Unplugging from all sources of media and news for brief periods of time becomes the most rational an even more, the most obvious choice for finding some inner peace. It doesn’t take a crisis in our world or personal lives to feel the power of spending time out among nature, the peace of sitting beside a rambling creek, or the unspeakable wisdom exuded from old trees whispering in the winds. The land is always there; ready to accept us and all we bring to her.

Finding inner peace is not an overnight process, but more of a never ending process we continue throughout our lifetime and carry over into the next.

To be human is to experience hurt. Rare is the individual who manages to make their way through life without suffering many scars to the emotional body and will. Sometimes our scars are given to us by others; sometimes they are self-inflicted by allowance of what we should avoid.  We are human after all. Either way, the pain can run deep.

Our wounds may be clearly visible to us; we know the exact moment, circumstance, and person with whom inflicted them upon us or when we allowed them to be self-inflicted through actions of our own. Then there are the occasions that the perpetrator of the wounds, are not so easily identified until the damage is done.  We just learn how to take the time to be one within nature and heal the pain and move beyond the scars to find the inner being, to find our purpose and to grow.

Our purpose is held in our souls and there’s no better mirror of the soul than the natural world. The wilder the setting is, the better it serves to reflect, reveal, and teach. By stripping away all the distractions of our modern, electronics age and “plugged in” lifestyles, we can start to hear the still small voice that’s been trying so hard to get through. Spending time with nature and with the spirits in, we can return to our secular lives with a better understanding of our gifts and an appreciation of how important it is for us to use those gifts wisely.

It is good to recognize when we need to simply step away from our life so we can find our purpose, and refocus once again.  Our Spirit needs to experience the freedom of a day with no plans. Our soul needs to experience the solid ground under our feet, rich mud between our toes, and the sun on our face

Our soul is a hard thing to build around. It doesn’t lend itself well to a mobile app. It’s hard to have a conversation about Soul in a 120 character tweet, or in just a Facebook post, we must go beyond, by going back, and be renewed through nature. Our soul just won’t fit into the kind of boxes we love to worship in our culture and it doesn’t have a press agent to use the media and means to bring it to our fast paced lives.

If we, the future leaders of our culture, are to lead our people to seek out the basic unit of social change we have no hope creating a better society until more of us begin to understand how much of our behavior is influenced by the unseen. Behind everything we do, every decision we make, a deeper current is running. And for a society like ours we have what it takes to help others find their way back to what we know is within us, just misplaced.  Finding your purpose and using your fullest potential will be the change you seek.

©Copyright protected 2013: JD, NWU Local 1981

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