There was clearly something I wanted to write about today since I felt I couldn’t get started with anything else until I at least tried, though I hardly know where to start…so I jumped in to see where this would lead and the long-rambling title is where I seem to have got to, such as there is a theme.

It began on my walk, which I did in the woods and common sort-of behind my house. This is a place that I seldom walk, truth be known…and less so now than ever since our village is being hammered by new housing initiatives around it, preferring to get in my car and go even a mile or two away further away from all this urbanity, to other walks that I have claimed to be my own over the years.

“Why is that?” I pondered as I benefitted from the cool convenience of its trees on a day that was already too hot for being bothered with a car. The answer was there in how sickly the trees were looking, for all we are in mid-summer. Had I always noticed that or was I newly noticing just how tired and unwell so many of these trees were…how the crisp carcasses of last autumn’s leaves still lie thickly underfoot…how some trees have no leaves at all in this fringe of urban Nature. This is the same place I depicted in last year’s artwork “Looking Back”, of a pair of deer looking back towards a golden view that is rapidly disappearing before their very eyes. I used to be able to predict half or dozen or more deer sightings, in full view, on this hill but now consider myself lucky if I catch the merest glimpse of a solitary deer peering from behind leaves.

Yet, I knew this morning’s post wasn’t meant to be a dreary one; a treatise on the state of the ecosystem or lament about urban pollution. Even as I walked beneath these tired-looking trees, I knew that these trees weren’t done for; weren’t appealing for my sympathy. If someone had come with a bulldozer that very morning and declared they “might as well” get rid of them, build more houses on the spot, because this was now a pitiful excuse for a wood, I would have defended them in a moment, standing up for their right to keep doing what they are doing; which is no small thing.

Because, I realised, these places (tired-out though they seem) are being the every lungs, the buffer, the breath of fresh air for this and other such locations under urban pressure, surrounded by acute unawareness (as a grown man of at least thirty, walking his dog, stared fixedly at his phone which was playing rap music out loud…not even seeing his surroundings for a moment as he approached me), blighted by all manner pollution. They are holding up a certain frequency, regardless…and if they are worn out and haggered-seeming then its because they are valiantly holding that frequency all the days of their lives; and the birds know it, those birds which (yes, in lower numbers now) sing on in their branches.

And in that realisation I saw myself and those like me; people who look worn out, depleted, sickly, struggling to thrive in outward terms yet, inside, we know we are far from “done for” Yes, we are tired-out physically because we do this important inner work; this frequency work that so many others don’t even think about. As with the trees, I know we are like this not because we are failing but because we are succeeding in holding a certain frequency AGAINST TERRIBLE ODDS; against the flood tide of negativity and lost direction that has been the story of the last few decades. We are those who feel more, who notice more, who dare to be aware of things that others sweep under carpet and we are processing that knowing through the very cells of our bodies, transmuting it into something  more meaningful than it might otherwise be so that, as we stand tall and keep going regardless, we do it for all. And in doing so, of course, we look tired-out by comparison.

Yet all it took was the acknowledgement of what these trees stood for in order for a different current to whisper and tingle all about me. My unexceptional walk transformed quickly into the exceptional before my very eyes and it was as though the landscape lit up with a subtle vibration that my long-compatriotship with it enabled me to see clearer than, perhaps, someone who could not relate to the degree of  fatigue that this place knows as the daily reality of doing “the job” that it is here to do. Together, the landscape lit up and I also lit up; brimful with more energy and inspiration than I still know what to do with and…in another moment of appreciation…I realised how so many of the most inspired moments of my life had occurred whilst walking in these very woods over many years; how it had delivered more epiphanies and landmark understandings than I could ever begin to count.

There are two giant redwood trees on the brow of the hill, one (dark and shady with its overhang) that I consider to be female and the other (stark and erect) that I consider to be male and I like to visit both, to spend some time communing with their energies. Today, I noticed a pair of new holes dug into the earth at the foot of the male tree, at first assuming some mammal had scraped the beginnings to a burrow until I realised they were a bees nest; a fat bumble bee humming in and out of the entrance. This felt so meaningful to me that it made my walk because this evidence of highly organised and “sacred masculine” activity starting to stir around the roots of this totem to masculinity was just what I wanted to see clues of; divinely inspired masculinity being just what this world needs now, so that we can build its structures anew!

Then another clue; an odd one…provided by the oak that stands in direct line with my house; between my house and the spring that I have done very-much work with over the years, which was producing masses of vivid new leaves. Odd because the oaks did all that new-growth many weeks ago and look dark green and mature everywhere you go now; all the vivid new leaves having long turned to a much darker hue. All, that is, except here where this anomaly tree had begun to unfurl a second layer of brand new leaves at the tips of all its branches in just the last few days, creating a bizarre juxtaposition of old and new, mature and fresh, side by side. I accepted this, without straining my rationale, as yet another positive sign and smiled my way home.

