Make Believe

Yes.

This.

Ritual is not only about entertainment. It is not only a pleasant pastime or an opportunity to socialize. It is not even simply a psychological tool to shape ourselves and our communities through shared emotional or aesthetic experiences, though it can certainly be used this way.

At the heart of my spiritual life rests the deep knowing that ritual is a way of listening to the Song of the World as it moves through the earth and the land, and engaging with that Song as something holy, wholly challenging and transformative. Shared ritual is when we accept the burden and blessing of being embodied beings of this dense, physical world that gives us life, and when allow ourselves to respond in kind, to speak back to the natural world with its energies and currents and wild mysteries. Ritual is not for our sake alone, but for the sake of the whole world. It is for the sake of the solitude and silence that surrounds us, that frightening shadow of void and absence that makes us who we are, makes us whole.

We ignore it or seek to replace it at our own peril, for the world is what is real. Even in our deepest solitude, the world of experience and natural forces persists.

* * *

We have been neglectful and arrogant for a long time in this country, intoxicated with our own power, lulled into disconnection by our own thirst for convenience and speed and ease. Those years of solitude I spent grieving and kneeling to the dust on the floor were not made up of my grief alone. The land, too, grieves. She misses us. She longs for us to once again touch her as a lover caresses the beloved, to whisper to her of our secret dreams and sit with her in the long silences of twilight. She aches to be with us in our ritual and our prayer. She loves to feel the pounding of our feet and our drums in dance and song and praise — not the scraping and gnawing of our machines and our indifference and our consumerism and our denial.

Our religious communities are not only human. The world, too, the earth and her creatures and her ecosystems and forests and rivers and storms — all these are part of our community of spirit, the community from which our lives crest and subside again like waves of the ocean. And we cannot embrace the world in its wholeness and holiness if we seek to escape it or deny it through digital media that robs it of its voice and deadens our ability to listen to its thrumming presence in even the deepest silences and loneliest moments. Digital and social media have their place, they can give us some direction and help us to share ideas and information across the globe. But they cannot ever replace the hard, necessary work of showing up to ourselves in all of our limited, bounded, frustratingly beautiful imperfections and engaging in the wildness and wilderness of a world so much bigger than we are.

Please, please, please: Go read the whole thing. And then go outside.

Picture found here.

Wildlife: A Love Story

I get that there are huge problems with zoos. And I can imagine that dealing with crowds of people isn't fun for the animals. But I also get that if we don't convince our young people that nature and wildlife really matter, on a visceral, emotional level, we're headed for really bad trouble.

What's your take on this?

And We Are Living in the Material World . . . .

Richard Louv notes:

For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions: to oil and to despair. But what if our lives were as immersed in nature as in technology every day? What if we not only conserved nature, but created it where we live, work, learn and play? The filmmaker Camilla Rockwell recently sent me a clip from her film Mother Nature’s Child: Growing Outdoors in the Media Age.

Here's Rockwell's interview of Louv:

Richard Louv: Human Energy Through Nature Connection from Camilla Rockwell on Vimeo.

Here's Louv discussing easy ways that you can help the child (daughter, son, niece, nephew, grandchild, godchild, neighbor's child, student, etc.) in your life spend time out in nature -- now, in your neighborhood, town, suburb. I like method No. 7:

Find a guide book. Consider “I Love Dirt,”; Joseph Cornell’s classic “Sharing Nature With Children”; and “Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature.”

I'm going to buy Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature for me and G/Son.

I'm also planning to read Louv's new book: The Nature Principal. One, and it's just one, of the things that I love about Louv is his ability to convey the need for a relationship with the material, natural world in a way that anyone, even non-Pagans (and you know how difficult they can be to talk to!) can get. I gave his last book, Last Child in the Woods to everyone in my family last year at Winter Solstice.

How did you connect with nature today?

Co-Creation with the Landbase Requires Deep Attention

Here's a great post by artist Sally J. Smith that shows what it's like to pay deep attention to your landbase. In a recent interview, Smith described how her art reached a turning point when she realized that she wanted to be out in nature, co-creating art with it, rather than inside a studio, making pictures of it. You can see in her post how this requires her to enter into relationship with her landbase, rather than simply live on it.

I don't know what it has been like where you live, but here it seemed winter would last forever. It was just last week that I was bundled up and huddled along the ice-bound shores of the lake waiting for the sun to rise. I still had the chance to make ice sculptures it was so cold here. The snow was deep in the woods, but it was crystallized and granular. The delicate flakes long gone, but now a coarse sugary texture. Difficult to make sculptures with as it does not stick together well. So this time of year is tricky in terms of making sculptures. But the sun is so strong now that the snows do melt, even if the temperatures can only rise to the low 40s which was all that could be managed last week. But the emerald green mosses are emerging and letting me know that soon, very soon it will be time to play with this exquisite green once more.

