Wisdom In The Wild
What if nature could speak — and you remembered how to listen?
This past Sunday I facilitated a workshop called *Wisdom in the Wild* at Western Hills Garden — a privately owned, publicly open sanctuary dense with plants from every corner of the world.
Walking into it felt like being received. Like stepping into a womb.
A group of people gathered there with me for four hours.
We talked about the poly crisis we are living through — economic instability, housing, political divisiveness, war, ecological collapse.
Heavy things.
Real things.
But I offered them a frame: beneath all of these crises, there is one that gives rise to all the others. A crisis in consciousness.
Then, I sent them into the garden.
They came back quieter.
Slower.
Something had shifted in their faces.
We talked about the consciousness of nature — the intelligence that moves through every root, every leaf, every climbing vine.
Drawing on the messages received by Dorothy Maclean, co-founder of the legendary Findhorn Community and Gardens in Scotland, I read them transmissions from the Devic realm — the realm of consciousness that holds the living pattern for each species in nature.
Then I led them through a guided meditation and sent them back in among the trees.
They came back smiling.
The smile of someone who had been held.
The noise of the world — the technology, the urgency, the relentless hum of the news cycle — had receded. Not because we ignored it. But because something older and larger had come forward.
Everyone left deeply nourished.
Wisdom In The Wild Workshop at Western Hills Garden, Occidental, California
Through the Lens of Expansive Living
I want to tell you something I haven’t shared publicly before about the Expansive Living framework.
Nature has consciousness. And it is in constant communication with us.
I know that might ask something of you — a willingness to sit with an idea that doesn’t fit neatly into the rational mind.
But stay with me, because what I witnessed on Sunday was not metaphor. The people who walked into that garden distracted and heavy walked out of it changed. Not because of what I said. Because of what the garden did.
In the Devic realm — the realm of consciousness that overlights each species in nature — there is a language being spoken at all times. Not in words. In resonance.
In the way a bean plant spirals upward toward light, the way snow peas send out delicate curling tendrils that find and grip their trellis with surprising strength, the way a stone spiral holds stillness at its center.
The entrance to my back yard
One of the messages I read to the group on Sunday came from this realm:
“Tune into nature until you feel love flow. That feeling is your arrow into the angelic world. Always it is your state of being that the nature world responds to — not what you say, not what you do, but what you are.”
—The Devas, pg. 24, To Honor the Earth: Reflections on Living in Harmony with Nature
Read that again.
Not what you say. Not what you do. But what you are.
This is not a passive invitation to go smell the roses. This is a call to a different kind of relationship — one where you bring your whole self into contact with a living, responsive world. Where your inner state is not just your private experience, but the signal you are sending into a field that is listening.
Through the practice of Immersive Presence™ — one of the core practices of the Expansive Living Method — we learn to slow down enough to actually receive what nature is already offering.
Not as metaphor.
As contact.
Flower and herb spiral in my back yard
segment of flower and herb spiral in my back yard
On Saturday morning, the day before the workshop, I stood in line at the farmer's market. A local organic peach farm was back for the first time this season — earlier than expected — and the line was long.
I chatted with the person in front of me, the person behind me. I waited to taste a peach that was cold and sweet and so full of water it almost undid me. Then I bought local feta from a man who keeps goats.
Snow peas in a vegetable bed in my back yard
This is also nature. This is also nourishment. People’s craft. People’s devotion. The land, made edible, made shareable, made into a reason to stand in line and talk to strangers.
The more I turn toward the living world, the more it turns toward me.
That’s not poetry.
That’s what I keep experiencing.
And it’s what I watched happen in that garden workshop on Sunday.
A new meadow garden under birch trees planted
with grasses, poppies, and clover seeds
I invite you to notice:
This week, find one moment to step outside — into a garden, a park, a patch of grass, a single tree on a city street — and practice Immersive Presence.
Don’t go to think. Don’t go to decompress. Don’t go to take a photo.
Go to be.
Bring whatever you are carrying — the heaviness, the worry, the fatigue — and let yourself arrive. Notice what is alive around you. What moves. What holds still. What reaches toward light.
Then ask yourself: what is this place responding to in me right now?
Irises in my garden
What Inspires Me
The Miracle Inside a White Bean
This year I planted flat beans I saved from last year’s harvest — small, hard, almost weightless. And from that bean, something wondrous is happening. A full plant is emerging. Tendrils reaching and green leaves unfurling.
I cannot get over it. I don’t want to get over it.
That a single dry bean holds the complete pattern for an entire living plant — that is not ordinary. That is the miracle I want to keep noticing.
To quote the poet Mary Oliver, “who made the world?”
I ask myself that every time I look at a dry white bean sitting in my palm.
Trough with flat beans gathered from last year
I’m curious — has nature ever spoken to you in a way you couldn’t quite explain? I’d love to hear your experience in the comments below.
Sending your way blessings of rootedness,
Anna