Recently my wandering attention of daily affairs was suddenly arrested by music on one of the devices in our house.  Here’s what I heard that stopped me in my tracks and brought instant tears to my eyes, not of sadness, but of some unspoken recognition.

You think you own whatever land you land on

The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim

But I know every rock and tree and creature

Has a life, has a spirit, has a name 

I know every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name. A powerful YES rose up in me. I knew that I knew as lived experience the truth of these words, but where were these words coming from? You may know them instantly, but it took me a little looking around to rediscover the song Colors of the Wind made famous in the Disney movie Pocahontas. 

Some 30 years before, I first encountered that song with my then small children in the movie itself. And in those days, I was just beginning to wake up to what I now fully embrace in so many ways. Trees, rocks, birds, flowers, “weeds” so called, deer, ladybugs, (and the list goes on beyond my ability to name all the beings of the Earth) have life.  They all have spirit. They all have a name. I can see the swollen stream behind my house stretched out beyond her banks by the recent storms, and I greet her and feel her spirit in particular as I write this. Learning to greet the spirit in every other being is such a calling, such a blessing, such a daily gratitude, such work!  The song, however, does not just leave me basking in the beauty of nature. It takes me to more difficult places.

You think the only people who are people

Are the people who look and think like you

But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger

You’ll learn things you never knew you never knew 

This is me, on both counts. I have spent too much of my life affirming first and frequently those who look like me, people who think like me. And, Spirit has coaxed me with more patience than I have had into those footsteps of strangers, where EVERY SINGLE TIME, I learn things I never knew I never knew. 

This is, for me, the life long and perennial lesson: when I make connection with my own heart, my own inner and true self, I immediately am in touch with and connected to every other living thing, in a circle, a hoop that never ends. Every time I touch into my heart center and find, again, these enduring and countless connections, life invites a new painting, one where we paint with the colors of the wind. Invisible, we think? Look again. Sink down. Learn some things we never knew we never knew.