The Great Remembering
How Humanity Lost Its Connection to Nature and How We're Finding Our Way Back
There was a time, not so long ago, really, though we have forgotten, when our ancestors walked differently upon the Earth. They spoke to trees, and the trees spoke back, not in words but in the ancient language of rustling leaves and creaking bark, in the wisdom that moves through roots deeper than memory. They felt the vibrations of flowers as they passed, knew the hum of life that connects all things, and understood that every petal holds a frequency, every bloom a prayer answered.
They watched the clouds like we now watch screens, but with different eyes. Eyes that could read the script of cumulus and cirrus, that understood the stories written in the sky’s great book. They knew when rain would come by the ache in their bones, by the way the birds flew low, by the smell of the wind shifting. This was not superstition. This was intimacy.
And they prayed. Oh, how they prayed. Not because they were primitive or afraid, but because they understood what we have forgotten: that prayer is the breath of reciprocity, the acknowledgment that we are not separate from the web of life but woven into it, that our words carry weight in the unseen realms, that gratitude and intention shape reality itself.
We call these things strange now. We have clinical names for those who speak to trees. We say they are “unstable,” “dissociated from reality,” when perhaps they are the only ones still in touch with it. We have medicalized the natural human capacity for communion with the more-than-human world. We have pathologized reverence.
The Great Forgetting
How far we have strayed, dear ones. How far from our true nature, from the very things that sustain us and give us life. We have mistaken the map for the territory, the symbol for the sacred. We have traded our birthright, this direct knowing, this felt sense of belonging, for the cold comfort of certainty, for the illusion of control.
And what do we normalize now instead?
We normalize anxiety, as if it is natural to live in a constant state of alarm, disconnected from the rhythms of day and night, divorced from seasons, severed from soil. We normalize depression, as if it is reasonable for the human soul to thrive under fluorescent lights, breathing recycled air, never touching the Earth with bare feet, never seeing true darkness or true stars.
We normalize war. Endless war. We have become numb to it, this suicide of the human family, this fratricide played out on the world stage. We normalize division, drawing lines, building walls, forgetting that borders exist only in our minds, that the water and the air know nothing of our nations, that the mushroom network beneath the forest floor doesn’t stop at property lines.
We normalize the poisoning of our own nest. We fill the oceans with plastic, the air with particulates, the soil with chemicals, and call it “progress.” We call it “the economy.” We have created a system that requires the destruction of the living world for its continuation, and we shrug because it seems too big to change, because everyone else is doing it, because we have bills to pay.
And consumerism, this insatiable hunger that can never be filled because we are trying to feed a spiritual void with material things. We are told that happiness is the next purchase away, that identity can be bought, and that love is expressed through objects rather than presence. We fill our homes with things we don’t need while our hearts remain empty, cluttered with possessions but starving for connection.
This is what we call normal now. This is the world we have built.
The Sacred Task of Taking Out the Trash
But here is what the elders knew, what the mystics and the shamans and the healers have always known: we are not broken beyond repair. We are not lost beyond finding. We are in the midst of a great cycle, a turning of the wheel, and yes, we are moving toward a higher consciousness, toward a great remembering.
But first, beloved ones, we must take out the trash.
This is the work of our time. Not to bypass the pain, not to spiritual materialize our way past the grief, not to pretend that meditation apps will solve what colonization and capitalism have wrought. No. We must look at what we have done. We must feel the weight of it. We must grieve.
We must acknowledge that in our rush toward “civilization,” we have committed atrocities against the Earth and against each other. We must own the ways we have participated, consciously or unconsciously, in systems of extraction and exploitation. We must sit with the discomfort of realizing that our convenience has come at an unspeakable cost.
This is the descent before the ascent. This is the composting of the old before the new can grow. Every great transformation requires this: the breaking down of what no longer serves, the difficult work of sorting through the debris, the humble act of saying, “This was wrong. This caused harm. This must change.”
Taking out the trash means examining our beliefs, our habits, our allegiances. It means asking hard questions: Whose labor makes my lifestyle possible? What violence is hidden in my supply chain? What am I pretending not to know? Where have I chosen comfort over conscience?
It means feeling the feelings we have been taught to suppress: rage, grief, guilt, shame, the terror of what we have done and what may come. It means letting these emotions move through us rather than medicating them away, because they carry information, are appropriate responses to the world as it is, and because tears are how we water the seeds of change.
The Spiral Path Upward
But hear this, and hear it well: this necessary descent is not the end of the story. We are not doomed. We are not finished. We are in the labor pains of a new birth, and yes, birth is messy and painful and terrifying, but it is also sacred and inevitable and full of promise.
The higher consciousness we are moving toward is not some abstract, distant possibility. It is already here, already emerging, already alive in the margins and the cracks of the old world. You can see it in the rewilding projects, in the regenerative farms, in the Indigenous land back movements, in the mutual aid networks, in the people who are learning again to grow food, to build community, to live in right relationship with the Earth.
You can see it in the young people who refuse to accept the world as it is, who demand better, who strike and march and organize and imagine. You can see it in the artists and storytellers who are weaving new narratives, remembering old ones, helping us see ourselves and our world with fresh eyes.
