Communing with Gaia

A while back, I made a pact with a colleague that we were going to try to be more like the people we were on holidays.

Every day – despite having too much stuff to do, too many places to go, too many people to please.

Who was I kidding?

Life gets in the way, things goes off the rails and well, often I end up more like a train wreck than a traveller.

However, no matter how overwhelming things seem, a walk in the forest always helps. I am fortunate to live close to some of the most magnificent temperate rainforest in the world, in the Dandenong Ranges on the outskirts of Melbourne. Just looking at those magnificent trees and treeferns, hearing lyrebirds, parrots and cockatoos call and feeling the soft (often very soft) earth under my feet is really grounding. Yet, even then, the “exercising” me gets in the way – must keep up a decent pace, get the heart rate up, stick with the day’s schedule. It’s just not the same as being on holidays.

I think now would be a good time to let you know that I am NOT talking about a “lying on the beach, sipping pina coladas” kind of holiday. I’m more the “overlanding through Africa, trekking the Himalaya, journeying to the ends of the earth” kind of holiday-maker. (Well, I was before the Munchkin came along to put down anchors for a while!) I’ve puffed, panted and photographed (breath breaks – I have a LOT of photos of mountains in Nepal and Peru!), climbed, broken down, sworn, gotten drenched by spray from oceans and falls, spent days in bed sea-sick, slipped and been helped to my feet, given up and been pushed along by others, been frozen solid by fear AND the cold.

I’ve breathed in the energy of the place, gotten the dirt under my fingernails and made sacrifices to the local gods with water, sweat, blood and hats.

And I’ve found that when you’re in the middle of nowhere, and you didn’t arrive on the last helicopter, something really amazing happens.

You’re not you any more.

You are connected to everyone and everything else. You’re part of the earth, the system, the energy of the planet. Communing with Gaia.

I have a quote from Kim Stanley Robinson’s book Antarctica on my desktop, to remind me each day of the intense feelings I experienced in this amazing place. It connects me back to the earth’s energy, and makes it so much harder to do things that I know are damaging to the environment.

We are the primitives of an unknown civilisation. And here that becomes so clear. This primal icescape brims with chi’s vital breathing, its winds blow clear every nook in our brains, balloons them as it did in the original co-evolution; and so when we’re here love fills us, that’s all.

Then this love for the landscape that is our collective unconscious, this knowerlover’s apprehension of the land’s divine resonance, blossoms outward and northward to encompass the rest of the planet. Love for the planet radiating from the bottom up, like revolution of the soul.

You may never get (or wish to go) to Antarctica, but wherever we are on earth, we can feel that love if we stop, even for 5 minutes, and really try to tune into nature…

• Sit on the beach and listen to the waves
• Lie down on the grass and look up at the trees
• Climb to a high place (it need not be a mountain) and take in the view
• Watch ants go about their business
• Smell the roses.

Every day. Not just on holidays.