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This morning as I walk in the mountains, I feel like abandoning life and beating a path to erase the outside and explore the vast, empty wilderness inside.
 
It is a beautiful scene: The morning mist descends, sinking gracefully below the mountain peaks that rise above it like guardians. It embraces the early morning silence as it diffuses the light of the sun’s rays and subdues the echoes of the bird’s morning symphony in the valley forest. As the winter sun ascends with grace, spilling its radiant light over the land, it casts warm, golden lines across Earth’s cool, shaded curves. And in the mist below, an infinite number of misty droplets each absorbing and reflecting the entire sunrise. With the sun’s touch the Earth awakens, her magnificent form accentuated, unveiled, her contours bathed in hues of dazzling golden light. The birds now begin to celebrate the dawn, their trance-like chorus harmonizing with an almost imperceptible pulse that feels like it could be the very heartbeat of creation. And there I stood, an awed witness, placing one foot before the other, traversing an unknown trail and embarking on an inward perambulation of discovery and connection. 

This place draws me inwards, circling closer and closer towards a silent retreat inside myself. In that familiar place I feel harmoniously aligned to this mountain, a familiar union between the still light of the Self and the light of nature. The light of nature reaches out with its tendrils and touches my light. With each breath I consciously embody this intimate embrace, weaving these sacred threads of love between my heart and this mountain.

As the sun rises I walk more swiftly, my body craving the sensation of movement, lungs breathing hungrily. Now it is my sense of smell that is flooded with infinite messages. Each inhalation a tapestry of scents from the wild space of the high fynbos slopes. And the flowers! The flowers…. their scent! The air is a perfumery of intoxicating scents, condensed botanical fragrances, the smell of a wet earth warming in the morning light, the invisible chemical messages of a thriving ecosystem of living creatures. I rise above the ground and with my mind’s eye envision an interweaving of fragrances that become a vast ocean of these chemical messengers, of mingling and merging currents floating above a living Eden. The air itself is cold and fresh and I take deep recharging gulpfuls. In this mountain breath I find solace and renewal, the kind of replenishment that the earth mother offers so freely and abundantly. The cold air floods my warm chest and it bites so sweetly. 

But more than that, this walking feels like it is a weaving between the inner searching and the outer unfolding of a human life rejoicing in the fortune of living another single precious day. These steps bring new life to my inward trail. I feel so lucky to walk here and I feel embraced by this majestic mountain. In its presence I feel fully alive, my soul spinning, singing and humming with deep recognition of kinship with this living place. 

As the sun rises and casts a seemingly sentient light on the peaks above, the sight of it invites me to sit down and soak it up. I drink it in, starting by sitting upright, then gradually edging closer to the ground until I am lying down wholeheartedly, my whole being saturated with its warmth. I drift into sleep on that warm rock, my body surrendering to the earth and to the sun. In this daydreaming state I call to the sacred threads of light that are woven into this living body of the natural world. This surrendered state makes way for a clear inner vision and through the mists of time a visitor appears: 

An old indigenous Khoisan man walks towards me from this image-encrusted fabric of the dream realm. He tells me that he has lived within the folds of this mountain for thousands of years. He wants to know why I am here and why I carry such an unfamiliar scent. He tells me that he wanders through these mountains endlessly, patiently waiting, observing, and bearing witness. Wise as the mountain itself, he may well be the very essence of this towering place, come to welcome me. There is a stillness inside him that haunts me because it is enticingly beautiful, dark and primal and potent. The leopard purrs inside him. His breath smells of wild honey. The plants have become his skin. He embodies the fabric of a dream, as though he were made of the stuff of a mountains own psyche. It is the gods that speak to us like this, appearing as simple men, but with the scent of the extraordinary. 

After an hour or so, I awaken from this tranquil sleeping meditation. A cascade of love for the mountain surges through me, from my heart flowing outward, saturating me with a profound feeling of kinship to this sacred place. 

I love you, mountains. I love you for these gulping breaths of fresh air, for lungfuls of sweet fragrances. I love you for your labyrinthine trails, your towering vastness, your majestic presence, your sheer massiveness. I love you for the enigmatic spaces that appear with each step I take along these rocky bones that expose themselves through your fragile soil skin. I love your abundant unfolding greenery, a cascade of life in vibrant hues of living things. Beloved mountain, you encompass all that I hold dear, so many things I love find shelter within you—ancient trees, secret valleys, pools and waterfalls, the sunrise from lofty peaks, the primal potency of dawn’s birdsong. I love how wherever I wander within you, I can never truly arrive. I love how I can become lost in your wilderness, losing my way back home. I love that if I were to dwell in you once more, I would reclaim my wildness and feel that I finally found home. I love how time slows down here, changes form, unveiling another world’s presence. I love immersing myself in the primal darkness of the earth, there hides a wild magic, in plain sight. In my heart, I hold this mountain—the entirety of it—inside. Love expands my heart to encompass its vastness. This love stretches me.

Everything has become the face of the Beloved now. All nature is made from bursting-bright light and saturated in love: The flowers, with their million faces turned towards the sun; the aloe glistening with morning dew; the sun that swims inside a dewdrop; the rays that warm the earth; and the ants that crawl, in their microscopic universe beneath my feet. 

With these soft eyes of oneness I see the signature of divinity in that tree, since it was a tiny seed, coaxed by dew and warmth, awakened to surge and sprout. And now this tree embodies the Beloved’s face, ever-present in the earth. The tree is His face now with earthly form that speaks to my heart. 

When the earth is thirsty, it yearns for Him in the rain. When it is cold, He is the sun. I see how the mountain is longing only for the Beloved and how it is in this yearning that rain falls, that sun shines, that seeds flourish, that the aloe glistens, and the ant carries on. Everything within the earth points to this profound love affair. Everything materializes as a manifestation of this yearning and reciprocation of divine love.

