Your Natural Joy

If anybody asked me which one of my books is the one that touches me the most, I would say they each touch me in different ways. But if I were really pushed to choose a favorite, I would have to say The Magical Forest of Aliveness. It is a fairytale, which describes the journey we’re all on from the delicious and intimate connection with life we knew when we were very young, into what it’s like to be caught in the village called Mind (where most of us live most of the time) and finally reconnecting with the aliveness and joy that is our birthright.

I’m in middle of recording Magical Forest so we can offer it as an audiobook.  I recorded chapter 7 this morning called The Clearing. This is the part of the fairytale where Rose, the main character, finally makes it back to the magical forest and ends up in a clearing in the middle of the forest. She lays down on a carpet of green by a musical brook and as she let’s go, she remembers who she truly is and what life is really about right underneath the busyness of her life.  This remembering bring her a deep joy she hadn’t experienced since she was very, very young. Then a bear, a lion and a tiger show her how she can be present even while living in the village called Mind.

The other day I came across one of my favorite quotes and it is by the author Edward Abbey. And I felt the same joy Rose felt in the clearing as I read his words. Because this quote points to how you experience life when you learn how to use your mind but not be lost in it, I wanted to share it with you:

“Even a rock is a being, a thing with character and a kind of spirit, an existence worthy of our love. To disparage the world we know for the sake of grand verbal abstentions (being caught in our minds) is to be false to the mother earth who sustains us.  The highest treason, the meanest treason is to disavow and deny this lone but gracious planet on which we voyage through the cold void of space.

For what do we really know?  I think of a lightning-blasted but still living shagbark hickory in the pasture back home on my father’s farm in Pennsylvania; I think of a twisted juniper on a ledge of sandstone at Cape Solitude, far above the Colorado River; I think of the pelicans that sail along the shores of the Sea of Cortes; I think of a thousand other places I have known and loved and all the creatures great and small that live there – each a part of a greater whole, but each an individual as well, one and unique, never to be known again, here or anywhere, each as precious as the vivid moment in which it first appeared on earth.

Don’t talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms – I know where I belong.  Heaven is home, Utopia is here, Nirvana is now.

Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy giant Douglas fir.  I stopped to look.  And what I saw was the moon – the moon itself, nothing else; and the tree, alive and conscious in its own spiral of time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky.  We are.  That is what we know.  This is all we can know.  And each such moment holds more magic and miracle and mystery than we shall ever be able to understand, holds all that we could possibly need – if only we can see.”

Everything I share with the world is with the intent to help people see through the clouds in their mind so that they can reconnect with this living moment in all its wonder, uniqueness and mystery; see that “every moment holds more magic and miracle and mystery than we shall ever be able to understand.”

To come back to life in this way, to be intimately alive, comes from the understanding you are a part of a greater whole, an individual as well, one and unique, never to be known again, here or anywhere, as precious as the vivid moment in which you first appeared on earth.

Reading these words is an indication that you are on the journey back to life. And know, that no matter what your life looks like, you’re exactly where you need to be on your journey home.