Because it has been pretty-much been like this, for me, these past few weeks, while I have been putting all my efforts into transformation and positivity. There have been just so many things come up that I could take “in the negative”; signs and indications that things are going wrong, that we are doomed, that things are only going to get worse from now on, that our children’s lives have been stolen from them and that our future world will be a living hell. In conversations with others, these threads have tried to bully and force their way in…and yet I have felt quite compelled to resist them, to walk away, extricating myself from the very building if necessary rather than go down those vibration-lowering routes. In fact, it has never felt more important to do so. By the way, you can tell when you have been spinning an exceptionally high vibe from the stark contrast when some of these topics try to come in to your awareness; like sticking your leg out of a fast moving vehicle and touching the tarmac, you will feel the burn as your alert. Use this to step away and, for goodness sake, prioritise the high-frequency work you are doing above ALL else; this is what makes a real difference, over and above all the chitter-chatter of fear.

Because when we allow ourselves to be infected with the blight of negativity, it spreads like wildfire, jumping from branch to branch of our experience until, suddenly, the whole forest is depleted, with great gaps in communication where once there was a canopy serving as the unbreakable bond between all life-affirming things. Whilst this might not destroy everything, it sets it back and it depletes energy that some of us are expending a lot of effort whipping up to a higher place…and why court set-backs anymore? We do it to ourselves, each time we allow fear thoughts to come in, when we explore those “what if (insert catastrophe)” books on the best-seller list, when we allow our newsfeed and the media to fill in the blanks of our questions…rather than what we feel and notice with our hearts.We do it (to refer back to my previous post) when we “fail to believe in the belief”; in other words, we say we believe in something positive but we still defer back to our old fear-driven, doubting selves (or we harbour “insurance policy” thoughts in case our positive beliefs turn out to be misguided). No…we have to get on board this thing and stay there!

Yes, even when we feel sad about the trees, about the ecosystem, we allow ourselves to go there. The trick is to be discerning about what is happening, which is to see it and admit it, but not to lower our vibration to where we feel defeated by these things. To allow for different outcomes than those based on how things turned out in the past…

There is always a plus to “the hardest times”, as life has taught so many of us well in recent years. When we are most depleted, when all else seems to conspire against our thriving, we are left with nowhere else to go but to exercise the heart muscle and allow ourselves to feel into other possibilities…and then we hold onto these possibilities as our reality, ahead of them manifesting, since it is in the very holding of them (we quickly realise) that we manifest them, regardless of all those other bully-energies attempting to bulldoze, blight and cut our positivity down via the weaponry of demoralisation and trauma.

Outward appearance is not everything, and far more goes on beneath the surface of all living things than we can yet fully comprehend; not least, the ability to turn health around on a pin-head when the time is right.

The trees know this; and I know it too…and today I felt it, as the distinct clue that we are far from depleted on the inside, in fact (dare I say it) I sense that we are through the worst of it all now, though things don’t outwardly seem that way, I concur. Yet we are all turning around as surely as I am turning around in all my efforts to heal from the core of my cells outward, which I feel occurring day-on-day. Like being on a slow moving train turning an obtuse corner to face in a completely different direction, it can be so hard to perceive that we are now starting to facing an entirely different way, since we hardly noticed the transition and the view from the window doesn’t look so very different to how it was a short time ago…but I feel it and I know I am not alone in feeling it, either.

The turning point…THIS turning point…is not going to look the way we expect it to; to appear according to benchmarks that we have in our minds; based on the way things have been in “the past”. There has been no other time like this and so it cannot look that “old” way; its clues are subtle, under the surface, there to be felt but not neccesarily measured, even with the eyes…

Its your job, all of our jobs, to train ourselves how to use a different set of cues…and to not set ourselves back with old-style thinking, which undoes all of our efforts, rewriting the quantum effort in the very moment we naysay ourselves into typical fears and doubts, other people’s stuff, the (still) popular trend to disregard what cannot be demonstrated according to logic. Smile at all that baby stuff…and believe in yourself, what you feel coming, anyway!

So, it’s never been more important to keep our attention on the positive, to look out for signs and clues of regeneration, to withdraw energy from the naysayers, to be vigilant about who and what we keep the company of in the weeks and months ahead. Once you alter your focus, expect these clues to come thick and fast and know that in seeking them, and acknowledging and being grateful for them, you do the very work that moves mountains. Meanwhile, those who have done the work for the longest time, who have been the very life-support of the passing era (for all they look so exhausted that it could be assumed they have done nothing but lie in their beds feeling sickly for a decade or more) will start to show distinct signs of regeneration…you could say resurrection…in the coming months and I, for one, intend to be one of them.