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The Power of Place

14 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Lesley Irene Shore in Nature, Spiritual, Whole

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Tags

Attune, Awareness, Community, Connection, Earth, Emotional, Energy, Environments, Flow, Harmony, Harmony Farm, Haven, Healing, Heart, Holistic, Intuition, Land, Light, Medfield MA, Moss, Nature, Place, Pond, Retreat Center, Sacred, Sensation, Sense, Senses, Settings, Sounds, Spiritual, Trails, Vibrations, Water, Wellbeing, Woods, Yoga

Harmony Farm

In Medfield, a small suburban town 45 minutes from Boston, you spot the Harmony Farm sign hanging from a tree and know you have arrived.  Turning into the driveway, you hear the wheels humming a different tune as they move from harsh black macadam to gentle gravel. The sound of cars fades into the distance.

The car slows its pace as you travel along the gently winding road. You unconsciously let down your guard, breathing out a sigh, letting anxiety dissipate, worry and stress gently release.

Harmony Farm - Shore, Tragakis family reunion, August 2005

Looking to your right, you watch a few sheep and a donkey contentedly grazing in the verdant green meadow. After a while you cross a bubbling stream and begin to notice a profound shift happening inside you. A change in energy, something magical is happening. As if you’re journeying to another time, a sacred space.

You continue following the road, passing a barn, then what looks to be a residence on your right. The road leads ahead, then bends to the right and you chance upon a building nestled inside a circle of tall pine trees.

This must be it, you think, as you park your car and enter the building. You’re here for a workshop sponsored by the non-profit, Harmony Center. Upon entering the building, you notice herbs hanging from beams above, then stop and stare ahead, awed by a high ceilinged octagonal room, three sides of which are glass.

Resuming your slow pace, you move toward the windows and breathe in the scene outside. Woods slope gently down ahead, a pond to the right and stunning flowers demand your attention.

You open to the peace and tranquility of this place.Foxglove outside Harmony Center

Attunement

Wherever we are, we attune to our surroundings. The energy of place seeps inside us. This happens beneath the surface, outside conscious awareness. The vibrations around us affect every level of our being – physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.

Where we live and where we work affects us more than we may realize. It happens very gradually, almost imperceptibly.

Natural environments affect us differently from citified ones. We know this intuitively. If we live and / or work confined by concrete, we yearn for the healing energy of natural settings.

Tuning In

Your Harmony Center workshop includes experiential exercises held outside. The group walks slowly down a grassy path, arriving at a pristine pond. You watch sparkles of light dance upon the water as sunbeams play on its gently rippling surface. Birdsong fills the air and winged beings flit here and there.  You absorb the sound of water cascading over rocks below and open to sense water flowing through your veins, enlivening every cell in your body.

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A reflection floats through your mind, “This land soothes my soul and pulls on my heart strings.

After crossing the dam, you walk along trails through untamed woods. Your feet feel earth moving up to greet each and every step. The softness of moss, smell of earth, vibrant colors of trees – your senses awaken and absorb sensation.

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When the workshop ends, your car wends its way back along the driveway. Reflecting on your experience, you realize that something has shifted deep inside. You feel peaceful and serene, more connected to yourself and at one with the world. “How could this happen,” you wonder, “Is it this place?”

Turning onto the black-topped road, you enter the flow of traffic. You hold onto your sense of wellbeing, storing it deep within your heart.

Such is the power of place.

 

Note: All the above photos were taken on Harmony Farm, Medfield, MA.

Change

08 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by Lesley Irene Shore in Nature, Whole

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Change, Commune, Earth, Growth, Harmony, Harmony Center, Healing, Journey, Nature, Seasons, Spiritual, Walk, Wholeness

We humans alter the Earth to suit our needs.  We impact our environment, often with little thought to long term consequences.

I’ve been blessed to live on 23 beautiful acres.  Harmony Farm’s pond, stream, woods, and fields have impacted every aspect of my being.  Admittedly, we changed the land by building a house, a barn and a studio, but we tried to do so in an earth-friendly manner.  When planting and tending gardens, we did so organically.

While living on this small slice of nature, I spent time each day outside.  My activity depended on the season.  I walked trails through the woods almost every day and when snow covered the ground I did so with snowshoes.  During spring summer and fall, I ate breakfast by the  pond listening to birdsong, inhaling the sights around me.  I also frequently swam in the pond – a delightful sensory experience.

pondlambs-038

Something important happened during the 36 years that I’ve lived on this land.  I changed.  It happened gradually, almost imperceptibly.  By spending time outside each day, I began feeling whole, more complete.  More peaceful and serene.

The land changed me.

