Most people find it easy to communicate with animals in our daily lives, and with those animals who show up spiritual messengers—the deer or cougar or hawk who shows up unexpectedly as a totem, or sign.
But what about the rest of nature? What about the plants and trees, the elements of earth, fire, wind and water? Do these also communicate with us?
The answer of course, is yes.
And once you have had this experience of communicating directly with the natural world, you will marvel that it is even a question.
All nature communicates.
Do plants communicate with us?
Do trees resonate with our energy?
What about the earth?
Does wind respond to our emotions?
Does water understand our thoughts?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes (and the answer is yes), then how does we make this happen in our own life?
It’s a practice that seems complicated to those at the beginning of their spiritual path, and effortless to those who’ve been walking their path for awhile.
This is because full presence is all that is required.
When we become one of One: when we inhabit our full Divine reality, even for just a few minutes, we become able to resonate with everything—even the tree, deer, wind, water.
We are not separate
It is common to think of nature as something separate from us. That we are human, and nature is nature, and these are different, somehow. But we are not separate from nature, any more than we are separate from anything in the Universe.
Try this for yourself. Sit under a tree for an hour and watch the leaves wave in the breeze; or lie your back in the grass and gaze at the sky.
In that hour, you will become intimately involved with nature! You will stop your experience of being sanitized, clean and protected “human” and become “animal” instead. Your skin may become damp from where you are sitting. Your may become exposed to wind or sun. You may become the highway for various bugs: ants will crawl over you, gnats will pester you. Bees may buzz . Smaller life forms will also find you in your animal state: seeds, burrs, spores, lichens, mosses. In an hour, you will become so intimately involved with nature that it will be hard to know which is nature and which is you.
Nature changes our vibration
Yet it is not only our interaction with nature in the physical form that shows us our connection; it is also our interaction with nature in the energetic or vibrational plane.
If you have even sat outside quietly and meditated, you will begin to notice that your own vibration changes the longer you are in that space. You become calmer. Your mind clears. You become spiritually aware.
You experience consciousness.
You may even move into a state of bliss.
These are all things that just happen, when you are simply “being” in the natural world.
Nature responds to our thoughts
Something else very interesting happens when you become aware of the vibration of the natural world around you: Nature will begin to respond to your thought vibrations.
For example, if you are recalling a particularly charged memory, and you are very focused on this feeling, you may suddenly notice that the wind picks up, or the sun suddenly goes gloomy, or it begins to rain.
This will be enough to make you take notice: to think “hmmm, that’s something.” And then, you will shift into awareness and start paying attention, and you will realize that nature is providing you with a soul message.
For example, say you were thinking about how to distress from your busy, overscheduled life, and you might suddenly notice a snail crawling slowly across the path, without concern for rush or haste.
Or perhaps you are thinking about a conflicted family relationship, and you suddenly notice how the branches in a stand of trees are entangled; they cross and curve over each other. You realize these trees have grown together as a family does; they are entwined and wrapped and cannot be separated. And in this moment of awareness and noticing, you understand how your own family is entwined.
Energetic response
Two-way communication with nature is especially apparent when the energy is stronger: such as when two or more people are in a group. This might happen at outdoor ceremonies or celebrations, or in other aspects of outdoor meditation, relaxation or play.
I’ll often walk with my husband to the creek at the edge of our property, and sit by the trickling water and the ancient trees. Often—too often to even keep track of—when our own vibration is very high, we will notice the leaves suddenly begin to rustle in a fervent new way, shaking as if they are laughing.
Other times, if we are in deep discussion, the wind will rise up from nowhere and make itself known in a gust and whirl, showing that there is another vibrational presence with us.
Learning to sense
I’ve lived in the forest for 14 years now, and this has changed my spiritual understanding profoundly. When I first moved to the woods, I could not see the squirrel on a tree limb, or tell one bird’s call from another. Now, with those senses built in as a part of me, the communication has radically deepened.
Every time I walk or sit or meditate in the natural world and receive the deep response that is always there, it is clear to me—nature is no dumb force, no random neutrality. Nature is communicating with us, in ways both subtle and direct, all the time.
We must only choose to see, and to sense.
