Picture copyright Joanna Brook 2024
The other day I visited some land that a friend is working on. He’d asked Joanna and I if we could stop by and share our impressions of the land with him. It ended up being a very moving experience. We walked the land and I immediately felt the spirit of the area reach out and connect with me. We walked up a hill and I felt drawn to a bright spot that was lit by incandescent presence. The sun shone through the canopy of trees to this spot, which was a convergence of ley lines, creating a well of power, the Earthlight melding with the cosmic breath of the Sun. We continued walking the land and it spoke to all of us in whatever way was best suited for each of us.
One of the impressions I got from the land is that it didn’t like the fences that had been put in place to mark the human boundaries of the land. It felt like those fences were cutting into its essence and its overall sense of unity. It was like having a splinter in the skin, causing a consistent ache that was annoying and didn’t feel right. It wanted the splinter to be removed because it was taking away from what it really was. The fences were shaping its identity in a way it didn’t want and that didn’t feel right. The fences were an imposition put on the land because of a need to mark a territory. The problem with that need is that it prioritized human concerns over the land and in the process was fracturing the identity of the land.
After we left, I got to thinking about the spirit of that land and I wondered how it might have felt different as an identity and presence without those fences or without all the other changes humans had brought to the land. I wondered if it would have felt larger and encompassed a bigger, more diverse area. I began thinking about how the identity of the land may have changed over time. I thought of a yew tree grove on a different farm I had visited and wondered if at one time that yew tree grove had been part of a larger identity of the land that stretched over the area and then become its own distinct identity because of how the land had been shaped by the human need to create borders and declare ownership of the land.
In my book Walking With Nature Spirits, I discuss how nature spirits aren’t really concerned with helping people get results. What they want from us, if anything, is to recognize that we are part of the land. The actions we take with the land shape its identity, but we are also shaped by the land we live on and co-exist with. A good example of that connection is the story our host shared with us when we visited him on the land he was working on. The people who had previously occupied that land had planned on building a weed farm there. They spent two years, but didn’t get much accomplished. The spirit of that land resisted them. We saw this with all the tools and structures that were abandoned. In one sense, the place felt like a ghost town and I surmised that the land had subtly influenced the previous people to leave because it didn’t want them there.
At our home, Joanna and I are working with the spirit of the land we live on. It’s a distinct spirit that is separate from the land around it. It is separated by fences, roads, and it is much quieter than the spirit I encountered on the farm we visited. Yet even though it is quieter, it is also still present with us and has its own sense of being that makes itself known to us. When I walk in my yard, practice Kung Fu or do work on the garden, I can feel the spirit of the land interacting with me, shaping me, even as I shape it. The land wants to work with me because of the respect and collaborative relationship I’ve developed with it.
I’ve worked with the life on that land. In some cases I’ve worked to pare back the life, such as when I get took all the English Ivy off the fences, and in other cases I’ve planted seeds and plants in the land to help create the sacred space that we live in. All of that work is a cooperative process. I’m dialoguing with the land, listening to the spirit make itself known to me so that I can work with it in a way that opens me to being shaped by it as well. When we work with the land in this way, it teaches us that we are part of it and that our identities are shaped by the interaction with the land, even as we shape the identity of the land.
We name the land. For example, Joanna and I have named our home the together home. It’s a name that has personal meaning to us, but it also creates an identity for the home. We could name the land the together land and that too would shape the identity of the land, but also ourselves. The irony is that while naming provides identity, it also provides differentiation and separation. At one time the land was simply the land and then someone came along and named the land. Maybe they name it after someone or maybe they named it for a particular aspect of the land that they noticed. That act of naming shaped the identity of the land, gave it a bit more form in human consciousness and a way to interact with us directly, but it also separated that named part of the land from the rest of the land. We have done this again and again and it creates distinct presences. This is neither good nor bad. It simply is a reality of how we interact with the world and with each other.
Names have power and distinction. They confer presence and awareness. The benefit of names with spirit work is they provide us a way to conceptualize and approach spirits. The same applies to the land. We live in something so vast and yet we have brought it down to a level that we can make sense of, by naming parts of it and giving those parts their own identities. It is good to keep this in mind as we interact with the land…and to ask ourselves if its possible to meet the land on its terms and level of being, and what that might teach us as a result.