I call on myself to tune in to the frequency of love, the channel of longing. Open my eyes to the unity of longing and witness that it is one note that reverberates throughout all creation. This note I hear is a melodious love song that tells the tale of a divine romance between earth and her Beloved. I am drawn back in time, a thousand years ago, to the great Persian poets who so perfectly described this love. And here in this juncture of today’s ecological predicament I see this same love story played out between the Earth and her Beloved. She is the embodiment of this love affair between heaven and matter. She pulsates with a heartbeat turning on an axis of His love. She embodies the longing for the touch of the beloved and her endless sunrise and sunset are the result of Him turning her heart in his fingers. It is the harmonious dance of unity present in all things. The vast ocean resides within the river, and the entirety of the river resides within a single flower.

This mountain incubates and holds the potency of divine presence, the sacredness of the source of everything which is alive. This mountain embodies the music that is at the centre of the world. What great strength and presence it must take to hold the magnificence of this living song of creation. Each mountain a crucible for the earths sacred singing, like an instrument each with its own unique melody, its own fragrant sounds. The shape and curve and emptiness of the valley, a giant cauldron for holding the million voices of the birds and all the living creatures that rest in the folds of her rocky skin. And lest we forget the songs of the flowers opening to the sun and bowing closed to the moonlight or the sense of clouds capping the peaks and settling silence inside the valley whilst the peaks remain elevated. 

To be sure, the mountain is an inner rising to the highest point signalling those who see them to reach inside their rugged depths and find new routes to their inner elevations. The mountain’s spirit peaks reaching heights that stand above all men, a high alp that others aspire to reach one day. 

It is not often that you get to die. I tasted death once. It was excruciatingly beautiful. The taste of death turned me inside out, the vast emptiness of my existence laid bare. All vestiges of my small self dissolved into absolute darkness. Ground zero, the void.

Honestly I was expecting to see the light. I expected to be visited by divine beings who would hold me and reassure me that everything was going to be okay. That didn’t happen. Instead I was present in an ocean of vast darkness that pervaded everything and the darkness was utterly intoxicating. A black opium spilled through me, drowned all impressions of my identity ’til there was no ‘I’ left in this sea of nothingness.

Death is so difficult to describe because it is the opposite of life. What we describe in this world has weight, form and substance. There is gravitas in this world. In death this is absent. Death is far more real than this world, yet there is also nothing familiar about it. Death seemed to have consumed the world, my life, my humanity, my form and turned them inside out. An upside-down realm where form has turned into its opposite which is a strange nothingness. Here all things that I was familiar with were their opposite, antithesis. As full as life can be with all the things that capture our attention, that fill our world, the air we breathe, the light we see, the people and places and natural space in which we exist, the opposite of this is an emptiness that is simply not anything. What was more strange was that this state was the absolute perfect antidote to life. Viewed from the perspective of death, life was only suffering. Yes, death was the perfect antidote to life, supremely sweet, the centre of existence. The closest to ever being truly alive was actually to die. It takes everything that you know and turns it inside out. Suddenly even life is out of one’s reach, no longer our familiar friend that is always a breath away.

There is a certain madness to death too. Its intoxicating poison dissolves the mind and fragile identity of the small self. This dark magic steals the grounding pegs that tether our identity, its potency instantly dissolving us into the fabric of emptiness. This is terrifying. With no identity to cling to there is just the bareness of the soul swimming in the vast ocean of nothingness.

I had an unnerving experience in this realm. It shook me, literally. In this black void an old woman approached me, chattering about my fate. She held up my essence in a glass jar and studied it, then shook the jar violently and watched it settle. Then she said to a partner in the shadows that there was still something I had to achieve in the world and she tossed me back. At this moment I re-entered my body with a sharp needle delivering a shot of pure adrenaline into my bloodstream. My son was holding the syringe, his hands trembling, tears in his eyes.

My allergy emergency kit brought me back to life. I was still swimming in this other place though, in an ocean of unity, but very quickly my self reassembled in an instant and returned to this world that is no longer real.

The difference between these two worlds is that there is an aliveness and fullness to death beyond this world we call life.

For days afterwards I was forced by an inner compulsion to go into seclusion. I could not stand to be in this world. I only wanted to go back to that place that had felt so supremely alive. One part of me felt like it was still present in that world. The hands of the goddess of death still holding me there. I was still not entirely released from that place. It felt like I was being reborn into this world, bit by bit reassembled here, squeezed from a place that was infinite into a tight and finite body. So I made a place for myself outside our home in the garden cottage, I created a sanctuary, a halfway house between this world and the next, a temple where I burned frankincense and listened endlessly to Ludovico Einaudi piano. My world was pieced together bit by bit in that place as I was reborn into the world again. But this identity, ‘Steve’, was so frail and so malleable. The self still rested so palpably in that other place.

What followed this experience was a few weeks of what can only be described as equal parts bliss and pain. The bliss came from nature, the forest came alive and spoke to me. It was not as though I was observing nature any more, but it was alive inside me and spoke to me from a seamless wholeness of connection. And then something strange happened: I started speaking to flowers. Everywhere I looked there were blossoms and fragrances and the flowers, leaves and forest spoke to me in a way that was palpable and alive. I crafted flower mandalas from the blossoms and leaves. These mandalas were like messages from this other realm, they were like lessons in love that were being given in the form of a mandala. The world I occupied was saturated in love, dripping in a divine nectar that consumed me completely like a lover. I discovered a language of love, a conversation with the heart of Nature through the flowers. Her colours and fragrances sang of this other place, each mandala a blessed conversation with Her. Love notes everywhere.

Then there was the birdsong. I became aware of the birdsong at dawn and I woke up before the first birds started to sing and prayed whilst their dawn chorus erupted. Our forest home is a sanctuary for birds, our house, called ‘Birdsong’ came alive with its name and the birds and I greeted the dawn together. Then I wept and wept until I could not weep any more. Tears of what, I do not know, but they were cathartic and they were purifying. They cleansed me and left me raw and open.

