Image / Derek Audette


Wolves disappeared from Yellowstone, the world's first national park, in the 1920's. When they left, the entire ecosystem changed. Elk herds in the park increased their numbers  and began to make quite a meal of the aspens, willows, and cottonwoods that lined the streams. Vegetation declined and animals that depended on the trees left. The wolves were absent for seventy years.

When they returned, the elks' languorous browsing days were over. As the wolf packs kept the herds on the move, browsing diminished, and the trees sprang back. The roots of cottonwoods and willows once again stabilized stream banks and slowed the flow of water. This, in turn, created space for animals such as beavers to return. These industrious builders could now find the materials they needed to construct their lodges and raise their families. The animals that depended on the riparian meadows came back, as well.

The wolves turned out to be better stewards of the land than people, creating conditions that allowed the trees to grow and exert their influence on the landscape.

My hope is that the wolves' stewardship of natural processes in Yellowstone will help people appreciate the complex ways that trees interact with their environment, how our interactions with forests affect their success, and the role forests play in making our world the kind of place where we want to live.

Apart from that, forests hide wonders that we are only just beginning to explore.

- Peter Wohlleben, from The Hidden Life of Trees



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
www.danawyss.com

Image / Natalia Romanova


"And for what, except for you, do I feel love?

Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

Equal in living changingness to the light

In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,

For a moment in the central of our being,

The vivid transparence that you bring is peace."


- Wallace Stevens, from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Edvard Nalbantjan  


"Sensations are the language of the body. Listen to your own body’s story as if hearing a friend confide secrets she’s never shared before. Tune to the parts of your body that are crying out to be heard—and also to those areas that may have been numbed into silence.

Move from feeling—and allow your movements, in turn, to bring more feeling to areas that may be invisible to your awareness. Fully inhabit your body—opening locked rooms, exploring hidden crannies, flinging open the shutters in airless garrets.

Practice your yoga as a way of opening the boxes you have put yourself inside, not jamming yourself into more of them. What other shapes have you forced yourself into in your life? Where else might your perception of how freely you can move be constrained by other people’s conventions?

Along the way, you’ll uncover parts of your body that are stuck, injured, or vulnerable. Be with them with particular tenderness—not as obstacles to success, but as gifts to be unwrapped. Ask them how they want to be healed or released. By being with yourself in this way, you are expanding your capacity to attend your inner world with kindness and sensitivity —a capacity that will serve you well as you turn your attention to more and more subtle aspects of your experience.

Remember, it’s not just structures and alignment that you are feeling into. Yes, you are tuning in to your proprioception of bones and organs and muscles and skin, and their optimum relationship and function. But as you go deeper, such anatomical distinctions begin to dissolve. Your body emerges in your awareness as a shimmering field of sensations—arising and disappearing like bats swooping under a streetlamp. What you think of as hand breaks down into a pixellated field of dancing detail, just as an impressionist’s painting of a lake is composed of thousands of tiny dots of color.

Use the conventions of the yoga asanas as chisels to open your range of movement, build your strength, and awaken your body’s intelligence. But then move through them and beyond them. They are a trail map helping you navigate a majestic wilderness. But don’t confuse them with the silver river flowing between granite cliffs, or the red-tailed hawk soaring over them, clutching a fish in its talons.

Don’t just tramp down the well-traveled fire-roads of a familiar pose. Instead, meander down all the deer trails. Stop at a hidden beach for a picnic. Sit on the sand and listen to sea gulls call, and take a bite of an apple you pluck off an overhanging branch—sweet and crisp and tasting of rain and eternity."

- Anne Cushman, in "Yoga from the Inside Out"



Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/

Image / Bjrn Knauf


Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy


and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles


for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,


or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air


as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine


and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing


just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,


do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.


It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

- Mary Oliver, “Invitation,”  from A Thousand Mornings




Dana Wyss Healing Arts
Breathe deeply, practice often, be well.
http://www.danawyss.com/