Baby, it’s hot outside.
It’s scorching. It’s smothering.
The headlines scream: record-breaking temperatures, forest fires, floods, displacement, and even – death.
Global warming is no longer a warning. It’s a reckoning.
And I’m totally complicit.
My life of luxury takes more than it gives. This morning, I had a nice long hot shower, cooled off in my air-conditioned apartment, before retrieving a few single-wrapped Amazon packages from the lobby (How did they arrive so quickly?!). I expanded my already colossal carbon footprint before my day had even begun.
My life is one of convenience – and disconnection.
In the psychedelic arena, there’s a lot of talk about healing. In my blog post about The Trauma Pandemic, I claimed I wasn’t seeking healing, but rather growth. I’ve clung to that distinction – perhaps a little too loudly.
I find myself in need of healing after all. Specifically, I need to heal my relationship with nature.
Once when I was on mushrooms, I had a moment of awakening beneath a tree. I wrote about it here — how the tree spoke to me. A rooted, living presence reminded me: we are not separate. Trees breathe out what we breathe in. And we breathe in what they breathe out. Trees share their shade, beauty, and stillness. They are in relationship with us – even if we forget that we are in relationship with them.
And I have forgotten. Or perhaps I never knew.
I don’t know the names of the trees — not their species, not their stories, certainly not their quirks.
It’s time for me to connect with the non-human living world. Healing happens in relationship. And all relationships begin with a simple question: What is your name?
I can befriend nature. I can speak up for our green spaces, currently at risk. And I can honor the plant and earth medicines that awaken souls, by remembering that they also come from lands that need my protection.
Maybe this is the kind of healing I’ve been denying. Not the personal kind. But the kind that’s relational. Ecological. The healing that restores belonging — not just to self, but to planet. To something larger, greener, older, wiser.
