Morning Meditation by Sara Wright

I have just returned from the brook where I offered up my Toad Moon prayers to the song of the Hermit thrush and to the rippling waters  – first honoring my body with a poem written just for her, and then by repeating my hope/belief/intention that the search has ended and my house will get the structural help she needs without invasive machines scarring my beloved trees and land… I release my doubt – a plague that has incarcerated me for months.

I felt my body rooting into forested soil… I belong here; I am loved here.

Peace filtered through the green – trees, seedlings, lichens, mosses, grasses and the clear mountain waters. Silence, except for thrush’s morning benediction.

A prayerful moment at the beginning of each day opens a spirit door – a portal into the beyond perhaps, but also a sacred portal into myself – though I have experienced this lifting of the veil throughout my life it wasn’t until this winter in a New Mexican Bosque that the trees taught me a lesson I needed to learn. I must create space to do this morning meditation intentionally every single day – for myself, as well as for the Earth adding a third element to ritual. My walks to the river and Bosque began as a survival mechanism to deal with unbearable heat and transformed into a focused morning meditation that I hope to continue for the rest of my life … I didn’t plan it; it happened, and the Bosque full of trees, roots, fungus and hyphae was the medium… S/he opened the door.

Now the challenge is to stay strong and true to what I know… a four year journey into the hero’s (?) maze was the way I learned that this particular earth ground needs and contains me…  Would her house timbers have cracked if I hadn’t abandoned her? She needs me to love her too.

It feels almost miraculous to experience a full moon in a grounded way after my experiences in the desert with an empty sky bowl of thin blue air, mighty winds that stilled the songs of birds and polluted the air, and nights that were never dark; the moon rarely slept perching in the sky for two weeks out of each month.

Too much air, too much stone, too much wind, a glaring sun…  a sky bereft of stars for too long each month, no green, and no water….

How grateful I am for home…

Seal Skin

This body is
my holy altar
my bounded skin
my embodied soul
my closet kin.

Sara is a naturalist, ethologist ( a person who studies animals in their natural habitats) (former) Jungian Pattern Analyst, and a writer. She publishes her work regularly in a number of different venues and is presently living in Maine.

Author: Sara Wright

I am a writer and naturalist who lives in a little log cabin by a brook with my two dogs and a ring necked dove named Lily B. I write a naturalist column for a local paper and also publish essays, poems and prose in a number of other publications. View all posts by Sara Wright