Welcome! You are listening to our mindful nature, formerly titled The Mindful Minute. I'm your host, Meryl Arnett, and this podcast explores the deep connection between land and self, through nature-based meditations and meditative experiences that invite us back into the longing, to each other, to our ancestors, to the earth, and to all beings that make up this universe.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to Officially Our Mindful Nature. I'm so excited to be sharing that name from now on. And welcome to Spring. We are here at the Spring Equinox, the beginning of a new season. This is the season where we begin to experience the magic of migration as animals are moving towards their breeding ground, salmon, monarch butterflies, so many different kinds of birds. And I've just come in from sitting outside, and it's gorgeous out, sunny, I feel a hint of spring.
And so I knew that today was the day to sit and record this. It's not, you know, I'm recording this, obviously, a little bit before the Spring Equinox, but I feel spring in the air. And I'm so glad to embark on a new season with you under a new name and under the auspice of migration. So we're going to talk about migration. We're going to talk about migration through the lens of three different migratory experiences. And I want to begin with maybe one that's unexpected.
And this one, it comes with a deep nod and acknowledgement of gratitude to Mark Nipo, who's a poet, a philosopher, his books are so beautiful. And this first migratory experience comes directly from a reflection he shared in one of his books called the endless practice. This is a reflection I read many years ago, and to this day, it has stuck with me as a valuable, poignant reflection. And so we're going to begin in the water with a microscopic organism called zooplankton.
Now, these little microscopic organisms, they float, they drift, they're wanderers moving through all our bodies of water. And what they do is they drift from surface to depth and back again, migrating daily, constantly, up and down, surface to depth, surface to depth, through the water. And as they do this, they are filtering the water through themselves. They're eating, they're eating other plankton, they're nourishing themselves. They are cleaning the water as they move.
And this movement, this journey, serves as both purpose and process. And perhaps most instructive for us, the migration reminds us that we aren't meant to be introspective every second of every day. And equally, we aren't meant to simply rest on the surface of things and never dive deep, never be curious about what lies beneath. We are meant to move, to migrate to journey. And it's the journey itself that is the entirety of the purpose.
And so we'll spend just a moment letting the metaphor, the reflection, the instruction, sink in this concept of perpetual movement, of shifting from surface level awareness to a depth, and not being afraid to move between the two, not needing to judge if we are doing a good job or a bad job with our awareness, but simply to trust the movement itself. And at some point, we will let our spring migration invite us to leave the water and we'll land on the surface of the earth.
And we hear a sound that for me, and I bet for many of us, defines springtime. This is the call of the Sand Hill crane. Now, I remember very distinctly, several years ago, maybe even the first year that we were in this house, I can't quite remember. I'm outside, early spring. And I am noticing this noise far above me in the sky, over and over again. The most unusual bird call I had ever heard.
And I said to my partner, do you know what this is? He said, no, I keep hearing this noise. It's all the time. And so we do some digging and we discover that this is the Sand Hill crane, making its seasonal migratory journey north to its breeding grounds. And for many of us here in the States, and I think actually in other countries as well, there are other species of Sand Hill cranes, this bird covers a giant swath of the States.
So many of us hear this sound. It is loud, reptilian, very high up in the sky. But what really speaks to me about this migratory journey is that this bird's journey, its migration, is a traveling from the individual to the collective. The Sand Hill crane meets for life, and it lives within the confines of its solitary territory. They live alone these mates, aside from their offspring who stay with the parents for most of the first year.
And yet, sometime in mid-February, something stirs, an unknown call that prompts one of them upwards, until a quarter of a million birds or more take flight. They fly in huge groups, high in the clouds making fractal dragons, as writer David Abrams describes them. And they migrate north to roost in huge groups in wetlands and prairies, tens of thousands to a quarter million in Nebraska.
And they stay, reveling in community and collective cacophony until the fall, when again something stirs, and their journey guides them back to solitary space. So we have surface to depth, we have individual to collective. And I want to add one more migratory experience for us to reflect on. We will move from the Sand Hill crane, from the individual to the collective, to the monarch butterfly. Now, I know this one is maybe a little bit of an obvious choice.
Lots of us talk about monarch butterflies in the spring. Lots of us plant milkweed supporting their habitats. And it's a well known migratory journey, right? It's huge from Mexico all the way up towards Canada and back again. But there's something really, really interesting to me about this migratory journey that's not talked about as much. Because the truth of this journey is that it happens over the course of several generations, four to five generations in this journey.