The Great Turning

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

Posted by Lesley Irene Shore in Whole

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Awareness, Buddhist, Cooperation, Earth, Earth Community, Future, Harmony, Hope, Interdependent, Partnership, The Great Turning, Web of Life, Wholeness

People prefer not to think about the fact that we’re destroying our life support system.  Feeling helpless and scared, we protect ourselves from the awareness that we’re nearing a planetary tipping point, a point of no return for human life as we know it on Earth.  This deadening of awareness prevents us from acting in ways that could create a better world, a world where people live in harmony with each other and all of Earth.

Joanna Macy, an Earth activist and Buddhist scholar, proposes that active hope might enable the shift she refers to as “The Great Turning.”  While she recognizes that our industrial growth society depends on the ever-increasing consumption of Earth’s resources, with corresponding ever-increasing waste products which get dumped into, around, and on our Earth, she considers this to be an extraordinary time in human history – with the potential to move from an industrial growth society to a life sustaining one.

In her “work that reconnects”, Joanna guides people to acknowledge their pain for Earth and to open awareness.  She invites us to release the false sense of separateness and to experience ourselves as interconnected, part of the web of life, members of Earth’s community.

The Great Turning requires that we take responsibility for what is happening on Earth.  This entails releasing old structures and enabling life sustaining ways of being to emerge.  It involves creating a new world.

In this new world, partnership and cooperation will replace competition and strife, empathy and compassion will replace hostility and aggression, generosity and sharing will replace selfishness and greed, and the power of love will replace the power of force.  We will move away from striving toward perfection and aim to grow into wholeness.   Rather than disconnection and separateness, we will experience ourselves as integral members of the web of life.

Holding hope for the future, let us join together and help create this better world.  

Web of Life

01 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by Lesley Irene Shore in Whole

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Earth, Interconnection, Nature, Soul

We live in a web of inter-connection, inter-dependence, and inter-relatedness – the web of life.

Human beings co-evolved with nature, and in nature.  Everything in nature is genetically and molecularly linked.  This isn’t just a fanciful notion, for scientific sequencing of the human genome reveals that we share more than we might have imagined with other animals.  Over 90% of our human genome is identical to that of the lion. 

Deep inside, we know that every aspect of our lives intertwines with nature.  We depend on nature for the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water that quenches our thirst.  Nature exists inside, as well as outside, us. Nature forms the connecting link. 

We share Earth with the rest of our family.  In addition to kindred human beings, our family includes brother and sister animals, plants, birds, fungi – all life on Earth.  We are the human animal.  And Earth is our home.

Our deepest essence is rooted in nature, intertwined with all beings everywhere, with Earth our home, and with all of creation. 

Nature and Culture

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by Lesley Irene Shore in Whole

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Culture, Cycles, Food, Gardening Organically, Interconnecting, Nature

I live on Harmony Farm where we’ve been gardening organically, raising chickens and sheep, and connecting with nature for over 30 years.  In my early years of living on this land, I became enamored with living a natural life-style.

We aimed to grow as much of our food as possible.  Our chickens produced eggs.  The gardens blessed us with garlic, greens, herbs, strawberries, tomatoes, squash, and many other gifts.  I learned to freeze vegetables and make jams without using sugar.  During winter months, we also ate potatoes and carrots from our cold storage room in the cellar. 

Gardening organically and living in tune with the seasons became my personal mantra.  During the heat of summer months we ate more cooling raw foods (salads and fruit), and in winter turned to heavier stews and soups.  I also listened to my body as it cycled through the seasons, sleeping more during winter and less during summer. 

While our dream of living in harmony with nature was becoming a reality, we were also part of another world, society – living in it, working in it, enjoying it.  In some ways we kept our two worlds separate, leaving one to enter the other, but they also overlapped, and I felt torn between them. 

As much as I loved nature, I felt unfaithful and disloyal, for I also appreciated the comforts and conveniences of modern life.  My food processor was a blessing in the kitchen, along with the blender, grain mill and juicer.  And while I savored taking peaceful walks, I also fancied the feel of driving a high performance car, one that enabled me to feel my way along the road, sensing each turn.  As much as I enjoyed gardening, it hadn’t replaced going to movies, plays, symphonies, and eating out.

I felt torn, fragmented, pulled in two directions.  One of my feet was firmly planted in the earth, feeling her cycles and rhythms.  My other foot was speeding along America’s highways, which favored the straight, narrow path of logical, mechanistic thinking.  I wasn’t comfortable with these disparities and kept thinking that I had to choose between different worlds – that truly valuing nature meant renouncing culture and its technological advances. 

I was suffering from our society’s disease of either / or thinking.  Though nature had been showing me how she weaves parts into wholes, I’d been seeing the parts and overlooking the whole.  Either / or thinking was the culprit to banish from my life, not the machines that made it easier, enriched it. 

After coming to this realization 25 years ago, my learning from nature intensified.  I began looking toward living a whole life, not subtracting from it, and experiencing how interconnecting creates wholeness. 

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