A Spiritual Ecology of West Coast Rainforest

Here on the West Coast, the salt of circumspect washes steadily against the sea of verdure. Greening and etheric expansion prevail, the sprouting, moiling flora thrives and reproduces, roots itself into a constant crescendo. Here, none can turn away, because all directions are exposed. And none can hold in check the wheeling force that rises, anymore than the tidal range of the ocean can cease its endless respiration.
Ashore, as the eye and heart grow sated on outward effulgence, and turn within to look across the forest of soulhood, the seeker encounters a buffeting wind, ceaselessly wailing in sonic silence, blowing against all branching forces, delivering wind-in-bough-songs to a wild and vigilant audience.
In this coastal dominion we find a range of dwellers-in-habitat, from the diminutive wren, mouse-bird, in its fern-frond forest, up to old growth tree giants, who, in this ocean-edge environ, have evolved powerful rooting forces to withstand the great winds that prevail from across the waters.

In the morning light, the sea compels me to open my wings over the tide-flat of vision. By day, I will sing you a tree. I will dance you a stream. And when evening falls, I will orate for you a sunset, warmth and color twining into distant measures.
A small melodic bird spreads its wings by the seaweed leavings of the tidal bore. Song sparrow serenade, dulcet phrasing in the salt air, rises as a green-leafing melody beneath usnea whiskers, wildly bearded lichens draped on the lower reaches of conifer boughs.
And I walk slowly, with deliberation, through the sea-edge forest, where the mouse-wren flits furtive, barely sensed, in an under-story of fern and salal, through a storyline, compelling and intricate.
Here, Grandmother nature unfolds her genesis masterwork by the edge of the riffling, over the surface of the sea of allocation. Grandmother nature, in a spirit of prosperity and layers weaving, serves up an authorship penned in ink of confluence and deeply rooting provision.

And late in the night, by the same rapturous sea, but further down-coast, well beyond sunset’s quiet portal into animal dreamtime, the howling of wolves pierces the veils of primordia arranged to keep human knowing at bay.
For nine years they waited, spanning puppy-hood to elder, down through countless alpha moons. And then, as the calendar of inspiration came to wheel in full circle, now through the rain of night, the creative, wolf-born force holds no longer in abeyance.
Now the howling sings into the stirring of sleepers, into the spaces of wakening. Across the sea of freedom and imagination the wolf pack hurls its healing resonance, sound forming into a vessel that sails over the tumult heaving upon the surface of the feral and shore-less pond.


The moon stimulates the waking of our animal nature. This is why, so often at the time of full moon, insomnia is induced in those sensitive to environmental influence. Within the psyche, the moon enhances those qualities peculiar to this coastal landscape - rooting, sprawling, raining, seeping, dripping, climbing wave on wave, rolling across the soul’s beachhead. . . .
I am driven (by self) to be functional and/or creative. However, at this time I am more in need of centering myself. That is, of asking my deeper core for direction. What am I wanting to engage in, at this moment, from my center?
Seeing myself, then, attuning to the pulse of heart at every turn, going by the Inner Voice, is the same as aspiring to fulfill my incarnation - or, put another way, knighting myself in service to Lady Soul.
Meanwhile, down by the base of a giant old-growth fir, where mindful patience lends passage through a subterranean portal, rooting takes place, a biting into the earthen counterpart of human will forces. Feeding into the soul’s need for holding firm in the face of expanse, the grand-parental tree hums its steadfast tone, never giving way to common worldly dissolution.
In this setting, the milding of temperament proceeds at an even pace.
Here is the true West.
And in this westernmost place, earthen land (physicality) meets the vast arena of spirit’s metaphor (water).
Because of this, The West presides as a Threshold.
Interior eyes gaze, here, out over the end of incarnation’s journey. After arriving here, at this metaphysical meeting-ground of sea and shore, one can turn and explore either a Northern, or Southern path. Or one can turn fully round, Eastward, and wend a way backward, regress to a former time and circumstance.
Or, more often, as spirit tends to have its way, one can linger here, centered Westerly - for a duration that can even last beyond a thousand heartbeats.
What span can bracket a boundless destiny?
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J Graf is the coordinator of Insight21 and Earth Vision - doorways for the 21st Century.