NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS 133
Her healing becomes the healing of the Earth and of the people of
the Earth.
To harness the power of our response/ability, our ability to
respond, we must fully enter into the story of our own lives and
the stories that shape our reality and world. By making friends with
these stories and holding both their beauty and darkness in our
arms, we can leave behind unsustainable scripts that perpetuate the
status quo and further environmental and social unraveling. When we
cultivate an ethic of care, we actively participate in the Great Turning
(Macy and Johnstone 2012), the Great Conversation (Berry 1999)
and the magic of the real (Stoknes 2015).
We become authors of new and more beautiful and sustainable
stories that honor the life and dignity of our vast self, embedded
in the body of the Earth. We who practice the arts, who honor the
gifts of nature and the magic of the real, we are all the storytellers.
May we do so, honoring both art and nature as medicine for the
soul. May we do so with an ethic of care and courage and attitude of
wildness and wonder.
Tell Me, She Said
Tell me, she said:
What is the story you are telling?
What wild song is singing itself through you?
Listen:
In the silence between there is music,
In the spaces between there is story.
It is the song you are living now.
It is the story of the place where you are.
It contains the shapes of these old mountains,
The green of the rhododendron leaves.
It is happening right now in your breath
In your heartbeat still
Drumming the deeper rhythm
Beneath your cracking words.