The combination of melting snow and icy nights makes for some fascinating sculptures to be found however! One day, while walking in a nearby field, I found these delicate polka dot creations creating an exquisite lace effect at the edge of the snow. The day was grey and the wind was cold, but the day before had been sunny. Just warm enough to create the droplets on the underside of the paper thin ice... which re-froze in the chill and still night air.

You should read the whole post for great discussions of her close connection to some local birds and the control that nature exercises over her work.

How deep is your attention to your landbase? How deep is your landbase's attention to you? Who's leading the dance?

Picture found here.

This

By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Picture found here.

A Task for Writers

For those of us who care for an earth not encompassed by machines, a world of textures, tastes, and sounds other than those that we have engineered, there can be no question of simply abandoning literacy, of turning away from all writing. Our task, rather, is that of taking up the written word, with all of its potency, and patiently, carefully, writing language back into the land. Our craft is that of releasing the budded, earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things themselves – to the green uttering forth of leaves from the spring branches. It is the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape, tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again sliding off the digital screen and slipping off the lettered page to inhabit these coastal forests, those desert canyons, those whispering grasslands and valleys and swamps. Finding phrases that lace us in contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses. Planting words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen logs – letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf.

~David Abram

Picture found here.

What Are the Needs of the Beaver, the Bear, the Salmon?

We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.

- A Carrier Indian, from the Bulkley River, in British Columbia

~quoted in The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.

I think that this notion of "marrying," -- which produces, over time, as good marriages will, an understanding of what, for example, an animal or a plant or a river or a landbase or a watershed does and needs -- is a lovely one. It's an experiential marriage, one that proceeds and undergirds and finally makes possible a "marriage of true minds." I think that it's true, as well, for our relationship with ourselves, especially as Witches. It's one reason why I find daily practice so important. It's an opportunity to really get to know myself, my deities, my mission. It's not something I can get just from reading down what someone else has written in a book, any more than the Carrier Indian could really know about beavers by reading about them. And it is from that slowly-developed relationship with myself, born of daily practice, that I am able to begin to reach out and marry my bit of Earth, the plants and animals in my garden, my beautiful Potomac River, Columbia's landbase.

Well, we're all polyamorous in our own way.

Picture found here.

Know What I Love? I Love How "The Shadow" Is Such a Part of This. Literally.

Flight From Embodiment from Alliance for Wild Ethics on Vimeo.

Shadows WILL show up and make themselves known, no matter how hard we try to squish them down. It's not just what they do; it's who they are.

Staying in Love When It Snows

As regular readers know, it's important to my spiritual practice to be in active relationship with a specific piece of land, rather than just having warm feelings for the intellectual construct of "the Land" or "Earth." A large part of my daily practice involves getting in touch with and listening to the specific, small (less than a quarter acre) bit of land on which I live and garden. When I lived in an apartment with no yard, I adopted some spots near me as "mine."

Even in Winter, if it's at all possible, I'm bundled up and outside, even if only for a short time. I've learned that, as long as I can keep my hands warm (I've been known to wear mittens over gloves and one of my goals for the coming year is to learn how to knit those fingerless gloves that I could wear over full gloves), I don't really mind the cold, at least down to around 25 degrees or so. Finding out how to dress comfortably for the outside (for some people, it means fleece-lined boots, while for others it's a hat or a big warm scarf around the neck) can make it easier to maintain a relationship with your bit of Earth even in Winter. And, really, not knowing what a place is like in Winter is sort of like "knowing" a person, but being ignorant about a huge chunk of their life.

That said, as an old woman with a previously-broken-and-still-held-together-with-screws-and-plates ankle, I'm more than careful about not going outside when it's snowy or icy. When you really can't be outside, one way to deepen your relationship is to learn about your land. What do you know about the First Peoples who lived there before you? Do you know where your water comes from and where your waste goes? Can you identify the birds and other animals who live in relationship with the same bit of Earth as you do? Can you identify the trees that live with you? A lot of that information is likely available on-line. Additionally, Field Guides, which you can often get quite cheap secondhand, are a great way to get to know more about your area. A coven might want to buy a set and circulate them. I keep, for example, Birds of Virginia, on my porch so that when I see a bird I don't recognize, I can try to identify her. But in the Winter, when I can't go outside, I'll read a page or two every day in order to try and learn about local birds. And now, thanks to Margaret Roach, I'm in lust for this: The Bird Songs Bible. If you have children, all of these make good family activities on snow days and are a great way to instill a love of nature in the next generation.