The finale of this divine performance from the other side happened when a giant kingfisher flew past me and landed in a tree. It turned back to look at me and spoke the most beautiful secret I dare not repeat to another soul, but captured the moment in a poem. And then death finally let me go and normality returned to my world. I was not the same again after this. The rigour of a work life helped me retain my sense of normality. Perhaps one day when I am old and resting in a chair all day long I will not return from such a journey.

Tear everything away from me
so that all that remains
is Love

Take it all!
Nothing that I created
can compare with one sweet drop
of your dark Love

I want you, Beloved
to crucify this old self, 
cut it up into a million pieces
and feed it to the Earth
my Beloved Mother

Leave nothing of me behind
but a sweet scent 
that someone one day may recognise
as the presence of Love
pure and Yours

Just take it all!
There is nothing left here
for my sentimentality
I would die as it is anyway
without Love

I am ready for death
I know that it is but
the sweetest belonging
a return to that
which is everything

So take me
I don’t care for any of this

Unless, Beloved
I can die here
whilst still alive
and have the chance 
to share this deepest of Love
into the heart of the Earth

Then my decision to stay
will have been one
that serves You
completely.

Last night I dreamed of Poseidon. He, the great god of the sea and the rivers, said to me:

“I give and I destroy.”

Blue-eyed tempestuous raging power and strength. You are terrifying. Powerful. 

I woke up from this dream still feeling the presence and power of the god inside me. Some dreams do that. They stay with us. Messages from the depths, asking us to pay attention. They prompt us to journey inwardly and to follow the sacred thread that leads to the gates of the underworld.

The gods have been long forgotten, thread by thread removed from the rich tapestry of our inner lives. So when one meets a god, if even in a dream, it is a precious opportunity to catch the thread and weave it back into life. We need to listen with soft ears, to foster heartfelt connection, bow our heads down and feel their presence. It is through our prayers and attention that we can find those threads and weave them back into the song of creation. This sacred act will offer sustenance to them so that they may come alive in this world that needs their presence more than ever. 

Remembering the gods

Poseidon, you are our beloved old man of the sea. You are the place where the two seas meet. We remember you. Deep inside our hearts, there you rest in the ocean of oneness. I offer myself in service to you, to be a vessel for your presence. 

Your grandfather was Oceanus, the primordial living body of water that surrounded the earth. Oceanus was the partner of Gaia, the living earth. From their union emerged the vast unfolding of life and all the forms of creation. They gave birth to many children. Their sons are the river gods and their daughters the oceanids, nymphs of the watery worlds. 

Poseidon, you are the son of Cronus and Rhea. You inherited the rivers and oceans of earth whilst your brother Zeus inherited the skies and Hades the underworld. All three of you were given the earth to rule over, but you Poseidon held special dominion over the ocean and rivers. We see your presence in every drop of water as it makes it’s way from cloud to rain, to river and into the oneness of the ocean. We see you enter all living beings in the form of water, we see how you are everywhere that there is life and we honor you. 

You, great Poseidon, are imbued with the power to create earthquakes and lightning, tsunamis and floods. You draw an underwater chariot through the ocean powered by the dolphin-like hippocampus. You carry the power of the entire ocean in your belly. 

How quickly we forgot you, how easily we stopped recognizing your presence in all living things. Forgive us, come back to us, let us weave your magical presence back into this world that needs you so much right now. Come alive inside us again, through our prayers.

The ocean inside us
Poseidon was and is the living embodiment of the sea.  In ancient Greek culture there were temples, statues and sacred altars devoted to this great being. We sought his grace and his mercy. For what use is a life without the grace and mercy of the gods? 

Poseidon was a living god, alive in the hearts of the ancient Greek world. They knew the secret of caring for a god, they remembered that the gods were threads that could be woven into this world from inside the most secret inner chambers of our heart.

Our ancient gods are so lonely without our love, our affections our bowing down and honoring. What prayers remain to build bridges between their world and ours? 

My deep sense is that not only have we forgotten our gods but they too have forgotten us. We have muted them and they have tuned out from this world. In the depths of our silence they still reside. We are Poseidon looking back upon himself. He is alive, in the ocean inside us, if we care to descend into the depths. 

Lured to distraction
We have lost the wisdom of the ways that showed us how to navigate the depths. It has left us fixated on only superficial, material things which keep us afloat in a sea of forgetfulness, never able to dive deep. And so we are emptied of meaning with only the thinnest of threads connecting us to the depths where we need to descend in order to be re-born again. 

Now we fear the ocean and the power it has to take our lives, to drag us to the depths where we drown against our will. We know that the sacred lore has been broken and that we no longer have the mercy of the sea. We live with the deep unconscious fear of drowning and descending to the depths, but never meeting the gods down there. 

Where swimming leads to drowning
Drowning in the sea, I wonder if we feel a sense of returning to the oneness of life or if we fade away with a deep sadness that we are at the end a life where we forgot who and what we actually were. I wonder whether the spell takes us down and into the depths of the divine to witness what we have done. 

We die here, expecting realms of light, but perhaps we really are taken down into the depths of creation where the divine has been desecrated. Perhaps we are asked to make peace with the gods before we are released from this spell and given the opportunity to be born again.

I watch over the ocean as it recedes like a living breath, returning endlessly to the shore.  The rhythms of the sea mimic the journey of our souls, ever embodied in this world of form, endlessly moving into and out of this world with the moon and the tides. We are bound by the sea, as it is bound by the moon, endlessly brought back to the shore.

We forgot. Our purpose was to remember the oneness of the sea. We lived so that we could hold the entire universe inside us, remembering the gods with every breath. And yet our deep sense of security will vanish overnight and leave us to face the emptiness laid bare by our forgetfulness. 

And there, in the depths, Poseidon lurks. Closer than we care to see. Ever present, watching, waiting to see what course we choose next, where the vessel sails. Caught in doldrums, no distant shores in sight, no voyage of discovery, no new route being forged across unknown oceans to mysterious shores. He invites us to swim in the ocean of oneness, where swimming ends always in drowning. 

