A Spring Walk into my Nature
As far as I can see in all directions, there stretches an endless expanse of marsh and lagoons. I’m completely alone in the conventional sense that there are no other people around, though I feel enveloped in the myriad rich life of the marshes. There is the vast curve of the horizon forming a perfect 360 degree circle.
Being Animal
I’ve always felt a kinship with the living world ever since I was a toddler. I still vividly remember my first attempt at composing a sentence to accompany my crayon drawing in kindergarten, and it was predictably about wildlife. I can even recall the effort of pursing my lips as I struggled to form and spell these strange squiggles called words.
Remembering an Endling
You loved to collect nectar from flowering trees in the forest with your long curved bill. And you sang with a flute-like melody; a haunting sound which carried far through the subtropical forest. As was the custom with Kaua’i ‘ō‘ō birds, (pronounced co-why-oh-oh), you mated and paired for life.
Soul Loss
Could you be losing your soul? If I suggested that you may be suffering from soul loss, you might reasonably wonder if I’m losing my grip on reality. Let me explain. I realise that the very notion of ‘soul loss’ sounds to many of us today in the West like an ancient superstitious belief, or instead perhaps a New Age fantasy.
A Faerie Tale
On a hot Spring day, I’m walking through the open woodland pasture, zig zagging my path to stay mostly in the shade. Spying a spreading May tree in full bloom standing quite on its own on a little hillock, looking even more resplendent than Hockney’s ‘Arrival of Spring in Woldgate’, I make for its inviting cover.
Into the Fens
Early morning and I’m out walking on the fens before the heat of the day ramps up. The sky glows vastly over a swaying ocean of sedges and reeds. Far up in the pale blue arch of the firmament, a marsh harrier surveys her reedy domain.
Gratitude
I’ve been harvesting asparagus on my allotment. The spears emerge almost magically out of the ground at this time in Spring, thrusting through the crust of the dry soil; vibrantly green growth as new as the first morning.
Cuckoo
The magical sound resounds over the lakes and scrubland: cuck-coo…. cuck-coo! I listen transfixed, but find it difficult to know from what direction it’s coming from or how far away it is. The unmistakable call of the cuckoo, the visitor to our shores who has always heralded Spring, a sign of mid April.
Practicing Animism: Back to the Future
How might we begin to experience ourselves as being inherently part of Nature? Not as some disembodied observer taking a stroll through the woods or along the river bank, but rather as being within nature, fully embodied and interwoven. There is enormous value and benefit if we can come to feel this to even a […]
The Sanctity of All Life
We modern humans have constructed a peculiar walled off status for ourselves, entirely divorced from the vast realm of the animal kingdom. This is of course, completely fictitious, and ironically sits in complete contradiction to Darwin’s great discovery of our shared evolutionary origins and relationships with all other beings.