When the World Feels Heavy, Let the Land Hold You

There is a weight pressing down on the world, a grief that lingers in the bones of humanity. You feel it, don’t you? The tightening in your chest when you wake, the strange restlessness that no amount of movement can shake. The sense that something—everything—is unraveling, and you are caught in the pull of its undoing.

This is the time of troubles. The time our ancestors spoke of. The time when the old ways are forgotten, and the sickness of disconnection spreads like rot through the roots of the world. When the stories of the land are drowned beneath the hum of machines and the relentless noise of human minds that have forgotten how to listen.

But listen.

Even now, the earth is speaking. Even now, the rivers and forests hold wisdom that can mend the torn fabric of your being. Even now, there is a way through the darkness.

And it is not found in the mind.

When you cannot leave your head, when your mind is a storm that howls with worry and regret, surrender to your surroundings. Not in the way modern humans surrender—to distractions, to numbness, to the easy escape of screens and substances—but in the way a river surrenders to gravity, flowing into the embrace of the land.

Go outside.

Feel the wind on your skin. Let it remind you that breath is older than thought, and the world is far vaster than your worries. Walk until your footsteps match the rhythms of the land beneath you. Step with reverence. Step as though the earth is alive beneath you—because it is.

Lean against the rough bark of a tree and remember that this being has stood here for longer than any human sorrow. Press your palm to stone and know that it has witnessed ages rise and fall, and yet it remains steady and unchanged.

Drink from a running stream, and let it teach you the way water knows how to move around obstacles, how it does not resist but simply finds another way.

Breathe.

Not shallow, hurried breaths, but deep, belly-filling gulps of air, as though you are drinking in the sky itself. 

Let the wind enter you, sweeping away what no longer serves, clearing out the debris of despair, fear, and heaviness.

When the world of humans is too much, let the more-than-human world cradle you. The old ones knew this truth—our grandmothers who sang to the seeds, our grandfathers who knelt in the dirt, our ancestors who listened to the whispers of the wind and the silence of the stones.

They knew what we have forgotten:
That we are not alone.
That we were never meant to bear the weight of existence on our own, locked inside our own minds, severed from the great web of life.

The forest does not ask you to be anything but what you are. The river does not demand that you solve all the world’s problems before it will offer you its song. The earth does not require your perfection—only your presence.

Let yourself be held. Let yourself be reminded. Let yourself become small in the face of mountains, and vast in the embrace of the sky.

And when you return to the world of humans, carry the silence of the stones with you. Move like the river. Root like the trees. Let the wind move through you, so that nothing heavy lingers too long.

This is how we endure the time of troubles.
This is how we find our way back to ourselves.
This is how we remember what was never truly lost.

Angell Deer
Sacred Paths