All My Relations

Beings seeing beings

Turk’s Cap lily at Ceremonial Flats, Mandala Springs, NC. June 21, 2026.

I left you standing

When we opened the space for ceremony

Cleared the underbrush and saplings

And you grew tall in the newfound sun

Outpaced your shaded sisters

Set five buds

And opened the first

On my birthday

To be discovered

On my morning walk

My first gift

Gratefully received.

My childhood lily in bloom, after a year with no growth. July 23, 2025.

I placed you in the soil when I was 16

In a cage protected from voles

Transplanted you to Oregon

When my father passed

And in the year

When the slugs found you below ground

When you set no leaves

You somehow survived

When your younger kin did not

To be resurrected the following spring

To find yet a new home

With my dear friend

To someday find your way

Back to me once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two Lilies

Some folks connect to the natural world through the mind, through classifying, identifying, collecting information. Information about habits, habitats, food and medicinal value, ancestral uses.

These folks perhaps wish I would talk more, on my walks. They wish I knew all of the names of all of the trees, all of the ways each plant can become medicine or food or fiber or form. They tell me, well-meaningly, that my walks would be more valuable, more marketable if I billed them as educational.

I am always interested to learn more, and yet I feel a resistance to really leaning into this.

(And I find it strangely amusing - a synchronicity of divine proportions - that as I was approaching the nearest basswood just now to take the photo below, my access was blocked by someone giving a very, very informational talk about its qualities and uses.)

Basswood approaching full bloom along Mineral Creek at Mandala Springs, NC. June 21, 2026.

I well remember the hot summer days

In the time of fireflies and fireworks

When the woods became suddenly perfumed

When your blossoms burst open in their multitudes

When my uncle’s bees filled their boxes to bursting

With light, unique, wondrous tree-honey.

I have missed you

These past 17 years

Living west of your homelands

In forests of towering fir.

Here I have found you again

Old friend

And in these southern mountains

You are two weeks earlier

Blessing my solstice wandering

With your fragrance

Your boughs abuzz

With all who seek nectar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Basswood

Some folks connect to the natural world spiritually. They regard the entheogenic plant medicines - those that help to release the mind and reveal the soul - as sacred. They offer ritual, ceremony, prayer, acknowledgement to plant spirits, animal spirits, spirits of place.

I do this, too. And yet I do not do only this. And I can find myself feeling lonely and strangely different amidst the cacao ceremonies, the prayers to the four winds, the ayahuasca dietas.

Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I heard you daily in valley woods

But I only once found your hidden nest

Thatched over and tucked among last year’s leaves.

I listened to your proud proclamations

Teacher-Teacher-Teacher-Teacher

Saying “this is my space”

And I watched you

From high in my sunset tree

Hovering high above at dusk

Singing a whole wild melody before diving down

As if purely in the joy of being alive.

Here you are again

A thousand miles distant

Singing your joy into the dusk

Alongside the Veeries and Wood Thrushes

And I am grateful

For your presence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ovenbird

I connect to the natural world relationally, through the body. Through the senses. Through the felt recognition that the same life force that animates my cells, that shapes the exquisitely complex forms of my eyes and muscles and neurons, also animates the intricate patterned symmetry of lily petals, the bursting buds of basswoods, and the annual flight of ovenbirds from tropics to nesting grounds.

And something that has become clear to me is that information is not relationship, and relationship does not require information. This is perhaps best explored by human analogy. If I introduce my friend Bill as a most excellent carpenter who is also a chef with a PhD in engineering, proudly bisexual, and married with two children, I have not actually helped anyone to know him - only to place him into categories and grant him respect or judgment based on their values. And by contrast, as I connected with my dear friend and fellow Substack writer Hannah over many months, we built an immense depth of mutual understanding, of relationship, without sharing any of this usual information. Instead we shared experience, presence, emotion, sensory perception.

And - similarly - spiritual reverence is also not relationship. I offer prayers to your soul is a very different statement than I see you, I feel you, I am curious about your experience. I have been surprised to notice that those who have a deep spiritual reverence for nature are often unaware of the lived experience of the beings who reside there. As one example, I have occasionally pointed out that highly-amplified nature-inspired dance music blasted into the woods is almost certainly impactful to the acoustically-sensitive birds and frogs and creatures who call those woods home. And the response has usually been one of surprise, as if that possibility has not occurred to them.

I am the person who I am at least in part because I did not spend my childhood at sleepovers and block parties and in the company of siblings and friends. I spent it, instead, sitting in blinds to watch the secretive sparrows, playing in creeks, learning the timings and habits of the prairie flowers, planting seeds and watching them grow, and climbing trees in all weather to watch sunrises and sunsets.

And - at this time in my life - I feel called to invite others into curiosity, presence, relationship with the whole living world. The world from which we, as embodied beings, are truly not separate. There does not seem to be too much of a roadmap for this, and so I find that the best I can do is to follow my intuition, my heart. And in this moment my deepest calling is to create trails, to weave passageways among and between wonders and beings of nature, and to invite others to join me there.

I am still discerning exactly how to create these containers, how to gently invite my fellow humans to step out of their minds, out of spiritual reverence, and into curious, wondering presence, into being-to-being relationship. But it felt right, on this Solstice and birthday, to mostly skip the ceremonies and educational plant walks and instead to invite one person to join me on the just-completed, six-hour Chain of Wonders path.

Have a blessed Solstice everyone!

~Markael

Sunset from the prairie-rock gap in the forest 1600 feet above my home, along the Chain of Wonders path. Mandala Springs, NC. June 20, 2026.