The voice of a god
Useless to speak to humans nowadays. Always distracted by a thousand things. Voices in their heads, thinking, solving problems, obsessing, wanting more, always more. 

No silent receptive space to hear the voice of a god. 

But in the depths of belonging, the ocean inside, I am there. I am present. Inside you is an ocean of vastness, distant shores, spice routes. Inside you are new lands, continents, depths unexplored, unknown. Inside you an ocean where, yes if you choose to sail there, will leave you wide open, exposed, vulnerable and at my mercy. One small storm and I can take your life, sink your boat, drag you into the depths where you are never found. 

But on the surface of my vastness, the things you will see. The play of light, so beautiful it will mesmerize you, hypnotise you, make you want me more, more, more. The hunger it will leave in you, for that which is real, the taste of something that will light your soul. 

Be careful, one taste and it will consume you. You will become like a hungry lover who has been left wanting for millennia. Your passion will be reignited and your spirit will want always more.

Venture off the shore and into the depths, risk the security of thinking that your ground is stable beneath your feet. Take one step towards me and I will take two towards you. 

Where the two seas meet
Now I sit on the Transkei coast, looking out to sea. This place has special ancient magic to it. The world here is still a dream, it is not real. The sea glistens in the half light. Waves gently rolling onto shore. The silent loud white noise of the sea. 

There he sits, looking out, sitting on the shore and staring out to sea. A peaceful monk, contemplative, empty, receptive. I long for what he has. Stillness. Knowing. Inside him is Poseidon, alive and present.

He turns to me and says: 

“These are the furthest shores.”

I sit behind him, as though I am watching a scene from an ancient story unfolding. The furthest shores of love are this place where the two seas meet and it is right here, endlessly unfolding. Here everything of the world has been rubbed out. Only endless lapping waves remain, rolling to shore. No more world, no more grand illusion, just a person and a shoreline. There is nowhere left to go, nothing left to do. This is the furthest shore, the place where the small self merges with the ocean of oneness. This is the place of being, the still centre. Here the illusory world has fallen away and the soul can go. 

Then the scene changes. The dream fades, the intercession of two worlds returns to the present moment. 

I sit at sunrise looking out over the ocean and watch the red sun rise above the horizon. There have been whales jumping out of the ocean for days on end. They come here from far away, invisible visitors to our shores. Then for a brief moment the majestic creatures rise from the depths and launch themselves into the air, an explosion of whitewater. I gasp at the sheer magnificence of the sight unfolding before my eyes.  

We travel outwardly to wonder at the vastness of the ocean, the long meandering rivers and the cool mountain pools but we neglect to look inwardly. In the depths of the ocean is the oneness of being. There the mythical creatures of the ocean and rivers exist inside of us. In our own depths the gods exist, the spirit of the river, the spirit of the sea. They wait for us in the depths of our own psyche, ever-patiently waiting for us to see them. 

Here at the Southern tip of Africa, here inside us all, is the place where the two seas meet. The great Indian and Atlantic oceans merge here, but inside of us is the same magnificence. Inside there is an ocean of vast beauty, ready to drown our small self and make it whole again. 

There is a potential that has been unlived. A potential to be in a living relationship with the archetypal world. To acknowledge the presence of these beings who live inside us. Poseidon, god of the sea and rivers, father of the ocean, come back to this world that we may invoke your mercy and grace once more.

_{“To live, to breathe, to die, we all need the mercy of the sea”
– Peter Kingsley}

The world today doesn’t recognize it’s spiritual seers. We used to place immense value on these people, we gave them a central place in our communities as conveyors of the wisdom from the subtle planes. This time on earth where seers are no longer recognized is one of the signs of a darkening and constriction in the evolution of the consciousness of humanity.

A Vital Thread
Without seers we limit our access to the regenerative properties of divine wisdom because we deny the subtle inner worlds which are a living symbiotic thread with humanity. This relationship between humanity and the inner worlds is like a tree: the roots of a tree lie buried beneath the surface of the earth and they draw nourishment from the fertile darkness below. Their leaves draw nourishment from the sunlight and transmute it into vital life energy. You cannot cut the trunk from a tree and expect it to grow, regardless of how much light its leaves are receiving from the sky or how much nourishment its roots receive from the soil.

Seers offer us access to the wisdom of the inner worlds, the inner feminine wisdom of the earth, and keep the relationships that nurture the growth of our culture. They are the roots that reach down into the dark, fertile depths of the inner worlds and wrestle out the nutrients that nurture and sustain us. They also are the leaves that capture the light of the sun and bring it into this world of form, into the body of humanity, the body of earth. They weave the light of heaven and earth, connecting the threads, holding the balance between the two aspects of our being.

This is a little understood and hardly remembered truth that it was the seers who weave the light between the inner and the outer, creating patterns that hold and nourish the growth of our culture. It is less understood how the seers, unbeknown to humanity, weave the light between the worlds and by this act allow our current culture to exist in harmony with the world around us. Without these hidden spiritual workers holding the balance between the worlds our culture will collapse, dying from the inside where the light that feeds our collective soul is no longer present. Humanity, driven by scientific rationalism, eliminated this understanding of the world from our collective consciousness and this is why we now stand at the brink of radical ecological and social catastrophe.

The seers can be thought of as those who steer our collective evolution, guided by the wisdom of the gods, weaving the sacred threads of light into life itself that it may grow and thrive. What a terrible fate awaits our world when we no longer listen and learn from the wisdom of our seers.

Oracle, Seer, Visionary and Prophet
History has been shaped by those who have experienced powerful visions. Major events that have shaped humanity stemmed from seers who took to implementing their revelations into the world. Ancient wisdom gained from visionary states, and the truth it helped reveal, spans the entire history of humanity, passed in a golden chain from one mystic to another.