If you garden, keeping a garden journal can be another way to deepen your understanding of your bit of Earth. During the year, I'll note on Facebook when each new flower first blooms. Then, on a snowy day in Winter, I'll go through and make a chronological listing in my garden journal. It's interesting to see, from year to year, the patterns and the variations. More serious gardeners additionally keep track of last frost, rainfall, hours of sunlight, and temperatures. Margaret Roach also has up an interesting podcast about the process of preparing to order seeds for next Spring, another great way to spend a snow day.

Finally, even when you can't be outside physically, you can do meditations and trance work to communicate with your bit of Earth. Let it know that you want to listen and then be willing to open up and learn what is taught. You can do art inspired by your relationship. You can raise energy and send it to, for example, the shivering animals, the roots deep under the snow, the earthworms and bees that are so necessary to the Earth's survival.

How do you keep your relationship going when it has to be, for a short time, a "long-distance" relationship?

Picture found here.

Synchronicity, You're Soaking In It

I love the artist's discussion of how her childhood spent in Nature influences her art.

*****************************************

[H]ealing the broken bond between our young and nature—is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demands it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depends upon it. The health of the [E]arth is at stake as well. How the young respond to nature, and how they raise their own children, will shape the configurations and conditions of our cities, homes—our daily lives.

~Richard Louv
More here.

Hat tip to Margaret Roach, in A Way to Garden.

In Love with the Land

In Medicine for the Earth, shaman Sandra Ingerman says:

To heal the [E]arth . . . you must connect with the elements, the plants, the animals, and all forces of nature. You must reestablish your connection with the web of life, seeing that you are not separate from the rest of life, and you must see the beauty in all things.

. . .

Intention You must set a strong intention to return to living in accordance with the laws of nature, remembering [that] you are part of the web of life and are ruled by, and a part of, the cycles of nature. You must set an intention to open the lines of communiation with the spirit that lives in all things.

Love As you open to the wisdom of the trees, the plants, the animals, the insects, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the elements, you learn that all life thrives on love, and love is a key to creating harmony.

Harmony If you return harmony to yourself by aligning yourself with the river of life, the river of life will bring harmony back to you and the planet.

Union When you remember your connection to the web of life, and the spirit that lives in all things, you are once again in union with yourself, the rest of life, and the divine.

Focus You must focus on your intention to open the lines of communication with the spirits of nature.

Concentration You must concentrate on intentionally changing your way of life to once again return to harmony with yourself and the natural world.

Imagination You must be able to imagine the spirits and forces of nature that live around you, the forces of nature that live in you, and a world in harmony and balance again. You must be able to use your imagination to see the beauty in all things.

In comments to my post this week on living in relationship with nature, Literata says, inter alia:

I think this concept of relationship with the land is the idea some people are oversimplifying when they talk about grounding with a local tree or observing the seasons.

. . .

I just about jumped up and down when I saw the photo [used to illustrate the post] - I recognize that area, because my personal connection is with Teddy Roosevelt Island. Building my relationship with the land there is based on observing the seasons, but not just as an abstraction: it's about noticing what's going on, what the changes reflect, what the spirit of the place feels like and how that changes. It's a deep kind of knowing, and I think the idea of relationship captures it better than anything else I've seen. Being in love takes effort - but it has the most rewarding results.

I think that Literata is right. Some people imagine that, if they sit next to a tree and ground, they've done it all. Of course, sitting and grounding with a tree is a great way to begin a relationship with that tree. And, if it's all that you ever do, that's still about a thousand times better than not doing it. But it's only a start. Similarly, if you want to get to know someone, meeting them for coffee and a chat can be a great way to start, but it's not the same as having a deep and abiding relationship with them. As Literata notes, being in love takes work. And, as Ingerman says:

You must focus on your intention to open the lines of communication with the spirits of nature. . . . You must concentrate on intentionally changing your way of life to once again return to harmony with yourself and the natural world.

I think that the daily practice of being in relationship with The Land is as important as the daily practice we do when we sit at our altars and meditate, vision, do spiritual practices, make magic. Both are necessary, but alone, it's difficult for me to see how either is sufficient. And I find that, in order to be a Witch, I need to be in relationship with a specific and particular landbase, specific trees and plants, specific running waters, a specific fox, a specific bossy cardinal. Otherwise, it's like someone who "loves humanity," but doesn't really know or care for any specific people. And while it's certainly a good thing to "love humanity," it's difficult for that sort of relationship to translate into the sort of medicine that Ingerman references. And, IMHO, that sort of medicine is partly what Witches are for.

