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The "Cultural Orphan" and Spiritual White Women

7/19/2024

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PEGI EYERS

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Recently there has been an outpouring of recognition of our status as "cultural orphans" from very privileged white women in the matriarchal studies, feminism, new age and ancestral arts communities. But instead of the humility and "taking a beat" this positionality would imply, spiritual white women continue to make egregious mistakes such as the "we are all one" theory (out of Africa currently being debunked), talking over BIPOC, keeping our privilege front-and-center, and offering elaborate consultations on the theme with commodified "packages" (some very expensive).

Almost entirely disconnected from our root cultures (and in Europe for centuries before), white women in the Americas admittedly had no role models to follow, when it became clear that we needed to reconnect with land and ancestors beginning in the 1960's. But instead of focusing and linking to our own European heritage(s), we created a huge and growing belief system in "all ancestors" that encourages connectivity to ANY ancestor from any culture, within an amorphous spirit world that is constantly shifting to accommodate anyone-anywhere-anytime.

White women cannot take charge of this conversation. Without deeply considering our Euro-colonial past and the fallout from Euro-coloniality that is still experienced AT THIS MOMENT by BIPOC groups worldwide, we have no right to claim access to the ancestors of those same groups. To use our privilege wisely means staying in our own lane, celebrating our *own* ancestors, NOT appropriating from other cultures alive or dead, establishing and crediting all source material we may use, not arguing with or talking over BIPOC, and just generally not trying so hard to shape the conversation and commodify this learning. For people who are "cultural orphans," the ancestral arts - and all matters of interacting with Our Beloved Dead - should be approached reverently, carefully, and without ostentatious presentation.

Do our ancestors seriously care how many "followers" we have? I don't think so.
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Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for social justice, uncolonization, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
www.stonecirclepress.com
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ACQUIESCE

7/6/2024

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PEGI EYERS

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A question I continue to hear, is how do we make a personal connection to nature, or start or deepen an animist practice? There is no "standard" set of guidelines to follow, but based on my own experience, the key is to approach nature with a unique mindset. Simply put, this is how I would explain this convergence.

My deep connectivity to nature, experienced and nurtured over many decades, is based on the de-centering of my own desires. When I am fully embodied in the flow of nature immersion, my human presence is no more important than the vibrant life-forms that surround me. My full humanity - heart, mind, body and soul - plus the extra-sensory perceptions that "wake up" in nature, are more than capable of taking cues from Earth Community. This openness is based on a natural humility, and a need to acquiesce to the beings of the natural world. Made possible by the deepest love and respect, communications and interactions usually follow with my kindred spirits in gardens, fields, hedgerows, riverbanks and forests. 
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"Bearer of Wonderment" by Andy Kehoe
Activating our most primal and authentic eco-self in the wild.
Read more on Animism >here<
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​Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for social justice, uncolonization, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
www.stonecirclepress.com
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The Medusa Mythos Inspires Us to Rage Against the Machine

5/8/2024

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PEGI EYERS
Reprint from Girl God News / May 3, 2024

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"If Medusa’s talents are to freeze male violence and warfare and stop the androcracy in its tracks, then her converse role as nurturer, rewilder and sustainer of the living green world must equally be in play. Undulating across the land like magnetic lines of earth-emergent serpentine delight, the Medusa mythos inspires us to rage against the machine, and to never, ever forget our bond to the Ancestral Mothers and their sacred legacy of love."
Pegi Eyers ~ excerpt from "The Medusa Imaginal"
Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom
Girl God Books, 2017

Access "The Medusa Imaginal" by Pegi Eyers at MAGO WORK  "Re-visioning Medusa Book Excerpt 5"
>RETURN TO MAGO E-MAGAZINE<
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Medusa Cosplay by Pegi Eyers, with digital enhancements.
Pegi, thank you for sharing! Your words seem especially true now, and we are honored to have your work in this anthology.  Trista Hendren, Editor
​This deeply felt, thought and illustrated anthology asks us to imagine, know, feel, and face Medusa. This ancient goddess is not the monster to be slain by a patriarchal hero, but the face of the Earth and of wisdom. The diverse offerings in this wonderful anthology lead readers to knowledge, through study as well as dreams, art, and storytelling. It is a very fine and compelling read and also a glorious guide for getting down to the Earth wisdom so direly needed in these times. 
​Jane Caputi, PhD, Professor, Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Communication & Multimedia, Florida Atlantic University
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Order your copy of Re-visioning Medusa here.
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This writing echoes the heart of our upcoming online program~! I am continually inspired by how synchronicity weaves us together. I am preparing for a Medusa course tending the transformation of civilization trauma and Pegi Eyers posts this from a thread she has been following since 2017, probably earlier including research for the book. Thank you for being at the emergent edge!
Sara McFarland, Facebook, May 10, 2024
Improvisational nature-infused Singer, Storyteller & Ritual Theater Performer, Soul Initiation Guide, Ritualist, Death Doula for the Great Dying

I just wanted to connect with you, regarding your writing on Medusa. I had missed that you had written this, and am glad you brought it to my attention. I've been exploring the lesser known Demeter/Limos (and Erisychthon) myth, or rather that one has me.....the way myths live us. Thank you for your continuing work!
Wendy Robertson Fyfe, Facebook May 10, 2024
Author, nature-based underworld guide, psychosynthesis psychotherapist, poet, writer, teacher, photographer, cultural historian

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising:
Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community"
an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural
competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, uncolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Available from Stone Circle Press or Amazon. 
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SOUL WALKER

