Happiness is something that our culture seems to want to attain. There’s even an unconcsious messaging that we can actually buy happiness. Again, happiness is a feeling. It’s a 90-second, fleeting feeling that we cannot hold onto. Bur what we might actually be looking for is a state of being. The state of contentment, for example, is being in the present without worry or restlessness. That state is a practice and means we must come back to it over and over, as there is no perfecting it. Here, we can allow feelings to pass through our experience as we practice returing to the baseline state of contentment. In any event, our brain (the three pound ball of tofu in our skulls) likes to know what’s happening so it can survive. But at this moment in time, we just aren’t able to do that.

Much like Nature, we may feel the need to re-establish our roots and nestle into self-nurturing for the time being. Winter is a death of many kinds and an opportunity to let go of what is no longer needed, so what better way to enter the season of Winter for much-needed contemplation and restoration?

The spirits say that if we're going to create lasting external change, our energy must be spent in sustaining our own foundational root systems that are supportive, resourced, and grounded. We must stay “green,” so our inner developments are able to withstand the inclement weather in the external world we inhabit, most of all.

By calling in the collective ancestors for ritual, ceremony, or other etheric support, you may be calling in spirits who may not be malevolent, but they may not be at rest either. This is why it’s imperitive to create ritual boundary between yourself and the old ones.

If you’re living with chronic illness, it can be challenging to hold on to the belief that wellness is in the cards for you.

Grief Work is an essential step in metabolizing our losses so that we can make room for who we are becoming. Since we are a part of Nature and not separate from Her cycles, Autumn is an opportunity to put things to bed that we need to say goodbye to.

Your innate radiance lives and breathes within you even in your worst moments - and in this very moment. It is waiting for you to access it and hone it so that you can create a new way of being.

Navigating the path through chronic illness and pain can serve to be a catalyst for a new way of being.

How we engage in our relationship with the spirit of illness depends on whether we feed that relationship or whether we begin feeding our relationship with our innate radiance.

We can talk to trees. They do hear us. Many times I will go to my tree friend, settle into its energy, hug it, and whisper a prayer into its branches. In this prayer, I ask that its roots and the mycelium hear me and ground the prayer into this reality. When we talk to the trees, we are speaking to the whole cosmos. They are so consciously interconnected that talking to one tree is speaking to everything.

’ll never forget his Crow Whispering. It absolutely fascinated me to watch him call the crows! One morning when I was in my early teens, I watched him call at least 50 crows into the yard! I remember my mouth just dropping in awe. He sounded just like them! I could not tell the difference between the murder of friends and his voice! He always had a mischievous, Fair-Folk type of twinkle in his blue eyes when he called them. Maybe he was part crow, part Scottish elf.

Whatever the imbalance is in our lives, when we spend time feeding ourselves, we are rebalancing all these parts of ourselves. This is how we can keep our inner light fed. 💫

But when I became ill with tick-borne illnesses, my definition of success changed. I routinely experienced difficulty walking up any set of stairs. However, the day came when I was able to walk up a rickety beach stairway across from my grandparents’ home - without assistance! I admit, when I made it all the way up those stairs, I sang Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky) to celebrate that success! And when there were days my legs didn’t buckle from underneath me or days when I didn’t have a dystonic episode, I counted those as “good days.” That was success to me.

Fire Spirits at Winter Solstice Ceremony