Touching Nature's Heart

By Margaret Wilson

Gentle, perceptive, delightful. Personal encounters with nature to heal and uplift.

Margaret is an artist, healer and Intuitive who has been aware of a mystical connection to nature and the healing capacities of nature since childhood.

Nature has been my dearest friend, my stalwart companion, my inspiration and rueful comforter. I drink her beauty and feed from her energy. I polarise my body between the radiant light of her stars and her rich humus depths. She stills me and centres me and reminds me of my vastness, my wholeness, my capacity to heal.

She has been my teacher. She has sent me pink mists and blue moons, rainbow clouds and blue-sky rains. She reminds me not to limit my reality; she invites me to enter hers.

These pages carry the energy of loving moments shared with the life force and spirit of the natural world. Composed of lyrical prose, precise descriptive passages, and over fifty evocative photographs, they gently guide you to look for the gems embedded in your own experiences with life and nature. They uplift your heart with their beauty, and engage you with the loving intelligence of nature.

To live interwoven, sourcing energy sparks of knowing and healing, integrating all aspects of self, and flowing in and out of the heart beat of life attuned to the divine, this is the gift nature offers us.

www.margaretwlsn.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452506012

Margaret Wilson

Elizabeth McDonald is a Mental Health Social Worker/ Psychotherapist who has worked in the fi elds of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Adult Mental Health and Aboriginal Youth and Adult drug and alcohol. Liz is a descendent of the Trawlwoolway people in North East Tasmania.

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Copyright © 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-0528-2 (sc)

           978-1-4525-0601-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012909384

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Balboa Press rev. date: 06/06/2012

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Beginnings

Cate’s Sea House

Reach Out And Touch

Mothering

Clonmacnoise And Devas

Sacred Spaces

Being Together

List Of Photographs

INTRODUCTION

Opening to the sounds, sights, and sensory experiences of nature involves a quietening of the mind, a stilling, and an opening of the heart, a peaceful letting go and melding with our surroundings. In this gentle surrender we find connection to our own soul and the soul of the world. Not only do we enter the stream of life force palpable around us, we ride that stream into an awareness of our own vast selves, into our own integrity and harmonious authority, into calm strength, knowledge and certainty. We rest in our own wisdom. Nature restores us to our whole selves.

In quietly sitting with this book and sharing in the intuitive insights and the visual delights of my moments with the healing and teaching heart of nature, you are taking your heart also to nature, to be uplifted and renewed, and to reaffirm for you the joy of living a soul-connected life.

BEGINNINGS

When I was young I walked beside my father, small hand in his massive one. He had farmer’s hands, healing hands. He taught me about the sweet myrtle, whose honey nectar could be sucked from pale white and pink bell flowers that grew from the stumpy base of that humble native plant. He made gum leaf whistles that I tried to play. I sat on his lap and pulled the steering levers of the yellow caterpillar tractor as we ploughed the fields. I went with him in the farm truck to deliver fruit to market, and on the way we talked about death and spirits and the growing of things. At night we went outside to look up into the glow of the Milky Way and he would point out and name the stars for me.

In school holidays when my mother was not teaching, my two brothers and my sister and I would be bundled into the car with the kelpie dog and be taken exploring in the outback. At night we children were wrapped all together in the large farm tarpaulin, four in a row, girls in the middle. The red earth was our mattress and the stars our ceiling overhead. If it rained we simply raised our tarpaulin coverlet over our heads.

At early dawn galahs would pierce the air with their raucous greeting to the sun. The gum trees would glow in the early light. My brothers would be tending our crackling breakfast fire, and from my warm nest on the ground I would watch my brothers’ breath misting and listen to the sounds of life carried far in the clear air.

Cooking on fires in the open was one of my mother’s easy talents. She loved to be outside. Even when we weren’t exploring the Flinders Ranges, the Victorian Alps or the South Australian outback, our gentle intelligent, and educated mother would playfully take her cooking chores out to a little fire under the trees.

I was enchanted and entranced by life on the farm. I would creep out of bed in the early morning to sit on the front step and watch the sunrise, curious as to why the whole world didn’t do this every day. On warm moonlit nights I slipped out to the swing for the joy of feeling the air against my skin as I swung up into the beautiful night. On lazy afternoons I climbed up beside the passionfruit vine to the shed roof where I lay in the warmth, looking down on the scene below.

From the shed roof the whole world seemed contained within the dusty arena of the yard below. This space was defined by the giant mulberry tree to my left, the verandah of the house ahead of me, the fig trees and apple orchard to the right, and the milking shed below me. I watched in the slow motion of trance as the dog crossed the scene. My hen with her new brood of chickens entered, teaching her young to scratch and peck the earth. My mother appeared, called and wandered away. I slid into a oneness with all I saw and was suspended, timeless. Thus