4/15/2024

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BRIAN FAWCETT

Reprint from The Journal of Wild Culture, Spring 1989

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Your soul - don't leave home without it
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​    I was sitting in one of the bars at Pearson Airport in Toronto, waiting for a flight and trying to dig my way out of the vague depression I experience whenever I travel.  At the next table two men in business suits were talking.
    “Did you get those futures under control before you left the office?” the older of them asked the other.  The peculiar use of the word “future” instantly captured my attention. I noted that his suit was darker, and that his voice exuded seniority if not quite authority.  Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t like the idea of this guy with futures and authority.
    The other man seemed slightly uncomfortable with the question.  “I tied down wheat and hog bellies, Hal,” he answered, using the man’s man as if it were a prayer rug he’d only recently gained the use of. “I’ve got the energies in my app. They’re all unstable as hell, and I thought we could work them over during the flight and make our move from Denver.”
    Hal grimaced. “Can’t you handle this by yourself?” he asked, with a slight edge of irritation in his voice.  “Hal, I need your help on this one,” the younger man whined.  “I just don’t have enough experience in this kind of volatile market.”
    Hal gazed at the younger man, coiling his body in the chair as if to impart a great truth – or to bite out his companion’s throat.  “Experience no longer exists, my friend,” he said.  “There is only data, and the daring to recognize when it becomes profitable information.”
    Hal closed his alligator-skin briefcase as he said it, flipped a five-dollar bill into the center of the table and placed his empty whisky glass on top of it.  The conference was over.  Both men slid out from behind the table, tugged their suits straight and walked to the entrance.  The younger man walked just behind Hal’s shoulder. He still didn’t have a name.
    The little jerk is practicing military deference, I thought, as I watched them disappear into the terminal crowd.  Disgusting.  I was glad they were leaving my universe. Then I realized that it was their universe I was in.  At least I could be grateful that they were leaving the small part of it I was temporarily occupying, and I didn’t want to know where they were going.  Straight to hell, for all I cared. But with a stopover in Denver to manipulate the future.
    To tell the truth, I didn’t want to know where any of the grinning freaks still sitting in the lounge were going, or where they’d been, or why. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at home where I could think straight.
    Travel scrambles my brain circuitry, air travel more than any other kind. There’s probably no other place on earth I dislike more than airports.  They make me grumpier than I normally
am, and I’m a reasonably grumpy person. I’d been travelling for weeks, and right then I would give a lot to be non-conscious, and more if I could be at home. I certainly didn’t want to talk to anyone.
    I wasn’t to get my wish. An elderly man entered the bar and stood near the entrance, scanning the scattered clientele. Almost without hesitation, he focused on me. Our eyes met briefly. I broke contact first, developing a sudden urge to determine the species of wood used in the bar décor. Walnut, I decided. Most of it no doubt one-eighth-inch veneer. The wall panels probably ersatz walnut, the kind they photograph onto chipboard.
    Unpleasant-looking old codger, I decided as I watched him make his way to my table. Something had gone sour in his face a long time ago - his mouth was permanently resolved, as if he’d made an early but fundamental decision that life was not good, and the decision had been leaking a mild toxin into his facial tissues ever since. He appeared to be in his late seventies,
but there was nothing in his body language and demeanor
that indicated the kind of weathering that creates the oaky mild wisdom that sometimes comes with old age. Nothing had been softened or enriched by time. It had only petrified or scraped dry. I didn’t like his looks at all.
    The briefcase he carried intensified that dislike. It was an expensive leather one, neutral coloured, narrow, and soft-sheened. No laptop in that one. This guy was from senior management.
    Despite myself I wondered what was inside it. Plans for an industrial takeover? Plans for the end of the world? Then I remembered that he was coming to talk to me. He couldn’t be an executive, and the briefcase would therefore be filled with pamphlets. Pyramid sales, or some course on executive-building. Or worse – religious pamphlets. He had the look of a man bent on saving someone.
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    As he approached, I almost wished the two electronic executives hadn’t left. I could have pointed to them – see, look! These guys need your literature, not me. I would have had my objections brushed aside.  The old man was fixed on me like the Ancient Mariner on his wedding guest.  Oh, Christ, I thought as he closed in.
    “Christ can't help you,” he said in a crisp British accent. “But perhaps I might.”
    I'd have rolled my eyes if there'd been anyone around to do it for.  There wasn't, and anyway, it was too late.  My elderly assailant was staring at me as if he could see through me. Maybe he could. He'd already read my mind.
    “Bloody airports,” he said.
    “That's what I've been thinking,” I answered before I could stop myself.
    “l'm aware of that,” he said, his mouth sucking on his cosmic lemon again. “You're impressionable. That's why I chose you.”
    “Go away,” I said, feebly. “l don't want to be chosen.”
    ''Well,” he replied, fixing me with his cold stare, “You've been chosen. Stop snivelling and listen.”
    Maybe, I calculated, a little show of aggression will get him to leave me alone. He cut that thought off.
    “Don't try aggression. It won't get you anywhere. I'm here to help you, and there's no avoiding it.”
    “l don't need help. I'm just fine. Let me wait for my stupid plane in ignorance.”
    “Stupid ignorance.”
    “Pardon me?”
    “You heard me,” he said. “Planes aren't stupid. They aren't anything at all, one way or the other. They're machines. But you're stupid if you desire ignorance.”
    Well, I thought, at least he's not a born-again Christian. They love ignorance.  It's their operational precondition. “l desire you to leave me alone,” I mumbled. “That's what I desire.”
    "You're already far too alone. That's why I'm here."  
    This time I did roll my eyes. To hell with him. “Go away.” I said. “Cease and desist. Let me bear the agony of travel unmolested by your wisdom.”
    “Exactly,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Travel is agony.”
    “You came here to tell me that?”
    He lowered himself gingerly into the chair opposite me. With our eyes at the same level I felt slightly less uncomfortable, but I still wanted him to go away. “No,” he said solemnly. “l came to tell you why.”
    “You came to tell me why travel is agony?” I said. “l know why. It's because weird people are always hitting on me. Weird people like you.”
    The old man was unperturbed. “That isn't why, you silly ass, and you know it.”
    I didn't know, and I told him so. Then I repeated my request that he leave me to my discomforts.
    “lt's actually rather simple,” he said. “lt has to do with the travel abilities of the human soul.”
    Shit, I thought. “You're a Rosicrucian, right?”
    “No. Please listen carefully. The reason why you feel disoriented when you travel is because your soul isn't travelling with you.”
    “l don't have a soul,” I said. That didn't sound right, so I corrected myself - better to discuss theology than personality.  “There's no evidence for the existence of the soul.”
    At first he seemed to go for it. “There's no material evidence for the existence of the soul, you mean. Not conventional evidence, anyway. Don't underestimate me. I'm not a stupid man. We're both familiar with the philosophical arguments about the existence of the soul, which all proceed deductively, or by negation. My evidence is quite different.”
    “Go on,” I said, my curiosity aroused despite my misgivings.
    “Some of the native cultures on your West Coast have a saying. It's this: 'When one abandons their home ground, they lose their soul.'  Now, that sounds like little more than a localist slogan until you examine a few illustrations.”
    “l'm listening.”  I was listening, against my will. How did he know I was from the West Coast?
    “lf a multinational corporation were to purchase a plot of land next to the one you're living on, and announced that it intended to excavate a huge pit on it, what would you do?”
    “Depends,” I said.
    “On what?”
    “Well, on what my piece of property was worth to me. And on how much the developer was willing to give me to leave.”
    “Multinationals don't give anything away. And how is value assigned to what you're calling property?”
    He paused for a second, as if to let the possible taxonomies penetrate.  “Let me rephrase my question slightly. Imagine that there are two people living next to the target land. One of them was born on the spot, and his ancestors have lived there for at least several generations. The other person has lived there for less than two years. Which one would be more likely to fight the multinational, and which one would be more effective?”
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​     Those weren't very hard questions. “The homer, naturally. In both cases. They would know more, and would be more likely to persist when the going got tough.”
     "Well,” he said, “that's what the human soul is, and where it resides. It's a relationship between consciousness and material objects. lt is a sensibility created by familiarity and loyalty to places and things.”
     “Interesting,” I said. “But what's this got to do flying, or with hanging around airports?"
     “Quite a lot. Think of airports as generative structures for homelessness.  Repositories of physical and intellectual landscape alienation. Petri dishes of delocalized despair. Soul debris depots. First of all, airports are pretty much the same across the world; so, in a sense they breed a kind of contrary stereotype: home for the homeless. That involves several more things. The kind of alienated energy constantly passing through them, and the residual buildup of it.”
     “This is getting pretty far-fetched,” I muttered.
     “lt's unconventional, that's all. I could explain the physics to you, but you're not a physicist. I'm explaining it in urban planning terms and in anthropological terms, which is within your range of nominal expertise.”
     Right again, I thought, wondering if he was from the CIA or the CSIS. Too old, I decided. And too accurate. Far too weirdly accurate.
     “The technology for creating anti-localist experiential structures has existed now for some years. The motivation researchers inside the major consumer corporations have been using it for decades without really recognizing what they've got. They understand, for instance, that there is a fundamental human need for familiarity and solidarity, and they've learned to manipulate its focus from landscapes and kinship or social loyalty structures to consumer stereotypes. They're like terrorists with a plutonium bomb. They can't get it to explode, but the more they tinker with it the more radiation gets released.”
     “Give me another example.”
     “Well, Disneyland is the best one.”
     “Never been there,”  I said.  “Never will, either.”
     “Millions have, and millions more are going to go. Disneyland is a kind of laundered, cartoonized replication of the world.   It allows people to experience history and geography without physical risk or threat to their value structures. Everything is translated into a very simplified version of basic Western consumer capitalist values. Sort of like fishsticks or chicken nuggets. Instead of sharks you get shark fishsticks.”
     “You're losing me here. What’s this got to do with airports, or the human soul?”
     'Well, think of it - Disneyland, or consumerism in general, as an alternative to the human soul. Without a soul, as I defined it earlier - landscape and history have no meaning - no critical frame of reference or consequences.”
     “Uh huh. That I can see. But maybe that's the way things are going. Maybe it's a natural evolution of the species.”
     “Oh, an evolution, maybe. Not a natural one. It might also be a devolution, or a convolution.”
     “Those don't seem to be risks we can avoid. They're happening. No way to stop them.”
     “l'm suggesting only that they should be understood. Or rather, that you understand them.”
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     The waiter was standing beside the table. “ls this man bothering you, Sir?” he asked, motioning at the old man.
     “No,” I said. “Bring me another beer, will you?”
     “What brand would you like, Sir?”
     The old man cut in.  “Bring us two glasses of soda water. That will be just fine.”
     The waiter glanced sharply at me for confirmation. “Okay,” I said. “He's my long-lost uncle. Bring us soda water if he says so.”
     “Don't be impertinent,” the old man snapped. “Now. Let's get back to our discussion. The human soul has a very specific property that makes it hostile to contemporary reality.”
     “And what's that property?”
     “lt doesn't fly.”
     The old man stared at me coolly, as if expecting a response. I couldn't think of anything to say. lnstead, I sorted through the logic of his previous statements. Consistent.
     “Are you speaking metaphorically, or are you making a declarative statement to the effect that a human soul is prohibited from boarding an aircraft?”
     “What's the difference?”
     “Well, I'd be interested to know why, if it can't board aircraft. There's nothing in the IATA regulations to say that. l've read them. And surely it isn't the lack of seats.”
     “The soul is not an adjunct to the human body. It is not an automatic possession. It can be earned or nurtured, just as it can be lost or destroyed by misadventure. But it is not automatically inherited. Think of it as an external database that by its nature cannot be transported.”
     “Oh,” I said, shifting in my chair as the waiter slid the two soda waters onto the table. I dropped him a five and he disappeared. “That makes sense, I suppose. So where is my soul?”
     The old man frowned, and began to stare at the back of his hand as if it were a television screen. After a moment's consideration, he looked up again. “You've been travelling for thirteen days?”
     I nodded. “About that.”
     “Your soul is just east of Kamloops, B.C., walking along the TransCanada Highway.”
     He said it with such authority that I didn't laugh. “lt's following me?”
     “Of course. What else would it do?”
     “You said that the soul is landscape-derived. Why wouldn't it stay on home ground and wait?”
     “l said that it was the creation of a relationship between a body of understanding and a place. Once created, it can't survive without its body of understanding, so to speak. So it follows it, tries to locate it.”
     “All the way from Vancouver to Kamloops.  375 miles.”
     “Your particular soul is a fast walker,” he said, without a trace of irony. “lt would walk all the way here, unless you underwent a personality change, or a loss of memory, or you died.”
     “Then it would die?”
     “Not exactly. It would try to return to the conditions of its creation.”
     “And do what?”
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     For the first time, the old man seemed slightly embarrassed. “lt would, er, haunt. For a while. Nothing nasty, mind you. You may have noticed that places where people have lived a long time have a certain eerie coldness after they've gone.”
     I had, but I didn't say so. After my parents left the small town I grew up in, their old house had that quality.
     “That's right,” he said. “Almost a sense of betrayal. Yet the old places have always welcomed you back.”
     He was right. But then I've managed to visit the old places every year or so since I left.
     “l know that. They sense the kinship of your present soul.”
     I was getting used to having him read my mind. “l usually fly up there. That means my soul isn't with me.”
     “Smell,” he answered. “They smell you, because you're from there. As a point of technical information, so is your soul.”
     “So what happens when I leave here and go home? Does my soul see me flying over it and start walking back?”
     “Well, it senses it rather than sees you. That's why you feel disoriented for several weeks after a long trip. And that's why there's a strong sense of mental disturbance for a few hours when it actually arrives back.”
     “Sort of like re-entry impact, no? It must be pissed off when it arrives. All that walking for nothing.”
     “Yes. Quite. From its point of perception. And of course I needn't add that touring is not recreation for the human soul.”
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     “Look,” I said, watching a tall man about my age sidle up to the bar and drop his overnight bag at his feet. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn't quire place it. He was dressed in blue jeans and a weathered brown leather jacket, and was flipping an American Express card between his thumb and forefinger: the global village Visigoth. He looked even more exhausted and disoriented than I'd been feeling. “All day, I've had this sense that I might at any moment go spinning off my axis. Does this have anything to do with the temporary separation from my soul?”
     “Surely. Most of your physical and emotional interface nodes - the points that process incoming data - are unavailable, because those are afforded - lubricated as it were - by your soul. You're relying on stored intellectual fuel to keep you balanced right now. That’s why the longer you travel, the more likely you are to commit purely selfish acts, or to make decisions on a purely abstract basis. Or other kinds of stupid behaviors I needn't spell out for you. There’s nothing mystical about any of this. It’s coldly pragmatic.”
     “You're suggesting that the soul is an inherent containment technology that operates in typical fashion, right? And that there are possible strategies for nurturing the soul - mine or anyone else's?”
     'Yes. It's very simple. Travel as little as you can, for one. And never travel for purposes of geographical avoidance.”
     “Huh?”
     “One of the really evil practices consumerism supports is the practice of travelling to exotic destinations in order to avoid the reality of everyday life. Most people do that precisely at the
point where they should begin to investigate the particularities around them. And those pleasure ghettos are the worst. Two weeks at CIub Med will kill a weak human soul, or an incipient one. That's a far greater danger than herpes, which is what most people who go to those places worry about.”
     “l think most of them already have herpes, actually.”
     That got the smallest trace of a smile, but not for long. “That’s your joke. I have no precise data on that question. As a matter of fact,” he said, finishing his soda water and getting to his feet. “l'm pretty well out of relevant information.”
     I half-expected him to vanish. I even closed my eyes to see if he would. “lt's been, er, a slice,” I said.
     “No it hasn't,” he said. “This is not a mystical experience. Everything I've told you can be secured by operational data. It’s a question of accurate processing. I've merely offered you the metaphoric software.”
     “Whatever you say.”
     I closed my eves again, feeling weary and disoriented. When I opened them, the global village Visigoth at the bar was gone. In his place was the man I'd been talking to, dressed in the
Visigoth's costume. He was even flipping the Am Ex card, looking around the bar for someone else to hit on.
     I had a plane to catch. And trudging along in the cool evening somewhere in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, I half -believed I had a soul to placate. Or, for the first time in my life, a soul to disbelieve in.
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By Robin Ridington

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Location exists in time as well as in place. Local knowledge is obviously local because it takes place, but it is also local because of a centered sense of time. Almost universally, the time of people who are Indigenous to a place is mythic time, a dreamtime, thought-time, a time of mind.  Dreamtime imagines a deeper geography than that of the waking mind. The Tinkerbelle soul of sensation, dragged as it is from step to step by a body's inexorable sequentiality and ultimate failure, must measure time in a currency of distance. (After thirteen days, “Your soul is just east of Kamloops, B.C., walking along the TransCanada Highway.”)
 
Among First Nations on Turtle Island, or North America, certain men and women are gifted to act as spirit guides to the mythic dimension. (Anthropologists have labelled them shamans, and Mircea Eliade called them "Psychopomps.") The Dunne-za of the Peace River country call these people Naacheen, or Dreamers. The time and space in which the Dreamers travel is different from the time and space in which we ordinarily experience the world. Dreamers travel by what Eliade gropingly called “magical flight.”
 
They move within the multiple possibilities of a time and space that is not imprisoned by the body's sequentiality. They make connections by similarity, opposition, reflection, resonance, and remembrance, rather than by physical contiguity alone. They move in a geography of the mind. They know how to separate experience from sensation.
 
