Healing — Reawakening the Spirit

It’s almost autumn in Western New York and the bees and other pollinators are very busy nectaring and gathering pollen from my backyard. Today I walked around and began taking photos again of special moments admiring what I had created. I needed something to inspire me and lift my spirits. This summer has been extremely challenging mentally, physically and emotionally. A sign of the times I suppose, but also of choices I had made. All around the world there is chaos and the friends and acquaintances I once had, have been slowly drifting away year after year.

Everyone is busy with the challenges presenting in their own lives and they are many on a daily basis. I finally realized these relationships have also run their course within mine. The resonance is no longer there. What brought us once together has apparently come to completion. I am also no longer the person I once was. My perspective on life has changed immensely from what it once was, but perhaps more accurately— to what it had always been. My relationship with Nature had in fact deepened, as had my own inner knowing of my self. I could no longer pretend or lie to myself. It simply would not work. A myriad of things would fall in my path to remind me whether via my dreams, pain in my body or syncronicities within Nature or with humans.

My life has never been a straight trajectory nor has my career. I have been searching for greater meaning in my life for as long as I can remember, always curious and needing to learn and understand or challenge myself; endlessly searching for something. I know now it was greater intimacy with myself and all of Nature. I realize now that my path has been filled with a myriad of choices that always led me to my intended destination despite sometimes looking back and thinking how could I have chosen that? Years of insights, synchronicities and quiet reflection piecing together my choices has been the only way to make sense of it all— a pathway defined by my soul’s infinite wisdom yet never random. Of that, I am certain.

There is no going backward I found. We can only learn from the past, I realized after attempting to contact some people who had crossed my path years ago. I had been trying to gain some clarity once again, but the answers were not in the past but in the present. What did I want to create now and what did I want to attract into my life? Part of navigating our soul’s journey is becoming clear about our desires and yet paying attention to our heart and our body’s inner promptings. These are questions we are all facing during these times of uncertainty when each day presents something new to navigate. I’ve come to realize that forcing something to happen or denying your own feelings, is no longer allowed. It simply does not work when you’ve been on a spiritual path for as long as I have.

My home and my land have been one of my greatest challenges and I continue to reflect on my experiences, despite my absence from writing for quite some time. Today I knew I needed to write so here I am again, writing about what I have learned because it applies to the world at large and the immense environmental destruction and climate change that is currently taking place. It breaks my heart each and every day so much so, that some days I sit and weep and other days I immerse myself in the aliveness of my property to remind myself of what I have done and accomplished in a span of just over 9 years. It is my land that gives me solace each and every day now and reminds me not to give up or give in to the doom and gloom that currently pervades our society. These feelings of grief that some days are so heavily immersed in darkness and despair find a way through and out amidst the bees, wasps and hummingbirds upon my landscape.

Repeatedly in their present moment beingness, razor focus and love affair with the flowers, I am once again reminded that our beautiful planet and all things upon it can come back to their original state of aliveness, beauty and grace. Perhaps that is exactly our task in this century— to restore what once was to a pristine state of beauty and perfection upon this beloved planet we are privileged to call our home. In doing so, we also come back to ourselves and heal our own wounds often going back generations. That has been my personal journey upon this suburban landscape I have come to love and cherish despite the frustrations it has presented repeatedly.

Each time I have been asked to dig deeper into the depths of my own soul as I continued to learn and read the signs. Our Earth Mother is asking all of us to reconnect to her. To ignore her promptings, is to do so at your own peril for she is far more powerful than any human gathering or corporation seeking to rape and abuse her for profit, greed and power. I realize now it is only the insecure and abused who seek to control her, those who have lost their way— their connection to their ancestral roots, to the cosmos and this amazingly magical life sustaining blue green planet and the cycles of Nature inherent in all of us.

It was yesterday that I had a conversation with a friend regarding his concern over the recent development of land in my suburban neighborhood that happens to be down the street from me. It was a subject of concern for many years due to the existence of a threatened species, the Henslow sparrow that had been found nesting on the open meadows of surrounding wetland. The land had been slated for development of yet another housing project. After a moratorium on building for years due to concerns over this tiny songbird, sadly in 2019 ‘progress’ ultimately won. This spring a developer commenced with his plans and the project went forth. It would appear that somehow the town of Lancaster and the DEC gave in. I’m sure some form of reasoning was given in public and secret conversations.

It’s the way it has continued to be in my town that has a history of overdevelopment of wetlands and creation of retention ponds which divert the underground water in an unhealthy and unsustainable way that inevitably creates more problems over time for the community. I am one of many residents with issues of wet land that becomes swampy after the winter snow starts to melt. The difference is, unlike many residents in my area, I have been concerned with environmental issues since the 90s when I began volunteering for a local wildlife center, so I began approaching things in a creative way listening to what the land needed bringing sacredness back to a wounded and stripped landscape.

So today when I searched the internet for that article about the Henslow sparrow controversy that appeared in The Buffalo News so many years ago around the time we first moved to this street, I was surprised to find that it had disappeared from the internet and the links to all references were broken. Luckily I still have a copy of the original newspaper article in my files. I hardly found the disappearance a coincidence, but I did find a reference to this entire topic of flight paths of birds, overdevelopment and the Lancaster Henslow sparrow issue written in a book which stated “The thought is if this field goes away, then they’re (Henslow sparrow) done in Lancaster; that’s it.” I’d like to believe that these rare songbirds just came down the street to my meadow gardens, but I have yet to identify them amidst the myriad of songbirds my revitalized property now supports. Perhaps one day soon I will. I will not give up hope and I now honor that tiny songbird in this writing for your story has not gone unnoticed.

