You need anchors to stabilize, be resilient and find your way in today’s confusing, complicated reality pregnant with radical change.
Connecting to your local environment and building relationships with people, animals, plants, the seasons, and the food you eat is an excellent way to ground yourself physically and spiritually. Slowing down seems to be a prerequisite to becoming more intimate with the immediacy of the world around you. If I am always busy chasing my tail and doing stuff, I am too distracted to pay close attention to what is unfolding right in front of my eyes.
As I am preparing this early dinner, I am struck by the things I have learned lately (foraging weeds), and the result is visible on this plate:
> local reddish & carrots from a friend’s garden
> homemade pesto from foraged weeds (onion weed, wild carrot, pauaa, comfrey, local walnuts)
> homemade rye sourdough bread (I am German, after all)
> butter and sardines (from the supermarket)
It feels pretty good to notice that more and more ingredients are local and seasonal and that I have a deeper personal relationship with them. It feels somewhat like weaving new strands of connection with the living world around me.
Consuming the world around me has to bring you closer it. A merging occurs as you absorb the molecules of animals, plants, water, air, bacteria and the photons of light from your environment. The more you connect locally, the more you become one with your environment. Does that make sense? I believe so, and I am starting to experience that viscerally.
It can only be supportive to be locally rooted, grounded and connected, especially when dealing with the massive changes in our governing, political, and financial systems and the world at large.
What else helps to support yourself and your being and do the work in the world at the same time? Some ideas…
- Connect locally with your food, people, elements
- Consider a foraging course
- Double down on your morning routine
- Get your skin in the game (=sun)
- Plant your feed in the soil
- Make the nights dark again
- Get hot and cold
- Spend more time in nature
- Move your body, strengthen your body
- Breathe, meditate & go in
- Laugh more
- Be friendly and kind to yourself
- Have more physical touch and intimacy
- Listen more, talk less
- …
What are your thoughts? What helps you?