You can see it in the quiet revolutionaries: the parents who are raising children with different values, the teachers who are educating for liberation rather than compliance, the healers who are tending to trauma both personal and collective, the scientists who are studying mycelial networks and plant communication and proving what the Indigenous peoples have always known that we live in an intelligent, interconnected, sacred web of life.
This shift takes time because it is not merely a change of mind but a change of being. We are not just learning new information; we are remembering how to be human. We are reconnecting synapses that have been dormant. We are reactivating capacities that have atrophied. We are learning to feel again, to sense again, to know in ways that cannot be measured or quantified.
The Practice of Remembering
So what is asked of us now? What is our part in this great turning?
We must become apprentices to wonder again. We must slow down enough to notice, to really notice, the world around us. To look at a tree until it stops being a concept called “tree” and becomes this particular being with its own presence and personality. To touch the earth with our hands, to taste food grown with care, to watch the sky at dawn and dusk, to mark the phases of the moon.
We must relearn the art of listening, not just to other humans, but to the more-than-human world. To the birds whose songs carry warnings and welcomings. To the wind that brings messages from far away. To our own bodies, which are still trying to tell us what we need, despite our best efforts to override their signals.
We must practice reciprocity. To take only what we need and give back more than we take. To say thank you to the water, to the food, to the hands that grew and harvested it, to the sun and rain and soil that made it possible. To understand that prayer is not begging or bargaining but rather this: the acknowledgment of relationship, the expression of gratitude, the offering of ourselves to something larger.
We must find our people and build our villages, because this transformation cannot be done alone. We need the courage, creativity, and resilience of the community. We need to practice the skills of being together: of conflict and repair, of celebration and grief, of holding space for each other’s becoming.
We must tell different stories. About what it means to be human, about what constitutes a good life, about what we are here for. Stories that remind us we are not the peak of evolution but one strand in the web. Stories that honor both the transcendent and the immanent, both the mystical and the mundane. Stories that make room for magic and mystery while remaining grounded in the messy, beautiful, heartbreaking reality of embodied life on Earth.
The Truth That Sets Us Free
And here is the deepest truth, the one that the shamans and mystics have been trying to tell us all along: the separation was always an illusion. We never actually left. We couldn’t leave. We are nature. We are Earth. We are stardust and bacteria and sunlight and water. We are made of the same stuff as everything else, animated by the same life force, participating in the same great unfolding.
The trees never stopped speaking; we just stopped listening. The flowers never stopped vibrating; we just stopped feeling. Prayer never stopped working; we just stopped believing. The clouds never stopped teaching; we just stopped watching.
What we call “straying from our true nature” is itself part of our nature, this capacity for forgetting, for getting lost, for creating elaborate illusions. We are the universe experiencing itself, and part of that experience is the temporary forgetting of unity, the journey into separation, the dark night of disconnection. Because only in forgetting can we know the joy of remembering. Only in leaving can we discover the sweetness of return.
So yes, we have normalized terrible things. Yes, we have much to grieve and much to repair. Yes, we must take out the trash before we can truly transform. But this difficult passage is not punishment or proof of our fundamental brokenness. It is an initiation. It is the hero’s journey writ large, played out on a planetary scale. And we are living it together, you and I and all of us, in this precise moment in history.
The higher consciousness we are becoming is not somewhere else, sometime else. It is here, now, in the choice to wake up, to pay attention, to care, to act. It is in every moment we choose connection over convenience, community over consumption, reciprocity over extraction. It is every time we pause to thank the Earth for holding us, every time we speak truth to power, every time we tend to what we love instead of fighting only what we hate.
Coming Home
We are coming home, beloveds. Slowly, messily, imperfectly, but inevitably. We are remembering. And in the remembering, we are being remade.
The path forward is also the path back: back to the old ways that are somehow also the new ways, back to the ancient future that has been waiting for us all along. Back to speaking with trees, feeling flowers, watching clouds, offering prayers, and living in reciprocity with all our relations.
This is not nostalgia for some idealized past. Our ancestors made mistakes, struggled, and hurt each other, too. This is about integration: taking the best of what was and the best of what is, and weaving them together into something that has never existed before. This is about becoming fully human at last, which means becoming fully part of the web of life again, fully ensouled, fully embodied, fully present.
The work is hard. The times are dark. But we are not alone, and we are not without resources. We have the wisdom of those who came before. We have each other. We have our own wild, stubborn, irrepressible longing for beauty and meaning and connection. We have the Earth herself, still here, still patient, still hoping we will remember who we are.
And we will. We are. We must.
Because the trees are still speaking, beloved. Can you hear them? The flowers are still humming. Can you feel it? The clouds are still teaching. Can you read them? And prayer—oh, prayer is still the most powerful force in the universe.
We never lost these gifts. We only forgot we had them.
It’s time to remember.
It’s time to come home.
Deepest Munay,
Joaquina Mascuch 🦋
Life Coach, Shaman, Mystic, Ceremonial Leader
Munay is a Quechua word meaning “pure love” or “will”—the life force that moves through all things. It is the energy that calls you back home to yourself.
If you’re done performing to belong and ready to come home to yourself, I support women in this exact journey. Through ancestral healing, soul retrieval, and deep energy work, we’ll unravel the stories that say you’re too much or not enough, and reconnect you with your inherent worthiness. Let’s talk about what’s possible for you. Book a free consult here.
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