In this liminal time, what do we let go and what do we keep?
 
What needs to go?
Where does this grief come from?
Should I let grief go?
No
Grief is a measure of how much you care.
Carry grief, not to wallow in
But for memory.
 
Should I let my dreams go?
Ah, letting go of dreams and expectations is a wise path.
Keep your vision.
Keep your ear to the ground and your eyes on nature.
Follow her lead.
Notice what she is doing.
We are followers in this time.
Trust nature – she is only interested in expanding life.
She has 65 million years (or more) in making life happen.
She knows.
 
Should I let my fear go? How?
Yes, oh yes, there is no room for fear.
Fear prevents new options.
Fear makes us small.
Fear closes us down into tiny visions of the past.
The means a mix of claiming our agency in service to life.
We are learning the strength of service.
Service means to listen, to explore, to inquire into how LIFE happens.
Notice when your actions create the conditions that support life.
This is deep work.
Requiring authenticity and therefore courage.
Curiosity is the path forward.
Be so curious that there is no room for any other emotion except AWE.
 
Anger, should I let my anger go?
Anger, why are you angry?
Anger is a defense, a pretended strength against change.
Resistance is futile and even self-destructive.
Anger makes enemies, when we need to make friends.
So, letting go of resistance to these many shifts and changes, losses, will release the anger.
Loss is huge, and very difficult.
Treasuring memories, savoring the love the gifts you recognize as precious have stirred in you.
Every loss opens a space for something new.
Be curious to see what is also appearing in the new space that is available.
Be in gratitude for the experience that is bringing you such pain.
Appreciate your ability to recognize the beauty that serves life.
Trust LIFE to reemerge.
Have patience.
 
Love, I want to let go of love. It is SO painful!
Ah, yes, and no.
It is attachment that is painful.
Attachment carries expectations.
Expectations are painful and they make us believe in betrayal.
So let go of attached love, that comes with expectations about how it ‘should’ be, about how it ‘ought’ to be.
Keep that love that is full of gratitude and appreciation.
Keep the love that recognizes the divinity in the other.
Keep the love that opens you up to the delicious expression of LIFE
In all the magnificent forms it chooses to take.
Stay curious to discover the new forms that love will take.
Love is life in motion – enjoy.

 
Design is a very human thing to do. It's one-way we humans express ourselves and make our mark in the world. Because of this, design is often not only human centric, it’s egocentric. The hubris and ego that is often involved in design of any kind, particularly architecture, makes it very hard to even understand what it means to design with nature.
 
Biomimicry has been a fabulous invention. The very act of getting businesses to think about nature as a resource has moved our relationship with nature light years into the future. We have become very clever now by watching and seeing what nature does we then try to do it in our own way, bending nature's wisdom to our needs and desires. One of the real benefits of this approach has been the ability to at least think about minimizing our resource use, nature is very thrifty. However, designing with nature is a whole different approach.
 
In designing with nature, it becomes apparent that nature needs space, so we need to allow nature to exist, to coexist, to be in proximity, to interpenetrate the spaces we use. In actual practice, this means making sure the green expands instead of our habit of reducing or controlling anything green. We must begin paying attention to nature's health, as well as our own health.
 
Nature needs time, it's not rushed. It's sometimes slow, it may even meander. It needs to be supported in this by having the space, the opportunity, to take the time that it needs to flower, to come into fruition, to blossom. We need to be conscious of the cycles it needs to function in and allow for the changes, over time, that nature brings forth. Our addiction to standards, stagnant appearances, simplified expressions, and easily repeated designs don't fit in with natures exuberance.
 
There's an exuberance about nature, a joyous expression of creativity that doesn't tolerate standards or constraints or stability or repetition. The recognition, expectation, openness to spontaneity, to emergence requires trusting the process, and loosening our attachment to outcomes. We need to design with emergence in mind and allow for the evolution of the design as real life contributes.
 
Working with nature is not an event, it's a journey. It's an exploration. It's a collaboration. It may be a cycle, but it's rarely an event. We get caught in events, but with nature, it's always part of a process.
 
