of external events. I noticed how easily my faith in my path, in myself, in life itself could be shaken. I observed all of these things curiously, and noticed that there was a deep, underlying wound within me being triggered here, which my ego/mind would not let me get near, for now. Interesting. It was not a comfortable, easy day, but I trusted it and opened to receive the blessings and teachings of the situation, when I was ready to understand them.

And, today was a different kind of day. This morning Amy (who lives here on the land with us), Trev and I gathered up the dead bracken in the bottom fields to use as mulch on our organic gardens. This bracken has been largely untouched for years and a thick layer of dead matter has built up, forming a huge untapped area of premium mulch. I couldn’t help but notice the unmistakable feeling of joy and happiness bubbling up inside me and the big smile on my face as I marvelled at the generous wisdom of the land. It was all so ‘win-win’, my favourite state of affairs – we clear the dead matter away, freeing the pasture up, and we receive precious fertiliser and weed suppressor for the gardens, which fosters new life. It made me chuckle that finding a great new source of mulch on the land is the kind of thing that elicits these high vibrational feelings of joy, happiness and gratitude within me these days!

And, as I jubilantly shovelled mountains of mulch into the pick-up truck, I felt I finally understood at least part of the lesson of the cedar tree loss. I had a clear sense that any loss can be perceived as mulch or compost – the seed of new life. For something new to grow, something must be lost. This is a universal law. It’s natural to grieve any kind of loss, which always comes from a place of love, but I notice that it can be easy to slip into feeling like the victim and become stuck in anger, sadness and blame. Instead, we always have the choice to consciously decide to turn the loss into some new treasure, something even better, even if we can’t yet see clearly what that is – we can compost our grief and loss. I felt a renewed trust in the wisdom of life and, with this, a burgeoning strength replacing the previous feeling of helplessness. Yes, the cedar tree has gone from our land, but its loss is not for nothing – I have faith that we will understand the fullness of the treasure that comes from its loss in due course. But, for now, I already feel its treasure growing inside me – a deeper embodied understanding of moving beyond the victim/aggressor paradigm that our species has been in for so long now and that my soul longs to escape. With the teachings of the mulch today, I feel stronger in the world – anything ‘negative’ it throws at me I will do my best to turn into mulch and foster new life, within and without and, in so doing, I release the victim label and, instead, feel the strength that comes from gratitude and trust.