The places that a Dreamer knows are connected logically rather than physically. They fit together in the way that memory and anticipation fit together. They fit together within a mosaic of meaning. When a Dreamer travels, he or she “grabs hold of a song with the mind” and leaves the body secure in its appointed place on earth. Dreamers are different from ordinary people only in that they have studied and learned the turns of Yagatunne, the Trail to Heaven. They understand how to come back from the dreamtime world. They come back to the place in which a physical body remains alive to receive the returning soul. They can leave their bodies and come back to them without dying. They can fly out of ordinary time into the essential time of myth.
 
Dreamers talk about their experiences using metaphors from nature, and from the dimensionality of a physical world. A Dreamer's cosmic axis spreads and threads the four directions into an imaginary hole at the center of things, a hole at the center of time as well as of space. Four directions and three worlds converge upon the idea of seven. That idea is the world's germinal center. This idea animates the experience of winds and silences, still water and cascades, animal persons, and persons of the human kind. That idea is the principle of creation, Yage-Sateen, the motionless idea of a center around which even dimensionality itself turns.
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​Elders of the Dunne-za told me that a person who steps into a whiteman's vehicle loses contact with the trail that his or her life takes on this earth. This trail begins with a child's very first steps. The Cree still ritualize these first steps in a ceremony of “walking the child” into the world, in a new pair of moccasins. The Dunne-za used to bury an old person in new moccasins for his or her journey along Yagatunne, the Trail to Heaven. Only the Dreamer is able to leave the trail of his or her physical body on earth and return safely. When ordinary people lose their tracks to those of a vehicle among the multitude of vehicles, they are no longer able to find the Trail to Heaven. The old people who lived most of their lives hundreds of miles from the nearest roads were in agreement that the ghosts of people who died in car accidents, might spend years walking up and down the Alaska Highway, thinking that it was the Trail to Heaven.
 
The Dreamer Charlie Yahey, told me something else about the relationship between vehicles and place. He said that the white men make the world smaller with their cars, trucks and planes. He said that they can do this because they power these machines with grease from the giant animals that Saya, the culture hero, placed beneath the earth in mythic time. His observation was a subtle reference to the story of creation. By exhuming the physical substance of that mythic time, the white men have taken the world back to a time when it was smaller and insufficiently interdependent. This story (which I also heard from Charlie Yahey) says that as the world grew from a speck of dirt under Muskrat's fingernail, the creator made a wolf and set it out to see if the world was big enough.
 
The wolf came back with a human arm in its mouth. The creator asked why Wolf had done such a thing, and Wolf replied that there was nothing else to eat. After that, the creator made moose and made another wolf. He sent the first one down beneath the earth. The second one never returned. By this sign, the creator knew that each animal had its proper food. The world was large enough to be self-supporting.  With their machines powered by the grease of the giant animals, the white men have returned the world to a condition in which life is out of balance with its resources.
 
Place is important to the Dunne-za. They continue to struggle for the place they call “Where Happiness Dwells” because it reminds them of the people in Heaven who used to gather there. Heaven itself is a place of reunion “where happiness dwells.” People are happy when they learn from a Dreamer that a person who died recently has finally made it through. They know that when a person dies, his or her shadow must first walk at night along the trail of a past life. The ghost is blind at day but can see in the dark. When the Dunne-za were nomadic, they would avoid returning to a place to which someone who had died recently, might be returning. Now that they live on reserves, ghosts have become more of a dangerous presence than they were in the past. A person's ghost must literally touch down upon every footstep taken in life until at last it reaches the place at which it was light enough to rise along Yagatunne, the Trail to Heaven. Its journey is sequential and tied to the body's physical nature. It cannot be released until it comes to the place where it can rise like the spirit of a Dreamer. That is why the shadow's journey can be shortened if, in life, a person dances with others around a fire to the songs that the Dreamers brought back from their journeys along Yagatunne. People who dance along the circle of a common trail support one another. They give to one another in the same way that animals give to people who respect their bodies.
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In some societies, a myth is something that is untrue, but that people believe out of ignorance or wishful thinking. In the spiritual traditions of Indigenous peoples, myths are true stories. Myths provide a model or directory of a culture's accumulated knowledge. Unlike legends and tales, myths explain the fundamental realities of a primordial or essential time. They explain the present in relation to a time of fundamental truth. Mythic cosmologies are not attempts to explain in fantasy where factual knowledge of the “real world” is lacking, but are rather the opposite - statements in a metaphoric language about what people know of the interrelations between the natural, psychological and cultural dimensions of reality. Myths do not “give meaning” to experience. Instead, they disclose the meaning that makes experience different from mere sensation.
 
Mythic time is about primordial events that are not, like those of history, forever relegated to the past. Mythic time is alive and active in people’s lives and experiences, dreams and visions, ceremonies and artistic creations. When myths tell about the world’s creation, they describe a process that is continuous and ongoing. The mythic image of creation describes a quality of renewal that is inherent in every moment of meaningful experience. In contrast to historical events which happen once and are gone forever, mythic events happen everywhere and always.
 
Mythic events return like the seasons. The events of history are unique and particular to their time and place. The events of historical time are like the events we experience with our senses. They materialize once and then are gone forever from our sensation. Mythic events are different. They are essential truths. They are of the mind, the imagination and the spirit. Yet, they are not imaginary in the sense of being without substance. Mythic events are metaphors. They stand for the ideas without which substance and sensation would be dead and devoid of meaning. 
 
Dreamers, edgewalkers, or seers are adept at travelling through the geography of mythic time and space. The Dreamer, edgewalker, or seer's “magical flight” and spirit calling are usually described as taking place within a spiritual realm. In order to understand the meaning of this experience, we must find an adequate language of translation for it. What do we really mean when we speak of a spiritual realm? Oral traditions and stories held by Indigenous peoples and/or hunter-gatherer groups belong to an animist reality, and have shown clearly that they have detailed, intimate, and accurate knowledge of the natural world. 
 
Magical flight and conjuring are inner journeys that recognize the transformation of sensation into experience. The three worlds of an animist cosmology are not geographical places; they are internal states of being, represented by a geometric metaphor. The seer does not fly up or down in the physical world. He or she flies inside to the meaning of experience. Magical flight enters a symbolic, internal, experiential dimension in which time, space, and distance as we know them, as well as the distinction between subject and object, merge into a unity. The magical flight delves into the center of things, a place where the four directions and the three worlds come together. It is not escape from the “real” world, but rather a flight from the ordinary world into the more profoundly real world of human experience and meaning. It is a flight inside to a spiritual center.
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​Mythic thinking links the individual intelligence we all have as members of a common species with the collective intelligence of a cultural tradition. The myths of people who live as hunter-gatherers show them how to make sense of their experiences in relation to a natural world, of sentient non-human persons and natural forces. The myths explain that animals and natural phenomena are alive and thoughtful, in the same way that humans are alive and thoughtful. They show how the physical events of this world make sense, by reference to the essential events of mythic time. In the mythic world of animism, the world of local Indigenous Knowledge (IK), an event must be experienced as a thought, an idea, a dream or a vision before it can take place in physical reality. A widely distributed creation myth known to students of folklore as the “earth diver” story illustrates this principle. The story tells about how the world came into being as a speck of dirt that a diving animal brought up from the bottom of a primordial body of water. The story explains that the world came into being because a thought and an image of it already existed. Charlie Yahey told me this story as follows:
 
Yagesati [He-She sitting motionless at
the center of Heaven] first made the world.
Someplace there was a cross.
Yagesati made it and put it there.
There was water everywhere.
Yagasati is the one who wants it to
be like that.
Yagesati put that world in here.
When Yagesati put that world here
He-She sent some animals down to get a
little dirt.
The Creator sent Muskrat down to get
some dirt.
Muskrat dove down to get some.
Then Muskrat came up
holding some dirt here, under his nails.
Yagesati said to that dirt, “You will grow.”
From then, every year it got bigger
and bigger.
 
This “earth diver” story perfectly illustrates the essential features of an animist system of knowledge. Muskrat's speck of dirt is a world of substance that must be discovered at the center of a cross, the center of an idea that is motionless at the center of Heaven. Muskrat's dive gives depth to a two-dimensional world. He dives down into the cosmic center. He dives down into the center of an idea. He dives down to discover an idea at the center of things. He is the agent of a transformation of form into substance. He shows the possibility of diving from one level of cosmology to another. He is not just an animal. His dive is not just an event that may have taken place long ago. Muskrat is a metaphor. His story is active within every moment of experience. It reminds us that the world is continually being created. His dive stands for the human experience of transcendence and transformation.
 
Muskrat's dive to the nadir also suggests the possibility of a flight toward the zenith. It suggests the vertical dimension of an ancient cosmology. In Dunne-za tradition, this cosmic axis is known as Yagatunne, the “trail to Heaven.” The Dunne-za recognize their Dreamers, and describe them as being like Swans, the only animal who can fly from one season to another, and between Heaven and earth. Muskrat and Swan together complete two halves of a personality. Muskrat dives down to retrieve the world. Swan flies up to return to Heaven. Another Dunne-za myth tells about how a boy named Swan became a Dreamer and a Culture Hero through the transformative experience of his own vision quest. Even today, the Dunne-za find Swan in the constellation of stars we also know as Cygnus, the Swan.
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Another perspective on local knowledge comes from the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska. Unlike the Dunne-za, who traditionally lived in small bands of closely related people with no overall tribal organization, the Omaha are a formally organized tribe. During the 18th Century, they and four other tribes, known collectively as the Degiha Siouans, moved from a land of lakes and forests (probably in what is now Wisconsin) to the middle Missouri River country of eastern Nebraska, where they took up residence in earth lodge villages. During the summer, the tribe as a whole moved west onto the prairies to hunt buffalo. They camped in a circle known as the Huthuga. The Omaha symbolize their sense of place by cosmic symbols of a union between female and male, earth and sky, night and day. The tribe itself is made up of clans belonging to the “earth people” and “flashing eyes” or “sky people” moieties. Traditional Omaha ceremonies allowed people to visualize their connections to one another and the cosmos. The Omaha tribe centered itself in the idea of a cosmic union of complementary forces rather than in any particular place. They call the idea of life and motion Wakonda.
 
Ethnologists Alice Fletcher & Francis La Flesche, who wrote a study The Omaha Tribe in 1911, introduced the traditional Omaha ceremonies and institutions with an account of the religious and philosophical ideas on which they are based. These ideas suffuse every aspect of Omaha life. They provide “a point of view from the center” from which we may come to understand their meaning.
 
The tribal organization of the Omaha was based on certain fundamental religious ideas, cosmic in significance; these had reference to conceptions as to how the visible universe came into being and how it is maintained. The universal life force is conceptualized as Wakonda, described by Fletcher & La Flesche as follows.
 
An invisible and continuous life
permeates all things, seen and unseen.
This life manifests itself in two ways.
First, by causing to move:
All motion, all actions of mind or body,
are because of this invisible life.
Second, by causing permanency
of structure and form:
As in the rock, the physical features
of the landscape, mountains, plains,
streams, rivers, lakes, the animals,
and the humans.
This invisible life
is similar to the will power
of which humans are conscious
within themselves.
A power by which things are
brought to pass.
Through this mysterious life and power
All things are related to one another
and to the human.
The seen to the unseen,
the dead to the living,
A fragment of anything
to its entirety.
This invisible life and power
is Wakonda.
 