Photo by the blogger; if you copy, please link back.

Fox

All of my life, I've loved these animals. There's something both awful and lovely about them. Or lovely about how they inspire awe, or awe-ful about how much I love them, or lovely about how they fill me with awe, or awe-inspiring about how lovely they are or . . . .

Well, foxes and ravens, I guess I'm just and old Wiccan stereotype.

There's a fox who lives on the hill just behind my yard, in an old woody thicket up there. I'm deeply in love and in awe of her. She came out into the yard early this morning, during a short break in our heavy rains, sniffed the space around my altar and my fire pit, turned, looked for the longest time at me standing, coffee mug in hand, on the screen porch, and then decided, I surmise: "Neither food nor foe." I keep thinking about putting out dogfood in the Winter, but I bet a naturalist would tell me it's a bad idea. But, if birdseed is good . . . .

In Relationship

In the world of child development, attachment theory posits that the creation of a deep bond between child and parent is a complex psychological, biological, and spiritual process, and that that without this attachment a child is lost, vulnerable to all manner of later pathologies. I believe that a similar process can bind adults to a place and give them a sense of belonging and meaning. Without a deep attachment to a place, an adult can also feel lost.

. . .

Attachment to Land is not only good for the child, but good for the land as well. As naturalist Robert Finch asserts: "There is a point . . . in our relationship with a place, when, in spite of ourselves, we realize we do not care so much anymore, when we begin to be convinced, against our very wills, that our neighborhood, our town, or the land as a whole is already lost." At this point, he argues, the local landscape is no longer perceived as "a living, breathing, beautiful counterpart to human existence, but something that has suffered irreversible brain death. . . . "[I]t no longer moves, or if it does, it is not with a will of its own."

...

Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD; passion is personal. Passion is lifted from the [E]arth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

~Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods.

I'm in relationship with two running waters. One is Spout Run and one is the Potomac River, into which Spout Run, well, runs. I follow Spout Run on my way to work every morning and join the Potomac just where it does, right near the Three Sisters and a broad, open curve in the river. And then I drive along beside the river until I cross over it, just beside the Teddy Roosevelt Island, where I've seen eagles, ravens, foxes, squirrels. This time of year, the leaves are nearly gone, and both Spout Run and the Potomac are easier to see. This morning, there was a gentle rain falling, making the dead leaves look slippery and the rocks look like they'd been polished all night.

I want G/Son to have this sort of relationship with Land. He's already developed a few favorite places to go hiking, one the things that Son and DiL do to help him grow into living on this Earth. What did your parents do for you? What do you do for the child(ren) in your life? What do you do for yourself?

Picture found here.

Serene & Bright, And Lovely as a Lapland Night

Aurora Borealis timelapse HD - Tromsø 2010 from Tor Even Mathisen on Vimeo.

And we get to live here.

/hat tip NTodd's Ma

Being in Relationship with Nature

The newsletter from G/Son's Montessori school (sent via paperless e-mail, the better to be shared w/ loving Nonnas!) has a wonderful article about helping each child to find a "sitting space" outside, someplace the child can go to to feel safe, alone, in nature.

Did you have a place like this, as a child?

When I was young, my sitting space was under a giant, old forsythia bush, big enough to have multiple rooms inside it, where you could crawl in under the branches and feel that you were, indeed, in your own little world. I made tea-sets out of sycamore leaves, stitched into little cups with their stems, crawled in there to read without being bothered, lay on my back and learned more than I knew at the time by watching how the sunlight filtered through the leaves and golden flowers.

When I got a bit older, I graduated to a secret cave made by three ancient pine trees, off in the far SouthWest of our yard, sappy branches for climbing and all. The needles made a fragrant bed and no sunlight penetrated here. I went there to "play Indian," "Indian" being about the only model I had for living in relationship with nature. I hid treasures there, watched the ants make colonies, and climbed up higher than my parents would have liked.

When I got even older, my sitting space was down beside a local creek, where I could watch water dance and play with stones, where I could project myself into dragonflies, skimming over the water, where I could put my hands on the sandy bank and believe myself home.

The newsletter from G/Son's school makes the point that ensuring a child a "sitting space" helps the child to develop a relationship with nature, especially as it changes from season to season. There's no program or structure. There's just a child, a special place, time, and nature.

