It’s been a rough few years, and this past year has been the roughest yet in many ways. But it never has been easy, as Betony says in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Life isn’t easy, and nature is often brutal, pitiless. Humans make it harder than it has to be most of the time, though.

I’ve been thinking about doing Human Nation News (HNN) since 2003 or 2004, but I guess it needed to stew a bit. The idea was basically that we are all here on this One Planet, in the vast cavernous space around us, and we have come to the point where we must recognize we are One People. The Human Nation. The purpose was to write about this nation, focusing on our commonalities through story. To connect us through the stories of people everywhere.

This was way too broad, though–made even more broad when I set up the fraternal-twin websites of Handmade Shoes and HNN. Gestating in the same womb, but each from its own zygote. Handmade Shoes is soul musing, a journal, a place for dreams and for sorting through my life and finding my way. HNN is more outward-facing but still firmly planted in soul soil. I’ve been dabbling in here for a few years, testing the waters and allowing myself space free from others’ eyes for the most part. Things do need darkness to grow sometimes. Even the trees, who love the sun, will tell you that.

Back in the early 2000s when I went deep into the darkness of my own mind and soul, propelled by the accumulated and ongoing insults of life with humans, I also went into the woods. Nature, who offered me succor and magic all through my childhood, once again became prominent in my daily life, and as I walked outside with my dogs (first Heidi, now Lucy) daily around the neighborhood and every weekend at Thacher State Park, I became friends with the beings we encountered. One tree in particular, an old maple at Thacher, became a “someone” to me, and I greeted her with joy each time we passed by. Over the years I would often stop and talk to this great being, and when I was feeling utterly lost I would come right up to her and wrap my arms around her and cry, letting out all the poison.

This tree did not mind. In fact, I felt that she appreciated my attention and talking and even tears. Until, after many years of greeting this being and talking to her and loving her, I was once again in a very dark place (I know the dark places well) when I visited her. I put my hands on her trunk and my forehead too, and said, “I feel so bad,” and felt that badness all through me, in all its possible meanings, from all the accumulated and ongoing insults of living with humans and being a human. The tree, this magnificent old being, took me down deep into her roots, into the darkness where the creatures of the dark live and never see the light. There she told me not to be ashamed of the darkness. She told me darkness feeds Life.

Over all these years wandering in the woods I have come to understand that the Human Nation is one among many other nations Here on Earth–which goes against my indoctrination, which says humans are the ones that matter on this planet, we are the smartest, we are the conscious ones, the most important ones. We alone of all living beings have Soul, and all the other beings on Earth are for our use. Our use.

Except we treat “other” humans as though they were expendable/beneath notice and, often, as though they are there for our use. To make profit off them. Within our own groups, even the smallest groups, we treat certain members as though they do not matter as much as other members, effectively rubbing them out.

Human history is very dark, filled with brutality that has its source in a concept of power as physical (and physical wealth is an extension of physical power). The atrocities that have been carried out upon our own species in the quest for power have never been adequately healed because the victims have been obliged to get back in the game or perish: a game whose rules are defined by those who have managed to grab power over others. Unresolved trauma gets passed through the generations, leading to perpetuation of brutality through retribution and acting out patterns of abuse upon those who are physically and economically weaker.

But something has been happening. The darkness has been coming up to be acknowledged and healed, in my personal life and in the world. Concurrently, a reemergence of the consciousness of our interrelatedness with one another and all of life on Earth has been gaining clarity and force–connecting direct back to the true source of power: the place where we all ultimately connect.

Now, after all these years, I’ve decided that Human Nation News is to be an exploration of the re-emerging consciousness that we are all interconnected–not only all humanity but all living beings. This includes the compassionate observation of what comes up to be healed and let go as we dismantle the old physical power paradigm and embrace the life-giving power that resides within each of us. It is also a battle cry in the eternal War of Love, sending dispatches out to humanity in the name of all life Here on Earth. Calling to all who feel their innate value and who understand that each human possesses this innate value regardless of their position in the current crumbling hierarchies. Calling to all who, conscious of their own innate value as living beings, also recognize the innate value of all living beings.