Class V: Adventures in Nature
“Adventures! Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think
what anybody sees in them.” –Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit (p. 4)comes hurt while learning lessons about loving and
giving, and you are tempted to grow as hard as stone
to protect yourself—stop for a moment, and choose
the healing power of Water as teacher. Give yourself
to Water, even if it’s just soaking in the bathtub.
A bath of seawater can be effectively replicated
by adding 1/2 cup of salt and a cup of cider vinegar to
a tub of hot water. This creates a gentle cleansing
soak that removes toxins from the body and feels like
ocean water on the skin. If you like, seaweed can also
be added. The water in which you immerse yourself
will cleanse away any negative energy, fears, sorrow.
Water can and will transmute you if you learn to offer
your sharp corners for cleansing and polishing. It will
absorb your weariness, and combined with salt, puri-
fies away anything you need to let go of. Learning to
let go is one of the greatest lessons of Water, thus
may you more greatly understand what surrendering
to the great primeval ocean of consciousness, like the
ocean from which all life emerged, has to teach you in
the silence of your own Inner Self, into which Water
can bring you, even at home.
Should you ever find your temper getting the best
of you, you will find a resource in gently falling rain as
well. Go stand in the rain, and let your anger be changed
by the raindrops, for as they gently cleanse the Earth
and bring nourishment to growing plants and trees,
so too can the same rain bring you growth and re-
newal, if you allow it. Allow the falling water to help
you find your balance point, and return to your situa-
tion with a healthier, different perspective.The River
For eleven years of my later life (the longest ever
in one home), I lived with my family right on the Rush-
ing River (or Russian River, as it was called by
mundanes...). Our backyard was a private beach and
swimming hole, with a rope swing dangling from a
high tree. Salmon and otters played in the running
waters, ospreys and kingfishers hunted in the pools,
and friends hung out all the time. At the beginning of
each Summer, I would go to a tire store and buy up a
bunch of used but airtight truck inner tubes. Most
weekends, we would gather up a bunch of folks and
tubes, take everyone a few miles upstream in trucks,
and float down the river back to our place—or some-
times much further.
Along the way, the experience itself offered so
many lessons that I came to think of it as a magickal
teaching all its own. There were rapids with white
water, deep still pools, giant boulders forming nar-- Introduction: Nature is the
Greatest Teacher
Regardless of Bilbo’s opinion, I
love to go on adventures (and
even he eventually came to love
adventuring). In my 60+ years, I
have climbed to the tops of moun-
tains and dived to the bottom of
the sea. I have crawled through
narrow passageways of prehis-
toric painted caves, and celebrated total eclipses of
the Sun within ancient stone circles. I have hiked
through the rain forest jungles of Peru, Australia, New
Guinea, and Costa Rica, wandered amid the redwoods
of Califia, and swum in clear pools at the base of high
mist-shrouded waterfalls in Hawaii.
I have walked with unicorns at the Renaissance
Faire and swum with mermaids in a South Pacific la-
goon. I have ridden camels and elephants, petted ti-
gers and dolphins, and hung out casually among herds
of wild deer and kangaroos, scratching them behind
their ears.
I have slept out in the high desert and scrambled
down into the craters of extinct volcanoes. I have
walked the Inca roads, and explored their ancient ru-
ins under the full Moon. I have bathed in natural hot
springs, and frozen my ass off on an Alaskan glacier.
I have combed for shells on beach sands that were
black, white, and glass. I have kayaked with 10-foot
alligators in the Florida Everglades and snorkeled with
30-foot whale sharks in the Coral Sea. And I have trod
the paths of the Dead, where bones and skulls were
stacked like cordwood by the hundreds of thousands
on either side.
All these things and more...I have always re-
garded Life as a continuing adventure story. And ev-
ery adventure I have gone on has taught me Lessons.
The most important Lesson of all, however, is this:
Nature is the Greatest Teacher.Lesson 2. Water
Water—Nature in your own home
—by Lady PythiaWater can soften, shape, and polish even the hardest
stones. When you need to learn to be flexible, adapt-
able, when life is giving you difficult lessons and mak-
ing you tighten up with fear or pain, if your heart be-Corrected pages 3rd printing.1.p65 32 6/10/2004, 2:59 PM