With reverence, silence, soft eyes and slow gentle motion we can open the pathways and set the beautiful foundation for two worlds to come together, to touch and speak, no matter how seemingly different they are.
Ever since I was a child I’ve had a close and beautiful relationship to animals and all wildlife, and I am deeply grateful and blessed that they approach me with gentleness and openness in the wild. I’ve also sheltered and rescued many animals, and I dream of having my own wildlife conservation and animal shelter someday. I’ve taken care of and opened our home to malnourished stray kittens, injured squirrels and baby swallows when their nest was hit by a storm; and I’ve had hands-on encounters with Siberean tigers, Arctic wolves, leopards, hawks, foxes and a hyena. I once even protected a little mouse in the subway.
In the wild, I’ve had beautiful and mystical experiences with animals approaching me, and ever since I was a little girl I just had a way with them, feeling into their way of language. Each has its own language no matter how different from ours, just as us as human beings speak in different languages – we see it through movement, through eyes, and though very subtle we have the ability to create a relationship and speak the unspoken worlds if we can have the openness and the noticing – the patience to learn the unspoken ways in which we speak.
Unspoken communication is just as important and deep as the spoken one – it is a language of our soul and hearts; and we deepen in gratitude also because we notice that even if someone cannot express gratitude in the way we may understand it it is still important to open our palms and offer our help; and we deepen into humility also because no human should be high enough not to kneel to help someone – and humility, as we know, is the bridge to love.
So today let’s talk about the beautiful natural connection and why it is important to nurture that in our life and how it is integral part of our spiritual life and human relationships also.
The natural connection
In Indigenous and many others cultures, people have an intimate connection to the natural world. They relate to rocks and trees and animals as they connect to humans. This is what I do as well, ever since I was a child. I believe that everything around us has consciousness, in its own way of course, maybe not as evolved as a human mind, but it is alive. I believe that spirit flows through everything. And I believe that how we treat nature, wildlife and everything else around us – including our furniture – reflects our relationship to ourselves and how we’ll ultimately treat other human beings also. I’ve seen people on big world stages who talk all about the environment and their humanitarian work, only to then turn to the person beside them and treat them rudely, disrespectfully or with arrogance.
As children we give names to our toys and dolls – and look at animals with wonder as if they speak to us. As adults we continue to give names to things – sailboats, trucks, cars – the bigger “toys”. Name giving is actually a very important tradition and ceremony for many Indigenous cultures worldwide. Children do this authomatically because they have a greater connection to spirit, the supernatural world and their psychic senses.
To build a deeper connection to nature, spirit and life we don’t have to go out and look for the faeries, all we have to do is just spend some time in silence in our bedroom. Truly sit still and notice – notice how everything around you is a part of greater consciousness and unites it all together; how every object is imbued with spirit. This is shamanism. This is spirituality. This is yoga. We can do this anywhere, even within four walls.
This is how we build a connection to everything and everyone: spend time with it, see it, truly see it and appreciate it even when it doesn’t look like you nor share the same language. This is how we build respect towards life and everything and everyone in it. Learning that wordless language teaches us how to relate more deeply to all life surrounding us.
Wild communion
We all live together on this earth, and with little ones and big ones, little creatures and wild bigger animals, we share everything, we are in wild communion. We share life, streets, breath, earth, storms and biology. We share our needs for food and water and shelter and nurturing. We share the longing to love, mate and build our homes, to give new life and to keep our little ones safe and warm and fed. We share in the fragility of life, in our living tangled in complexity, in our vulnerabilities to ailments, and in the tears when we’re in pain. We share a certain life, and a certain death. We share everything, constantly and continuously, every moment of the day and night, across the fabrics of time and the soils of lands. And in this shared earthly living, when we give our attention to it and we reach our hands towards it, we find our compassion and our empathy for wildlife.
Every animal has its own rhythm, presence, voice, silence, song, body, place. We are bound by our sameness and uniqueness, simultaneously. Everything in life is a relationship, and we can build a relationship to anything and everything if we pay attention to it. We can build intimacy even to a room with four walls if we spend enough time with it; and if we notice, truly notice, we’ll see how spirit flows through everything around us, is imbued in everything, all has its own language, and it is all somehow in union and interconnection. We can only love what we appreciate.
This is the wild communion – connections we make out of heart and all the other unspoken but deeply felt languages. And it is in this recognition that we move beyond simple compassion to a more essential kind of connection. In return to your kindness, the animal may not give you back a tangible gift, money nor stand up on its back legs to say thank you, merci boucoup or dankeschön; but you will receive something deeply meaningful through the way you are able to be generous and love those who do not give to you in turn in the way you want them to.
Whether wandering the sea shores or the deep forests, whether I meet eyes with a rabbit in the wild, or whether I’m smelling a rose beside the urban sidewalk amidst the concrete jungles, I have no difficulty feeling that which may not be feeling me the same. I have no difficulty desiring to help and kneel to help a creature that may not be able to thank me with words. I have no difficulty feeling the roots of our interconnection – it’s a sacred thing. It is a humble thing.
If we cannot show love and compassion towards the small things, if we don’t show up for them when they need us and in the ways they need us, then we surely do not deserve the love and grace of the big things. Humanity needs to learn to love, and to love isn’t selective, isn’t selfish, and it isn’t only “when I feel like it or get something in turn”. Love is not just a feeling, or thoughts or dreams, it must be shaped and expressed through our lips, hands and gestures. Love is a verb.
