How can we utilize our relationship with nature to live with more inspiration, peace, and intuition? Join us in this week's episode, Things of That Nature, as we continue our Talk Story Time Series, in which Dr. BethAnne shares selected passages from her books and offers dialogue and wisdom inspired by her journey.
Key talking points include:
- Personal reflections on times in her life when she was invited into stillness
- How learning to be and receive supports our psychological and intuitive growth
- Inspiration to stay in our authenticity and integrity
- Live poetry readings, storytelling, spiritual wisdom, and candid reflections
Tune in next week for our next episode, The Gifts of Temperance: Archetypes of the Tarot. New episodes of Your Heart Magic drop weekly on Thursday evenings at 6 pm.
Selected Readings/Books Shared in Episode:
Things of That Nature: words for the mystic heart
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Your Heart Magic is a space where heart wisdom, spirituality, and psychology meet. Enjoy episodes centered on mental health, spirituality, personal growth, healing, and well-being. Featured as one of the best Heart Energy and Akashic Records Podcasts in 2024 by PlayerFM and Globally Ranked in the top 5% in Listen Notes.
Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright is a Licensed Psychologist, Spiritual Coach and Educator, and Akashic Records Reader. She is the author of the Award-Winning Lamentations of the Sea, its sequels, and several books of poetry. A psychologist with a mystic mind, she weaves perspectives from both worlds to offer holistic wisdom.
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Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] Embracing nature's wisdom for personal growth.
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Hello, hi, everybody. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we have a talk storytime episode. And our topic is things of that nature. This is actually the title to one of my books. And I was thinking since it's May and it's Taurus season and Taurus is all about the Earth and being in relationship with the Earth, Taurus seasons about a lot of things.
But one of my favorite things since Taurus is earth energy is to really think about how do I fall in love with the earth? How can I be supported by the Earth? How can I appreciate the earth right now. And so those energies and qualities of being grounded, noticing the simple pleasures and Earth's gifts, noticing the abundance all around me, and looking to the natural world for lessons and wisdom and teachings and inspiration is a beautiful way to honor Taurus season. So I do talk storytime episodes around a theme where I share passages from my different works. And they're usually woven together by some sort of a theme.
And today's is just nature. All of these happened to be from the same poetry book. But this is a celebration of nature and the many many ways nature is a friend to us and helps anchor us. So the first passage that I want to read is actually called the nature of nature:
A tree doesn't run around shouting, I am a tree for all to see. Instead, he simply stands his ground, receives the seasons and knows his place in this world.
A river doesn't go against her own flow, or fight the current of where her streams go. Instead of river liens and bins, allowing herself the freedom to change direction. Flowers don't feel they need to be a sea or a cloud or a crescent moon breeze. Instead, they realize themselves for exactly what they are in open when rife and splendid symphony, we can string ourselves out into 1000s of pieces, always busy doing live in fear and believe security equals and amassment to stuff span ourselves dizzy with tired circles of worry.
And yet nature would teach us the art of being reminding we were always complete and are already enough. Something that has probably been a such a valuable thing to me for since I've been a writer is looking to inspiration from nature, and intuitively thinking what is this teaching me right now? What medicine might this tree have to teach me? What lesson can I learn by observing the clouds? How can I be inspired by the beauty of the natural world and then taking those musings and translating them into poetry form, it's been such a gift.
Because not only does it allow for personal artistic expression, and it's always fun to write poetry because I get to play with words a little bit more, and play with imagery and play with metaphor and just be really creative when I do that. But more so I think it captures and helps integrate these wisdoms that are shown to us through the natural world. And I've talked about often on your heart magic that if nothing else, if I'm feeling lost or out of sorts, or like I need some guidance, something that I often do is just tune in to the world around me and observe and ask what lesson might this have to teach me right now.
