The image of the Collective Body looks different today.
I'm not seeing it in the realistic way it usually shows up, but as an ever-changing painting. As if someone had animated an oil painting with its thick brush strokes and palette knife edges.
And that difference means something to me, just like it means something to me if I'm working with an individual body and the imagery shows up in a specific way.
This story isn't something in the past, something old, or something we need to look behind us to find.
It's something we imagine into existence.
The oil paint tells me this is something that will take time to get right. But once it cures, it can persist for hundreds of years if it's cared for.
The trees pop and crack, splinter and groan, as they push up out of the soil using the power of their roots. For a moment they wobble like a toddler just learning to walk, branches outstretched like arms and heavy masses of trunks swaying dangerously with the sudden movement. For too long they've fooled everyone into thinking they were immobile. For too long they let humans believe they were inanimate. For too long, they kept their secrets.
It's time to follow the trees.
They begin to form a line; not exactly single-file, but in a narrow group as they make their way across the lands, over hills, and down through valleys. Following the path of least resistance until they arrive at the water.
The trees advance into the water as the shorelines become available. Their roots sink into streams and lakes, rivers and bogs, and they let the water in their trunks flow into the living waters, and they refill, more full than they've been in centuries. They've been starved for this pilgrimage.
Weighed down with water, they begin to move again.
Using an innate sense of direction and secrets only the trees know about how to navigate, they find new homes. They find where they belong on this planet now, after this period of immense change. Their ranges are new, their purpose has realigned, their alignment with the directions has shifted.
But they come bearing water.
As they let their roots find purchase in their new homes, the extra water they've brought is gifted to this place.
Immediately, ecosystems spring up at their feet. Underground mycelial webs are woven, insects move amongst the roots and on their bark, moss and ferns and tall grasses spring up, with the occasional wildflower nodding its head from between stalks. The bees arrive next, ants begin to engineer the environment, and beetles scurry over leaves.
As if sensing the change in the top layer, the rocky crust responds. It pushes up a bit here and there, bringing outcroppings to the surface and splitting the new landscapes. In other areas the surface rumbles as the bedrock beneath turns over. And occasionally, an entire mountain stands up, walks a few paces, and settles back down.
And the Land heals.
It carries on without ownership.
Because the humans remembered true sovereignty, interdependence, and kinship.
From the beginning of this story I was feeling a tug to re-read the Somatic Forecast that I wrote for August. I didn't remember until I looked it up that I titled it, "everything is moving."
I encourage you to re-read it and notice:
Where are you moving?
What has shifted since you first read it?
What have you been holding in place that is asking to move now?
And maybe how...how does this help bring about what we're imagining into existence?
Yours,
Ash