Wakonda is the spirit of life in the universe, “the mysterious life power permeating all natural forms and forces and all phases of man's conscious life,”[2] but it is not a spirit, even a “Great Spirit,” removed from human experience. Wakonda is within and around the conscious life of the universe, not from it. Wakonda “causes day to follow night without variation and summer to follow winter.” Wakonda is “an invisible and continuous life believed to permeate all things, seen and unseen.”[3] This life force animates all motion and dwells within all fixed forms. It may be seen in the world's changes and in its structures. It may be seen in the changes a person experiences in his or her life, and in the continuity that carries life on from one generation to another. Wakonda is the spirit of physical bodies in motion and the spirit that animates thought. It shows itself in the permanent structures of a physical landscape - “the rocks, mountains, plains, streams, rivers, lakes, the animals, and the humans.” It shows itself in the moving winds and resounding Thunders. It shows itself in the sun's path across the daytime sky, and in his momentary passage through the zenith point to become aligned with the earth's center. It shows itself in the fixed star of the night sky, the star around which all others turn. It shows itself in the wanderings of the planets. It shows itself in the structure of thought and in the mind's quick changes of mood. It shows itself in the cosmic union of male and female principles, each one giving to the other in order to create a completed whole.
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​Wakonda is not a distant god. Wakonda is a comprehensive indwelling spirit of life and of thought. The lives of humans and animals alike “are animated by a life force emanating from the mysterious Wakonda.”  In Omaha thought, “humans are viewed as one of many manifestations of life, all of which are endowed with kindred powers, physical and psychical.”[4] Wakonda is an intelligence, an “integrity of the universe, of which humans are a part.” As such, Wakonda has the authority of cause and effect. The person who fails to keep sacred vows, the person who lies, or the person who fails in pity and compassion, will be touched by Wakonda in the same way that the forces of nature come back upon a person who ignores them. Fletcher and La Flesche report:
 
Not only were the events in a person's life
decreed and controlled by Wakonda, but
man's emotions were attributed to the same
source. An old man said, “Tears were made
by Wakonda as a relief to our human nature;
Wakonda made joy and he also made tears!”
An aged man, standing in the presence of
death, said, “From my earliest years I
remember the sound of weeping; I have
heard it all my long life and shall hear it
until I die. There will be partings as long as
man lives on the earth - Wakonda has willed
it to be so!”[5]
 
The expression of emotion is an integral part of Omaha ceremony. The Keeper of a particular ceremony wept whenever there was a break in the ritual order for which he was responsible. He wept because he trusted that the compassion of Wakonda will always send someone to wipe away the tears.
 
Omaha people pray to Wakonda in times of need. “A man would take a pipe and go alone to the hills; there he would silently offer smoke and utter the call, Wakonda Hol......women did not use the pipe when praying; their appeals were made directly, without any intermediary.”[6]
 
Wakonda is emotion as well as intelligence. It is a compassionate as well as an intelligent integrity suffused throughout the universe. Wakonda is both compassionate to people and a reflection of the compassion that exists within them.
 
It seems appropriate to end with stories of beginnings. ln mythic time, beginning and end are inherent in every moment of experience. Whatever spiritual traditions may guide us as individuals, we each carry within us a speck of the world that Muskrat brought up from the primordial ocean of our beginnings as a species. The traditions of animism did not die with the rise of civilization and its “great” religious faiths. The world of nature is still alive with meaning. Indigenous traditions continue to offer us knowledge and power. “We are in need of that intelligence now as we have never been before. Our civilization has brought into existence the monstrous power of self-destruction. Our cultural intelligence has lost touch with the sapient intelligence we all have, as members of a species that is “wise and full of knowledge.” Although we possess exponentially increasing amounts of information, we are not necessarily any wiser or more full of knowledge than our Neolithic ancestors. Their spirits live as we continue to thrive on the planet they left for us, and we are responsible for the living planet that will give life to the generations that follow.

NOTES
 
[1] Fletcher, Alice C. and Francis La Flesche, The Omaha Tribe, Washington, 1911: Bureau of American of Ethnography, 27th Annual Report, p.134; p.597 [2], p.134 [3], p.599 [4], p.598 [5], p.599 [6]
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Reprint from The Journal of Wild Culture, Spring 1989,
Illustrations by Julia Blushak.
Brian Fawcett (1944 - 2022) was a Toronto raconteur and author who was very active in the Canadian literary scene. Robin Ridington is professor emeritus of Anthropology at UBC, and has worked with the Dunne-za people since 1964. 

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising:
Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community"
an award-winning book that explores strategies for intercultural
competency, healing our relationships with Turtle Island First Nations, uncolonization, recovering an ecocentric worldview, rewilding, creating a sustainable future and reclaiming peaceful co-existence in Earth Community.
Available from Stone Circle Press or Amazon. 
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ECO-AGONY

11/21/2023

2 Comments

 

a photo essay ​- otonabee watershed, kawarthas, ontario

PEGI EYERS

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"EARTH-HOLDER"
Eco-agony is a punch to the gut, is the shock and sorrow of losing the beloved, and is a grief older than time. It is witnessing the beloved being killed, destroyed or eroded, for no good reason.  It is a terrible heartbreak that never fully heals. But who are the beloved?  They are my kin – the trees, plants, flowers, animals, birds, rocks and meadows - the landscapes of home, and eco-agony is only possible with a deep heart connection. To know that each being in nature is alive and sentient, with spirit, emotion, body and mind equal to my own, is to be captivated by the most powerful love. Beyond all reason, admiration for the perfection in nature – a weaving of form, colour and movement in ultimate beauty – must be the truest target of the human heart.  Whether we know it or not, what we love in nature is a reflection of our own divinity and perfection. Beings in the wild carry a freshness, spontaneity and innocence that we remember, a deep time knowing from before the rupture of civilization. When we have an open heart, Earth Community returns our love in countless ways - either obvious, or more finely-tuned to our intuitive and spiritual senses. 

I have always known that the currency of nature, and of all creation, is LOVE – each being in nature endlessly giving and nurturing the other.  And the greatest sacrifice of all, is to give one’s life so that another may live. There is a harmonic balance in this collaboration, a vibration of joy and sweet synergy - but this intricate network is NOT the way of our humancentric society.  Eco-agony is grief upon grief, from witnessing the dominance and cruelty perpetuated by human beings.  It is not a simple sadness or regret.  It is the memory of each beloved and how they disappeared.  It is holding their ghostly forms in my psyche. It is a desolate loneliness, and a feeling that an attack on the beloved is also an attack on me. It is compounded by not “owning” the land, and by being powerless in the face of ecocide.  Eco-agony is being unable to make the decision that could save the life of the beloved.  Eco-agony is carried over time, as a terrible witness to gratuitous and deliberate carnage. Acute PTSD happens in the killing field, and then morphs into the interwoven and ongoing conditions of eco-agony and eco-anxiety. 
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"ECO-AGONY ALTAR"
Branches from beloved trees lost forever, Silver Maple leaves, bones, feathers, porcupine quills, stones, herbs, sweetgrass, sage, tobacco, bird's nest, snakeskin, fur, driftwood, barnboard, seaweed, shells and baskets.  
Since 2012 I have been in the farmhouse on the hill – a drumlin actually - with breathtaking views, and below, fields, hedgerows and forests receding for miles in all directions. I am truly blessed to have found an intimacy with this place, and to be part of such a gorgeous (and embattled) ecosystem. Up on the hill, the vast panorama of sun, sky, cloudscape, moon and stars takes center stage. There is no barrier between the land and the cosmos, and one is immersed in the direct experience and full range of nature’s expression - from bucolic summer days to five alarm blizzards, to thunderstorms replete with lightning bolts that rival mythic tales. Up on the hill the movement is constant, with the  light changing, sky shifting, and  clouds drifting in daily patterns. The breeze over the hill is persistent – warm and caressing in summer or roaring like a vengeful spirit in winter.  Sounds and voices drift up from the farms below, and clear as a bell, music carries all the way from summer concerts in the city. The wind transmits messages from other places too, and listening hard, I can hear the whispers of traumatic events, and what other kin are saying.

Here on the hill, the wildlife have made their way. Over the years there have been visitations from deer, fawns, foxes, raccoons, wild turkeys, chipmunks, squirrels, frogs, snakes, bats, butterflies and countless tribes of birds and insects. Down in the back fields there are deer trails and burrows in the long grass. The peepers call in the early spring from the wetlands, summer fireflies light up the meadows, and a cacophony of crickets fill the warm days and nights. There is evidence of coyotes everywhere, and their calls, howls and quarrels in the night have become a comfort, a marker of the constancy of nature and the wild spirit thriving still.     

Many birds come and go on the hill, and birdsong is usually the backdrop of my days. Eco-agony is shifting baseline syndrome, as the flocks of cowbirds, geese, seagulls, ravens, vultures and swallows have diminished. Extreme weather events on migration routes caused by climate change, are taking a toll. There are so many heartbreaks I have witnessed, in one short decade that a “list” is the only way to express the pain.  They did not deserve to die, for “sport," on a “whim” or for financial gain – that is evil perpetuated by human beings.  Eco-agony is a catalogue, still ongoing, of my kin now gone - when they passed, and if known, a description of their killers.  Not only was I the only witness, but the only human that seemed to care. 
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"CHINESE LANTERN ALTAR"
​Bountiful season, Stone Circle Farm, 2023

