Listening from the Land Cultivating the Soil of Intention
A New EMBODYING EMERGENCE Series
Before a single new interview begins and is shared , there’s soil to tend.
This inspiration first took root somewhere unexpected — years ago, on land with the Open Space community in Kenya, on the mother continent. What was learned there simply by being present to that land and those people has stayed close ever since, in much the same way as decades of teaching on watersheds closer to where I live.
A particular kind of listening, one that moves through the body before it ever reaches the mind.
Gratitude for being alive during this particular stretch of time on Earth has found its way into poetry, and into every project since. This quality has a name now: Living Love. It arises in part from a commitment shared with ILP partner Newell Eaton, toward a consciously loving relationship — one that has taught, again and again, that this kind of flourishing is not something to teach. It is something to demonstrate.
This belongs to the same larger movement from me to we to world consciousness that runs through all of Embodying Emergence — the same granular unfolding Nipun Mehta describes through seed, bud, and blossom.
Movalogue found this work before this work had language for itself — Dirk Bräuninger holding a container wide enough for firekeepers scattered across the globe, and inside that container, Geisa Paganini De Mio. Years now, built on a shared trust that an image can listen as fully as a body can.
That trust didn’t begin with Geisa. It began with mountains.
Moving from the East Coast to Colorado, decades ago, love found the peaks before there was any theory to explain why. Wilderness became daily practice rather than weekend escape — guiding, training others, eventually leading a college outing club whose whole purpose was teaching people how to be safely, humbly, competently outside. That kind of learning enters the body and stays there, named or not.
This is the long path underneath Listening from the Land. From our bodies as they connect through our senses to the watersheds beneath. Not a new interest in nature. A return to the oldest one.
Situated
Embodying Emergence the Yoga Radicals series has always lived inside the Wayfinder’s Octave, and the Octave itself stacks — one octave’s completion becoming the next one’s ground note. Like here, right now.
Situated is where 🎶 Listening from the Land 🎶 finds its place - inside that stacking of octaves in the Wayfinders Octave: place and space as their own register, not as backdrop to a person rather a grounded participant in their fuller becoming… with gravity intact, Energy and information moving through from all dimensions.
Nora Bateson’s ecological intelligence names something this series has been circling from its first conversation: a person is never separate from where they stand. Or sit or lie down or travel or greet… This capacity to be “socially present” with deepening awareness from the ground, enabling more space within the body, through the bones….instrument of our spines Lifting and lowering, twisting and revolving to bring the magic spiral of ancient wisdom for all to hear, sing and dance. True time, empty; emptied of anything except being now in a creative space of living love.
🌀 Attention, given fully enough, stops being private. It turns relational, and the fields of human and other-than-human, knowing, respond… Reflecting, perhaps the depth and multidimensional capacity of our listening. Yes, this is the practice of consciously composting and then arriving at the place where we all first began… Collectively constellating From this new zone Of awareness, Creativity, and action Arriving during this “new time” on the planet.
Underneath the five senses, when the guard finally drops, something else begins to register — neuroceptive capacity, the nervous system’s own quiet sensing of safety and belonging.
🌀 Remembering has many dimensions …
Through space and time
We wind our way back home…. ✨🌈
When that sensing softens toward the world rather than only scanning it, the line between a person and the larger living system around them gets harder to find. Call this liberating the ancestors: restoring capacities that were never actually lost, only unpracticed.
None of this is abstract. It traces back to my father’s work in cellular signaling — a single cell knowing how to listen to its neighbors, also to my great grandfather’s work honoring the clearing magic of oysters m.
Listening from the Land asks the same questions at a Differentscale. Bohm Dialogue is the container for that question — conversation as a living, thinking system finding its own coherence with Nature in real time. Thinking my Dialogue colleagues Roopin and Kim fo co-creating a great listening container …. A place ove 7 years Where much of this has been seeded.
The first conversation is coming soon, With my co-listener from the south, Geisa. We hope that the condor and eagle will have some good flights …Together… Seeing what we see, feeling what we feel, Inviting what wants to be revealed to be revealed.
In gratitude for life on earth and beyond
🎶🌠💞
Allie Middleton, JD, MS, E-RYT, C-IAYT, is the founder of Integrative Leadership Practices (ILP.World) and an Advisory Council Member of the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy. She is the author of A Wayfinder’s Wanderings (2020) andYoga Radicals (Singing Dragon Press, 2021), and is currently completing Confluence*, a manuscript following the waters moving through our bodies as they remember the waters moving through the Earth.* Listening from the Land continues that inquiry through conversation, land, and generative scribing with Brazilian artist and researcher Geisa Paganini De Mio, PhD.
