Last Wishes is an offering to you and for you.
What is the point of it? Why bother? What is my/our interest in death all about?
I’m passionate about you, yes you, out there, sat on your computer or your phone or your tablet reading this. I’m passionate about people, nature and planeTree healing. People and nature are indivisible. Did you know we have spent 99.99% of our evolution in the trees.? Being away from the forests makes us ill, and being ill makes the planet ill too. Trees and nature help us in dealing with our grief. If we want to re-green the land outside we have to – on the inside too. It is the only way, and of course vice versa. If you don’t understand what this has to do with death let me explain…
“Courting beauty is an act of rebellion, and love the revolution.” Amanda C Vesty Ancient and Sacred Trees founder.
We are conditioned to focus on fear, ugliness and despair. We are taught to grasp and hold onto experiences and to consume as much as possible. We have not, in this modern society, any real cultural support network for the dying or the grieving. We very often ignore death until it is too late to do anything about it and to leave a positive legacy.
When I talk about courting beauty I’m not talking about surface beauty but something that chimes with the heart when you see it. I’m talking about the things you treasure, the things you cultivate, not possessions but experiences and connections. That time you saw your lovers’ hair lit up by the sun, a flower nodding in the breeze, the beauty of a lone tree on a hill.
What of love? Well I would say we don’t know how to love mostly because we don’t know how to grieve and grieving only comes from a deep wellspring of openness to the wonder of life. Life is about change and change is inevitably about letting go. We are not taught about that. We’re taught to be greedy, to acquire things, to hoard and to covet. We expect to be able to command life to make our demands from it and to act without consequence. This of course is the source of our rampant consumerism. It has been a disaster.
It is not wrong to want things. It’s ok to like lovely paintings, nice clothes and your car. It’s the constant craving for more and more of these things that’s the issue. Needing a car to reflect the status people crave in society, wanting the latest designer gear to fit in, filling the house to overflowing with more and more things to impress their friends and neighbours that’s a problem. We can’t judge people who do this. They aren’t bad, lost maybe … but not bad. They have forgotten their connection to nature. We need to educate not denigrate.
You can lecture people all you like but you will never change them by making them feel guilty or afraid. Lasting change only comes from within when someone has the ability to tune into their own resilience, their own gifts and their ability to love. Having worked as an artist, teacher and coach for many years, in prison, with kids in care, with people with psychiatric/psychological disorders etc I have seen this first hand. There is a deep healing takes place when people return home to nature and themselves.
Greif is about connection. It is about connecting to something, or someone you connect with deeply.
Grief is about love and the inevitability of change and as creatures of habit, and as creatures who have been tamed out of their wildness and conditioned to think that ownership and consumerism are the answer to all ills, we will do anything rather than face this truth. Change is about letting go.
Nature has some deep teachings for us and some deep medicine. I love trees. Trees have a sense of permanency and a sense of being ever changing. That is the beauty of them, how they encapsulate the nature of reality so succinctly. It’s hard for us modern humans to grasp that, or rather to accept that.
Let your tears flow they feed the earth – the late Anna Ziman, Open To The Goddess
If we want to really change the world to leave a positive legacy, if we are really serious about this as a mission, then teach people to love nature. It is that simple. It is that simple because love is infectious, it’s a habit and we humans, as creatures of habit, love that.
So yes, trees and nature are teachers and healers. In courting beauty we learn to witness, honour and ultimately to love. What you see with Last Wishes is that in action. Lots of people doing just that. It doesn’t matter that they all have different belief systems in this witnessing, honouring and loving they are all stood on common ground, celebrating what is important to them. That ground is this planet and their loved ones, and they were all brought home to themselves through connecting with nature and each other.
That’s what remembering is all about. That’s our gift …. See? I have brought you full circle back to my previous article remembering, just like the trees through the seasons do.
So here we are and life continues.
In a few short hours it will be dark again. In the dark the trees do their silent growing, expanding root and branch. The darkness is necessary above and below ground so that sleep can come and seeds might germinate. It is the same with us humans. Our mentalhealth is important. The #earth is important, we need to look after that too. We need to look after each other.
Just remember to take heart and know that at some point the light will come again.
Blessings to you all
Amanda
Founder Ancient and Sacred Trees
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