I was thinking today that the concept reminds me of the speech that Le Petit Prince makes to the Earthly roses:

You are beautiful, but you are empty. One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose

.
Except that, I think that the opposite thing happens. When one learns to enter into relationship with one particular bit of nature, when one learns to communicate with the genius loci of one place, one comes, somehow to a deeper appreciation of all nature.

But I do think it is Le Petit Prince's practice that is important: watering one's rose, protecting it, sheltering it, killing (some of) the caterpillars for it, and listening to it, even when the rose grumbles (every rose I ever tried to raise did), boasts, or says nothing. And, that, I think, is the value, for both children and grown-ups, of a sitting place. Do you have one? Does the child in your life?

Nowadays, my sitting place is in my woodland garden, near my magnolia trees, beside the ferns, just near the spot where I make Hecate's depinion on the Dark Moon. And, of course, I can't go there w/o reciting to myself David McCord's wonderful poem:

This is my rock
And here I run
To steal the secret of the sun.

This is my rock
And here come I
Before the night has swept the sky.

This is my rock
This is the place
I meet the evening face to face.

If you don't have a "sitting space" how could you find one?

Picture found here.

Outside

When were you last outside?

"I believe that one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live. We lack a widespread sense of intimacy with the living world. Natural history has never been more popular in some ways, yet few people organize their lives around nature, or even allow it to affect them profoundly. Our depth of contact is too often wanting.

~Robert Michael Pyle

Protecting Time in Nature

Writing about children, Richard Louv says:

It takes time -- loose, unstructured dreamtime -- to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, because time is consumed by multiple invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play.

What's true for children is, I think, true for all of us. It's difficult, for example, to head out to a park on just the Dark and Full Moons and expect to have a deep experience of nature. It's different if, in between the Moons, you've had what Louv talks about: time -- loose unstructured dreamtime -- to experience that same park in a meaningful way. Then, when you rush there from work on the Friday night of a Dark Moon, and hurry to the tree that you've come to know on a first-name basis, a few minutes of grounding may find you ready to practice your nature religion, to have a deep and meaningful experience with the object of your religion: nature, your landbase, your watertable, the Goddesses/Gods/Spirits of your place.
And as Louv says of children, we have to be vigilant about protecting our spiritual practice, about ensuring that we have loose, unstructured dreamtime out in nature. Otherwise, a million different "shoulds" encroach upon the time. Otherwise, you look up and realize that you spend hours a week watching tv and no time at all in nature. And the next thing you know, you say that you're practicing a nature religion, but you don't have a regular, intimate relationship with any specific part of nature, you just kind of like Capital-N-Nature in a vague, general way. Which may be OK, but it's a lot less than you're entitled to.

Picture found here

Synchronicity: You're Soaking in It

This grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise
somewhere;
the dew is never all dried at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise,
eternal sunset, eternal dawn
and gloaming, on sea
and continents and islands,
each in its turn,
as the round earth rolls.

~John Muir, quoted in Muir Woods Meditations, edited by Robert Lieber

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Lyra Sacra

Picture found here.

In Relationship

Here in the district of our country dedicated to the Goddess Columbia, the wonderful Autumn weather is in full force. It's a perfect time to get outside and actually connect with nature, rather than staying inside and thinking about being a member of a nature religion.

Here's Marcellina, living and singing in Europe, who is not a Pagan, but who is developing a relationship with a bit of land that speaks to her.

The call to look out for and tend to a place, a piece of land that has magic about it, made me think immediately of the Paschberg and the trails (don't worry Mom, I'm not converting to Wicca!). The Paschberg wears some of its history on its sleeve (Tummelplatz, Battle of Bergisl just steps away, the FLAK rings on Landser Kopf) and some of it you have to look for (rocks with cup markings.) Yesterday I walked the trails, instead of my usual jog, and looked for signs. I found a few, but also a lot of tiny litter scraps, and so I began to pick them up.

A great way to develop a real relationship with a bit of land is to get out into it as often as possible (Marcellina's "usual jog"). Over time, one begins to look beyond the obvious (Tummelplatz, the Battle of Bergis) and to see what the land has been hiding (rocks with cup markings). And, then, the land begins to ask something of us ("I found . . . a lot of tiny litter scraps, and so I began to pick them up.") The relationship can go as deep as we will let it. Here's John Muir, talking about being in Yosemite:

In our best of times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.

~Quoted in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future by Bron Taylor

What's stopping you? Breathe. Go.

Picture found here.