So what happens is the monarchs a weekend from their winter in Mexico. And they only fly a few days before they land, they lay their eggs. And that generation of butterflies transitions. And the eggs, of course, do what eggs do and move through the butterfly life cycle until they too have their orange and black wings and take flight. And they fly a ways following this path up north until they too land and lay eggs and transition.
New wings are grown. Another generation is flying north. Lays, eggs, grows wings. It is not until the fourth or fifth generation. That they ultimately reach the ancestral starting point, the ancestral homeland. And there's something. There's something powerful about reflecting on a journey as impacted by our generations, by our ancestry. We know that we can look at that both through the lens of positive, loving, healed support. We can look at it through the lens of trauma.
Both lenses are valuable for us to be aware of, for us to be conscious of as we reflect on our own journeys, our own migrations. So we can look at these migratory experiences, the movement of ourselves through seasons through the lens of time in daily, seasonal, generational movement. We can look at it through the lens of space, from surface to depth, from underwater to the highest reaches of the sky.
We can look at it through the lens of awareness, from inner to outer awareness, from individual to collective, from present moment to ancestral knowing. And my question is what else? What are you experiencing in this migratory season? As spring awakens, as seeds are planted in the earth and in the heart, what journey or journeys, are you aware of? What is stirring in your blood? Calling you for me.
I want us to practice now, inviting in awareness of our own migratory callings and experiences at the very start of spring. So we'll go ahead and take a comfortable seat. If you can listen with headphones, I highly encourage you to do so. And we'll begin, as we always do, with a deep breath, inhaling it. Exhaling out of sight. And let's do this again, inhaling deeply. Exhaling out of sight. And allowing your breath just to flow.
And making a moment to feel yourself just settle. To land fully in your body. On the cushion, the chair, or the earth, wherever you rest. And then by silently saying to ourselves, now is my time to meditate. Now is my time to meditate. And as you say those words to yourself, feel yourself like go a bit. Soffoning all of your edges. As if you were allowing yourself to lie down, you could even lie down. Let yourself lie. Invite your ears to open. And welcome in the sounds of migration.
Soffoning your body so that you too are able to drift and float on the water just as zooplanktonness. On surface to depth and back again. No need to struggle or fight with where you are. Just noticing. And as you drift, release any need to control or shape your journey. The migration takes care of itself. As we breathe, as we float. We both feed ourselves and process what needs to be processed for the health of inner and outer ecosystem.
Over time, over breath, migration carries you into the wetlands. We hear the wind moving through the grasses. And we find ourselves nested with the sand hillcreens. Allow yourself to rest on the earth, feeling, inviting the movement of the individual from the solitary practice to flow into the collective, to flow into the wellness of all beings everywhere. The people, the plants, the animals, the insects, the unseen and the unnamed. No need to struggle or fight with where you are. Just notice.
And as you listen to the reptilian call of the crane, release any need to control or shape your journey. The migration takes care of itself. And gradually, we feel the call of the wind, the rain, the spring air. And we take gentle flight. We flow through the morning dawn on a path we have never traveled before. And yet some quiet part of us knows and knows that we know. We breathe. We listen. And we invite the knowledge of all those who came before us to flow through us.
We invite our inner knowing, our ancestral knowing to be an awake, aware part of our journey. No need to struggle or fight with where you are. Release any need to control or shape your journey. The migration takes care of itself. And we meet you earlier, brother. The acknowledging the cyclical nature of migration and the many entry points of our journeys through space, through time, through awareness, through healing. Let's take a deeper breath now in the healing room, releasing a little sigh.
The wiggling, your fingers, your toes, feeling those edges. And when you are ready, take all the time you need. When you are ready, you'll let go of the practice. You'll open your eyes if they were close. I hope you'll take a few minutes to grab a notebook, a journal, and write, stream of consciousness. What came up for you? What did you think about? What did you daydream about? What do you remember? Maybe reflect on your own journeys or journey that you might make.
The seeds that you might plant this spring. Thank you guys so much for sharing the equinox with me. It was my pleasure to be here with you. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to Our Mindful Nature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider sharing it with a friend, or leaving me a review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps others to find the show, and let's face it, we could all use a few more meditators in our lives.
Our Mindful Nature is recorded on Muscogee land, and produced with the support of Brianna Nielsen. Deep gratitude is offered to acoustic ecologists, Gordon Hempton, and Nick McMahan, for the use of their nature field recordings in many of these episodes. To join my live classes, ask questions, or learn about my teacher trainings, please visit maralarnet.com. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next week.