The path back to spiritual connection is a bit like walking a forest trail you haven’t visited in quite some time.
The landscape has changed, the seasons progressed, and although you know the way—it’s easy for the smallest rock on your path or the slightest snap of a twig, even the changing of the wind to convince you there is no point in being here, that there is nothing that awaits you.
But come a little further into the cool dark of the canopy, let your ego and expectations of the natural world fall away, and you begin to see each being in the forest as a collective hum of energy with knowledge to impart.
If you sit beside the stump of a fallen tree, you can listen to its secrets. “Ancient one, what have you seen that I have not?”
The magic is not just in the plants that you may gather, or know the names of, but in the whole ecology. And it’s when we forget that we are part of an ecology that we begin to feel lost. It’s when the forest trail loses all meaning and wonder.
In his new book, Courting the Wild Queen, Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue writes about a wild form of empathy, one in which we can use the perceiving, feeling parts of our bodies to come into deeper connection with our natural ecologies.
One obstacle in achieving this, is the unlearning we must do.
“This type of wild empathy refuses to honor the rules set for whom or what we may empathize with and whose experiences should matter to us most.”
In other words, our modern society has established a hierarchy of who and what we are allowed to care about and feel for. It goes a little something like this: Family, friends, acquaintances, animals, strangers. For some of us the list will look a little different, with animals higher up or lower down (for me, my dogs fall into the family category). But one thing that many of us have in common is that “in-animate objects” ie. elements of nature, typically don’t make the list at all. 1
“And you are not supposed to empathize at all with trees or stones or rivers or stars. All those rules and categories break down when we bypass abstraction and go to a place of directly experiencing the presence of other beings.”
I’d be lying if I said the last few months of my absence here were purely about the stress of planning a wedding (a real thing/topic for another time). They were also about feeling lost in my landscape and not knowing how to make my way back.
This past weekend (at the 2022 Good Medicine Confluence) was a meeting of minds. People I’d never met before who immediately felt like kin, people who live lives that inspire my own.
People who reminded me that to stop looking for the magic is to become lost. And that there is grounding in the natural world, in places you can literally go and put down roots, feeling your way back into the earth’s rhythym.
They also reminded me that the spirits of our world, our ancestors, are not just to be found in ancient stories. They are here with us now, if only we can silence ourselves and our place in the world enough to listen.
Silence can be hard to achieve, but I’ve found it to be an integral part of my practice. When I think back to all the moments of my life I’ve felt happiest: In a garden, on a boat over a peaceful reservoir, laying out in summer moonlight, climbing rocks, sitting by the ocean, walking in winter sunlit forests—all of these moments had elements of near-perfect silence.
I define silence like this.
When I am too loud to hear the wind, I am not truly engaging silence.
There’s two components to this: Inner silence (thoughts, worries, an endless replay of your to-do list), and Outer silence (mostly noise from machines- cars, lawn mowers, planes.)
Finding it in turn, is two-fold. First, you must go somewhere you can be alone, undisturbed. If this sounds like an impossibility, remember that’s it’s a natural inclination and and one of our many earthly rights. So many animals practice this kind of silence for much longer than a few minutes each day.
O'Donoghue writes:
“Three months out of the year, the Bear King returns to the womb of the land, which is also his grave as well as his cavern of initiation and the cauldron of rebirth, deeply listening in ritual and trance to what the land would have the people know.”
For the bear, silence isn’t just a prerequisite for peace or happiness. It’s a necessity to bring his gifts back into the world.
“He returns in these times to give death to a culture severed from the living world and already rotting on its uprooted vine, and to sing enchantment back into the world, and sing the world back into enchantment.”
I see so much of what we get wrong stemming from a lack of mystical silence. We fill the voids with noise and obligations, and then later on (in our “free time”) look for magic again in stories other people have written or in substances we take to achieve altered states. And while I’m not against the lessons to be found in those places, I think it’s important to know that we can achieve a higher sense of connection without them too.
When you start to think of your landscape as a living story, as mythical and awakening as it ever was, and of something in which you yourself play an integral role—you will start to receive the messages that silence has to offer.
So the next time you’re feeling lost or alone, I invite you to find a corner of your world in which to engage in silence: To be so still in mind and body that you can hear what the earth mother is saying.
Sit against a tree, and think of it like a grandmother’s embrace. Lay down on the heat of a rock or sand, and wonder at how many iterations of life it has experienced. And remember, there’s a very accessible form of magic that can teach us about our place in this world— and it might just be right outside your back door, under a tree canopy, or on a forest path that’s calling you home.
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If you’ve yet to start believing in the sentient powers of plants and other “in-animates”, I invite you to read Stephen Buhner’s The Secret Teachings of Plants.