Thoth, the ancient Egyptian scribe, was thrown into a world of visionary wonder and was given the first seeds of wisdom that gave birth to Western civilization. The Greeks claimed he was the true author of every work of every branch of knowledge, human and divine. Thoth drew his wisdom from the visionary states reached deep in the underworld and he gave these to humanity. This was the origin of the ancient civilisation of Egypt.

The ancient Greek philosophers would not have existed were it not for their oracles. Pythia, priestess to Apollo at Delphi, and the oracle of Dione and Zeus at Dodona in Epirus were the source of their wisdom. It was not clever men adept at analytical thought and reasoning that suddenly developed wisdom from nothing. It was wisdom that was first given by the oracles and then later interpreted and birthed into this world as the great founding secrets of Western civilisation. The fathers of Greek philosophy such as Empedocles and Parmenides performed elaborate sleeping rituals in which they visited the spirit realms and conversed with the gods of antiquity in order to access this wisdom of the divine. From these conversations with oracles and gods they gave us logic, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.

The bible is littered with accounts of people receiving communication from God through dreams and visions. In the old testament these visions and dreams were considered so important and their absence was a cause of great concern for the ancient Israelites. The transcendent was accessed through dreams and visions and these sacred dialogues were treated with great respect.

Mohammed’s prophetic visions have altered the course of human history. He heard the voice of the angel Gabriel tell him that he was a messenger of God. This developed into a lifetime of religious revelations, which became the Quran, the foundation of Islam.

Genghis Khan claimed that he had many dreams sent from Tengri, or “The god of eternal blue sky”, who told him that the world would one day kneel before him. 

Carl Jung, a modern messiah, journeyed with the ‘spirit of the deep’ and gathered the remedies for the collective symbolic nourishment of the Western psyche. The birth of Jungian psychology ostensibly held the potential for the spiritual awakening of Western culture. Our failure to recognise the nourishment of the archetypal revelations of Carl Jung have led to a missed opportunity for spiritual rebirth in the Western psyche.

A New Deism
Yet today we act as though revelation is something belonging to an ancient past and not worth consideration by an educated mind. Science has become our prophet, our messiah, our truth. We worship peer-reviewed studies, objective measurements and the proof of things that we can see and touch. We fear that which our ancestors claimed to be the source of their wisdom, inspiration and decision-making. We fear the primordial source of all wisdom. These are tales of a forgotten history of the modern world and the fact that they have forgotten the gift of revelation is a sign of our desperately impoverished inner world. The stories of the seers are the lifeblood of humanity, our collective sacred source of rebirth and renewal.

Our terrible fear of all things other than a Newtonian world has led us to believe that science is Truth. We have given away our access to the imaginal worlds, the unconscious depths, the fertile darkness. We have blacked out the mystery inherent in creation for the sake of science. We have turned the earth into an object for our enrichment, forgetting her sacred nature.

We Are Multi-Dimensional
Logically there is an absolute certainty that we are not the only civilization of sentient beings in the universe. Nor is our objective world, the world we can see and measure, the only thing that is real. Our universe is alive with possibility. Like a fractal, all forms exist within an endless variation to infinite ends. Similarly, if we follow logic and ask it to lead us to truth, there are multiple unseen dimensions too. Our experience of the world is but one dimension, one tiny realm of possibility. The inner dimensions, the worlds that exist beyond form, are as vast and as varied as the physical universe. There are many dimensions that our ancient forefathers knew only too well, the dimensions of the Gods.

And here we are. We exist, of that we can be sure. We share in the experience of being human but are terrified to look beyond the physical veil. We refuse to look deeper into our collective and universal psyche, to bow down again to mystery, to put science to use where it has validity whilst we marvel at the inner worlds. 

Speaking To Gods
In ancient times we had a relationship with dreams and visions, but today we are disembodied spirits experiencing a shallow and utterly superficial fragment of the human condition. Yet our world is still filled with people experiencing visions, having prophetic dreams, of trans-dimensional communication with beings from other realms, both angelic and godly. The stories these people tell are vast and deep treasure troves of knowledge. But we discount these tales as nonsense. Leave these tales to the artists and fob them off as crazy and therefore useless.

Yet our modern spiritual traditions are built entirely from those human beings who claimed to speak to the gods. There are countless detailed accounts of direct revelation, direct experiences of these mystical prophets that walked the earth then and now. The very source of all cultures on this earth are epitomized by spiritual traditions that describe a living relationship with the gods. Yet somehow we deny our ability to communicate with the divine, with the spiritual, the transcendent, the angelic, the otherworldly. And look where we are now. What fruits has our supposed scientific enlightenment brought to the world other than desperate inequality and rampant materialism that is devouring the earth alive?

For all our greatness in science, medicine, engineering, art and music, why are we so terrified of the transcendent and otherworldly?
Why do we guard our material world so closely and yet give everything transcendent away?

Material Fixation
There is something dreadfully wrong with the global collective mind and soul. Our world is increasingly devoid of the wisdom of the soul, devoid of spiritual leaders and prophets who have been ignored. Somehow we have managed to make life all about ourselves, about individualization and about everything but spirituality and this is why we are dead, dying and on our way out. This global culture is a failed civilization that has given up its soul purpose. We live, eat and breathe a materialistic world which is devoid of spirituality and the transcendent and so we have cut ourselves off from myth and imagination, from the possibility of even hearing the messages from the spiritual world that may be trying to communicate something valuable, something needed in this time.

Materialism is the culture of the earth today. It dominates all aspects of the world. We have no collective wisdom for how to take care of the soul, not for our own soul or for the soul of the Earth, of life. We don’t have a collective story to tell other than the nightmare of the earth falling apart under the weight of our materialistic fixation. That is the story of our time: global ecological catastrophe as a direct result of our materialism, perpetuated by a humanity without a spiritual purpose and connection.

