Now that we are well into the year, I am finding myself busy with new and wonderful offerings. I have just returned from a Nature retreat, where I focused on my new year's intention of deepening my relationship with The Sacred. I am renewed at a Soul-level, and am practicing bringing that renewal into my personal life, into my work, and into my realtionship with what I consider to be the grave enviroonmental, economic and global/political conditions in the world around me. I entered the retreat with deep despair over the condition of the world, and over what I could only describe as the rip, or tear, in the Anima Mundi (The Soul of the World.) Upon my return, I experience the deepening of my relationship to The Sacred in Nature as a powerful force in 'righting' my relationship to this despair.

With the conditions of our world being as they are: economic recession, potential war, and the dread of terrorism, this is a time when the need for a connection to Soul and spirit is more important than ever. I hear, in many of my sessions, an underlying discomfort and insecurity that has subtly infused our psyches; many people are speaking of depression and angst, of free-floating anxiety, and of deep concerns about the conditions of our political system and western culture in general. When the world around us is in so much flux, finding our 'center', and truly living from the core values that rise from our Soul is not only helpful, but an important act of courage, an, in my mind, activism!

My experience has been that through connection with the forces of Nature - both the creative and destructive forces - truth, vision, and clarity become available. Once connected to ones Source, one is more able as a human being to reflect on the big questions of this time, of Life, and of ones relationship to the world. Of course, each of us must find our own path to 'right action' during this time. For myself, I have come to the conclusion that doing nothing is no longer an option, and that the most radical activism for me is to respond to the struggles of Western Culture - and the United States in particular - with reflections on several questions. Taking these questions into the natural world, where both creativity and destruction simultaneously express, is a path to truth that I have come to trust. I have also come to the conclusion that the truths that arise in response to this deep inquiry must also be followed by real actions, small or large, in my life and in the world around me. I would like to share with you the questions with which I am called to grapple, even as I contemplate the actions to which I am called: