EarthWaysLLC Summer 2018 Newsletter
EarthWaysLLC
Summer 2018 Newsletter
Summertime:  Getting Ourselves Outdoors

Remember summers of your childhood.  Running barefoot in the grass, picking up seashells at the shore, family picnics, road trips visiting relatives, the long light of the days, stacks of books to read. Memorial Day to Labor Day is the summer of old.

Recall you the child in summer.  Days outdoors, playing.  Take yourself out into the natural world this summer.  Let your mind and body relax.  Give yourself some time away from the routines and chores of daily living.

There are many articles now proclaiming the benefits of going outdoors.  Researchers, physicians, adjunct health providers, mental health specialists all agree that time spent outdoors is beneficial to us human beings. And yet, we don’t get ourselves out the door as often as we want.  Why don't we leave the house, the car, the office, the endless to-do-list and get into nature?  

Getting To Know Us...

We sat down with EarthWaysLLC founders, Susan Kistin and Sara Harris to discover their inspiration for creating EarthWays and a deeper understanding of their relationship to nature.
Susan    
"It’s sure something being human,”  says Susan as she takes a picture of a huge redwood tree at Ragle Park in Sebastopol CA. “These trees were 3 feet tall when I first came here,” Susan reflects, remembering many years of close connection with this beloved piece of natural land in the regional park. She has walked the back trails, never tiring of the beauty here. She’s led many circles beneath the trees here and has often come for counsel with a favorite being: ‘Grandmother Tree’ who lives deep in a bowl, lower down in the park. 

Sara
Sara’s magical garden is filled with flowers reaching happily to the sky. Sitting together under the shade of an umbrella with small plates of delicious vegetables and fruits. We begin by making little piles of cheese, tomato, avocado, tarragon mustard on a cracker like a child’s lunch. Our conversation opens with a reverie of guiding talk with all its complexities and intimacies. Continuing on to what happens to all of us when we are on the land which somehow takes us beyond what one does for a living. The relief of being found out, of going thru the layers of identities of who I think I am.

Spring Winds
By Sage Abella
There is a life force. The wind. An energy. The wind. A quickening. The wind.
If I were the wind, and I might just be the wind, would I need to use words or would words use me? 

I am the child wind, wild wind, fertile and smiling wind, rearranging everything: your scarf, your thoughts, your plans and designs. I’m electric, static, electo-static, magnificence. The good acorns don’t fall out of the tree without me. Listen to the names of my kin: squall, turbulence, bora, mistral, sirocco, and these are just a few of my sisters. You could spend the whole rest of your life getting to know the faces and names of me. All of me. Wind. Breeze. Trees. Shaking knees. 

Ever think about this. Where do I come from? Off the back of butterflies the myths say. Out of the crack between dawn and day that’s where I come from. I rise and disappear like a dream, fragile as a queen, bold like your own destiny you are too afraid to own. Hunting for it with your fingertips all your life as Destiny alive and wild walks in you like your backbone. Long.

The old people call me the Chinook; the new people call me the Santa Ana. Doesn’t matter what you call me. I’m always here waiting to rise. Open a door, I’m there in the push of it. Run with your skirt, I’m in the billow of it. Turn and yell, I’m in the shout of it. Move your hand across the page, I’m in the move of it.

Wind. Electro-static, magnetic, magnificent, life cleansing, wild brewing, wandering, at home everywhere. Wind. 

101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty
by Trebbe Johnson
For most people, places that have become damaged through human or natural events are nothing but eyesores, best avoided if no official agency has some kind of plan to clean them up. It's rare to set out with a sense of adventure to visit a clear-cut forest, a mountaintop flattened by coal mining, a gas fracking site, or a polluted river. Trebbe Johnson not only celebrates these "wounded places" but invites us to discover meaning, vitality, and delight in them and, in the process, in ourselves. We do this by visiting these places and making "guerrilla beauty" for them-anonymous, bold, spontaneous tokens of gratitude or consolation.

SINGING FOR THE WILD WATERS
Radical Joy For Hard Times
June 16, 2018
By Sage Abella

I'm traveling now, will be up along the Hood Canal in WA, have seen clearcut after clearcut the whole road trip up, piles of dead brush and trees heaped so long they've been sun bleached with stump forests all around them. I arrived at Sahale Retreat Center to find that the property next door is scheduled for clearcut this month. There’s a beautiful spring fed well at the source of a creek supplying household and clean drinking water for the Center. They are negotiating to keep a band of canopy over those precious waters. We are going over there with ceremony, singing and prayers on behalf of the trees, land, the waters.   Read more...
Forest Bathing
by Amos Clifford
Simply being present in the natural world - with all our senses fully alive - can have a remarkably healing effect. It can also awaken in us our latent but profound connection with all living things. This is "forest bathing," a practice inspired by the Japanese tradition of shinrin-yoku. It is a gentle, meditative approach to being with nature and an antidote to our nature-starved lives that can heal our relationship with the more-than-human world.In  Your Guide to Forest Bathing  you'll discover a path...

Summer 2018 | EarthWaysLLC | admin@earthwaysllc.com | www.earthwaysllc.com