And there's always something beautiful to be found. I think that knowing that the moon teaches us how to embrace all of our phases and shades. That's a huge paradigm shift for many of us. I think watching clouds drift and thinking about they're transforming, right clouds are so transformative, the whole process of water and evaporation and clouds forming and then it rains and all of this kind of transforming and unbecoming and then becoming and recycling haggling and these beautiful synergistic patterns that are the essence of a cloud.
Oh my gosh, there's a lot of lessons for us to learn in that. And so being able to anchor into the wisdom of nature and learn from his teachers is just so valuable to me. So this whole book, and all these poems are a celebration of that, and a celebration of a lot of those wisdoms, with a lot of whimsy thrown in as well.
[5:31] Nature, creativity, and appreciation.
If you have actually seen this book, it's in black and white, but there's all this artwork in it. And something that was really fun about making it is that I love putting art in my books. But when you do colored printing, it really ups the price. That's why most books are in black and white. Because when it comes to publication, and actually publishing in color, especially the more you're doing it with a small indie price or self publishing, by the time you get to actually having the book it can be quite beautiful, but the costs can be really expensive, because the materials are expensive. So colored book can run anywhere from like 35 to $50.
And that might just be paperback. So I wanted to make this artistic, but I didn't want to have to charge like a super high amount for it. And I ended up doing all this black and white. And which is ironic because nature's anything but black and white. It is an explosion of glorious colors. But working within the parameters and keeping it budget friendly. I did all this fun stamp art. And this was published through golden dragon flying press and the woman Alice over there, who runs the process, took it and ran with it and contributed to that and did all these other fun like black and white borders.
And it ended up being this super fun alchemy of creative design and fun whimsical words on nature with a lot of deeper thoughts and reflection shown in there as well. So not only was it a fun book to write, but it's fun to read because every page has something on it. And you might find the page I'm looking at right now has a trellis border of vines.
But one of the pages that I found earlier had a black and white stamp and it was two porcupines riding a broomstick sailing up to the moon. That was a stamp that I must have found somewhere and put it in the book so it's really joyful and delightful and unexpected. This next poem is called Chasing fairies.
She is the first mountain I ever climbed eight years old. I think I can one foot in front of the other because I didn't want to quit and thought I heard the songs of fairies hidden in her gardens and went and chase today magenta mixed with mahogany ease muddy tracks and white flecks and tundra collects and hides 10,000 Hoos and specs, I almost hear their joyous noise over the thunks of my earth slip steps.
This mountain she hides all her mysteries and her wrinkles and her lines blink and you will miss them her portals to the Divine things unseen, yet still alive, worlds within worlds on her face reside.
And just as I did way back when I go and chase of the invisible, mystical unfathomable foreseeable if you have the eyes, her magic weights and the in betweens Earth's kaleidoscope of rhymes.
[8:24] Personal reflections on mountains, wonders and magic.
This mountain is at a place called Arctic Valley and Alaska, I believe that particular mountain is called rendezvous peak. And the first time I claimed that I was eight years old, I was with the Boys and Girls Club, and they had done some hike. And I remember really well what happened on this hike is that a lot of people turn around a lot, a lot of the kids only went like halfway up or they got really tired. And they didn't want to force us to hike.
So there was a lot of counselors out and about and it was kind of this like, if you want to go back to the bus or wait at the bottom, that's fine. It's not too terribly hard. But it's still a still a decent hike. And I was like I have to get to the top of that. I just had this sense that like something beautiful and mysterious was waiting up there. And there was also some part of me that wanted to do it to see if I could and to show myself that I could.
So there was this mix of being like I think I can't I think I can I'm gonna get to the top of this. And then also just feeling this magical mystical quality to it. So the day that I wrote that poem, we'd been hiking there and this was like 30 years later or something like that. It was I was leaving Alaska and a couple of months and I believe I was hiking Arctic valley that day hiking and mountain biking. because our house was on the market, and there was a big open house, and so we were asked to clear out, so we're up kind of biding our time and just getting a hike and, and I wrote that poem as a reflection of this magical mystical quality in the space.
