Dear Readers and Writers,
Spring is here in the Northern Hemisphere. The 234th annual edition of my Farmer’s Almanac says the first day of spring 2026 came on Friday, March 20, at 10:46 a.m. EDT. The vernal equinox (aka “the point of Aries”) is that dynamic turning point when light begins to exceed the darkness of winter.
We too turn, tending to spend more time out of doors in sun and under rain, being with trees and lawns and gardens. Creative juices flow faster through “the green fuse that drives the flower” and through You. Your poetry can be part of that flow.
My first poem came to me at age 14 in 1963 after I attended a poetry reading in my native Kansas City:
THE QUESTIONS
With the pristine innocence of a child,
without thought of self-advancement,
other than gaining knowledge,
the young girl stands and asks,
“What is the highest aim of a poet?”
Now a nervous silence engulfs us.
Our little group huddles together mentally.
We wait. The speaker cannot answer.
He evades the arrow with a quick step backwards
then launches a feeble counter-attack.
But only the young girl has walked
through this verbal labyrinth
with a ball of twine.
My mind questions its garden
and I know this girl through myself —
a self that has nearly disappeared.
The girl and I– if we find this self–
we will be the speaker and answer all questions.
The sudden emergence of these words was a great surprise to me. I’ve been questioning and attuning to that inner garden and writing songs and poetry ever since then.
A resource I can offer: my self-published ebook, Attunements for the Earth was partly inspired by and includes the 10 letters I wrote to participants in IPM’s 2021 Poetry of Nature group. These letters affirm our largely unexplored capacities to connect with and directly benefit our natural environments. They include poetry and prompts, and a report on my work with people bringing forward regenerative cultural, agricultural and marine approaches to our climate crisis. There’s also a peer-reviewed scientific study conceived by me and conducted by my friend the neuroscientist and parapsychologist Julia Mossbridge PhD, on the role of intuition in understanding and addressing climate change.
The book can be downloaded for free at geoffoelsner.com. It’s brightened by my wife Leslie’s nature photography and lyrics and recordings (links to mp3’s) of me performing my songs with a lot of help from my family and friends.
***
Here is an excerpt from Attunements for the Earth:
My beloved friend Dorothy Maclean died in early 2020 at age 100. She was one of the three founders of the Findhorn Community in Morayshire, Scotland. Dorothy practiced and taught what she called “attunement” to the energies and entities of Nature.
Dorothy Maclean at Findhorn, 1969
Dorothy spent an initial ten year period attuning only and often to what she called the “Living Silence.” She then discovered that she could attune to any thing or being, after making conscious connection with that silent sacred Source of all things and beings.
I first met Dorothy in 1969, when I lived in Scotland for a year and worked in the remarkably productive Findhorn garden. There, in 1965, a garden planted on sandy soil with scant additives of cow manure, grass clippings, and seaweed tested out completely satisfactorily for all nutrients, including rare trace elements, though the Morayshire County Agricultural Advisor considered this impossible at that time.
While at Findhorn, I participated in making the first large batch of compost for the garden, based on a recipe of specific organic materials that Dorothy received in an attunement. During my stays at the community in 1969 and thereafter, I witnessed the amazing size and quality of vegetables that grew in the ambient field of love and cooperation which we co-created with Nature. I saw that the benefits of attunement can extend to our surroundings.
Geoff with Eileen and Peter Caddy, co-founders of Findhorn Community with Dorothy Maclean, 1969
Earth-wise people down the ages have experienced that cultivating a more open, harmonious state of mind can infuse our environment itself with greater well-being. The implications of this for our present climate crisis are very much worth exploring.
When she visited Leslie and me in Arkansas in 1980, Dorothy taught us and many of our friends attunement.
She described it as a simple process of first going within to a relatively quiet, meditative space and getting in touch with a felt sense of the Living Silence. One may then simply rest into this sense of the Sacred, or may go on from there to actively hold a clear intention to commune with a particular being or aspect of the natural world. If the latter, one briefly holds then drops one’s intention back into the Silence, rather like one drops a letter in the mailbox in order for the message in it to reach its destination. Finally, one relaxes in receptivity and notes whatever response may come by way of insights, impressions, images, words, the felt sense of a particular presence, energetic sensations, physical effects such as goose bumps, or ineffable experiences of the Sacred.
Sometimes nothing comes, and that is restfully welcomed as well.
There must be endless ways to attune. Let what you love lead the way. I love to garden, walk, write, sing, and meditate. Surely you have found special ways of your own. Writing and reading poetry may open routes to more receptive, deeply attuned states.
Dorothy wrote luminous passages describing impressions of her attunements to a variety of trees, flowers, places, even to whole countries. One can find these writings in the collectively authored book The Findhorn Garden, and in her own books, among them To Hear the Angels Sing, Choices of Love, and Memoirs of an Ordinary Mystic. Dorothy referred to her writings as “translations” into words of the subtle, nonverbal impressions she received. She called these writings her art form, and considered them to be an integral part of her practice of attunement.
In his little gem of a book, Stillness Speaks, author Eckhart Tolle writes wonderfully about a reciprocal dimension of Nature:
“You need nature as your teacher to help you reconnect with Being. But not only do you need nature, it also needs you.
You are not separate from nature. We are all part of the One Life that manifests itself in countless forms throughout the universe, forms that are all completely interconnected. When you recognize the sacredness, the beauty, the incredible stillness and dignity in which a flower or a tree exists, you add something to the flower or the tree. Through your recognition, your awareness, nature too comes to know itself. It comes to know its own beauty and sacredness through you!
…Nature can bring you to stillness, That is its gift to you. When you perceive and join with nature in the field of stillness, that field becomes permeated with your awareness. That is your gift to nature.”
***
All arts and crafts can help us tap more spacious, harmonious states of mind and reveal our interbeing with Nature.
Here’s a poetic option for you to complement NanLeah’s suggestion to find yourself a particular sitting place: walk around places where you live and find a natural feature—mineral, plant, insect, animal or something else in your environs— perhaps the whole place itself—something that attracts you and inspires and “helps you reconnect with Being,” as Tolle puts it.
Let your attention rest on that natural feature. Here you might want to sit down or lean on a friendly tree. First take a few minutes to welcome and settle into a simple sense of your own Being. Once you feel a bit of inner quiet and receptivity, go ahead and attune to that natural feature, that particular aspect of Beauty, Being, Nature and places on Earth that you love.
If you can’t get outdoors easily or often, you can always attune to Nature anyway by resting in the living silence we are, then to that aspect of Nature most intimate to you: to your body and those of all the other embodied human and animal and plant beings living with and around you partaking of the sacrament of our shared creatureliness, our unique expressions of True Nature.
Leslie recited this love poem by the American pacifist poet and novelist Kenneth Patchen during our wedding ceremony in 1975:
CREATION
Wherever the dead are there they are and
Nothing more. But you and I can expect
To see angels in the meadow grass that look
Like cows –
And wherever we are is paradise
in furnished room without bath and
six flights up
Is all God! We read
To one another, loving the sound of the s’s
Slipping up on the t’s and much is good
Enough to raise the hair on our heads,
like Rilke and Wilfred Owen.
Any person who loves another person,
Wherever in the world, is with us in this room –
Even though there are battlefields.
Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Kenneth_Patchen
Leslie and I have shared that poem in the years since under many roofs and skies, gaining strength to go on during this transitional crucial time that calls us to love and listen to each other more deeply and span gaps between ourselves and our One Heart.
I encourage you to explore and enjoy your own ways of communing with the place where you live and the plants, animals and other living beings you love the most there. Please touch the Earth with love,
Geoff