My journey began long ago. A flower child. Daughter of the sixties. Clad in worn out jeans and cute peasant shirts smocked with threads of all the colors of a rainbow after a summer storm. Hair bleached almost white from the summer sun, usually wind blown from being outside. Wild and free with a heart filled with the promise of how I would change the world.

My creative urges were strong, but I always felt different than how I saw my other creative friends. They would study books and spend hours in the art rooms trying to mimic the creatives that came before. I on the other hand, found going to the woods the best place to learn. Since the earliest times I can remember, nature spoke to me, provided the lessons, showed me the way.

I could hear the heart beat of the earth. I could feel the energies just waiting to be released. Always, it seemed, just bubbling below the surface. Just waiting for someone to come and use the energy that was there.

Most of the time you could find me barefoot. I needed that direct touch so I could "Hear." Always striving to quiet my mind long enough to hear the whispers that would come through. Those tiny tid-bits of "Knowing."

Most of my friends knew me as fun loving, always seeing humor every where, a free spirit ... always wandering off. There were very few that knew what I did on my little walks into the woods.

How do you tell people - "Oh, I'm just talking to the trees, and the animals, and the earth."? I learned that mostly you didn't speak of it. Because, how crazy is that? I learned pretty young that it is just not the type of thing that many do ... talk to trees. And even crazier, to tell them the trees answer!

Even with the closest of friends, there would be the raised eyebrows. And that look. You know, the one you can imagine as they are thinking, "Wow, she has totally lost it!" Or the "Does she know how crazy that sounds?"

And so we fast forward to today. Finally, I am not so crazy sounding any more. How far us earth beings have come. We honor the earth, we listen to what she has to say, we listen to the plants and animals. If they had only come with me into the woods. They would have known what I knew all this time. The answers are there ... when we quiet ourselves and just listen.