A Lesson From a Cactus
After checking on the Brady’s Pincushion cactuses and building walls around any new ones that popped up, I started to feel a deep connection with them. But one day I walked up to find some campers with their gear strewn all over them. While approaching, an overwhelming feeling of hurt came over me. It felt as if I was walking up on a crime scene. I almost couldn’t take the inflow of emotions that came over me. After I snooped around to assess the damage while the perpetrators of this violent act were off somewhere else, I felt so helpless and eventually started back on my walk home - about a mile down the road where my van was parked. I thought to myself, How sensitive I’ve gotten since separating myself from the human world. Having detached myself from society and by fulfilling my need for connection with all of earth’s other nonhuman spirits, my senses have opened back up to a more primal state as my ability to connect with the environment has become safe to do so; the environment has become safe to be sensitive; I’ve become safe to open up my senses.
I thought to myself, this is a dangerous state to be in around humans and society who have numbed themselves from feeling these delicate and subtle connections we are capable of having with the earth - we’d all literally be traumatized every single moment. Witnessing all the cars speeding around mindlessly aware of their impact on the planet - the poor little bugs being smashed against the windshield without any care or thought, the sounds cars produce deafening us and every other creature from the far more soothing sounds of nature, the fumes spewing out of the exhaust pipe and destroying the air and everything it touches - all actions I am horribly shameful of, and I am guilty for cutting my own senses and feelings off in order to migrate to a new spot. And then on a grander scale, there’s the beautiful rock formations and miraculous colors of Sedona with the abhorrent mass of the concrete city dumped right in the middle of it all. Not to even mention wars, racism, and all the bigger obvious aggressions that these smaller aggressions have escalated to. And how society has switched the idea that being sensitive is weak, when in truth, it is strength…strength to sense, see, smell, hear, taste, feel the full range that our bodies are so miraculously capable of…strength to take in and acknowledge the truth and reality unfolding around us…strength to re-sensitize ourselves to these constant crimes against nature we commit in order to survive the cage they’ve put between us and our natural selves and habitat. Strength they’ve turned against us and forced us into a state of compliance so we could continue on carrying out this assault against our own power and life source numbly and dumbly.
Our senses are given to us by this earth to survive the environment and explore depending on our needs as a species. To be in tune with our surroundings so our bodies can navigate the world depending on our very own senses we pick up. Instead, society has turned them off by traumatizing them so regularly so that we don’t want to feel our senses and then we end up relying on the people in “power” to tell us where we can and cannot go and do and how we ought to feel about it - evolving our species as a whole, away from being human and closer to becoming a non-sensing and non-feeling robot vulnerable to their programming and brainwashing. They’ve become our eyes, ears, heart, brain and central nervous system. Even in the wilderness, the sound of planes, highways, and humans are never far enough - this machine has even taken over our ears. But if we turn our own eyes back on, take all our other senses and central nervous system back, reconnect with the only true thing that does hold all the power and riches - our planet - we’ll see they have no power at all and that is why they are separating us from it, stealing all its power and cutting us off from our natural source. Our senses are our direct link between our human self and this planet. Keep them on - keep feeling - stay sensitive. Only when we’re sensitive will we feel the nerve to take our power back and protect our one true power source - the earth.