Understanding the processes and patterns of nature and recognizing the need for that kind of expression is a way of being in tune and creating harmony with what's existing and with what wants to appear. In any dance, there's a leader and a follower. Allowing nature to lead can give us the confidence, the trust, and the feeling of safety that we crave, if we understand nature and how she works. Trust is not about blind faith, but in being confident enough to ask questions, and seek examples to put our concerns to rest. It’s about learning to see situations through Earth’s eyes.
 
Listening to nature requires the patience and depth to be in silence, enough grounding in science to understand the processes and cycles, and a depth in working with systems to see the patterns nature enjoys. The biggest shift, however, is putting nature first. By keeping the serpentine bend in rivers, water can serve the entire ecosystem. By allowing for flood plains, water can nurture vast areas on a continual basis. Our ability to ‘straighten’ rivers, put them in concrete beds, bury them underground and divert them hundreds of miles, subverts their nature and purpose. When we claim land to serve our own desires, we put ourselves in a situation of continually fighting with nature, which becomes costly, both financially and emotionally.
 
Nature LOVES life! By trusting that we can develop a harmony with nature, one that is especially needed as the Earth rebalances to adjust to the changes we have mindlessly made, we create resilience and robust health. Working together, we can co-create a new normal, one that serves us both.
 

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We all love trees. Forests are wonderful in the abstract, but messy and difficult to engage with or walk in. What, you say, that’s not true, I enjoy walking in the forests around me. I’ll bet you do, but here’s the kicker, those are not forests. What most of us know as forests are really mono cropped tree farms. They were planted to replace the real forest that was there and cut down to build the house you live in. Most of us have never seen an old growth forest. That said, some of those semi-forests have been around for 50–100 years. They are not something we really want to lose. No, they don’t make porous soil as well as old growth, and no they don’t make rain as well as old growth, but still they do something and that something is needed. They just need to be managed into diversity.
 
In the paper today was a long article about the devastating cuts to the Forest Service. Any fool can cut, but few can prune for growth. It’s the same with budget cuts. Easy to eliminate, but to eliminate for growth take time and deep knowledge of what’s needed and what’s currently present. The skill and decades of learned information are going out the window, and these will take decades to bring back. The article even mentioned pack animals that need years of training to be really skillful in bearing heavy packs over rough and unknown territory. Helpers who removed 850 trees last year worked with rangers who knew the forest and who could tell them what to do and which trees to take out. All that is gone.
 
The Forest Service does yeoman’s work. But there are few who would not say it could be improved. For decades, the Forest Service has been underfunded. In our Western world, work happens if you pay for it. As more and more of us are born and live in cities, the hard work of forest management is not understood or attractive, so people can be hard to find. That and relatively poor pay make the job unattractive to many.
 
There’s been a resurgence, lately, of interest in indigenous ways of living and being on the land. Indigenous people are raised to know they are part of the whole system of life and to recognize the reverence and gratitude that comes with that understanding. They are taught to live their lives in ways that are interconnected and interdependent with the rest of the life around them. They understand to leave things and not take it all. They understand how to take in such a way that nature is stronger for the loss. How can you pay to make this happen?
 
Since it takes money to manage the forests, even with the imperfect knowledge we have, we aren’t willing to do even that. “Since 1854, Menominee Tribal Enterprises has harvested more than 2.5 billion board feet of lumber from our sacred land. We have completely cut standing timber over the entire reservation twice. Yet, today we have more than a half billion board feet additional standing timber than when we started. A drive through or fly over our forest would show the results of a forest that looked like it had never been cut.” Adrian Miller, Menominee Tribal member.
 
The truth is that people learn and work harder for love than they do for money. We all know this from our own life experience, yet we designed our society around money and not around love. Love makes the world go round, yet we go around being alive every chance we get. The Earth is calling us, she wants us here, but if we are not doing what brings life and increases love, maybe not.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about a forest near you.