We want to tell you all about a new tome from Maria Rodale, Love, Nature, Magic, in which she combines her love of nature and gardening with her experience in shamanic journeying and embarks on an epic adventure to learn from the plants, animals, and insects that she encounters all around her. Through journeys filled with surprises, humor, and foibles, you can follow Maria’s evolution from being annoyed to accepting—and even falling in love with—our most difficult neighbors (including human ones).
Throughout, Maria also shares an essential truth that resonates across her shamanic explorations: we first must heal our own hearts, for only then can we truly love others and begin to heal planet Earth.
“Growing plants for food, beauty, and pleasure is a creative collaboration with the greatest artist of all—nature. It took me decades to learn that I am not the one in control, and the more I relax and pay attention to what everything in my garden wants, the happier we all are. It’s not a war, it’s a dance. It’s not a competition, it’s a partnership. It’s not a race, it’s a festival. It’s not easy, but it’s the kind of hard work that builds strong muscles and creates something new and wonderful. And isn’t that what we want to do in this world? Create something new and wonderful, encouraging everyone to live to their full potential and enjoy this strange experience we call life? With a garden, we can create the world we want to see and live in. That, my friends, is magic.”—From Maria Rodale, author of Love, Nature, Magic
Here’s what Maria wrote in her journal about her shamanic journey after seeing the monarch tree:
I turned into a fairy and flew up to meet with them as they all congregated together on the tree. There were thousands and thousands of them! One of them flew me over the landscape and all I saw was shopping malls, concrete, barren suburbs, and weedless farms. They told me that since the wildness is gone, there is nothing for them to eat and lay their eggs on and they are thirsty. They also told me that all of them together—generation after generation—are all “one mind.”
