Walk outside.

As Elemental Activists, we want to be outside. Our goal is to connect with nature so intimately we remember we are nature. When we remember we are nature, we realize that nature's well-being is our well-being.

I know for a fact that contact with nature brings this awareness. It happened to me.

I spent the entire year of 2013 hiking the trails and roads of Point Reyes peninsula. I started on Winter Solstice of 2012 at the northern tip on a very rainy day. My goal was to reach the southern tip by Winter Solstice of 2013.

Before I began, I committed to using my time on the trails to understand why humans create trash. We might think that trash is inevitable, but what I wanted to understand was what was happening in the creative process which allowed humans to create without regard for the long-term consequences.

Because of the hiking, 2013 was an epic year. I worked the question from every angle as I hiked in all types of weather. It was near the end of my year when the answer came.

"Humans create trash when they forget they are nature."

I knew I had forgotten I was nature when one day I was standing in the dappled sunlight of the Bear Valley Trail. The creek whispered softly at my feet as a bird whistled from the treetops.

Suddenly I experienced the bird's song as a viscose entity. It traveled from the treetops through the viscose air and right into my body. The reverberation entered and change me. I became bird. Now I was reverberating with creek and sunlight and soft wafting breeze. As they entered my senses, I was changed.  At this moment, I remembered I was nature as surely as a flower or a bird or the water itself. I was part of the creative symphony of life.

It was an ecstatic moment!

Return to our nature.

The goal is for each of us to find this awareness. Not only is it a sublime experience, it is what we need as a species to get back into balance. We used to live in this awareness as all animals do. But like anything, we must see the opposite of something to know what we are looking at. Without wrong, we do not know right. Without black, we do not see white.

We can think of our separation from nature as an individuation process we needed to go through to know ourselves better as a species in much the same way children must individuate from their parents to stand firmly on their own feet. Now that we see our creative capacities and their consequences, it is time to mature and return to an awareness of ourselves as part of the whole and begin to take care.

Walk outside.

Walking outside helps us with this. It allows us to reclaim our connection with Earth. When we slow to a creature pace, we have time to open and feel. Nature is our home. It helps us feel well.

The first part of the Elemental Activist journey began in 2012. It yielded the truth that we need to find our way back to nature in order to right the balance. This leads us to the present and the question of how best to do that with things as they are. Getting from here to there is an inside process we will go outside to do.

Here is where the journey began in 2012.