The Brink of Decay
We are at the brink of decay. The earth has reached its tipping point. Not only will we lose the ecological balance of the planet, but we are effectively killing our very own children. The primal forces of nature that we have ignored through our stubborn attachment to materialism are going to rise up and kill us, preparing a barren earth for our children to inherit. When our children die, then nothing remains of us or our lineages. We will be the fossilized remains of a species that once again rose up from this planet and then got wiped out.

By all accounts of forbidden archeology it would seem that humanity has done this before. We have reached great heights of civilisation and then lost it all to ecological collapse. The difference this time is that humanity has singlehandedly brought the collapse upon itself and what’s worse is that we are vehemently denying it.

Today we have stepped even further from the truth. We now live in a post-truth era, where even science is questionable, where truth is constructed through an extremely complex system of media and marketing.

Perhaps our collective call has been for the Ahriman to lead us. Perhaps instead of the oracles we have chosen a different source of wisdom. We live in the era of the Ahrimanic deception, the title of a Rudolf Steiner lecture one hundred years ago. As he said: “Ahriman is the power that makes man dry, prosaic, philistine — that ossifies him and brings him to the superstition of materialism.” As Steiner went on to say “Ahriman will appear in human form and the only question is, how he will find humanity prepared. Will his preparations have secured for him as followers the whole of mankind that today calls itself civilized, or will he find a humanity that can offer resistance.” Our intelligence has been substituted for an artificial intelligence that will now lead the way. Unless we change that.

Oneness is the common thread that binds all of humanity across time and space. Oneness is the flow of light within all living systems that has been present since the inception of the world. It is the sweetness that existed before the honey, the fragrance that was present before the rose. Oneness is the living presence of God in this world. It takes us back to God.

Looking deep into a flower in the morning light, dewdrop reflecting a thousand hues, inhaling the fragrance, absorbing the colours. The light of God is present here. Feeling the sun warm the earth, listening to the birds greet the morning sun. God is present here. The sweetness of this moment exists before time. Nature is always reflecting this primordial love that is at the centre of creation. This love always revealing itself to a heart that is filled with awe and longing.

The substance of oneness, the presence of God in creation, is innately understood by the mystic who experiences this state in every breath. This state of knowing is the natural state of the mystic that we all long to experience. The mystic realizes this state and remembers it constantly. When we witness this remembrance in the teacher it strikes a deep chord of longing. We recognise this as our primary purpose on earth when we see it in a master.

There is a reason for this longing, a reason for our deep hunger for that which is real. There is a reason for our cry in the middle of the night when the darkness of the world seems to close in on us. We long for God when we are close to death, we cry out to God when we are in danger of being extinguished by the darkness of the world. We long for oneness because somewhere inside us there is the memory that it is our innate nature, it is the cloth from which our souls are cut. Humanity is a fabric woven by the angels who hold continual remembrance of God. Each thread is woven with the remembrance of God. Our true nature is that we are one cloth, one humanity woven together with threads of divine remembrance.

Each breath of nature witnessed in the cycles of night and day is a divine remembrance of God. Our beloved Earth breathes and remembers God. The birds sing this remembrance, the river flows with it, the sunrise pronounces it. Each breath a human being takes is an opportunity to remember God. Each breath we take is a moment of invoking the remembrance of God. The mystic longs for God so much that she remembers Him in every breath. 

“…trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (William Wordsworth)

I sit on a hillside overlooking an expansive estuary. My trusty old tent and I are hidden in a campsite that borders a bird sanctuary. My mattress is laid out and I am sleepy, but I have words to write. I am alone. On my headphones I listen to the lecture of a respected spiritual teacher and savour the eloquence of his words. There’s a tension in the air as I battle with stilling my mind from the 1 000 distractions of the day. I try to wrestle my thoughts into submission so that I can be present in this moment. There’s that knowledge that,unless I settle into my heart,I won’t be able to write. My heart is sore from the loss of a great love and I am raw inside. That is sometimes the only place to write from. 

“Life goal: Reach the furthest shores of Love.” 

I decide to make a cup of tea. The kettle comes out from the neatly packed camping box. I give the Steve from a few weeks back a little nod of appreciation for packing up so neatly on my last trip. The camping stove comes out.I have plenty of gas, now for matches. Yes! They are neatly packed in an airtightjar for protection from the rain. Another nod to that Steve. I have become more organised as I age. 

“I am sorry for your loss. It’s painful, but you’ll be okay.” 

The tea brewed, milk and honey blended;I get comfortable at my camping table. It’s a red fold-out table that I can carry like a briefcase in the back of my car. Over the years it has been an art table for the kids, a desk in the outdoors, a picnic place during lockdown road trips. It carries the signature of my life over the last decade: Raising kids, road trips, drawings, journaling, impromptu painting sessions in the garden, lockdown relationship. The threads of my past and present woven together and presented to me in this moment through the red table. I have made the transition to where I am.

I melt into the land for a minute, settle my breathing, attune to the voices of the birds. The birdsong in particular is so beautiful here. It starts early in the morning with the Cape Robin Chat performing her song to the pre-dawn stillness. Then in the evening she returns to her perch and sings, sometimes into the dark night. The first and last song of the day. I find the birdsong nourishing. It’s the main reason I chose this campsite, because I love to be present when they sing. The birdsong reminds me of my old home on the edge of a forest,where I would wake up before dawn to pray with the birds. It is a conversation thread with nature that has woven a tapestry of inner peace and connection over the years. I learnt recently that the birdsong awakens the flowers every morning to open to the sun. These songs are prayers of love, the birds remember God with every call. For what more is a prayer than a call to the beloved? Through these shared prayers with the birds I have spoken to the forest and planted roots in her soil. I hope that one day,when this body falls away,my spirit will live on in this birdsong. 

In this beautiful place it is so easy to feel aligned with the harmonic symphony of prayer that spills like a spring from the centreof the natural world. Sinking into this moment, I let go and surrender to the love that is present in the light of nature. 

