We go into Nature and LOOK and are enchanted. Yet there’s another way to glean Wonder from landscapes, one that is uncommonly spoken of or practiced. And a little witchy. 

The sense of touch.

Let’s go for a walk, right now, in your imagination, to see how this works. (Wonder and walks naturally hold hands, as you know.) Off you go, out a hidden portal of your home. See the canopied path leading to a forest like any other.  

Take off your shoes, for this is holy ground.

Set bare feet on the grit of earth.

As you go along, please know you may find yourself attempting to use descriptive words for what will come to pass. However, it’s most divine to Go Wordless. No vocabulary will be needed (on your part) for this imaginal experience. The point is to conjure sensations, not syllables.

Dip your head as you slip out of bright sunshine into the realm of what is emerald and sage-deep. This is you, bowing to the forest.

Pause. Feel the coolness on your skin. (Take your time with this.)

Press your palm against the flaked crevices of tree bark. (This is just the beginning.)

Graze the back of your hand along the velvet stockings of moss on exposed old-growth roots.

Allow the raspy tickle of a caterpillar’s crawl on your arm. Rub a ridged leaf against your cheek, next press it to the space between your eyes. It may happen that you intuit the wonder of wood breaching earth to stand inside a sky, to grow star-shaped hands to fall upon your head, autumn upon autumn.

Caress the perfect curvature of a river’s stone. Feel the sacred weight of it in your hand, how clean it is from rushing ice melts.

Do you understand? With touch comes closeness—a felt intimacy with Mother Nature.

Who notices when she’s being courted.

A fallen twig from a pine takes care to bump and prick beneath your fingertip. This is the braille of dryads, and as you read by touch you discover what the tree knows by heart:

Silence and birdsong and wind, the trifecta of primordial comfort.

A storm arrives. Tilt back your head and drift your eyes closed. Float your arms. Catch puddles of cloud; accept the thrumming patter of cloud-drops in your cupped hands. Become a chalice-goddess in the rain.

Push your toes into the mud.

A plant of spindly stems scratches. Breathe deep and ‘see’ the stems undergo a metamorphosis into gray-green tendrils of hair belonging to some tiny, wild creature straddling this world and the realm of Fae.

You may be surprised at this ability you have, at your age, to make-believe. Brace yourself. Images will flood your mind through the sense of touch, just as eagerly as through the sense of sight, if you come to the world as does a child.

Playfully.

Open, open, open. 

Know this:

Mother Nature wants to tell you stories any way she can, using every last one of your senses and all of the world. To this end she’ll cross any boundary because she knows no boundaries.

Imagine if we all welcomed her outreach efforts. She might just extend her beauty and story so deep inside our psyches that we all move in a synchronized dance to tend our blue and green and creatured Home. And, one another. Earthy, natural miracles might happen.

The other day in my back yard, of a sudden an unexpected and seemingly related-to-nothing image arrived inside my mind:

War submarines beaching themselves like whales upon shores. Stiff uniforms popped out of metal-lidded spouts to spray onto a lapping beach and become people, relaxed and natural people, strolling on sands of all colors and origin stories.

It remains mysterious to me how such images and meaning-making come out of nowhere, out of imagination, which is the sublime stuff of the heavens. Just remember the axiom goes like this:

As above, so below.

Tactile immersion in Mother Nature holds power to transport you into Wonder. Go on and try it. Make it a practice to be witchy in wild places by way of the wondrous, liminal threshold that is your skin.  

Much good will come of it.

 

 

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
~ Margaret Atwood

 

To remember Wonder by Cricket Baker’s new pieces arriving in your email about once a month, be sure to SUBSCRIBE.

Pretty please leave a comment to share any thoughts you have on this piece 🙂

featured image by Yvor Punchev

image of forest by Lukasz Szmigiel