Nature Communication Part I: What Is Nature Communication?

“This is outside of what the rational mind can understand,” said Marysia Miernowska, my first human teacher of communication with plant consciousness. Forget all the stories your mind has ever heard. Let us venture together into the first article of this series – Nature Communication, Part I: What is Nature Communication?

Instead of a definition, renowned Nature communicator and educator Dr Saskia von Diest, founder of Ecofluency, offers a description of this ancestral way of life – and what now re-appears as a discipline, with a certain degree of methodology to it: Nature communication “is the innate or inherent capacity that humans have to communicate or dialogue with any aspect of Nature, using an expanded range of senses and awareness.”

Let that sink in. The magic is in the animist. And humans are not the only ones who participate in the dialogue. At the heart of Nature communication lies an animist worldview: the understanding that the world is alive and filled with intelligent, free-willed consciousness of the more-than-human and beyond the human kind. 

“We possess enormous knowledge that is transmitted all the time. [To receive it,] it’s just a matter of your openness,” is what a forest Pine tree once conveyed to me. Plants, animals, rivers, mountains, winds, nature spirits, and stones are all participants in a multidimensional web of life. In this perspective, as Saskia puts it, “everything becomes everyone.”

Communication with Nature is not a far-out ability or a supernatural talent reserved for just a few. It is an innate human capacity – something we, too, as “Westerners,” are born with, but have mostly forgotten, due to the uprooting of our indigenous circles and cultures. It is something we now learn to remember, practice, and re-enchant our lives with, realizing that our healing and belonging have always been within the spirit of this one Earth. Nature communication is listening to what your body is trying to say to you, acknowledging your intuition, or feeling drawn to a given place or celestial body. It is reading nature’s omens, communing with a landscape, receiving messages from plants, animals, and power spots, your ancestors and guides, the elements, and your dreams and subconsciousness. 

Since communication is a two-way conversation in which we actively participate, one may ask: why communicate with Nature beings in the first place?

First, because we do not know. We ask questions because we seek to understand. We ask to hear the truth. And we ask for guidance. The messages that come often carry a kind of wisdom that feels immediate, universal, healing, and ancient.

Second, by communicating with Nature, we literally save energy – reconnecting with (its) source.

“We meet within the One, where all voices meet,” said another tree of the same Pinus species. Nature communication does bridge the gap, but rather than communicating across a distance of time, space, and biology, we speak with nature beings from within the same shared Origin.

Hence, Nature communication, by design, remains a mystery. It cannot be fully systematized or institutionalised. It lives within our bodies and within the greater body of the land of whom we are part. And perhaps this is precisely where its power lies. It is never Life-less. On the contrary, Nature communication feeds life and continuously weaves in more life-altering knowledge, information, and guidance.

On a practical note, communication with Nature beings happens through energy language, transmitted through awareness rather than speech – something that is felt rather than fully explained. It may arrive as sensations in the body, inner visions and images, emotions, pure inner knowing (claircognizance), subtle or profound shifts in energy, or realizations and messages that emerge with or without words. There are more than eight billion people in this world, and how each one of us experiences Nature communication may vary and express itself quite uniquely. Yet, this practice feeds something that is starving and ancient in all of us. People spoke to rivers before crossing them. Hunters addressed animals before taking their lives. Folk healers gathered information about herbs not through trial and error but rather a direct communication with the plants and relationship with the living Earth.

Nature communication asks little of us: to listen. And to listen, we must be open to the possibility that we don’t know. Once we open our hearts, the communication can flourish.

Communing and communicating with Nature beings is the practice of learning how to listen again. “To truly listen is to hear the Truth,” was a message I received from an old forest Birch tree, home to birds and fungi. The ear cannot be concealed; it “is simply present to the world,” and “when listening there is only now,” writes Rick Rubin in his book The Creative Act: The Way of Being.

We communicate with Nature beings from within the same living field, awaiting our conscious arrival into the present moment: sometimes to dance around the fire, and sometimes to sit still and meditate. Knowing what and when through simply listening to ourselves first.

Perhaps authenticity – the source of greater coherence – is the prerequisite for any Nature communication to happen, making this practice as healing and insightful as it can be. It is this encounter with the raw, unmasked material within ourselves that invokes tears of honesty and our greater light. And one can only cry truthfully. Everything that falls short of communicating from an authentic place within ourselves may distort the transmission, pure knowing, and the many messages wishing to come through. This is why the practice of Nature communication, besides offering us wisdom, also brings both personal and planetary healing, guiding us in how to move and co-create change in this world.

In these times of the great turning and at the dawn of new consciousness, Nature communication calls us into metamorphosis – the process of coming from an immature form to adult form.

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