I feel it in my bones: Our beloved earth still sees us and she welcomes our calling out to her. I let myself fall… in love… deeper and deeper. My call to the earth is her “I am here”. 

Going deeper, breathing into my heart, my attention moves from the outer to the inner. There is a softening in this space inside, a vulnerability, a place where I am alone with my deepest feelings. The language I use to describe this world changes, my perception scans this inner landscape and I see my heart on the inner planes. There is a space inside my heart that is sacred and I remind myself to keep it clean. I used to clear this inner chamber out so that,in the absolute depth of my being,there was an emptiness reserved only for the longing for God. This sacred place where no person or thing may come inside, a sacred space reserved for my beloved alone. I recall the prayer, a sweeping of the dust, clearing the inner chambers so that the light can be present in this primal emptiness. There are wounds here that are fresh. My carelessness with boundaries. In this space of love the boundaries fade and merge and I make space for the love to be present again. 

Then,arriving in this space with my rawness, the longing for connection and a heart that is receptive to both the pain and the pleasure of her love, I spontaneously, prayto connect with the divinity in nature- less of a prayer than a deep and compulsive urge to feel that profoundconnection and oneness with the beloved who is present in the form of the earth.The goddess reveals her face and we dance. 

A warm wind pours over me. I recognise that the wind is alive and remember itsancient language. It carries the scent of the essence of creation. A note of love. The wind is like the birdsong prayers of the dawn chorus. The abundant generosity of nature’s love is palpable. It takes my breath away. It cleanses and nourishes the spaces inside me, soothes and holds, leaves an even deeper rawness and emptiness inside me which I don’t want to rush tofill. 

“Fall in love, Steve. Just let go.” 

It’s like an intoxicating plant medicine. It takes me away, to some other place. I am now at the edge of the world, where the earth comes into being. I see the light of nature as a wholeness that is the ebb and flow of life, evident in the estuary before me,which breathes the rising and falling tidal flow. This ocean that I am so familiar with flows onto the shallow banks and recedes again, like the blood of the world moving endlessly in currents and tides. For a moment I wonder whether the cremated ashes of my old surfing friends have found their way from the bay and onto these shores, back into the great cycle of life and death, absorbed into their beloved ocean. 

As the sun sets and it gets dark the frogs start to sing and the traffic from the highway quietens. A night-timebreeze carries the sound of the sea,which was drowned out by the daytime sounds. Crickets sing, dogs bark, nightjars greet the evening sky. A cricket beneath my feet sings loudly and passionately and it reminds me of a dream a sangoma friend told me about these little creatures that mean good things are coming. The stars sparkle and float and drift about in the vast night sky, taking turns to shine brightly. They fill the sky and some even drift about in their own strange journeys in the vast darkness of the heavens. The night sky is soaked in mystery. A vast oneness floating in the utter emptiness of space. Filled with the warm breeze, the sky appears to be both full and empty. 

“Through suffering and longing our hearts are liberated.” 

I experience an image of the people’s prayers floating up into the night sky asking God for mercy, grace, rescue, protection and sweet respite from all the other insecurities that we share. I imagine that there are also prayers for God’s sake, without requests, simply prayers of alignment and submission. These prayers hang in the misty sea air above the houses where the dogs bark. Do they really go up to heaven or do they soak back into the earth and travel to God through nature’s heart? I see my own prayers and wonder whether they arrived with God and whether they were received with grace, whether they will be answered or if they will lie at His door piling up in the night. I close my eyes and just remember God for His sake, bow in reverence. It feels good to surrender and to want nothing in return. 

I feel small in this scene where the evening stars dance in the darkness above me. My heart feels the wholeness and the emptiness of nature. I dry the tears from my face. Raw and alive, the emptiness within me surrenders. 

There was a shamanic secret being whispered in the wind this morning as the clouds rose up above the mountains and wet the earth with their scattered drops. It tasted like a magic spell that sighed… “remembrance”.

The spell coaxed a memory from the recesses of my unconscious, from way back before the burnings, to a time before the darkness fell over all humanity. It whispered between the resting moments of a warm breeze, spoke trance on the surface of a dancing autumn leaf in the parking lot, painted a fractal riddle across the ocean surface at sunrise. It was there in the clouds, you could read it if you were still, taste it on the inside of your stomach. I stood on the side of the highway witnessing it this morning. Maybe you saw me as you drove by and wondered why I was looking out over the ocean.

After watching the wind on the sea I drove down to my favorite part of the river. I wanted to see if they were still there, the Cape Salmon that had swum so far upstream from the ocean. I loved the sight because it reminded me of an old sufi story. There I saw hundreds of them lying in the shallows by the low-water bridge, next to where all the morning traffic was rushing past. I spotted the feint signs of their presence, watched them dance on the surface with the wind as a cormorant zipped beneath the still surface hunting for klipvis.

I thought to myself: When you sit in nature and just watch the signs, it’s an act of partaking in something real. Most of the time we just dont recognize what’s real anymore, so we make up the world around us and get drawn into this crazy materialistic-consumerist dream. But there’s a realness in the simple act of being alive and just observing the world.

I know what was being whispered in the signs before dawn. I know that deep inside me is the memory of this thing that wants to be spoken. Its a part of who I am, an ancient part of my soul that was awakened ever since I first watched the fish kiss the water surface at sunset on the wetlands. Its at the core of every moment, a memory of my ancient nature soul. Its a memory that the Earth is what we are: humans, crafted from the body of Gaia, the living Goddess. We are made from her dust, birthed from her body, our breath is her breath, our mind is her mind. No separation exists between us and Her. She is the Beloved wrapped in form. We are the embodiment of her.

And so, with the sunrise and the fish, I remembered this secret.

Our beloved Earth is Mother to us all.
She is a sentient being, an ancient soul in the process of completing her own life’s journey. She is the embodiment of the deepest and most ancient mysteries of our universe. She is the keeper of the secret of secrets.