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​As a new gate is carelessly installed in the neighbour’s pasture, a section of tall Lilac shrubs are destroyed. My shock turns to horror turns to anger turns to grief, and then to praise.  Every year like clockwork, the astounding Lilac marks the joy of spring with fresh colour and  juicy flowers, and the Lilac fragrance blesses us with new hope and new life.
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Contemporary farmers have exchanged chainsaws and labour for mega machines with a claw, that pluck forests out of the ground like so many blades of grass.  Next door to Stone Circle Farm, a hedgerow beside a track is pulled out, the magic of the spirits and lifeforms lost forever. The mega-machine tosses the trees, shrubs and plants into a pile, and the wider roadway allows  the neighbours to bring in and install a giant solar array. Watching from a distance, I feel the agony of living things taken before their prime. The irony of destroying nature to provide “green power” does not escape me.  It is even worse when the ecocide happens in spring – what kind of willful ignorance destroys first growth?  My shock turns to horror turns to anger turns to grief, and then to praise.  As with every farm, the ancient shapes of the undulating hills, the wisdom in rocks and deep soils, and the sacred underground waterways remain - the eternal watchers, still in place, resilient (for now) to damage perpetuated by humans. The green fuse is eternal, and the green world will continue to rewild and renew itself, long after we are gone.     
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Another solar array is installed - this one much closer - on the site of beloved nature walks, right across the road. Major construction is involved, the road is widened, sacred Hawthorn trees are uprooted, and rocks are moved from where they sat for hundreds of years.  But worse of all are the Hydro men, who in the course of connecting the array to the grid destroy two of a rare Red Pine community, the crowning glory on the ridge. The largest one is at least 150 years old.  Many other trees, large and small, are destroyed in the hedgerow under the wires. How dare anything grow, in the path of this archaic technology!  The carnage brings me to fits of sobbing. I am suffering, and the sound of a chainsaw anywhere in the region begins to make me disturbed and distraught. Over time, my shock turns to horror turns to anger turns to grief, and then to praise. Mighty pines, you always stand  firm, and provide a sacred network for all the species in the forest. Thank you for the magnificent sound the wind makes when rushing through your branches, bringing messages from afar. Thank you for your scent and beauty throughout the cycle of the seasons, and for your carpet of needles that nourish the forest floor. 
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During the years on the hill, so many plentiful and noisy flocks of Canada Geese soar overhead that I run out of the house to greet them, heart open at their majesty, and once in a while they circle around, at my call and response. Then it is hunting season. I see two men with rifles prowling in the field down below. I cannot believe what I am witnessing. There are geese flying overhead, following the unerring compass of their route, and I try to warn them. Of course my urgent calls don’t make any sense and they fly right into danger. Shots ring out, a couple of geese fall, the men run over, grab their trophies, and swing them around by the neck. I am sickened by this display of toxic masculinity, and a dark rage overcomes me. Over time, my shock turns to horror turns to anger turns to grief, and then to praise. Beloved Canadian Geese, you teach us trust, and organic patterns of community and cooperation that have lasted for millennia. Thank you for showing us how to take turns as leaders, and for lending your wings as we soar on currents of love and protection. As beings who are grounded on this sacred Earth, you will always inspire us to fly higher, and make our own pilgrimages and migrations.
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It is Samhain, and a wicked wind takes the roof off the century barn here at Stone Circle Farm. From the kitchen inside the house, I can hear it crashing to the ground, like a freight train twisting through a screaming tunnel. It is terrifying. Of course the farmer-landlord takes it personally.  A blow to his barn is a blow to his ego. Over the winter a lone man picks through the rubble, hired to clean up and take the precious barnboard away. The old stone walls of the barn are intact, but there is no aesthetic interest in preserving them. The site of the barn, in a lovely grove of trees, would make a tableau for events in the summer, but there is no vision in the farmer's mentality for this kind of trendy or rustic amenity.  So on the summer solstice to be exact, a mega-machine is dropped off, outfitted with a giant claw. The next morning I watch nervously as it bulldozes across the land, and starts to alter the landscape.  Despite my best heroic efforts and a number of frantic calls, at the end of the day most of my beloved tree friends near the barn are gone, young and old, violently uprooted and tossed aside by the horrific claw. The beautiful green space is gone. The materials that used to be a colonial barn - stone, wood, metal and living vines - have been deposited in a huge tangle. The dumping ground itself, at the very edge of the acreage, was created by destroying the place I used to call "the sacred grove."  To the workmen, the farmer, and the farmer's family, my eco-anxiety is a huge joke. Over many weeks, my shock turns to horror turns to anger turns to grief, and then to praise.  ​It is a delight to fall in love with an individual tree, or other being in Earth Community, each a unique personality the world will never see again.
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The next day I assume the mega-machine will leave after changing the landscape forever, but the assault is not over. ​ Mid-morning, from my upstairs office, I hear a mighty crack like a tree trunk breaking.  I run outside, around the house and down to the woodland separating the fields. The mega-machine is destroying a mature tree border that has been in place for at least 100 years. There are no words.  I halt the ecocide and just stand there in shock, preventing them from working, until the farmer-landlord brings threats, screams and insults. It only takes a couple of hours and the forest border is gone. I have gone numb, and shaking in sorrow and rage, hide myself away from this evil. And yet, in the cool of the evening when the workmen are gone, I slowly go back down to see the damage. I can feel the trauma and fear emanating from the land, and giant tree trunks, branches, and living leaves have been unceremoniously shoved into a massive pile. It is a horrendous sight. This is eco-agony, and all that it implies. The farmer has decided to take the opportunity with the hiring of the mega-machine to clear the hedgerows between his fields.  The beautiful woodland, plus another green tunnel, an essential corridor for local wildlife with antique apple trees and split rail fences - are all gone.  The land is barren.  And ecocide is a criminal act.[1]
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Over many weeks, my shock turns to horror turns to anger and then to grief. I declare myself Earth-Holder of this specific place, as there is no other person bearing witness to the land on a soul level.  Nobody cares.  I alone hold the stories of doom. As the land suffers so do I. My eco-agony is akin to the grief held in the bones of the land from other traumas. Visiting the wounded places that I witnessed being destroyed, feels like a crime scene. Even with the deep love and animist bond between us in peaceful times, I was not able to stop the carnage. There is no “making of mandalas” or other whimsical creation of earth art to make me feel better.  There is a lingering guilt that I belong to a species capable of such ignorance and brutality. There is no redemption. But to the same degree that I adore my beloved kin, I now abhor their murderers. My overwhelming response is anger, and later, when I express that fury to the attackers, I pay a serious price.

For those reading these words, and have valid suggestions for healing eco-agony, I thank you for your kindness in advance. My immersive love for Mother Earth is the healing process for my own trauma. But it is difficult, when the land is hurting. To carry the scars of deep wounding and tremors of ecocide, may be the mark of a being that cares deeply for the land. Time and rejuvenation, and the power of the green fuse heals all wounds, and my positive outlook on life is just fine.  But as I consider the dynamite-blasted fissures in the rocks, the fields that undergo serial rape, the clear-cut old growth forests, and the oceans full of plastic, obtaining human perfection is hardly the point. Being a witness is also part of the divine plan, and to work toward shifting the worldview of our society to an overwhelming love and respect for the land. On this beleaguered planet, there is nothing more important.

Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is
  the natural way love honors what it misses.   
Martin Prechtel

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With appreciation and gratitude to Robert "Greenman" Hood
​for installation assistance and photography. 

NOTE [1] on Earth Rights Organizations -
Act, Donate, Spread the Word!
Stop Ecocide International, the initiative founded by Barrister and author
​Polly Higgins.    www.stopecocide.earth         
Ecocide Law, comprehensive resource hub providing a regularly updated collection of material relating to ecocide law, including definitions, history, publications, research, existing laws and media coverage.
https://ecocidelaw.com
The Ecocide Project at The Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.    http://surl.li/nkobu
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, with Maude Barlow, Cormac Cullinan, Natalia Greene, Bill Twist, Vandana Shiva, Michelle Maloney and
Liz Rivers.  A worldwide movement creating human communities that
respect and defend the rights of nature.   www.garn.org
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​​Pegi Eyers is the author of  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, an award-winning book that explores strategies for social justice, uncolonization, ethnocultural identity, building land-emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
Available from Stone Circle Press or Amazon
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Eco-Agony
​Giclee Prints
​​🕸

Earth-Holder

Giclée Print on archival paper, rich colour, ready-to-frame, image size 6X9 inches, mounted on foam core with plastic sleeve for shipping.


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Eco-Agony Altar

Giclée Print on archival paper, rich colour, ready-to-frame, image size 6X9 inches, mounted on foam core with plastic sleeve for shipping.


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Chinese Lantern Harvest Altar

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Eco-Agony - Presentation

11/20/2023

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Pegi Eyers at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) 

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Our Emerging Selves: Exploring Self and Nature through Creative Practice
(HDS Working Group)

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It was incredibly exciting to share my recent photo-essay "Eco-Agony" with my co-members in our Harvard Divinity School working group! I created a video presentation incorporating my personal spiritual journey with more recent artworks. The range of feedback and responses included comments such as "grounded and at one with the earth," "a metaphor for birth," "the fetal position," "birthing the new earth-connected human," "a sense of awe," and "grieving as a core piece of the work." For me, the underlying intent of "Eco-Agony" is the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature - one that is grounded in love and care. To engage with loving the land, is to experience the land loving us back.

Watch the Recording
ECO-AGONY by Pegi Eyers

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Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for uncolonization, rejecting Empire, social justice, ethnocultural identity, Apocalypse Studies, building land- emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
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Decolonization & Uncolonization Defined: Implications for Ecopsychology

10/1/2023

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PEGI EYERS

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Decolonization is a relatively new concept for the ecopsychology community. This blog sets out the main definitions for decolonization and uncolonization today, to assist with actions moving forward, both in thought and action. The liberation of the colonized group from the nation state, or the removal of the Settler, do not apply to the dynamics within ecopsychology, but much can be gleaned from other definitions of decolonization that center Indigenous resistance, sovereignty, land restoration, and repatriations. Through solidarity and the Allyship framework, opportunities abound to assist First Nations in the struggle, and other initiatives are flourishing such as ethnocultural recoveries and the re-indigenization of worldviews that challenge colonial thinking and behavior. At the very least, those in the ecopsychology community have excellent opportunities right now to incorporate a fuller awareness of the ongoing colonizer/colonized relationship, model the restoration of nature-relatedness for all people, and educate others on good intercultural competency skills with First Nations.
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DECOLONIZATION & UNCOLONIZATION DEFINED
​IMPLICATIONS FOR ECOPSYCHOLOGY

With brand-new, and often confusing conversations on decolonization happening today in the ecopsychology sphere, a reminder of baseline definitions can be helpful before widening out to other interpretations. There are movements happening right now across ethnic and cultural lines that use "decolonization" to describe a wide array of practices. As applied to ecopsychology, do we need to re-examine how we use the term? From my positionality as a Settler in Canada of Scots Gaelic descent, I have identified seven principal definitions of "decolonization” as starting points for discussion, and for action moving forward.

(1) Break Free
​
The first and most basic meaning for “decolonization” is when a nation seeks to become free of the oppressor/oppressed regime imposed on them by a colonial power, and to physically and legally undo the colonial state or Empire, that has dominated their society. Dependency can be transformed to independence through nonviolent revolution or national liberation wars, and there have been several active periods of decolonization in modern times. For example, the breakup, or dissolution, of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century, the German, Ottoman and Russian Empires following WWI, and the Soviet Union following the October Revolution.
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2) Settler Removal
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The next profound meaning for “decolonization” is for the colonizer to “de-colonize” - that is,withdraw and leave the lands of the oppressed they have taken by stealth or force. Here in the Americas, there is a justified belief among First Nations that the colonizer (folks of European descent) should return to their lands of origin. So far, there are a few progressive Settlers who are exploring their own removal, yet for the majority this is far beyond our capabilities, or even our desire.

Everyday life in the homogenous American or Canadian nation-state does not support the yearning for a European homeland, or any substantial links. For many members of the diaspora the trail to Europe has grown cold, as our motherlines have been thriving on Turtle Island for 12+ generations. So, if it is impossible to leave the Americas (as much as we may want to) it can be helpful for Settlers to think of this directive symbolically, and to ask ourselves what exactly an America or a Canada would look like, if we were able to reduce our Eurocentric imposition, dominance, supremacy and power? And what would a re-indigenized society look like, if First Nations were in the ascendant position? In the face of such realities, we can be grateful for alternative approaches being offered by First Nations leaders such as Robert Lovelace (Tslagi/Algonquin).

"Indigenous peoples and Settlers have our own histories, where those histories have led us, and where the possible futures might lie for us together. Because guess what? We are here and now, and we’re not going to change that fact, but what we can do is change the possible futures that we face." [1]
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(3) Return the Land

For Indigenous freedom fighters, scholars and community peoples, decolonization cannot happen until the ancestral lands are returned. As the source for cultural keystone(s), epistomologies, TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), food sources and medicine for good health, the land is deeply embedded in the communal heart and soul. At the root of Indigenous community, the priority to care for and protect the land applies to the Web of all Life, and the Seven Generations yet to come. In marked contrast, Empire has failed miserably in the protection of pristine ecosystems. Now, all people - including Settlers who reject the paradigm of endless growth and recognize the values of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) - can support the repatriation of lands to the original Earthkeepers and First Nations of Turtle Island.