And this contrast between being eight years old and my first memory, hiking it, and being 3039 years old, I would have been at the time, and knowing that this might be the last time I go up this mountain, this was it was such an extraordinary time in my life, because knowing that we were getting ready to leave at the beginning of July, and it was April, when I wrote this, it made everything kind of be like is this the last time we'll ever do this? Is this the last time that we'll ever do this.
And it really brought this quality of gratitude to it, and coming full circle, and being able to appreciate with this really poignant, sadness, but also joy, whatever that mountain or piece of land or relationship or place that maybe I went to, whatever it was, where I was like, Is this the last, I had this quality of this sort of bittersweet, beautiful appreciation and saying goodbye, but also cherishing the time that I had in that space. And so that was a really fun reflection. And because there's always this mystical quality in the mountains, to me, it just feels like something from another world might pop out. And that there's these portals or something there.
[11:36] Nature, spirituality, and personal growth through exploring the unknown.
That's kind of transformative. I was hoping to evoke and capture that and the words and give the reader not only a sense of the mountain herself, in the tundra and the colors on it, but that mystical quality, where it's less hard to believe that there's a gnome living under the mushroom on the mountain, when you are in a place like that, that feels a little enchanted than we might have in our day to day lives.
And so that is one of the reasons we go to nature is that we open ourselves up to the possibility of the energetic realm. And I think it allows us to dip into a space of imagination and perhaps clairvoyance and sensing presents even if we don't always understand what it is, we often sense the intangible and it can be so heart filling.
This next poem is called one step closer, the ocean will tell you there are no perfect tides, we let life shape and change our shores with ragged waves and crooked lines, each one of us flailing then swimming than floating, and finding our way in our seas, moving towards light, and all it's vasteforms and learning to sink and our mysteries, each pearl retrieved from our own depths, teaching us how to make peace.
And what we don't realize is when we love ourselves, we are one step closer to divinity. There's a lovely picture of a black and white nautilus shell on that particular page. And that was obviously inspired by our friend vitamin C, something that was beautiful as a writer, especially my first year on kawaii was being so close to the ocean. And at that time of my life, I had a lot of space to go be by the ocean and a lot of poetry came through, a lot of reflections came through a lot of wisdoms came through I think the ocean is naturally inspiring to so many people, I often think about the ocean as being by the ocean, I think of it as a portal, where we are just able to access our higher selves or better selves or better nature, our higher thoughts were able to transport ourselves to a more peaceful place or a joyful place or a place where we feel more at ease.
Oftentimes, if I'm working with somebody and say, like think of a calm place, or whatever represents calm to you, it's not unusual for somebody to say, oh, like a big body of water, or the ocean or the sea or something like that. I've heard that many, many, many times throughout the years. And I think there's just something about it that is well we live on a planet that is three quarters water, and our body is composed of an awful lot of water.
And so there's something about it that is not only transformative, but I think it just brings us back into what's real and brings us back into our better self and water with its lessons on how to be in flow. That it all comes out. out in the wash the river always finds its way, it's not about perfection, it just all gets mixed around in this big sea. And it's all part of that bigger ecosystem.
There's so many gorgeous wisdoms and that on how to live well, and how to live with more grace and acceptance for our process. This next poem is called horizons unseen. Take unknown paths, and look for new delights with adventure and curiosity. Recognize that every time you choose the unknown over the familiar, you're entering into a deeper relationship of trust with universe's intelligence and life's creative mysteries. Believe you will be supported and you will know you will be guided and it shall be so fly far from anything that seeks to bind you to the gravity of certainty.
And with faith and fortitude as your forceful wings glide towards the skies of horizons unseen, through Starbrite, and heartlight. And Soulshine. And Moon dreams, become the cartographer of your uncharted seas.
When I was first working with the Akashic records, really working with them now where I was getting readings from somebody, but I was called into the work myself, and on that threshold of beginning to read for others, and develop a sense of confidence that not only was I meant to do that work, but that it was real, that what was happening was real.
[16:35] Spirituality, intuition, and the Akashic records.
