For those of us deeply connected with earth and her creatures, climate events—fires, mudslides, hurricanes, intensive winter storms—bring shocks and questions beyond the ordinary.

We feel it in our bodies. We see images of decimated neighborhoods, boulder-strewn yards, or mud-filled cars, and can’t imagine the terror. These successive disasters show nature going wild—despite our belief that nature is ours to use and control. In affected communities, we give support, talk about change, begin to rebuild, all the time feeling like we don’t know what we are doing.

There is mystery.

It’s bigger than us: why this path of destruction and not that? Why were some spared and some not?

Yet it’s not mysterious: nature is reacting to climate stress with changing weather patterns, drought, fierce storms, extinction, and transformation of the vey landscape as we know it.

Up Close and Personal

I have been walking our fire-scarred open spaces in Northern California for three months, and I still can’t take in the whole.

I see destruction. I watch regeneration. I interact with dear friends and strangers struggling to get through each day post-loss. I talk to people who have forgotten: it’s yesterday’s news, already. Yet…

I remember: escaping rising floodwaters as a child, the fear and excitement. Raking through the ashes of my parents’ home 25 years ago post-fire in the Oakland Hills. Seeing the trauma in my friends (Sonoma, Montecito, Houston, around the world) who have lost their homes, their countries, their cultures. Hearing ancestral stories of migration and loss.

I remember all this, and can imagine a not-so-distant time when we will all be migrants again, searching for safety.

Trauma lives in the body and rises up in times like these, reigniting past trauma, often making us less resilient, less open-hearted. The trauma is very personal, individual. The trauma is collective.

How do we survive our experience, nature’s response, our collective response?

As earth lovers, shamanic practitioners, animists, meditators, humans, how can/do we respond with grace, love, and power to suffering that goes on and on?

These are not easy questions. Yet those of us committed to creating a more beautiful world have to keep at it.

Ten Steps to a More Beautiful World

In a lifetime of spiritual teaching and learning, these ten essential practices have evolved for me. May they re-mind and re-inspire you:

• Renew yourself daily with your roots in the earth, your star connections, and the shared breath of the world.
• Release the heavy boulders of loss daily.
• Keep returning yourself to the practices of presence, compassion, equanimity.
• Fill with the beauty of the green earth, your loved one’s face, the light of the full moon, the great cosmic web.

Make space for world work. Even while you do your own spiritual work, cleansing, heart opening, and healing, also make space for your passions. Whether they are land healing, trauma aid, ceremony, permaculture, citizen action, or prayer, the world needs you!

• Believe in alchemy.

• Believe in transformation.

• Feed the holy, as Martin Prechtel says.

• Feed your love and joy so you can do your part

• Be joyful and full of radiance, as my spirit helpers remind me over and over.

These are the ten steps my spirit helpers remind me of over and over. Which of these will help you to re-inspire and empower your path to a more beautiful world??

Need encouragement to step out of immobility and fill with joy? Explore Energy Alchemy Training for releasing density and filling with the healing energy that surrounds you. 

Meg Beeler—Author, Shamanic Guide, and Spiritual Mentor—helps clients heal soul and spirit, find luminous presence, and move energy to remove blockages through mentoring, training, healing, and ceremony. She is a lifelong explorer of shamanic, animist, and meditative consciousness who practices Earth-centered, nature-based, ancient wisdom ways, and studied Andean mysticism extensively with the Q’ero in Peru. Meg is the creator of Energy Alchemy™ & founder of Earth Caretakers Wisdom School. Author of Weave the Heart of the Universe into Your Life: Aligning with Cosmic Energy, she is a contributing author and photographer to Where the World Begins: Sonoma Mountain Story and Image. Meg lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. megbeeler.com