Humans and Elementals Need Each Other

 This exploration, this continuing attempt to bridge the long-time divide between humans and nature spirits, is of mutual urgency: humans need the elementals because they carry a living knowledge of the earth that we have lost; they need us, because we embody the great, progressive, experiment of freedom, of conscious collaboration on the planet. Barbara’s work with the elementals is founded on this shared need, and she is so secure in her inner serenity and her task that she can give herself over to their influence, without fear. She can enter their realm and know that she will safely return.

During her two-month retreat last summer, going to the amphitheater every day and doing ink-stick drawings to connect with the spirits of the land, Barbara came to know Joseph, one of these spirits. He was new to her and, after some time, made a request. In her studio, Barbara sometimes does what she calls “kerfuffle” paintings, a process that I would be interested in witnessing. (Doing too? Maybe. Hopefully.) “Kerfuffle” is a documented word meaning a fuss, or commotion, and in Barbara’s description that means moving and singing and yelling with wild abandon—as she paints. (Think about doing that at age 87!) “I do the kerfuffle painting to very loud classical music,” Barbara says. “The music gets inside of me and does the whirling, whooping, and stamping, and the paint splashes on the paper to the rhythm of the music. An enormous amount of energy is released, and I feel charged and renewed when I am complete.” So Joseph asked if she would allow him to do a kerfuffle painting through her, and she agreed. Afterward, in expressing his gratitude, he said, “Thank you, my dear, for trusting me.”

“Ask if there is anything you need to know to serve or co-create with us,” the gnomes have told Barbara. “Each time you open to our presence through the heart, you create for us an opening into human consciousness that was not there before. We use that opening like a passageway to input and download information in the form of stabilizing and grounding the vibration of wholeness. We appreciate the opportunity to speak. We all learn and benefit.”

“You give your team of co-creators access to learning through your experience,” they add. “Everything you allow the team to experience of your life, they do not have to go through personally.”

Barbara reminds us of the historic split accomplished during the Middle Ages. “When we first came to the planet the elementals and angels interacted consciously and physically with humans. In the dark ages humans became so destructive that the elementals and angels had to leave the surface of the earth. The elementals moved their home deep below and the angels moved up into the layer of consciousness above. Yet the elementals continue to watch over our physical bodies and outer needs, and to teach us to work with the structure of nature. The angels keep us connected with our inner wisdom and spiritual remembering; they continue to guide and protect us.”

If you have been reading along in this blog, you know that Barbara’s participation with these great movements is deeply entwined with Mano, a master gnome who, she reiterates, “has acted as a brave one in making contact with a human, wishing through this relationship to awaken other people to the elemental beings that make humans’ life on earth possible.” In fostering Barbara’s book Burned Woman, and then her DVD, Mano addresses “one of the disconnecting forces separating humans from the reality of the spirit world and the elemental beings on which our lives depend. The purpose of this blog, too, is to reinforce the reality of the elemental beings that are the intelligence within nature, within the elements.”

“Now it is time to rebuild the relationship between humans and nature, for us to learn how to interact with these elemental beings that live in our yards, our house plants, parks, forests and beaches, actually everywhere, in all of nature,” says Barbara. “They need our help. The air elementals are suffocating from industrial pollution and the darkness of human fear and negative thought forms released into the atmosphere. The water elementals suffer from polluted oceans, rivers, and streams. Mother Earth herself is being suffocated with poisons and the release into canyons and crevices of radiation from atomic explosions.”

“Gnomes and other spirit beings experience relief,” they tell Barbara, “when you align your heart and mind. Then your aura radiates out and invites them into its outer edges. Each layer of your aura nourishes a different level of consciousness, and each color relates with a different level of faerie and angelic consciousness. The inner core is the light of presence.”

“It’s about the planetary shift,” Barbara said recently. “Earth Mother is awakening and casting off old thought forms. The gnomes and I have a destiny to work together: they promised to help me wake up, and I promised to disseminate their information. Mary Jane made a promise in there somewhere too.”