Be Love - Be Loved - Beloved
Dear Community,
I’m on the tail end of an incredible adventure to New Zealand to visit family and attend a medical conference in Australia. My time on the North Island of New Zealand was absolutely magical. It seemed that at every turn I witnessed an entirely new ecosystem. I’ve never visited any place where I’ve been so viscerally aware of how alive our beloved planet is. From coastal rock formations that were being sculpted before my eyes to watching geothermal eruptions that reminded me that I was literally standing on an active volcano.
Photo by Sue Steindorf
My last wilderness adventure of the trip was a walk to one of the highest waterfalls on the north island. I was drawn to the falls like a magnet and found myself cris-crossing the river until I was at the base of the falls. I stretched out on rocks and received the majesty of this sacred place. At some point the sensory input of the water rushing over the cliffs, the mist surrounding my body, the soft grasses in my hands and hard rock on my back and the wispy clouds dancing across the sky melted into an embodied symphony and I felt like I was the mist, plants, rocks and clouds. I experienced the alchemy of unity where I didn’t simply feel nature but experienced what my long time teacher and friend Christina Donnell calls “being-meld”. Christina exquisitely articulated this process in one of her recent newsletters, describing this as an alchemical process and reminding us that in alchemy there is both an ascending and a descending exchange of energy that fuses into something entirely new.
“We must touch but also be touched. Something must flow inside or invade us. Something must pour down into us, all the way to our root, in every cell. Our nonphysical touch must go deeper than merely feeling the world. It must go to the place where touching travels both ways. It involves a living exchange between the human and nonhuman world, and eventually, with the world itself. Here, we experience the body itself not just as a temple for the spirit, but as a place where the spirit manifests in a new intensity of fusion with our matter. This alone transforms the whole of reality.”
- Christina Donnell
**Read Christina’s full newsletter here: Timeless Consciousness Newsletter. I highly recommend signing up!
These moments can’t be created, but through practices of silence, stillness, awareness and cultivating receptivity, we can become a vessel for this possibility. We’ve been exploring love with a capital “L” these past few months – a Love that reminds us that we are Love, we are one. Though this love isn’t relational in the typical sense of the word, it deepens our capacity for all kinds of love.
Much love,
Sue