In the truest sense of the word, for colonized Indigenous people
“decolonization is not a metaphor.”[2] Those in the dominant society are being asked to avoid using “decolonization” to refer to ideas or actions that do not hold Indigenous resistance, sovereignty, land restoration, and other repatriations at the center. As “decolonize” refers specifically to the repatriation of land and sovereignty to Indigenous peoples, Settlers are being urged to use alternate terms such as “uncolonize” instead.
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(4) Resistance & Resurgence

As a baseline in the Americas for colonized Indigenous people, “decolonization” is the active principle that attempts to undo the Settler State on a daily basis, both from within and without. Eurocentric dominance, white supremacy, racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, slavery, land theft, imposed treaties, broken promises, relocation, forced assimilation, government manipulation, corporate control, psychic violence, and all the associated forms of oppression that continue to impact Indigenous people in the Americas are identified, confronted, called out, and resisted. One step at a time - and marking victories along the way - decolonization attempts to undo the colonization of the individual, the community and the land by protest, social justice activism, civil disobedience, education, cultural projects and legal battles. At the same time that the Settler State is challenged, the necessary recovery and rejuvenation of pre-colonial heritage, language and tradition is taking place, with the further preservation of culture(s) ongoing. A focus on health and healing translates into relationships that realign individuals and entire communities with their Original Instructions. The majority of references to “decolonization” by First Nations and their allies refer to these active principles of resistance and resurgence, and the ongoing education that supports and empowers those actions.
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(5) Neurodecolonization [3]
 
The minds of all people who navigate within Empire have been occupied, or colonized, by the memes and values of the Settler State. In today's era of massive change and climate  disaster, root causes such as monotheism, imperialism, white superiority, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, corporatism, resource extraction and binary political systems are rapidly being exposed as outdated frauds. Even if we have learned to thrive within the simulacrum of these human-created systems, the fact remains that Empire is toxic to all life, including our own. The conditioning and domestication we have received over centuries has translated into many artificial beliefs and habits. Already well-known to ecopsychologists today, here are some key examples of colonized behavior.

Placing human entitlement and humancentric needs above Earth Community,
•  a disconnect from nature and the normalization of urbanity,
•  control and domination showing up in our own lives with “me”
instead of “we” behaviors,
• implicit or overt judgement of people who don't fit the white cisheteropatriarchy ableist “norm,”
• intense competition and the “cult of the individual,” resulting in narcissism linked to low self-esteem,
• a measure of personal value situated on a hierarchy of wealth or class,
• a reliance on consumerism to provide “fulfillment” with fleeting pleasures, experiences and material objects,
• developing self-identity from the workplace, commercial enterprises and other disconnects from the real,
• a lack of rites of passage, low emotional IQ and infantile behavior throughout the adult years,
• a fear of the natural cycles of life such as birth, adolescence, aging and death.
 
The process of neurodecolonization challenges the memes of Empire (western thinking) in our individual or collective consciousness, and replaces that ideology or action with pre-colonial, or ancestral thinking. For ourselves, our clients and our communities, the move toward life-enhancing and creative patterns, and compassionate and inclusive solutions, can be a life-long undertaking. The key point to remember when engaged with the ongoing neurodecolonization of the psyche is that humans are not fundamentally flawed creatures. That is a myth perpetuated by industrial capitalism “in order to naturalize the behavior of violent imperialists. They are the insane.” [4]
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(6) Re-indigenization

Neurodecolonization and the reprogramming of the psyche can naturally lead to an interconnection with the evolving processes of all life, and return us to our essential bio-lineage. We are invited tolearn from, and emulate the values of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) systems without indulging in cultural appropriation, and a natural extension of this work is to recover specific indigeneities based on our own ethnoculture(s), as suggested by Zainab Amadahy.

"If the aim of decolonization is to rid ourselves of colonial mindsets why not centralize our own wisdom traditions when they enable us to think and act in ways that support our communities, including Mother Earth, Our Relations and the Great Spirit?"[5]

Decolonization insists that we understand ourselves as we existed before modern civilization, and that implementing holistic solutions are vital to the survival of the human race. In these times of unlimited access to information, it is now possible to source a traditional earth-emergent way of life from our own root ancestral heritage(s) or European Indigenous Knowledge (EIK). For all people and disciplines including ecopsychology, the most exciting movement of our time is underway – to reject Empire and its toxic hegemonies, and to shift toward rewilding, spiritually-based ecological wisdom, uncolonized community, bioregionalism (if possible), and inclusion in the Sacred Circle of all Life. To recover our pre-colonial eco-selves we must stop taking our cues from the dominant society, and become spontaneously directed by the natural world.
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(7) We Have All Been Colonized

By the time our ancestors arrived on the shores of Turtle Island, honoring natural law and living in balance with Earth Community had already been outdated concepts for centuries in Europe. Our ancestors were part of a social organization based on hierarchy and control, and instead of taking their cues from the Indigenous civilizations already thriving in the “new world” they went on to repeat the colonial pattern. For our "woke" generation today, the challenge is how to approach reconciliation and make amends in a meaningful way. For those offering ecopsychology, nature relatedness or nature therapy services, here are a few questions to ponder as we engage with the process of uncolonization.

• Where do you see yourself on the decolonization continuum? Do you belong to the historic colonizer Settler Society or the colonized group?

• Are you recovering your connection to a landbase that has nurtured your people for generations?

• How can reparations be made to First Nations?

• Do you center Indigenous resistance in your uncolonization work?

• How are you educating your own cohort on issues of racism and oppression?

• Do you consider the recovery of your own heritage part of the uncolonization process?

• What habits in your thinking, or daily life, can be uncolonized?

• How can you dedicate more time to the rewilding of both soul and place, and the protection of wild nature?

At the local level, the popular “acknowledgement of territory” before public events provides a solid foundation for the uncolonization of self, family, community and the wider world. After decades of denial and ignorance, the unadorned truth of this “first step” declaration centers Indigenous reality, and is essential to the uncolonization journey. Find out whose land you are on, and honor it! [6]

In the Kawarthas region of Ontario where I live, this short statement serves as an accurate land acknowledgement.

"I acknowledge that I am living in the traditional territory of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg, stand in solidarity with First Nations  land claim processes, support First Nations sovereignty and cultural recovery efforts, and respect the traditional values of the Curve Lake, Hiawatha and Alderville First Nations." [7]
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Implications for Ecopsychology

In terms of the seven definitions, how can practicing ecopsychologists & ecotherapists engage with “decolonization” more accurately in both thought and action? Points (1) Break Free and (2) Settler Removal do not apply to the dynamics within ecopsychology, and point (3) Return the Land reminds us that many First Nations feel “decolonization” must be applied to the total reclamation of Indigenous land and culture only.

At the time of this writing non-native people are still being cautioned to use the term “decolonization” sparingly, if at all. The key document “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang [8] has been re-published, circulated, and discussed all over the world. In many spaces, non-native people are not using “decolonization as a metaphor,” but others continue to use “decolonize” to refer to all kinds of activities, without consideration of the context, or respect for boundaries. Unfortunately, “decolonize” does seem to be the perfect term for the work people are doing, both in native and non-native spaces. The terms non-colonial, anti-colonial, post-colonial, or de-programming do not seem to carry the same meaning. Until the work of Tanya Rodriguez [9] an alternative term was incredibly difficult to employ. Her passionate stance in recent years offers “uncolonize” as the perfect term to describe the work folks of all ethnicities are doing, to unlearn colonial conditioning. I have adopted “uncolonize” wholeheartedly, and do not use “decolonize” in my own work. In reality, only people actively decolonizing from a nation-state would be correct in using the term “decolonize.” We are also reminded in point (3) Return the Land of the role that Settlers can play in every sphere of society, to bring change and assist Indigenous struggles with real action.

As point (4) Resistance & Resurgence outlines, decolonization is a set of ideas and actions embodied by First Nations and Indigenous community worldwide, from the grassroots to the highest level of NGO’s, international courtrooms, and governing bodies. Within this praxis, a possible role for ecopsychology practitioners today is to engage with Allyship theory, educate others on the principles of allyship, and lead by example by showing up for regional protests and movements.

“Allies are people who recognize the unearned privilege they receive from society's patterns of injustice and take responsibility for changing those patterns.” [1]
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​TANYA RODRIGUEZ   Decolonization, A Guidebook
For Settlers Living On Stolen Land 

In summary, points (5), (6) and (7) present ways the ecopsychology community can incorporate social justice, Allyship, pre-colonial thinking and ancestral worldviews into our practices and offerings. And yet, Settlers are still faced with many unresolved ambiguities in reference to our own connection to the land, and whose land are we on. Almost without exception, dialogues in ecopsychology on spending time in nature, continue to neglect the original First Peoples in approach and speculation. This neglect reinforces the stereotypical colonial notion that Indigenous people are a “thing of the past” and not part of communities that are surviving and thriving all around us. Also, the oft-suggested engagement with “spirits of place” by ecopsychologists could be considered by First Nations to be an assumption of epistemological and metaphysical superiority. We must acknowledge that the spirits in the land are already part of diverse Indigenous Knowledge (IK) systems, and may or may not be open to interloper peoples. Many metaphors in our European traditions like folklore, storytelling and  deep ecology are not transferable to landscapes in the Americas, and we must be willing to sit with those ambiguities. Ecopsychology may be finding “new” ways to connect with the land, but approaches can be conspicuously temporal, and not acknowledge that millions of First Peoples already hold strong spatial connections and beliefs. Many of the dynamics in the definitions (1) – (7) have an ethical dimension, and make an automatic appeal for a strong moral code, or position. For example, when ecopsychologists offer therapies, how can the non-acknowledgement, or invisibility, of First Nations be reversed? Perhaps there are ways to treat First Nations in addition to our other clients, for the PTSD, demoralization, soul loss and crippling ennui that have developed from the same separation from the landbase, the discipline of ecopsychology is designed to recover. In our nature therapy offerings, perhaps there is also a way to mention that First Nations have thousands of years of TEK embedded in place, and a much deeper and more nuanced connection to the land than Settlers. We need to be aware that statements and actions that do not exhibit our knowledge of these political realities, may be construed as Settler Colonialism all over again.
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And finally, for land acquisition “nature preserve” projects that offer nature therapy to the public, especially projects ostensibly partnering with First Nations, it may be a good idea to take the time and energy to assist First Nations in their very real and ongoing struggles with the settler state to recognize foundational First Nations claims to the land, the fallacy of Settler land ownership assumptions, the inadequacy of “treaties” as any meaningful guideline to land use or occupancy, the absence of treaties in many places, the ongoing attempts by the nation state to dissolve First Nations sovereignty, and the colonial agenda to assimilate First Nations into a fictional “multiculturalism.”

As part of the re-balancing that is occurring in western society, the field of ecopsychology focuses on excellent methods for breaking the stranglehold of industrial society.

​Compared to the eons that human beings have spent embedded in the primal matrix and in close kinship with the other-than-human world, our current malaise of modernity is the result of quite recent domestication, and ecopsychology reminds us of familiar strategies for overcoming the emotional trauma of our alienation from the Earth. May we explore the psychological benefits of nature relatedness, and introduce practices that ultimately reconnect us to our “ecological unconscious,” at the same time that we practice good intercultural competency skills, mutual respect, and peaceful co-existence with First Nations.
​

​Reprint from Academia.edu // February 23, 2023

​                                       NOTES
​
[1] Robert Lovelace (Tslagi/Algonquin), The Architecture of a Decolonized Society: Reindigenizing the Self, Community & Environment, Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC), Trent University, Peterborough, ON, 2013
 
[2] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Unsettling America:Decolonization in Theory & Practice, 2012
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/decolonization-is-not-a-metaphor  

[3] Holding the values of western civilization, the colonization that happened on Turtle Island was rooted in structures thousands of years old. These structures have been, and continue to be patriarchal, imperialist, white supremacist, abled-supremacist, cisheteronormative and capitalist. Decolonization is both an outward process through resistance and action, and an inward process that examines deeply embedded patterns of thinking and behavior (otherwise known as internalized oppression). The term “neurodecolonization” as created by First Nations professor Michael Yellow Bird is a perfect description of this process. He requests that all references to the term “neurodecolonization” include an attribution to his work.
Neurodecolonization and Indigenous Mindfulness
www.indigenousmindfulness.com 

[4] Derrick Jensen, Comment on social media, Deep Green Resistance, 2015

[5] Zainab Amadahy (African American, Cherokee, Seminole), Why Indigenous and Racialized Struggleswill Always be Appendixed by the Left, Unsettling Settlers: Where We Talk about Unsettling Our Settler Selves, 2012
http://unsettlingsettlers.wordpress.com 

[6] Native Land, 2019 https://native-land.ca  Native Land is a survey of Indigenous territories worldwide maintained by Victor G. Temprano on Mapster. The maps are constantly being refined by user input.

