Gathering the Work of Summer: On Relationship, the Root System, and Coming Back to What Matters

What August is teaching me about invisibility, connection, and the forest that has always seen you.

Everything in the forest is in relationship. Even this.

I have been craving some time away from the online space lately.

As many of you know, I have been working very hard to bring my work online over the past months, and it has been a massive body of work. Something I am genuinely proud of. And yet somewhere in the middle of it all, I realized I felt a bit ejected into the ether. Disconnected from myself. Becoming quietly addicted to checking my phone to see if what I wrote and posted had resonated with anyone.

And a loud question popped into my head: what is truly important?

The resounding answer was relationship. Connection. Finding real people in real life to just share space, life, and stories.

And so I threw away all my content plans and claimed my space of freedom. To go back and talk about what my heart truly aches to express.

The Harvest and the Heart

I recently read a thought by Brigit Anna McNeill about the month of August that really opened something in me:

"Everywhere the living world is gathering the work of summer into nourishment. Our ancestors gathered at the beginning of this month to celebrate the first harvest, pausing to honor the countless relationships that had made such abundance possible."

I sat with that for a long time.

Just connecting with this idea of being in relationship grew a little sparkle in my tired heart. The idea that we are at the peak of summer, when the most nourishing fruits are ripening thanks to the relationships in the living world. The bee and the flower. The rain and the root. The mycelium and the tree. None of it happens in isolation. None of the abundance is produced alone.

And this applies to us too.

When We Forget We Are Not Alone

In my lowest moments I realize that I have let myself sink into the belief that I am alone. Unrooted. That my work is disappearing into a void and nobody is receiving it. That I am somehow separate from the web of connection that holds everything else.

But when I feel into the fact that we are in countless relationships, not only with each other but also with the more-than-human world, that is when the heart softens into tenderness.

And I remember: this feeling of isolation is not the truth. It is simply what happens when I forget how much is actually holding me.

What the Forest Knows

Take the forest. We see only a fraction of what a forest actually is.

The root system extends seven to ten times deeper and wider than the canopy above.

Every time you walk by trees, they are probably communicating through their root systems via the mycelium, that vast underground network of fungal threads that connects tree to tree, passing nutrients, chemical signals, and information across distances we can barely imagine.

And not only that. Trees have a sense of taste. They can detect and identify what insect or animal is eating their leaves, and then produce specific scents or chemicals to make the invader retreat, or to attract a particular predator on their behalf.

The forest is not a collection of individual trees. It is a community in constant, intelligent conversation.

And we are part of that conversation every time we walk among them.

Nature Has Always Seen You

This brings me to a passage from one of my most beloved books, Mirror in the Earth by Asia Suler. She writes that even if you have been feeling invisible for a long time, nature has always seen you. As you walk through a park or a forest, the birds are probably talking about you, announcing your arrival, and the trees are having an experience of you as much as you are having an experience of them.

This landed somewhere deep in me when I first read it. And it lands again every time I return to it.

Feeling invisible is something very real for highly sensitive people. After a lifetime of being told we feel too much, we tend to shrink and feel unseen. I know I felt invisible for a long time. Even if my personality feels bubbly on the surface, for a long time I felt deeply misunderstood, as if my emotions were not welcome anywhere.

But the forest never got that message.

The forest has been registering my presence, responding to my arrival, holding space for my particular quality of sensitivity, every single time I walked beneath its canopy. Long before I knew how to do any of that for myself.

An Invitation for August

Let this August be a month of relationship with everything. Not just human or romantic. With the trees, the birds, the mycelium, the fruit ripening on the branch. With the part of yourself that has been waiting quietly to be seen.

You were never as alone as you felt. The roots knew it all along.

With abundant love,

Federica

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear what relationship with the more-than-human world means to you. Leave me a comment here or find me on Instagram at @tenderfloweryoga.

Become part of the growing Inner Bloom Community! If you would like to keep receiving this kind of nature-rooted love letters, with the latest on my workshops and offerings sign up for my weekly newsletter here.