Feasting On Your Life

The migrating birds know.

The slowing, dying bumble bees know.

The gnarled, wild pear tree knows, its fruit thumping to the earth.

Something has been released, a heaviness is settling into our limbs, the tree’s limbs, the earth’s limbs.  The cosmic axis has shifted, moving us into what is potentially one of the most challenging transitions of the seasonal wheel. A magical opposition appears as the energies of the Earth element grow abundant and generous all the while mysteriously moving into decline and decrease. 

Red Squirrel knows. She has been visiting every morning for a feast of sunflower hearts, leaving little piles of leftover shavings. She sits on the deck railing, close enough for me to notice the black markings along her flank that separate her red fur from her white belly. When invited into conversation she tells me of her urgency, how to plan, store, pace oneself through a season of eating- a skill we no longer possess. She refuses to reveal anything about her secret neural maps for the thousands of seeds she has left in the surrounding fields and forest. But she does remind me of a fact that supermarkets can lull us into forgetting: the harvest is a serious matter.

The Earth element conjures themes related to gathering, nourishment, and digestion, all the while bringing us deeper into our flesh, our embodiment, our black soil centers. Hunger, pluck, chew, savor, tongue, swallow, digest, rippen, rot, compost down. One long interconnected pathway meant to fill us with life force. 

There are thousands of ways to seek mediocre nourishment, but it is more challenging to connect with what genuinely enriches our lives. The truth is that most of us skim the surface of sustenance from our choices in life, the people, the food, the images, the entertainment, and the other environments we choose to engage in, leaving us with a kind of psychospiritual indigestion. We are taught to be overly fixated on external sources of nutriment, taking and extracting, without focusing on a soul nutrition that fills our true inner needs. 

Exploring the themes of the Earth element / Digestive center / Late summer season, we can strengthen our centers by wondering:

• What do our animal bodies know about this time of year? How does it live in us? How can we take our cues on how to live from the more-than-human beings around us?
• How are we digesting our world? How might we be more discerning about what is truly nourishing?
• How does looping, excessive thinking, or worry act as a psychological knottniness, not only in our minds but also within our bodies?
• How does the Earth element help us better know how to love, nourish, and mother ourselves?

And recently I had the pleasure of being in conversation with astrologer, Kristine Backes, on the Natural Wisdom Podcast. We explored the pros and cons of this word “rewilding” and why us humans seem to be so enticed by it. I also tell the story of why my house is so full of plant refugees and why instead of ascension, I am so drawn to going downwards to be in dialogue with the 50 million year old boulders and the spirits of the ancient stone grandmothers. You can listen in here.

May you feast on your life!

With gratitude and kinship,

Kendra

(excerpt from the Sept 2022 newsletter, sign up to receive my monthly love letter!)