Nature Teaches Us To Trust Our Deepest Wisdom When We Let Her

On finding your inner nature compass

Recently, I have begun embracing my ability to intuit Nature. I intuit Nature to understand better myself, my mission, and my place in the world. I intuit Nature as a way of sharing profound experiences with friends and family.

I intuit Nature to share what I have learned in my writing and on my social media outlets. I have come to respect my gifts of Nature Intuition and Expression. I am beginning to see myself as the Earthy, Nature Witch I have always been.

At one time, this terminology would have frightened me due to the negative connotation of witches as ne’er-do-gooders in childhood fairy tales. But, don’t we all know that the history of witches is more complicated than that? If being a Nature Witch means I know how to listen to Nature, forage for wild plants, talk with the moon, and see in darkness, then, by all means, sign me up.

Through seemingly disparate events yesterday, the tapestry for knowing deep within my bones that I am a Nature Witch myself was powerfully woven on my mind, heart, and spirit through Nature and my own intuition.

It was sunny yesterday. It was a perfect day for watching butterflies, so I did. Many different species traveled through our backyard, but one, in particular, held me under some enchantment. She was yellow with a tinge of orange and black barring on her wings.

I spent much of my day sitting near a Wild Senna (Cassia hebecarpa) plant and watching this butterfly visit it. She would flit around the leaves, pausing only for brief seconds, fly away, and then return after several minutes. She was nearly impossible to photograph. Finally, my 9-year-old daughter, Ceci, captured the photograph you see below.

Ceci and I spent a good amount of time arguing about which kind of butterfly it was. We knew it was either a Cloudless Sulphur or a Sleepy Orange Sulphur because both caterpillars host on Wild Senna plants.

After I posted the photo in my local Facebook butterfly identification group and received the id: sleepy orange sulphur (Abaeis nicippe), a leader mentioned it looked like she had laid some eggs on the wild senna leaves.

While watching her, I had realized she was probably laying eggs, but I wasn’t sure my intuition was correct.

Maybe she was visiting the plant for kicks. It wasn’t flowering, but maybe she didn’t need to eat. Maybe she was scoping it out for later. I kept second-guessing myself.

The day grew longer and my husband, David, our son, Jaden, and Ceci sat down to dinner as tornado sirens began sounding. I glanced at the irises I had put together into a bouquet when I heard there might be hail that night. Oklahoma has some wild weather.

When the sirens sound, they alert the entire county of possible tornado touchdowns in Tulsa's entire city, which covers a large geographical area. Radar is more reliable than sirens these days. David kept his eye on the weather radar while we all ate our dinner salads, wondering if part of our evening would be spent taking cover in an interior closet.

When I finished eating, I stepped out the front door to look at the sky. It had grown a strange bright grey, the wind had picked up, and rain had begun falling. There were low thunder rumbles, similar to a dog’s growl, and patches of light illuminated the darkened daytime sky. Sirens blaring, I stood on our covered front porch, barely seeing any lightning bolts, just quick flashes of light in a suddenly darkened world.

I watched our front yard Tulip Poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) tree take in the storm. Her bright green leaves vibrated confidently. Her orange, green, and white flowers floated to the ground when they were ready to descend and the leaves that were not ready stayed in place. I knew as I have always known: Nature is a beautiful beast.

David and I had gotten into a fight over clearing the table after dinner. Stubbornly, I wouldn’t back down and apologize for the mean words I let come out of my mouth. Instead, I decided to stand on the front porch while the sirens were sounding, the lightning coloring the sky, the rain falling, and the wind rolling by.

I decided that this was a moment I needed to take for myself — David and I could make up later. Intently, I observed the storm and considered how a tree reacts when a tornado is nearby. I came up with this as I watched the mature trees standing tall in all their glory amidst thunder and lightning and human-made noise: trees know how to soak in and transmute that fierce, powerful energy of an intense storm and turn it into some kind of new magic.

They are not afraid. They let the storm embody them and they move in the ways that they must. On the porch, I closed my eyes gently and tried to be a tree. I wanted to take in the storm's transmuting magic and the trees to let this natural force embody me. I felt a tinge of the energy and then opened my eyes. I went back inside. Nature is deep.

Later, David and I apologized to each other, the fight fleeting like the storm. I lay in bed, resting, and pulled the curtain back to see what it looked like outside. It was about 7:30 pm. The darkness had lifted and daylight now appeared like filtered brightness with emphatic tones of pinks and yellows.

Yanking my phone out of its charger and throwing my glasses on my face, I rushed out of bed to more closely see what the sky looked like. As I walked out the backdoor, I looked up and found myself breathless. The skyscape was filled with what I later learned are called Mammatus clouds. These clouds resemble breasts.

I snapped several photos and took a short video to share on social media. I was awestruck, having never seen these clouds that I could recall in my 41+ years here on Earth. Slowly my social media feeds filled up with local photos of the amazing Mammatus clouds. Pure magic. Nature had connected us at that moment. Nature is connection. Nature is magic.

As I lay my head down to sleep last night, my mind drifted back to the Sleepy Orange Sulphur butterfly. Suddenly, my heart leaped with understanding. This butterfly knew out of the hundreds of thousands of plant species on Earth exactly which plant to lay her eggs on. She knew. She just knew.

All butterflies know which plants to lay their eggs on. That is pure intuition. If you are ever unsure of what intuition is, consider the butterfly who knows without knowing exactly how to give her progeny the very best chance of survival by laying her eggs on exactly the right plant. Nature is Intuition.

I have recently begun working with my Spiritual Guide, Christine DeMelle, who is heavy into Intuition, Earth Healing, and Magic. She calls herself and her clients Nature Witches. I am realizing now that I, too, am a Nature Witch.

Like Nature, deep within my being, I am a beautiful beast. I am deep. I am connection. I am magic. I am intuition. I didn’t realize until today as I sat down to write this article that my experiences yesterday, from butterfly gazing to imbibing the energy of a tornadic storm to the collectively shared vision of Mammatus clouds to my Intuitive insight about butterfly intuition while I was drifting off to sleep, were all intricately, knowingly, intuitively woven into my deepening understanding of Nature. I am a Nature Witch, and I am thankful for this rite of passage.