Nature School Pt. 2: “Michael, Don't Assume You Know Anything”

You’re Given What You Need

While I was busy discovering more about the minutia of the human energy system a mentor introduced me to the groundbreaking work of Machaelle Wright and her Center for Nature Research she named Perelandra. Machaelle has worked directly with nature intelligence since the early 1970s. It was because of her writings that I realized the information I was receiving about the chakras and auric bodies was coming from nature. 

Reading Machaelle’s Garden Workbook helped me learn how to work with nature intelligence in a garden. The emphasis of this work was on communication. In the body energy work I wasn’t asking direct questions; it felt like I was downloading. However, the garden work requires a conversation. You learn how to speak to nature clearly and concisely and then receive nature’s answers to your questions. 

You’re communicating with a consciousness you can’t see but whose presence becomes palpable in how it ‘speaks’ back. This takes some trust in the beginning, but after you get the hang of it the proof that something is happening becomes evident in the results you get. 

I Got to Work 

The soil in my front garden has a lot of clay in it. It’s the opposite of the enviously beautiful loamy soil you see on garden shows. Nature had me move many of the plants that had been growing in this soil to the side garden. 

This caused the first significant shift in the garden’s energy. The change in energy was wonderful, but the garden was so torn up that I worried I’d misunderstood nature’s instructions and made everything worse. Being a beginner at working with nature intelligence I focused on how the garden looked, not how it felt, and decided that I must have screwed up. Feeling a little dejected, I stopped work for the day and went inside. 

You know that feeling when you finish a great yoga class and you’re lying on your mat feeling totally calm and open? Such a great feeling. That’s how the garden felt when I opened my door the next morning. I was sure everything would look at least as bad as it had the day before, but not only did the garden feel calm it also looked calm. Instead of seeing what had been taken away I had a sense of what was possible. 

This was my first big lesson with nature: Michael, don’t assume you know anything. 

The lesson of not assuming I knew anything opened me to receiving more detailed information in the body energy work. It began to feel like I was peering through a high-powered microscope into the inner world of subtle energy and the human form. And this would often happen before breakfast! 

It would have made sense for me to have felt overwhelmed with all of this information but nature is the perfect guide and teacher who had me working with so much soil that I was completely grounded. Everything unfolded in balance for me, keeping me engaged and energized month after month. 

Nature turned my garden into a kind of laboratory that became my introduction to how nature explains itself. I was a very happy student.

And this was where I was in my life. Three thousand miles from my previous life in Manhattan and everything I’d grown accustomed to for twenty years: tons of people, nearly constant engagement socially or creatively, and not much time alone, to spending the majority of my time each day for a year communicating with the fully formed and invisible consciousness that makes nature nature. 

Nature surprises and delights me and continues to help remove my preconceptions of how things work. I’ve found the best partner in the world.