Nature Conservancy Land

I couldn’t download your template for what you actually want in terms of text to accompany image(s) so I just had to tell you a little of our story because we had such a luscious time. I’ll craft a blog post soon for myself and happy for you to use none or some of the below. I just wanted you to know that I’m grateful for this last year in my life of committing to artful prayer for the planet because of my solo EE last year. I did take some video footage and hope to craft a wee film but that will take a few days. I’m including three images here because I wasn’t sure which one would appeal to you more for the GEE website.

Yesterday the 22nd of June, seven of us met to honor the earth by creating a RadJoy bird in the center of a water wheel mandala on the beach at a Nature Conservancy near Hansville, WA. We experienced magic: feeling like kids on the beach again building stuff from stuff that took on shape and meaning beyond our plans; working together spontaneously with each person’s gifts contributing to the whole creation so that it became far grander than any one of us could have designed. When we found a dead fish to fill the bird’s mouth, we were overjoyed by the symbolism of life feeding. Then a whole, but dead, crab showed up and that was placed tenderly in the belly. The bird had a heart filled with beach trinkets and a winking eye that reassured us that reverence and humor are returning to life on this planet. Our bird is in the center of a large mandala with its beak pointing toward true north—not magnetic north. (I learned a lot yesterday from one of our gang!) I’m guessing the mandala was close to fifty feet in diameter. Before we painted the spokes or petals of this huge flower-like shape by shuffling our feet through the sand, we circled around the bird and spoke a little about the meaning of our shared experience. When we finished the mandala, we danced a short “Sufi dance” for peace and then chanted a Hawaiian prayer asking for forgiveness and expressing our love for the water. Exactly as we finished this chant, one of us looked up and shrieked. We were blessed by 2 osprey and a bald eagle overhead. We looked further out to sea and were aghast to see a tribe of heron—yes a gathering of heron—I counted 18—flying back from their day of foraging to their rookery in trees that we could see from where we stood. An amazing experience to watch them settle in for the night. AND then, I happened to look up even farther and realized the clouds were looking like cranes and wings and even a single, quite detailed, feather. Amazing affirmation of the planet’s response.