And if we all come together, with love and with compassion, and with intentional actions, we’ll be together; and our children will not grow up not knowing what an endangered animal like a snow leopard was. As the Native American proverb says, “We don’t inherit this earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” so may we not rob them of what’s theirs to see. Tomorrow depends on today.
How to build and nurture the connection
As a spiritual guide and mystic, animals and animal spirit guides and totems are always part of my path, life and work, and when someone asks me how to build relationships to their animal guides it really is the way we’d build relationships to people also. To build a connection to anything or anyone, and to have a relationship sustained in the long run, we need three elements: silence, respect and sharing.
This is something we learn when we are building and nurturing a relationship to animals, and these are also the lessons that human relationships teach us. These three seemingly simple elements are a way for us to deepen into understanding and compassion, to grow and become hopefully better people, and to settle into a more harmonious union with all around us.
Relationships teach us silence. Silence allows us to listen and to experience the relationship as it truly is. It enables us to know when to speak and act for the greatest benefit. It allows us to notice, truly notice, how all around us is imbued with spirit, and to learn the unspoken communication.
Relationships also teach us respect for other lives, and to only take that, which is truly needed. We learn to approach one another with reverence and gentleness and respect the space of another and their worlds and boundaries.
Relationships also teach us sharing. They teach us how to live in the world with one another. We live in a consumerist world where people constantly take and rarely give back, so we need to learn the universal laws of equivalent exchange of energy – give thanks to people, show your gratitude, share of yourself. Many people don’t share of themselves because they feel an emptiness within them, as if they have a finite well of love and any giving will leave less for themselves but love is infinite, and generosity is a spiritual gift.
We are all here to share and be with one another; we are not here to become spiritual, we already are, we are here to embody this wisdom and apply it towards our human relationships. A giving of our hand, a soft word and gesture, a holding of another’s hand are all precious and needed. Human touch matters. Kindness matters.
When working with animal spirit guides the act of sharing is foundational because this is how we build and strengthen the bridge of communication with spirit. This is why when we receive a message from an animal we then give back to nature in some way to show our respect and gratitude – and it is this act that then creates a bridge between us.
The ritual of approach
What we encounter, recognize or discover depends largely on the quality of our approach. When we approach with reverence, beautiful great things decide to approach us. In many ways, our real life and the mysticism and magic that it is decides to come to the surface and its light awakens all concealed beauty that we once couldn’t perhaps see as clearly.
When we walk and move and speak with reverence, beauty trust us. Rushed minds and gestures and arrogance and selfishness lack the gentleness and patience that are needed to enter the embrace that beauty is.
Patience opens the soul of matter; patience is the mark of truest love. And when we open to the world like a flower, we marry all the invisible strings and finally see how spirit is imbued in everything. Soul-sized is the land of our hearts, and that’s the land that truly matters.
Often we approach things with greed and urgency because we don’t like to wait and we seek the instant gratifications, only to then realize we miss the heart of things and we rob ourselves of the actual pleasure of life and all things. There is a journey that all relationships share. Each friendships and love itself is the intimate journey where the soul is born and grows.
When two people meet, when two souls meets, when two worlds touch, they kiss and merge and a new land is born – the land of the relationship, the soul of the relationship. Like any soil, it has its temperatures, landscapes, wildlife, mysteries. They are to be discovered with kindness and patience of rhythm; and ah the beauty of all that will be blossom and grow into its being by our nurturing and tending to our lands. The unique emotional, physical and spiritual wildlands, a heart’s voyage into the tide of possibilities which open before it.
When we approach life with deep appreciation and patience, beauty and love approach us. This is more than a mindset – reverence shapeshifts into an almost physical state – it becomes an attention of the body, when we are fully embodied and present, all of our senses opened and deeply connected, and we are shown that the sacredness is already here.
Reverence, like patience, are the soul companions of humility. Because we recognize that we are always in the presence of the sacred – that the divine flows through our body and that it is in everything. This understanding gives us a certain kind of peace because we let go of judgments about how we should hurry things, about how *it* should be be and look like, and we stop comparing ourselves to others and even to our own previous selves; with this freedom and allowance, we begin to open doors and thresholds everywhere. Some will be spaces where we’ll have some quietness and stillness, where in our surrender and seemingly not-doing, we’ll be shaping worlds within us; other spaces will be exploring unknown worlds and distant lands perhaps, and being approached by new stories and feelings; and others will be rooms with a writing desk. Beauty awaits you.
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Rabbit photograph by me.
Cover photograph is “It Is You” by Martin Stranka. I love this photograph so much – it is dream like and stunning and mystical, and meaningful also.
For over ten years of his professional photography career he’d connect to people who’d rescue wild animals and learn their stories – the stories of the two wounded foxes saved by a forrester and the young deer saved by a woman who then sheltered her among other rescued wildlife, and many other animals, tiny and big, who would usually hide frightened in the corn fields. Some of the animals were, happily, able to then return to nature after they were treated and became stronger again. Stranka fell in love with these stories deeply and beautifully captured them in a collection of photography with the animals, while also spreading awareness and inspiring people to reconnect to nature. You can visit his official website at https://www.martinstranka.com/
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