[7] Pegi Eyers,  Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community, Stone Circle Press, 2016   www.stonecirclepress.com 

[8] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice, 2012
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/decolonization-is-not-a-metaphor  

[9] Tanya Rodriguez (Boriqua), Tres Rosa on Medium, Decolonization, A Guidebook For Settlers Living On Stolen Land, December 26, 2020
https://gdiriseup.medium.com/decolonization-a-guidebook-for-settlers-living-on-stolen-land-57d4e4c04bbb    Uncolonizing Decolonization, April 18, 2012
https://gdiriseup.medium.com/uncolonizing-decolonization-6a88044f7589 

[10] Bishop, Anne, Becoming an Ally: Breaking the Cycle of Oppression in People, Zed Books, 2002
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Read more on social justice, ethnocultural recovery, settler re-landing, rewilding, ancestral connections, sacred land and animism in 
Ancient Spirit Rising:
​Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community
Available from Amazon >here<
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Spiritual Extractivism

9/27/2023

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An excellent set of resources on cultural appropriation published by Unsettling America~!
From the Unsettling America archives:

What is Cultural Appropriation?  PEGI EYERS
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2017/04/26/what-is-cultural-appropriation

What, Exactly, Is Cultural Appropriation (And How Is It Harmful)?
MARINA WATANABE
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/what-exactly-is-cultural-appropriation-and-how-is-it-harmful/

Wanting to be Indian: When Spiritual Searching Turns into Cultural Theft  MYKE JOHNSON
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/wanting-to-be-indian

What’s the Difference Between Cultural Exchange and Cultural Appropriation?  JARUNE UWUJAREN
https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/whats-the-difference-between-cultural-exchange-and-cultural-appropriation

Cultural Appreciation or Cultural Appropriation? A text on culture, respect, allyship, and racism.  VEGETABLES FOR BREAKFAST
​https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/cultural-appreciation-or-cultural-appropriation

More.....https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/tag/cultural-appropriation
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Animist Quotes: Exploring the Animist Philosophy of Life

9/18/2023

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Reprint from "Mindful Ecotourism" by Kyle Pearce, April 29, 2022  www.mindfulecotourism.com/animism-quotes

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Some of the best quotes illuminating an experiential philosophy and ecological worldview rooted in nature.

1. “The experience of animistic consciousness wipes away the Cartesian distinction of an independent, rational self surrounded by a mechanical, dead universe. Gone is the hardened dualism of self and other, opening us to a form of apprehension that pre-historian Jean Clottes described as fluid and permeable: 'Fluidity means the categories that we have, man, woman, horse, tree, etc., can shift. A tree may speak. A man can get transformed into an animal and the other way around. The concept of permeability is that there are no barriers, so to speak, between the world where we are and the world of spirits.'

The world of spirit, for me, isn’t limited to ghosts, holy or otherwise. It means the innate, unique sentience of all beings, now hidden from us by the blinders of our a priori world view. In this way, animistic perspective is the great equalizer: you cannot poison the Earth if you instinctively recognize it as the organic extension of your own body and mind—indeed, as your body and mind.”    ― Robert M. Tindall

2. "Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed."      ― Graham Harvey

3. "The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are our biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity—then we will treat each one with greater respect. That is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective."    ― David Suzuki

4. "Animism is not a belief but a worldview: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It’s a statement about what you mean by 'sacred,' just as 'money can’t buy happiness' is a statement about what you mean by 'happiness.' To put it all very simply, Animism isn’t a belief system, it’s a value system."   ― Daniel Quinn

5. “Animism is the way humanity has been deeply connected to the land and its seasonal cycles for millennia, in rapport and conversation with the animals, plants, elements, ancestors and earth spirits. The opposite of animism is the 'cult of the individual' so celebrated in modern society, and the loss of the animist worldview is at the root of our spiritual disconnect and looming ecological crisis. Human beings are just one strand woven into the complex systems of Earth Community, and the animistic perspective is fundamental to the paradigm shift, and the recovery of our own ancestral wisdom.”
― Pegi Eyers

6. "The distinction between life and lifeless is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are an immortal part of us."   ― John Seed, Thinking Like a Mountain

7. “The elders were wise. They know that man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; they knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to a lack of respect for humans too.”
― Chief Luther Standing Bear from the Lakota Sioux

8. “This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.”    ― Plato, Timaeus

9. “The crisis is at root one of perception; we no longer see the cosmos as alive, nor do we any longer recognize that we are inseparable from the whole of nature, and from our earth as a living being. But there is hope, for as the crisis deepens, the call of anima mundi intensifies.”   ― Stephan Harding

10. "What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner

11. “People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself- the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect, the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.”   ― Masanobu Fukuoka

12. “Science is a dangerous gift unless it can be brought into contact with wisdom that resides in the sensual, intuitive and ethical aspects of our nature. For most non-Western cultures, nature is truly alive, and every entity within it is endowed with agency, intelligence and wisdom. This animistic perception is archetypal, ancient and primordial."    ― Robert Riversong

13. "Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
― David Abram

14. “Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.”   ― Zeena Schreck

15. “Life is a planetary level phenomenon and the Earth has been alive for at least 3000 million years. To me the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves.”   ― Lynn Margolis

16. “James Hillman so eloquently 'put it, 'It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.' A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy.”
― Stephen Harrod Buhner

17. “I was educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals.”   ― Jagadish Chandra Bose

18. “Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”  ― Erich Fromm

19. “You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.”   ―  Alan Watts

20. “There is no environment 'out there' that is separate from us. We can’t manage our impact on the environment if we are our surroundings. Indigenous people are absolutely correct: we are born of the earth and constructed from the four sacred elements of earth, air, fire and water. (Hindus list these four and add a fifth element, space.)”    ― David Suzuki

21. “Life is not separate from death. It only looks that way.”
— Blackfoot Proverb

22. "The nomadic gatherer-hunters live in an entirely sacred world. Their spirituality reaches as far as all of their relations. They know the animals and plants that surround them and not only the ones of immediate importance. They speak with what we would call 'inanimate objects,' but they can speak the same language. They know how to see beyond themselves and are not limited to the human languages that we hold so dearly. Their existence is grounded in place, they wander freely, but they are always home, welcome and fearless."
― Kevin Tucker

23. “The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”    ― Terence Mckenna

24. “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”   ― Chief Seattle

25. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eye of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”    ― William Blake
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26. “One thing to remember is to talk to the animals. If you do, they will talk back to you. But if you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.”    ― Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh Nation

27. “Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.”    ― George Washington Carver

28. “Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons. Persons are beings, rather than objects, who are animated and social towards others (even if they are not always sociable). Animism may involve learning how to recognize who is a person and what is not – because it is not always obvious and not all animists agree that everything that exists is alive or personal. However, animism is more accurately understood as being concerned with learning how to be a good person in respectful relationships with other persons.”    ― Graham Harvey

29. “Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.”    ― Hippocrates

30. “In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of a mountain, and so he drew strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock. And he had to put forth a great religious effort. For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos. mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into the immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion …..”   ― D.H. Lawrence

31. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”    ― Rumi

32. “The animistic perspective has a long and distinguished philosophical pedigree. For some eminent philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, and more recently Alfred North Whitehead, it was inconceivable that sentience (subjective consciousness) could ever emerge or evolve from wholly insentient (objective, physical) matter, for to propose this would be to believe in a fundamental division or inconsistency within the very fabric of reality itself.
Therefore each of these philosophers considered matter to be intrinsically sentient. The new animism that they espoused simply recognizes that the material world around us has always been a dimension of sensation and feelings–albeit sensations that may be very different from our own–and that each entity must be treated with respect for its own kind of experience.”
― Stephan Harding

33. "If we are to survive, we must learn a new way to live, or relearn an old way. There have existed, and for the time being still exist, many cultures whose members refuse to cut the vocal cords of the planet, and refuse to enter into the deadening deal which we daily accept as part of living. It is perhaps significant that prior to contact with Western Civilization many of these cultures did not have rape, nor did they have child abuse…. wish that we could say the same. It is perhaps significant that members of these cultures listen attentively (as though their lives depend on it, which of course they do) to what plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and stars have to say, and that these cultures have been able to do what we can only dream of, which is to live in dynamic equilibrium with the rest of the world."    ― Derrick Jenson, A Language Older Than Words

34. "Once the idea of a supernaturalistic creation is fully overcome, the idea returns that the universe must be self-organizing and therefore composed of self-moving parts. Also, insofar as dualistic assumptions are fully overcome and human experience is accepted as fully natural, it begins to seem probable that something analogous to our experience and self-movement is a feature of every level of nature."   ― David Ray Griffin

35. “Children arrive animists. They learn about life, themselves, and empathy by imagining the liveliness of everything they come into contact with.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

36. “Animism is a monist metaphysical stance, based upon the idea that mind and matter are not distinct and separate substances but an integrated reality, rooted in nature.”   ― Emma Restall Orr

37. “Everything in nature is alive and speaking. Our spiritual practice is about opening our eyes, ears and hearts to hear, understand, and communicate back. The elements, the Ancestors and the spirit beings that surround us want us to communicate with them. They want to work with us to heal the Earth, but they need our invitation.”   ― Starhawk

38. “Sympathy binds human beings to plants, animals, rocks and stars. Therefore they become beings rather than objects, fellows rather than things, and members in a circle of social relations.”   ― Peter Nabokov

39. “Animism, because it seeks to relate and converse with the world, rather than to define and control it, always renews itself. It wakes up every morning fresh and alive, and every evening it tucks itself to bed to dream again for the very first time. Since animism involves a relationship with the world, a living being that exists in the now, the present moment, what more relevant perspective could you find?”   ― Willem Larsen

40. “In tribal societies, there is so much to see and hear. The bear speaks, the river speaks, the rainbow signifies, the eclipse is a sign. The animistic personification of natural objects may be difficult for us to accept in any ‘literal’ way. Yet, judged solely on intellectual grounds, animism can be credited with a more sophisticated perception of physicality than Western Knowledge. Far from regarding matter as dead stuff, tribal societies perceive it as infused with mind, will, and intention.”   ― Theodore Roszak

41. “In the cosmology of the Haudenosaunee (often referred to as the Iroquois), the world around and all its features – rivers, trees, clouds, springs and mountains are regarded as alive, endowed with spirit and sensibility every bit as real as those of humans, and in fact of exactly the same type and quality as a human’s. Among the Iroquois this was called Orenda, the invisible force inherent in all parts of the universe.”   ― Kirkpatrick Sale

42. “We bring breaths of open spaces and hills, of sunshine, showers, and breezes. All of these are part of your being. Even if you live in the midst of a busy city, these natural things are home to you. They are part of the atmosphere of this Earth, part of the surroundings in which you live and grow. Even if your life and thinking are completely enmeshed in the human world, still you are part of our Deva world, which works for the perfect flowering of all life. This is your birthright. You may turn your back on it, but someday you will learn the truth and live in connection with all life on this planet. Only then will you tap your highest potential.”   ― Gentian Deva

