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THE HEALING POWER AROUND US
2-6-04
We often go in search of peace and healing when it is all around. My father told me of a time when he and mother found it.
When they lived in Miami they were both drawn to the ocean. They often walked the shore and found their favorite places. One was near a banyan tree where mother would spend days writing. The other was a part of the shoreline where the waves crashed against a large wall of rocks.
One day at sunset he found her listening in awe to the sounds of the ocean. Tears were streaming down her face. She said, “Roy, be very still. The Great Spirit is here.”
Her grandfather was a Cherokee and he would walk the north Alabama woods with her when she was a child speaking in hushed tones of the many wonders of nature. Throughout her life nature was a strong healing force for her. She knew if she could calm her mind and spirit in times of mental or physical stress that the higher power within which we live and move and have our being could be experienced.
How indebted I am to her Cherokee grandfather and to her for learning how to access this source of healing energy. Most of the jobs I have held were stressful. I am certain I would have had major health challenges if I hadn’t learned how to let the power of Earth and it’s myriad forms of life flow into the core of my being.
I will not debate whether or not man is the highest form of life on the planet but for practical purposes I find it altogether beneficial to see all creatures as my equals. We cannot get the good out of anything by looking down on it. It is only when we open to it that we are able to feel and experience it. At this magical opening something happens that I simply call ”a transfer of essence.”
It can be something as simple walking from my home to the Chickamauga Boat Dock and feeding the ducks. It can be sitting eye-to-eye with the goldfinch feeding at the thistle feeder just outside my computer room window. It can be feeding a desperately hungry stray cat someone has thrown out to die. It can be rubbing the head of Jerry Hall’s “Baby Girl” Boston Terrier curled up on the back of his motorcycle outside the Waffle House.
I remember one day when young goldfinch crashed into my window. I found it unconscious on the ground. I put a couple of drops of ice water on its head to reduce brain swelling. I rubbed its head and body to keep the blood circulating. When I heard it moving in the cardboard box where I had placed it, I carried it outside and set it down. When it took off and flew across the yard, something inside my soul took wing with it.
Oral Roberts speaks of a “point of contact.” I think the amount of joy we experience in this life is largely determined by how open we are to our points of contact with all the life we see and touch every day.
Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry speaks of this eloquently in his Peace of Wild Things:
“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in the beauty of the water and the green heron feeds. I come into the place of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. I feel above me the stare of day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.”
Write Dalton at daltonroberts@comcast.net
or check out his other writings at www.ipsfeatures.com . His website is
www.daltonroberts.com
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