One of my earliest words as a child was “lichen.” On nature walks through my native North American state and national parks with my parents, I was obsessed by how lichen flourished on trees and rocks, on brick and mulch, even on metal. To my young eyes, lichen seemed miraculous.
Now, as an adult, I witness lichen with even more wonder, because I’ve learned what ecologists have known for years: lichen isn’t just one organism or life form. It’s a symbiotic creation comprised of at least two, sometimes three, distinct lives: algae, fungi, and yeast. These different lives exist together in a mutually beneficial, harmonious, ancient agreement; the colony of algae finds its domicile within the filaments of multiple fungi species, and the yeast embeds itself in the cortex.
Lichen’s existence in nearly every ecosystem, from sea level to alpine regions, defies the tendency of the human mind to categorize, separate, delineate, demarcate, and sort into binaries. Just like within lichen, on the pathway to awakening, seemingly stable forms and shapes begin to blend, meld, and disintegrate. Where one thing ends and another begins is not just contested; the idea of separation itself slips like water between our fingers.
Humans have, for millennia, sought underground water, and on “Dowsing, The Direct Path,” a weekend retreat in August 2024 led by Tony Shuttleworth, the other retreatants and I all gathered to learn about dowsing. We also encountered the permeability and interconnectedness of life and the energies within and around us.
Tony taught us that the first thing to do before attempting any interpretation of the environment around us was to check one’s own polarity.
Simply put, everything has an energetic charge. Empaths know this all too well, but even those not closely in tune with emotions and energies can relate to walking into a room when there’s an ‘off’ feeling or can pick up on a sudden shift in the mood of a friend or family member.
So before wielding any divinatory tools (on the retreat we used a pendulum and a divining rod), checking one’s own energetic condition is vital. This practice alone, a full embodiment of one’s own presence, proves invaluable for all kinds of work, both inner and outer. Without taking that step, we run the risk of interpreting what’s happening around us through an unsettled or discombobulated inner system.
Then, under Tony’s guidance, each of us held a simple dowsing rod, taking slow paces inside the whare as well as out in the surrounding forest. The rods, Tony explained, were helpful for us as relative newcomers to the practice, but over time, our reliance on them would fall away and our inner knowing would speak directly.
Dowsing by the stupa, groundwater revealed its presence through movements of the dowsing rod in my hand. Lay lines hummed and chirped with invisible but undeniable energy. Electromagnetic charge vibrated.
One of the most valuable unlearnings that happened while dowsing was the misunderstanding that things are separate from other things. What happens in a place leaves a trace–our ancestors, our rituals, the lives lived all generate and vibrate with energies, and we also are each held within and bear influence on those energies. There is no real boundary between one and the other, only interactions and threads so fine that we miss them when we aren’t attuned and attentive.
It is our responsibility, in entering a space, offering a release, healing, or shielding, to check not only our inner calibration, but also to ask, “Is it in order to do this work? Is it karmically okay to do this work? Is the time right to do this work?”
When the ego rises up, as it so insistently tries to do, Tony reminds that we are not the ones forcing or ‘making’ something happen. “Be careful about not identifying with a sensation or emotional experience,” when feeling and working with energies, explained Tony. “Avoid identifying and avoid judging, for those attitudes take the charge out of it and turn into ownership and clinging.” All clearing and healing comes from “the pure awareness of being, not from an individual.”
So with open hands, I want to lay down the urge to assess and judge, and instead, simply feel my edges gently soften and blur, accepting the interconnectedness in which we are all always already embraced. Determining where one entity ends and another begins is a futile thought exercise. Like the lichen dangling from a late-winter tree branch, may we all be held and sustained by life itself, in harmony and trust.