Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020

My Special Place: The Chagrin River
Returning to the Land: Connecting with the Rhythms and Cycles of Nature
Earth-Connecting Practices

I jump across the stones over twelve feet of six-inch water. The stones are too far apart and my feet always get wet. Up the dirt horse-track, I step over another trickling creek. I continue up a gravel trail. My lungs pump with my legs and heart as I wind around, past the deer trail, through the cool of the pine grove. Fallen logs fan out through the trees to my right. A little further; down the old moss-covered stone steps into the gulch and across the wooden footbridge, then a scramble down a steep hill. I see a few small swirling pools and smell the fallen leaves, soft and wet under the drizzle. As I turn around a large stone, step over the fallen log, old with decay, the bright, wet green of the ferns against the brown and orange greets me. Another scramble down sliding rocks, most as big as my hand, and I’m there: A wet rock, covered with moss and rain. I sit, damp soaking through my jeans, and watch the water fall in a channel and spread across the wall of slate, separating, coming back together, spraying, washing, gathering leaves, swirling them into patterns.

I like to watch the river. When I say “the river,” I mean any river, though all rivers share something that is RIVER. RIVER speaks to me, guides me, teaches me, flows through me. I make friends with individual rivers and have visited one, and its surrounding brooks, regularly for the past decade. As my children have gotten older, and when I have time, I visit the river once a week. Last summer, I visited almost every day for a month and sat for long hours watching and feeling her flow. In northeast Ohio, relating to the planetary spirit of RIVER also means relating with slate and shale, spreading into broad sheets and back again as it winds its way across the face of our watershed.

When I watch the river, I try to do it for a long time. An hour at least, if I can. While I watch the river, I also watch myself. Sometimes I come to see myself much more clearly as I watch the river. Just like the river, my thoughts flow over bumps and grooves, new waters of thought finding common directions over the grooves in the river bed of my mind and body memories. Being with the river helps me be with myself. Other times, when I get very calm, I move more deeply into watching the river. I choose a place in the river and I concentrate on that place for as long as I can sit, looking deeply into the river to see its nature. As time passes, my vision shifts. I come to see that what I first saw in the river was only a very little of what is there, within, on and surrounding the river. Nothing metaphysical here, just that while at first I saw the spray, watching deeply I come to see that there are layers of spreading water, leaves, contours of rock that I didn’t see for a very long time. Light moves in new ways, forming new patterns and reflections all around.

When I start watching the river, I see what I decide to see. As I sit with the river, the river begins to show me the many layers I have missed with my preconceptions. While watching the spray, I missed the line of tiny leaves on the rocks just below. After a time, vision shifts again so that I see the small trickle slipping under the spray into a private pool. Under the trickle are the wet stones that shape the form of the water, and so on, until the small circle of river appears as a deep, complex interconnected world of its own.

Finding our ground, knowing our ground, is enhanced through creative relationship with the land. The next chapter illustrates the overlap between Earth-connected awareness and creativity. Earth-connected cultures use rituals involving art forms to express, teach and support their connection with nature. The following exercises integrate art as spirituality into rituals that support connecting with nature. Through these rituals, you will begin to integrate creativity as a gateway to ecological consciousness.