It's amazing when we have something going on that is transformative, and it's spiritual, how much we question our grasp of reality. Even I did that. And I would often reason well, BethAnne, you're a psychologist, what would you say if you came into your own office and said, I'm having these experiences? I'm sure, I would say something like, that sounds amazing. Tell me more. Tell me what this means to you and ask a lot of exploratory questions.
And I think there was always that piece there of if we're asking ourselves, if we have a grasp on Saturday, then some part of us really has a sanity check. I think there's this fear sometimes of like, what if by making it all up, and I just saw want this to be true that I'm kind of projecting or imagining or filling in blank spaces with this idea, in kind of maybe what a skeptic might say, who didn't believe in any of these things. And when I was first doing that work, I had a lot of some skepticism for myself, but mostly, I knew it was true.
But I think it was more of this fear of what if I go public with this more or talk about it more? Or what will people think and sometimes those fears that sanity check I was having of how do you know this is real, I think some of that was just me, like tapping into what I thought others might say to me who were skeptics and who didn't believe in that, or weren't really into something like that. And so they didn't see it as valid or beautiful or amazing, and just that I kind of gone a little wackadoo.
And when I was going through all of that the Akashic records, even though there exists an energetic form, they always feel like up, they feel very high to me, they're kept at such a high vibration and a high level. And so there's something about sometimes feeling like I'm sailing upwards energetically when I'm opening them, or almost like I'm reaching up into the stars. And that's how it translates into my mind's eye is sort of going upwards and going star words and kind of going into this like vast starry library, and it feels very cosmic.
And I remember at the time thinking about that quote by Hafiz that says, I'm gonna paraphrase, but it's something like run run fast from anything that seeks to like clip and bind your wings. And that is really when I was like, you have to like stop being so tethered to gravity BethAne that you stop yourself before you continue to open to this.
And at the time, I wrote a lot of poetry back in 2016. And really worked with the image of like, not letting my wings be clipped, what would it look like to soar upwards to fly up into the stars to fly up into the sky, to not have my wings bound to what has to be measurable in certain, but to open up to the intangible and the energetic and the seemingly impossible and to expand into a greater way of imagining energy and imagining spirituality and imagining Cosmic Connection and allowing myself to be more mystic minded?
So that work obviously continued when I was over here on kawaii and when I wrote this poem, it was just this reflection that horizons I'm seeing is really what it is to open up and expand, and it was really just this reflection of that expansion. This is what it is to allow our minds to open up to allow my mind to open up.
And that line fly far from anything that seeks to bind you to the gravity of certainty, and with faith and fortitude as your forceful wings glide towards the skies, of horizons unseen, so that was me expanding and trying to take that felt sense and quality and that quality and inspiration of the sky and the stars and the solar system and the Akashic and bring it down into poetic form and celebrate intuition, expansion and allowing ourselves to not be afraid to explore the mystic mind and open up to those experiences.
[20:57] Closing poem : When in Nature
I'm going to close with one final poem today and this is called when in nature, I think it's all going to be okay when I'm in nature, the rain washes anything bad away, the worries I carry are reduced to drops and trickles of midnight do when I'm in nature I find loves still and the beat of Earth's heart.
There is a precision, a fluid Start and End and end between a day cycle and set and golden mean. Things feel kinder and gentler, more reassured outdoors, cloud shaken awake and change shape gateways to imagination shores where things don't matter so much except for Angel Soft song and waters calm pour, and flow and ebb and the way the old falls away and two skies Misty Gray, to be transformed into Dawn of new day. Life is transient in this space. I find my place breathe in grace, feel love space.
Remember that courage always finds a way. And when I'm in nature, I know everything's going to be okay.
Thank you so much for joining me in today's talk storytime episode things of that nature. We will be back next week and continuing exploring the archetypes of the Tarot and we are moving on to card 15 The devil also called the Trickster sometimes. So we will be looking at all that that archetype means and how we can glean its wisdom and apply it to our own lives. Until then, have an amazing week. Be well. He love you. And imagine
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life.