Even though I maintain my license with the DEC to rehabilitate wildlife, I now focus more on establishing habitat for wildlife and supporting pollinators, rather than fixing broken animals or raising orphans. Nevertheless, the topic of diminishing habitat for all life forms remains dear to my heart. That is why I have done everything I can to support the honeybees and many other pollinators that now find sanctuary on my property. As I have rewilded my land and created a healthy, sustainable landscape to mitigate the problems that overdevelopment have created in my neighborhood, I have also gained greater clarity in my own life about my personal boundaries and what I will and will not accept from others. Wetland development is after all, a topic that we all should be concerned about now and in the coming years given the changes in climate that are being experienced all around the globe. Where will the development end and when will it be enough? In forthcoming writings I will discuss many of the things that I have experienced in an area that still hasn’t learned from past mistakes. It’s time to wake up and the time is now.

Clarissa Harison is an advocate for the natural world and has been writing since the 90s about her experiences with nature on behalf of those who have no voice. Her travels and observations healing her own land, as well as her diverse background in international studies, energy of space, the corporate world and consulting/teaching work have led her to develop an intimate understanding of the perfection existing in nature and our own individual journey of finding our way back to ourselves and ultimately restoring the well being of our planet.

I continue to be drawn to activities that have been recovering the creativity that I once had as a child. I used to love painting watercolors of the characters in Walt Disney movies that I watched. I still have several of those paintings to remind me of my inner creative child that somehow was lost as I hurried to become an adult. Gradually more and more of my creativity was lost until I could not even remember that I was more than analytical. The return of my artistic nature began to occur through my love of writing and with my interior design work. Eventually I also explored creating with my gardens and various projects upon my land.

Recently while doing a 7 week Soul Recovery Training with Robert Moss, I found more and more pieces of myself being restored. The first day of class, my sister told me that she had found a painting of mine in her attic. I didn't even recognize it when she sent me the photo. I can still not recall the actually painting of it, though I do recognize it as my own work and know why it was left amidst her things.

Three weeks into the coursework, I faced my fears and attempted to try something new-- needle wool felting. I had purchased several wool collectibles over the years and was intrigued by how much creativity was involved in these objects. I believe I was being simultaneously drawn to the wool as well. At that time, I never thought of making something similar myself. Many years later and almost exactly 2 months after the arrival of my first kits from England, I began my first project. I have usually done well at whatever I have put my mind to, but starting something new at this point in my life and after just a few tutorials on Youtube seemed a bit daunting. It took me a while to adjust to the idea of learning to work with wool since I knew absolutely nothing about it except that I used to be allergic to wearing it on my skin.

Coinciding with my latest creative pursuit, was my need to also wear wool sweaters. Instinctively I think my body was telling me it was healthier to wear a textile that had been woven into clothing for millenia instead of the chemically treated synthetics that I had gotten used to over the years, which always filled me with static during winter months and often looked horrible after a few months of washing. So, along with my hands working with wool, my body was now being clothed with sweaters from Ireland. Gradually I also began restoring dexterity and more feeling to my hands that had experienced painful inflammation and nerve damage from an autoimmune disorder I had developed from years of stress and doing work I didn't love. Somehow it seemed the eye hand coordination of working with the wool was stimulating new neural pathways in my brain.

It turns out there's a reason why wool has been used throughout history. It has many virtues. Wool absorbs moisture from the air and decreases static electricity. It is also water repellent and healthy. Wool insulates against heat and cold as it acts as an insulator. It is precisely this ability to absorb moisture from the air that prevents the build up of static electricity, which is the result of an imbalance between negative and positive charges in an object. Wool also does not attract dust or lint from the air. Why am I surprised my body was telling me to wear it now?

Felting is the oldest form of fabric known to mankind. No wonder I had such a draw to it. It was held within my ancestral memories. Somehow I was connecting to an inner knowing of a time long ago, perhaps some memory from the past, as it felt so familiar to me right from the beginning. After my first project, a brown hare, I was hooked. I immediately continued on with other creations. With each creature that was birthed, I found a piece of myself somehow being restored. I wasn't buying something someone else had created, I was creating something from scratch that was uniquely my own even if I had followed a blueprint. I was fascinated by the way in which each creature turned out differently and began to take on a personality of its own. Each was infused with my loving intentions and thoughts as I felted. As my skills improve, I intend to create my own designs perhaps honoring all the creatures I have met along my path.

While I certainly didn't need more collectibles in my home, creating something from wool has been extremely therapeutic both mentally and physically as a means to relieve stress and enjoy the satisfaction of creating something from pieces of wool. There is something primal about connecting energetically with wool, sheep and the Earth that cannot be put into words, but my body and psyche feel the ancestral memories. It has also been a way to retrieve pieces of my soul that had long been lost since childhood. As each character came to life, I found myself being carried away from the chaos and turbulence of our present world while enabling me to focus on what is important-- remembering who I was, while dreaming a new narrative into being and embracing my creativity.

Honoring the Henslow Sparrow, Saving Ourselves

Wild About Wool