I Am Free! I Am Whole! I Am Aware!

The Feelings We Get From Our National Parks

I wish everyone could have a personal relationship with the sun that I cultivate. It’s affirming and liberating.

Happiest day beloved Joy Train Rider! How I love you! Picture the experience described in Rider Bethany’s description of her experiences in Jamaica published this morning, and that’s how much I love you.

Last week she described her visit to us:

Last Friday began with the simple pleasure of meeting up with friends, sharing good food, good talk, and a point of view that leaves you breathless. Everyone should have a friend whose balcony chair stares out at the Blue Mountains, while in the foreground all manner of birds dip and swoop in and out of their favorite trees. Woodpeckers tease with their tap-tap-tapping, occasionally traveling around a trunk for you to see them. If you are lucky (and we were) a hawk will do a fly by – chased noisily by a cheeky petchary (also known as Jamaican Nightingale; or the Northern Mockingbird). It would be enough without the excellent conversation and food, but then it wouldn’t be the same!

I’m glad you can see it through her eyes, because this salubrious setting puts me in close and consistent communicating with Cosmos. Because I can figuratively see from the 30, 000-foot level Nature play out beneath me. It’s like having a delay button so I don’t have to respond instantaneously to the demands of the world - every notification, email or bit of “news.”

The feeling of restfulness is deepened as I have the time to process events through what I’ve learned in National Parks over 30 years. On these trips I hope you’ve experienced uninhibited joy as the sheer size and grandeur of these places strip away imposed restraints.

Have you noticed how embarrassing people find it to be complimented? As if we are more accustomed to being criticized. But all that societal conditioning of repression falls away in the presence of gigantic natural wonders.

Many of us are still like little children carrying around our wounds, so this mainline effect is literally a gift from God that we can give to ourselves any time. Any part of nature managed for people or any small space with trees and beauty is a good place to start feeling worthy.

Imagine the power and release I felt as I was listening to a consciousness-raising video from the series at Vibrational Portal on YouTube this morning, hearing closeness to Nature emphasized as one of the key ways to reach higher levels of vibration and awareness! I have that in abundance.

Further, it postulates that at a point the student will realize, “You are Free. You are Whole. You are Aware.”

Instantaneously I felt myself experiencing that completely new reality. The best part is that I not only feel all those qualities, but I can use my sense of heightened awareness to perceive a world far more harmonious than it is today.

Off our balcony, a cloud appears to throw a lasso around the Full Moon rising over the Blue Mountains, home of Jamaica’s single National Park and World Heritage Site.

A woman on Facebook chided me this week for being “not rational” for espousing these views. I told her she’s just as entitled to her opinion as I am to mine.

Why do people pray so much if they don’t really believe anything can change? I’m grateful that our friend the activist and poet Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali shares at least the same level of optimism in this piece where he challenges us with the moral question of whether we’re prepared to evolve to save lives from floods.

I credit the entirety of my evolution to my upbringing in the Jamaican countryside and the extraordinary amount of time I’ve spent in National Parks. HOW CAN YOU SEE THESE PLACES THAT HAVE NO END from East to West, North to South across the country; no comparison to anything on Earth - Yellowstone has half the world’s geysers and there’s only one Grand Canyon World Heritage Site in the world; blue glaciers calve in Glacier National Patk and synchronous fireflies communicate in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, without being transformed?

Shock, wonder and deep feelings of awe have been the most consistent response among hundreds of people we’re taken for their first time in a national park. They come away peaceful, reflective: How could something as glorious as this exist on Earth, in my own country even, and I had no idea? I understand the befuddlement as I still feel the same way from my first time.

I’m convinced that we are overloaded with “information” and “programming” when what we’re really looking for is a sincere feeling of love, for ourselves and others; of belonging and being part of something whole. That’s what our National Parks have to offer.