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Dalton
Roberts |
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I have had an intuitive awareness all my life of the healing power of nature. Anytime I was wounded in body or spirit I sought the quiet and solitude of nature and it never let me down. Added to my inner feeling was observation of my mother’s tendency to seek the healing of nature. After having measles at the age of 40, she lost much of her hearing and also experienced weakness in her respiratory system. By 55, she had emphysema. We had 27 apple trees at that time and when she had trouble breathing she would go and walk among the trees. Trees make oxygen and she always breathed better among them. When Dad lost his 27-year job and found employment in Miami, the oppressive heat made it hard on mother. She had two healing places. One was a big banyan tree where she would go and read on days of moderate weather. One the hotter days, she liked to go to the ocean. Dad was especially moved by one of her experiences there. . One day by the ocean, she found a high place behind the rocks where the waves crashed. He could tell she wanted to be alone so he walked on down the beach. After sundown he returned and she was standing with the sea spray falling on her face. Tears were streaming down her face. She said to him, “Be very still, Roy. The Great Spirit is here.” When they returned home to Tennessee, she told me, “I would not have been able to stay in Florida if it had not been for my banyan tree and that magic place by the ocean. No matter how weary I became, they always healed me.” When Dad pastored a church 60 miles from Chattanooga at Pelham, Tennessee, we passed a placed called Martin Springs each Sunday as we traveled to his church. It was some of the sweetest spring water to ever pass my lips. Each Sunday when we had time, Dad would heed our begging and stop for a drink. I remember that you could fall forward to drink and two rocks were perfectly placed for your hands when you fell forward and dropped your mouth down into the \delicious water. Years later when I was traveling to Nashville weekly and writing songs for Cedarwood Music, I decided to stop at Marti Springs. To my surprise the two rocks were still there. I fell forward and drank deeply. I remained there for maybe an hour that day under the influence of that place that been holy ground to me since my childhood, Up above the spring a beautiful little bird I had never seen had built a nest against the rocks. Later I looked it up in my bird book and it was a phoebe. As I drove away, I felt that I had been born again. The Bible says we can be born again but I believe the larger message of the whole book is that we can be born again and again and again. One way these birthings happen with me is when I return to all the places in nature that have been sources of great healing power to me. Our home sat on two acres of wooded land in the days of my childhood and youth. There were many places there that were sanctified to me at times when I was ill in body or mind. A good way to go back to our holy places in nature is in meditation. Today too much emphasis is placed on “living in the now” without telling us that any old memory of a healing place can be brought into our now and become as real today as it was then. We have this power to be born again and again and again.
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