Noticing With Natalie

Repairing Rupture In Connection With Land I Love: Healing Trauma From Wildfires [S1 E2]

• Natalie Ross • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

What do you do when the land you love could kill you? Does living there make you a victim of a codependent, abusive relationship? Or are there deeper patterns at play? In this short, heartfelt episode Natalie shares: 

  • Grieving humanity’s disconnection with the land’s natural seasons and cycles of creation and destruction.  
  • Reframing relationship with the land from one of abuse to mutual care
  • Resistance through refusing to give up our wild weirdness
  • Noticing how the body can feel distressed as it remembers anniversaries of catastrophic events, even as our conscious minds don’t remember or connect the dots unless the distress is investigated at a somatic level
  • Naming distress at having to play the machine’s game, even as one’s work is in devotion to healing the disconnect the machine perpetuates
  • Natalie asks spirit for support being shown what wants to be co-created through her in devotion to something other than the machine
  • Honoring decay as a pathway to realigning with nature’s wisdom, seasons, and cycles both within and around us

There are no quick answers here, only questions and deep listening as Natalie contemplates how best to show up as a voice for the Earth and its wildness.

Connect with Natalie:


Mentioned in this episode:

This episode of Noticing With Natalie was co-created by Natalie Ross and spirit. It was recorded and presented/channeled by Natalie Ross.

The show notes were written and the transcript edited by Leandra Maria Gil.

Natalie is broadcasting from the land of the Awaswas, Amah Mutsun and Ohlone peoples in what is known as Santa Cruz, CA

Connect With Natalie:

Listen to my other podcast about connecting with nature and intuition:
Earth Speak with Natalie Ross and Friends

What's up witchy weirdos, changemakers, whatever it is you identify as. Welcome to Noticing with Natalie, that's me and this is a podcast where I help witchy weirdos share their expansive, bold, big, beautiful, intangible gifts with the world. I'm Natalie Ross, I'm your hostess and fellow Earth loving animist. I hope that what I share helps you feel more confident about trusting what you're noticing as you engage with the seen and unseen worlds so you may tap into more connection, creativity, community, aliveness, whatever it is you're calling in. Nothing I say or do here is meant to override your own best knowing of what's right or true for you. Take what works, trust yourself, and welcome to the conversation. You can go to natalie.net to sign up for my free newsletter where I talk more about things like how to channel the expansiveness of your gifts into tangible offers and put them out into the world. That's natalie.net. I'm coming to you from the land of the Awaswas, Ohlone and Amah Mutsun peoples in Santa Cruz California. If you're into it, I now invite you to join me in invoking your helping spirits. You can repeat after me or use your own words, or completely opt out if this isn't your thing. You do you. I welcome my well ancestors. I welcome my spirit guides and helpers. I welcome the earth, air, fire and water. I welcome the benevolent spirits of the land I'm on. I welcome the little people. And I welcome the spirit of this podcast to protect, guide, and inspire me today. Help me to share exactly what people most need to hear in ways that reweave our whole beings into the living web of wisdom with grace and ease. So be it.

Today is August 16 2023, and three years ago on this day, lightning struck the mountains near my home over 300 times sparking wildfires that burned over 80,000 acres for the next few months. This morning before I realized it was the anniversary of the fire, I woke up feeling heavy, with stories of there being no way out and no safe place to go, circulating in my head. Fortunately, I had therapy today and I was supported to grieve and moves through so much despair I've been holding in my body since that day that came up on this anniversary. Afterwards, now as I reflected on the fire and how living in a place. . . well this is how I felt then. . . how I felt that living in a place that I loved that could also easily kill me, felt like I was in an abusive relationship. When those fires started, I spiraled hard. And I realize now that what I feel is more like I'm in a caring relationship with a land that has suffered traumas of its own kind. I care for this land, I love it. I'm sorry that it is not better cared for and understood by humanity. I'm sorry that its aliveness is not acknowledged, tended to, supported and nurtured to the extent that it could be to generate integrated wealth and wellness for all beings. So today, rather than be mad at the land, and feeling like this place and nature are destructive and abusive, I feel like what's toxic is the misalignment of humanity's systems and constructs with the natural cycles and seasons of the land, of existence, creation. I feel free Land. I'm sorry I depended on you to quote save me and that I blamed you for how I was feeling at the time. I'm sorry I described living here as a toxic, abusive relationship. It's not you. It's the misalignment of humans in nature. I grieve with you, Land. I have no answers, but I offer myself as a witness to how you speak, to your beauty, cycles, seasons and mysteries. I offer my voice to speak of you as one who exists and is very much alive despite supremacy's attempts to disenchant and dominate you. I give a fuck for the plants, the animals, the insects, elements, microbes, and unseen ones with whom we share this planet. I give a fuck for the wild animals of our own human bodies which have been constrained and manipulated by hungry machines whose satiation is impossible. Earth is a gem, even if it turns out to be but a dream of consciousness within a multitude of multiverses. That doesn't negate the beauty of this place and what mysterious wonders one can experience here. I guess this is why I resonate with the little people, the nature spirits so much, they are a living voice of nature's ways holding remembrance for those of us who feel called to something different than the broken systems we've been given. I give a fuck for the slugs and vultures and creatures that eat what's dead, breaking down matter into its individual building blocks that can be used to feed new life. I give a fuck for the decay, the downward wave, the decomposing of old ways, death, decay, rebirth. I'm defying the system's attempts to diminish, dominate and contain us -  fuck that shit. Fuck. That. Shit. I ask myself: what is my aim, my target, my vision? Maybe I'm not even asking myself, maybe I'm asking those seen and unseen with whom I'm co creating for a vision. Show me the energetic signature of what wants to be cocreated and co-composted through me and my beingness, through the way I show up, where I put my attention, what I offer. What is asking to come through me that I can dedicate myself to in devotion of this wildness that refuses to be contained. In therapy today, my therapist had her middle finger on her nose during our session. I feel like that kind of nails it, like that's what I carry, a big fuck you to the system saying "see we can be ourselves, be uncontained, and be free". And as I reflect on this, I guess this is one definition of resistance. Resistance through refusing to give up what we stand for, our aliveness, our humanity, our mysterious existence interconnected with intergalactic waves of creation and destruction in this weirdness of being. And I hate that it feels like I have to hitch this impulse, this resistance to the machine in order for it to make money to support me, that I have to somehow contort, distort or contain my wild impulse to fit into a box of helping others fit into the box, when the very nature of this impulse is to exist beyond the box, to compost the box. I question whether this is something I even want to link to earning income, or whether this impulse is best left to be untethered to the pressures of generating profit that feeds me. How dare I make this wild thing earn money for me within the very system it resists. Yet without income, this wild thing has no fuel, no place to rest, no way to move throughout the world in the day. So I ask: how would this energy like to be in relationship with income, profit and engaging with the sheen in late stage capitalism, but not of it? I don't know yet, but I'm asking and listening. I am sharing my voice and gifts and experiences regardless of whether they're attached to income. Thank you for witnessing me.