43. “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe … We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
― Albert Einstein

44. “When we speak of Nature it is wrong to forget that we are ourselves a part of Nature. We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.”   ― Henri Matisse

45. “The term environment refers to the external conditions or surroundings of organisms, whereas ecology refers to the relationships between organisms and their external conditions or surroundings, that is, their environment. The prefix eco (for 'ecology') is therefore more appropriate for my purposes than the adjective environmental because the kind of approach that I will be developing herein is one that attempts to break down the rigid distinctions that we tend to draw between ourselves and our environment. Instead of seeking to maintain these distinctions, this approach attempts to foster a greater awareness of the intimate and manifold relationships that exist between what we conventionally designate as self and what we conventionally designate as environment."
― Warwick Fox

46. “The basic pattern of life is a network. Whenever you see life, you see networks. The whole planet, what we can term ‘Gaia’ is a network of processes involving feedback tubes. And the world of bacteria is critical to the details of these feedback processes, because bacteria play a crucial role in the regulation of the whole Gaian system.”   ― Fritjof Capra

47. “I consider that this shift to an emphasis on our 'capacity to identify with the larger collective of all beings' is essential to our survival at this point in history precisely because it can serve in lieu of morality and because moralizing is ineffective. Sermons seldom hinder us from pursuing our self-interest, so we need to be a little more enlightened about what our self-interest is. It would not occur to me, for example, to exhort you to refrain from cutting off your leg. That wouldn’t occur to me or to you, because your leg is part of you. Well, so are the trees in the Amazon Basin; they are our external lungs. We are just beginning to wake up to that. We are gradually discovering that we are our world.”
― Joanna Macy

48. “Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth’s hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries.

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.”   ― James Lovelock

49. "Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the Earth, and sun, and stars – and love, poor blossom, we plucked from its stem on the tree of life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.”   ― D.H. Lawrence

50. “In my opinion, no more destructive belief exists than the idea that we have escaped the constraints imposed by nature on all other species. We assume that by enabling us to exploit and alter our surroundings, our intellect has freed us from dependence on specific habitats. We believe we are no longer part of nature, because we have acquired the ability to control and manage the forces impinging on us. This illusion of escape from nature has been reinforced by our extraordinary transformation in this century from country dwellers to city dwellers. In an urban setting, we live in a human-created environment, surrounded by other people plus a few domesticated plants and animals, as well as the pests that have overcome our defences. Living among such a dearth of species, we no longer recognize our dependence on the rest of life for our well-being and our very survival. It is simpler to assume that the economy delivers our food, clean air, water and energy and takes away our sewage and waste. We forget that the Earth itself provides all these services, and so makes economists and the economy possible. We are biological beings, as dependent on the biosphere as any other life form and we forget our animal nature at our peril.”  ― David Suzuki

51. "Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease a herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence."
― Mourning Dove Salish

52. "A ghost is haunting modernity–the ghost of animism. It awaits us everywhere when we step outside modern reason’s cone of light, outside its firmly mapped order, when approaching its frontier zones and 'outside.' We find it in the imagined darkness of modernity’s outside, where everything changes shape and the world is reassembled from the fragments that reason expels from its chains of coherences.  ― Anselm Franke

53. “As a Zuñi Elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the 'inert' letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless–as mysterious as a talking stone.”  ― David Abram

54. "Animism had its origins in two universal human experiences: (1) the sense that something invisible yet all-important leaves the body at the moment of death, and (2) the suspicion that dreams and visions make contact with a higher reality. Once the belief in a spiritual realm was established, it was only a few short steps to positing the existence of spiritual beings that stand behind nature, and behind the world as a whole."  ― Bradley L. Herling

55. “Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”   ― Native American Proverb

56. “Climate crisis is a catastrophic culmination of modernity’s existential crisis. As many other environmental philosophers have noticed, this crisis lies in a profound dissociation within the modern man — separation from the environment and non-human life-forms, which are seen as lacking subjectivity and consciousness, as well as from his own body and other people within the competitive capitalist society. It is a crisis of anthropocentrism and individualistic solipsism. To adapt to the new climate, we need novel modes of perception which animate the non-human environment and life-forms (similarly as in the Indigenous, animistic cosmologies and ontologies).”  ― Clinamen

57. “Animism is often described as the imputation of life to inert objects. Such imputation is more typical of people in western societies who dream of finding life on other planets than of Indigenous peoples to whom the label of animism has classically been applied. These peoples are united not in their beliefs but in a way of being that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth. In this animic ontology, beings do not propel themselves across a ready-made world but rather issue forth through a world-in-formation, along the lines of their relationships. To its inhabitants this weather-world, embracing both sky and earth, is a source of astonishment but not surprise. Re-animating the ‘western’ tradition of thought means recovering the sense of astonishment banished from official science.”  ― Tim Ingold

58. Indigenous people view both themselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins. It is an awareness that life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin. The kin, or relatives, include all the natural elements of an ecosystem. Indigenous people are affected by and, in turn, affect the life around them. The interactions that result from this “kincentric ecology” enhance and preserve the ecosystem. Interactions are the commerce of ecosystem functioning. Without human recognition of their role in the complexities of life in a place, the life suffers and loses its sustainability. Indigenous cultural models of nature include humans as one aspect of the complexity of life. A Rarámuri example of iwígara will serve to enhance understanding of the human–nature relationship that is necessary in order to fully comprehend the distinct intricacies of kincentric ecology.  – Enrique Salmón

59. “Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.” —Fritjof Capra

60. “What if our religion was each other? If our practice was our life? What if the temple was the Earth? If forests were our church? If holy water – the rivers, lakes, and oceans? What if meditation was our relationships? If the Teacher was life? If wisdom was knowledge? If love was the center of our being.”
― Ganga White

61. “Civilization may be the greatest bait-and-switch that ever was. It convinces us to destroy what is free so an overpriced, inferior copy can be sold to us later—often financed with the money we’ve earned hastening the destruction of the free version. The voices of civilization fill us with manufactured yearnings and then sell us prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue. Some throw up their hands and blame it all on human nature. But that’s a mistake. It’s not human nature that makes us engage in this blind destruction of our world and ourselves. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings thrived on this planet without doing it in. No, this is not the nature of our species — it is the nature of civilization, an emergent social structure in which our species is presently trapped.”  ― Christopher Ryan 

62. “We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”  ― Henry David Thoreau

63. “The people of your culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler’s mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

64. “Animism is far from primitive, nor is it about pre-modernity because animism does not serve as a precursor to modernity. Rather animism is one of the many vitally present and contemporary other-than-modern ways of being human.”  — Graham Harvey
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7 Books to Deepen Spiritual Nature Connection - Roots and Wings

9/3/2023

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Thank you so much to Roots and Wings for including "Ancient Spirit Rising" on this illustrious list ~!

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​The wonderful scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel defined spirituality as “the part of the reality that cannot be captured by thought or language.” He also shared my belief that spirituality is not optional but essential for human existence. We all have moments when we experience something deep within us that is special and hard to describe. For me personally “awe” is a good word to use, when we are touched by something so pure and profound that we have no words to describe it. I truly believe that spirituality is essential not only for our well-being, but also that of our planet Earth. It’s as if we are deeply united in these brief moments and encounters. "Awesome" experiences are often related to Nature, which never ceases to amaze me. It’s also possible though to consciously practice spiritual nature connection, and here are some wonderful books to guide us. Alex Koster, Roots and Wings
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​Pegi Eyers is the author of  "Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community," an award-winning book that explores strategies for uncolonization, rejecting Empire, social justice, ethnocultural identity, Apocalypse Studies, building land- emergent community & resilience in times of massive change.
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    ​~ BLOG ~

    Pegi Eyers

    ஜ
    The recovery of our ancestral roots, and the promotion of social justice & environmental activism as interwoven with our spiritual life. Engaging with the interface between Turtle Island First Nations and the Settler Society, rejecting Empire and embodying the paradigm shift to ecocentric society.
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    ​Ancient Spirit Rising: Reclaiming Your Roots & Restoring Earth Community


    Ancient Spirit Rising
    is the recipient of a
    2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award
    in the Current Events/ Social Change category!     
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    First Nations on Ancestral Connection

    ​Decolonial Dames
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    ​Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD)
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    ​6 Reasons To Stop Using the Word “Shaman" & 7 More Reasons to Stop Using the Word “Shaman"
    ​Julia Penelope 
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    ​Little Green Warrior

    ​Soulskin Journeys
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    ​    A Thousand Apologies

    ​    Dream World

    ​Forest Thriving

    The "Cultural Orphan" and Spiritual White Women

    ​ACQUIESCE

    ​The Medusa Mythos Inspires Us to Rage Against the Machine

    ​SOUL WALKER

    ​ECO-AGONY

    ​Eco-Agony - Presentation @ Harvard Divinity School 

    Decolonization & Uncolonization Defined: Implications for Ecopsychology
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    ​    Spiritual Extractivism
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    ​​​Animist Quotes: Exploring the Animist Philosophy of Life

    7 Books to Deepen Spiritual Nature Connection ​

    Indigenous Peoples: Key Trends

    ​Between Worlds
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    ​Holders of Staff and Bone

    ​Passage to Dartmoor

    ​Oceans Divide Us

    ​    Ecovillages: The Shadow Side

    ​The Lessons We Need to Learn from Indigenous People
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    ​Ancestral Motherline ~ Guided Meditation
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    ​    The Life Force: Restoring Sacred Myth

    ECO-SOUL

    Shifting Borderlands of Tame and Wild

    ​Ancient Spirit Rising is Recommended Reading-!
    ​
    ​Earth First 

    The World of Small

    European Roots ~ A Call for Leadership

    Settler Re-landing: Reclaiming Patterns of Connection

    Waeccan Means to "Wake Up"

    Initiation Now: Rethinking the World as Alive

    Dangerous Women

    Ancient Covenant

    "Earthing" in the Garden

    The Promise of Ecopsychology

    Kinomagewapkong ~ The Teaching Rocks

    The Ecomystic Experience

    Controversies in the Ancestral Arts

    The Sacred Balance

    Uncolonizing the “Bounty of the Land” Narratives

    We Live in a Death Culture

    Customary Law

    Earth Love

    The Green Burial Movement: In Conversation With Emma Restall Orr

    Letters to the Earth

    I Walked and Walked

    Sacred Tears

    Taking Issue With "We Are All One"

    Dear Greenmantle ~ Review Rebuttal

    Finding Our Long-Lost Ancestral Traditions

    Ancestor Quilt

    Our Struggles Are Not the Same

    Ally Mistakes - Oops ~!

    Love from the Earth

    The Problem with Far-Away Ecotherapy and Nature Connection Retreats

    Earth-Emergent in the City

    Voices of Earth ~ Archaic Whispers

    Good Allies 
     
    Song of the Ancestors

    Decolonization ~ Meaning What Exactly?

    Animism Unbound

    More Settler-Colonialism: Boomers and the Rez (True Story)

    What is Cultural Appropriation?

    The Story Behind the Story

    Cultural Appropriation in Goddess Spirituality and Matriarchal Studies

    Climate Disaster & Massive Change 

    We Are the Ancestors of the Future

    Earth Mother Magic

    True Reconciliation Requires Restitution 

    Are White People Indigenous?

    Full Disclosure/My Positionality on New Age!

    Allyship and Solidarity with First Nations

    Pagan Values - "Know Thyself" 

    Welcome to Stone Circle Press!
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