Stories from my Journey – Healing the Land

On a recent visit with longtime friends, the conversation turned to a time some decades ago, when we had all lived on the Big Island of Hawaii. In those years our children were small, and we were engaged in the worlds of parenting and busy creating our lives – and were just beginning to experience some of our deeper encounters with the worlds of energy, spirit, nature and the forces which are held within those worlds.

The conversation took us back to those early encounters, and our first explorations with the help and guidance of Machaelle Wright’s work and her Perelandra workbook. We talked about our first direct experiences with battle release and healing the land in Hawaii, and the messages and signs, and confirmations we received in the process…  The instructions to gather small handfuls of various substances from specific places – green sand from this beach, black sand from that, and how to bring their energy into the directional corners of the land to infuse the land with their essences.

The clear message received that everything would have to wait for three days to be done, as Kane’ was busy with important ceremonies in other parts of the island, and how all our doubts about this had been stopped cold by my reading of an article from the local paper lying on my bedroom floor announcing exactly this ceremony with dates and times spanning the next three days… (You just can’t make this stuff up, as we always say to each other.)

We talked about the incredible results that came, once the work was completed. How the land flourished and the orchards grew so strong and tall and quickly. It was as if the energies of life had been set free again, and indeed, they had. We talked about how long the young trees had stood, dormant, unchanging, for the first years, after being planted. This was what prompted the idea to try to help in the first place.

It was a powerful remembering for all of us. A reminder that this work is still calling us and asking us to step forward and do the work, regardless of how ‘crazy’ it might feel.

In the weeks after these visits, listening to the meditations and live streams of David Clements, I hear echoes of these themes. The rising of ancient dense energy up through, and out of the earth. The energy of trauma, warfare and grief. The energy of suffering, pain, hopelessness and despair.  So many difficult memories have literally been grounded in the earth herself, and it is time for their release.

Recollecting this lovely reunion with beloved friends, in the days after our visit, other memories began to surface.

My first night in Mississippi, a few years after the Hawaii experiences – when I had fallen asleep beside an open window in a cabin along a river. A place I had never been, entirely alone in the dark night, and suddenly I was bolt upright and wide awake. Motionless, I was transfixed and barely breathing as I listened and my head and ears and being was filled with the sounds of men moving in the night woods around me.

Somehow in the darkness I knew this was not happening now, in my physical reality, but was an echo of the past, and I listened and worked to still my pounding heart as the voices came closer. They were calling out to each other. There were dogs. There was another person, running – crossing the stream just beyond the door of this cabin and disappearing into the woods beyond. The dogs were on the scent of the person and then lost it in the water. The dogs bayed and barked, the men yelled. My heart felt as if it was in my mouth.

I considered briefly if I were dreaming, but I could feel the breeze coming in the window across my face, and hear the humming of a computer in the room next to me. I knew I was not dreaming. But I also knew that this was outside of time somehow. This was not happening now. I willed it to end.

After what seemed like an eternity of time the men’s voices faded off down the stream and along the larger river it joined at some distance from the cabin. It grew quiet again. The soft sounds of frogs and the night creatures of the woods returned, and I knew I was alone again. I lay silently waiting for sleep to return until the first hints of dawn appeared in the sky, and then fell into a fitful sleep.

It was an experience I will never forget. I never mentioned it to anyone for at least another decade. I could not explain it. I knew what it was, and the horror of it haunted me. But I could not explain it, or make it go away.

Later that summer I stood under some of the huge old trees in the center of the town of McComb, Mississippi at 3 in the morning when I could not sleep. I let the trees hold me in their energy as I listened to the trains moving through the switching station and roundhouse.

The sounds were distinct and clear. There is nothing like the sound of a train system moving trains through a roundhouse. I found it somehow soothing. I remarked on it in later years when I spoke of my time there. But now I know the roundhouse was closed in 1987. Because I thought to myself that I ought to look up the history of those trains and discover what trains were moving through that little town in the dark hours of summer in 1995; and what I learned stopped me in my tracks again, and sent chills through my entire body.

The roundhouse was closed in 1987. Only this time I was wide awake, and standing at the foot of these massive ancient trees. Sure, it was 3 in the morning, but I was wide awake and cold sober. There is no explaining what I heard. But even more startling to me, was that on those hot summer nights in 1995, the train that was passing through McComb, Mississippi at 3 in the morning was none other than The City of New Orleans.

The only train I actually knew – and not only knew, but had a long-standing emotional relationship with. Because that train was the train Steve Goodman wrote a song about in 1970 that was one of the songs I’d been playing and singing since I’d first heard it, before I went to Boston to become a guitar major at Berklee College of Music and actually see Steven in concert while he was still alive. This song and this musician are a huge part of my musical and emotional landscape from this period in the 1970’s. It was a train with a direct connection to a man whom I had considered one of the most brilliant musicians and songwriters of all time, since my college days.

To discover that I was literally standing in a town in Mississippi in the middle of the night listening to HIS train go by as those deep energies of the trees held me in the dark was almost too perfect to believe, but it was true.

At every turn we are held, and loved, and supported, even when we cannot discern for ourselves that it is happening.

At 3 in the morning the town was quiet, and the trains were the only sound. The dark held me and felt safe and comforting in the presence of those mighty trees. I would lean up against them and just breathe them into myself. Then I’d gather myself up and walk home again to a house full of sleeping children. We didn’t last long in Mississippi, and I knew why. It had something to do with the pain and suffering of the place, and a house full of children who were calling us to new horizons and adventures.

I knew then, as I have known other times in my life, that I was there to put myself on the land in that place. To make that connection. That more healing would be coming, later, and I would need to have this place in my memory, in my history. Just as I have Hawaii, and so many other places I have been, for reasons which all ‘made perfect sense’ at the time, but which were all, really, only excuses, only camouflage as Seth would say, for what was really going on.

As I walk through my life now, I can begin to sense it – the calling that is just outside of my reach, just beyond earshot – the time is coming. These places – these holy grounds of this precious and sacred earth, are calling us – the time of healing is coming – and it is our work to do.

The first lines of the final verse of Steve Goodman’s ‘City of New Orleans’: