Trust the seasons, trust the wind
A message from motion?
When you’re a leaf
of the Great Tree,
what choice have you
but to trust the seasons,
trust the wind?
Those words came while I was dancing everything loose through a 5Rhythms* wave a few Sundays ago.
Four musicians on multiple drums, strings, and didgeridoo were leading us through waves of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness. Their music, as always, was irrefutably alive, a conjuring presence for the 40 or so of us who’d come together for the weekly Prayer Body practice at Whidbey Island’s Bayview Hall. I was deep in the midst of a wave, letting go of whatever was ready to leave. My body knew exactly what it wanted to do. I was exultant. So much so that I didn’t care when a stray little tendril of thought started probing big questions: What to trust, what’s mine to do while the world groans and tosses, and what’s truly going on.
I wasn’t there to think. Gabrielle Roth, founder of the 5Rhythms practice, said “The fastest way to still the mind is to move the body.” I was there to move the body, to let music lead me back into my body and let my body lead me. I was there to give my mind a break. So when I noticed the tendril’s questions, I spun around and tossed the whole thought process skyward.
Within a second or two, I heard back, “Trust the wind.” My heart center opened, my core lit up, I felt my field expand. I love wind.
The rest of the words took a few moments to coalesce: “When you’re a leaf of the Great Tree, what choice have you but to trust the seasons, trust the wind?”
That I wasn’t so sure about, so more thoughts fired up. Was the image too passive? As in, are we just leaves waiting for autumn, waiting for our time to let go and fall? And is “leaf” too small? From toddlers to octogenarians, we were together there as dancers, each one of us moving uniquely, distinctly, powerfully. Were we and every other sentient being in existence merely leaves of the tree of life?
I caught and challenged those thoughts with more thoughts, as in “Merely? Why merely?” There’s nothing “mere” about what leaves do. What about the amazing communication between them and the rest of the tree, the transformation of sunlight into food, the communal nourishing, the signals received and sent, the breath, the movement, the emerging and maturing and releasing, the beauty of their shape and color, the final drift to earth at season’s end to rejoin the soil so the cycle can continue. Where in any of that is the notion, “merely,” for any leaf, much less a leaf of the Tree of Life.
And—big picture—if we’re at a turning point in the understanding and expansion of human consciousness, which I believe we are, not through AI, but through working with our own potential, that’s an evolutionary “change of season” worth trusting, yes? But we’re also active players in that change. Our choices and presence are crucial to co-creating the future we want instead of a future built on absurdity and inequity. Yet allowing is also crucial—the energy of fighting creates more fighting, right? So what’s passive and what’s powerful about “trusting the wind”?
These thoughts came in a rush and I was just getting warmed up. I could see so many layers of complexity and simplicity—pros, cons, if, and buts—waiting to be explored here. I could also tell by the way my heart had closed back up and my core had tightened that I was off track. I was overanalyzing what had been, in truth, an invitation not to analyze just now.
I stopped deconstructing the invitation, and accepted it. I chose to trust the music, trust the seasons, trust the wind.
The drumming sped up. I sped up. We danced.
*5Rhythms movement meditation practice was founded in the 1970s by Gabrielle Roth, author of Sweat Your Prayers. 5Rhythms and ecstatic dance gatherings occur all over the world, but South Whidbey is one of the few places where they are supported every week by live rather than recorded music. The power—the sheer glory—the musicians bring to us each week is immeasurable. We’re also blessed to have an expert facilitator and guide in Christine Tasseff, a master of the work and weaver of sacred space.