Our beloved Earth is not some geographical object that we make her out to be. She is a goddess, a deep and mysterious being who deserves our utmost respect. Her role is to be both the body of creation and mother to all of creation. This is a paradox. The gods don’t abide by our mortal rules. She is both the embodiment of creation and the mother to all living things within creation. She is the created world and the creator of life.

Her blood is made up of the waters of the planet which move in an endless flow from cloud to rain to river and ocean, filling every pore of the earth, bringing the kiss of life to matter. Her breath is the air and the wind, carrying pure particles of light which are woven into the very fabric of physical creation. Her bones are the rocks and her flesh is the soft green blanket of flora covering the land. Our beloved Earth exists in multiple dimensions, from dense matter to the subtle spirit realms. Her body is the meeting place of these worlds. She is a divine confluence of worlds within worlds, bound together in a magical spell of love and she is utterly beautiful, beyond the words of the greatest of love poets. Her heart spins on an axis love at the center of creation.  This love is the alchemical substance that gives birth to life in an endless cycle of death and renewal, the unfurling tapestry of creation

Love manifests as divine light at the center of creation and bursts forth from the seams of everything in existence. This light is love, they are one, and they are woven in a web of wholeness from the subtle world of the beyond into the dense forms of matter. This Earth that we stand on is utterly sacred and holy, but humanity has forgotten this sacred lore. She is an exquisitely woven body of light, a delicate and perfect fabric of creation, woven by the hands of the greatest intelligence with golden threads of love. This light body unfurls like a blossoming meadow of flowers throughout all aspects of creation, from the smallest microcosm to the cosmos itself. Always something new being born. Always utterly sacred and holy.

Our beloved Earth is only partially recognizable by the five human senses. It requires the sense born from love in our hearts, with eyes made tear-soft, to know the totality of her being.

With subtle sight we are given access to the non-physical worlds, dimensions of light and darkness, form and emptiness within the Earth’s body. These are the birthplaces of the ancient mythical creatures of fairy tales, the archetypal dimensions of our psyche and Hers. With soft eyes we know the truth of this spirit world, we see how there are beings within beings in an endless unfolding of light upon light, a seemingly infinite unfolding of the many faces of God.

From the depths of the fertile darkness to the brilliant dimensions of light, Her inner world is a universe of these endless manifestations of life. Angels, devas, nature spirits and beings beyond words who, like us, are living a specific note of God. In nature we can feel the presence of these devas, these aspects of Her that have accumulated great knowledge and power and made immense spiritual progress in their karmic journeys. Many of these beings have attained enlightenment or perfection in the strain of life which they represent. These are the great spirits of trees, animals and mountains, which still live in this world, applying their consciousness to the work of Mother Earth’s evolutionary journey.

These words are but the smallest taste of the Truth that underlie this most beautiful fragment of creation. Nobody can really see the true face of our Mother and survive. We see the smallest fragments and can only imagine what utter magnificence lies beyond these realms. We are blinded by the smallest glimpse of the true beauty of our Earth, so we rely on second-hand accounts of those that have seen fragments and survived. Yet truly, the depth of beauty of our Mother Earth is beyond words. Her name is etched inside the innermost chambers of our hearts where we dare not look for too long or face the devastation of experiencing a love that is beyond this world.

But once we have tasted even the smallest glimpse of Her vast beauty there is nothing left in this world that can satisfy us any more. We are devastated and entranced by her beauty and are left with a deep longing that brings us to our knees, begging for one more glimpse, one more glance from her loving eyes. Her beauty is That which can only bring us to our knees in prayer and surrender to Love.

And then there is the fall. Once we have seen Her face there is the inevitability of having to face a very different picture in the world that comes to greet us every day. There is the utter devastation as one recognizes where she stands today. Our Mother has been desecrated.

There is no pain greater than the acknowledgement of this. Our role on earth is to be Her guardians, Her lovers, to give of our light to Her light, to nurture the ongoing dance of light within Her. How is it possible that we have turned so absolutely callous and desecrated the body and soul of our beloved Mother Earth?

There is no answer for this question.

Human beings. We too are the Goddess, imbued with the same sacred powers of creation. We too are the continual unfolding of mystery and magic that is at the center of all life. We are a microcosm within the body of Gaia, we are born from her flesh and are her offspring.

If our Mother is an ancient goddess, then what does it mean to be an earthling? This is the secret miracle and mystery of what it means to be human.

In this time of great desecration of the planet it has become utterly important that those who can see with spiritual clarity, those whose hearts are awakened in conscious love, and those who simply love the earth, consciously choose to recognize and relate to the Earth as a sacred being and as our beloved Mother. Without this vital remembrance we will reach an evolutionary dead-end and unconsciously allow a great moment of spiritual evolution to be lost. Our love for the earth is the single simple key to allow a new era of the rebirth of humanity to unfold.

Spring is a time of renewal and rebirth. The darkest days of winter are past and the light grows stronger every day. All the forces of nature move from dormancy to growth in the cycle of outward expansion and renewal. There is a freshness in the air, an aliveness in the light, a sense of optimism and abundance.

But in the outer world, on a global scale, we appear to be moving into a collective winter. The world is getting darker as global ecological collapse continues unabated and our socio-political systems contract into less evolved forms of their true potential. Sages and prophets have referred to this period by many names and recently I heard the term ‘The Great Reset’ which rang true. Collectively we know that this is a time when the cycle of consciousness reaches a tipping point and either progresses into a new and more evolved form of itself or collapses and retracts into patterns of constriction. There is overwhelming evidence in our world that we have chosen the latter path.

There was a period at the turn of the millennium when humanity had the choice to step into the light and take responsibility for the new spiritual potential of oneness that was being born in the heart of the world, but this moment has sadly passed. Humanity has chosen the allure and addiction of material things over spiritual progress and now we are bearing witness to a time on earth where we collectively regress into a lower form of our divine potential.

Fundamentally, things have changed
In this time of great turbulence in the world, we are all bearing witness to fundamental changes in global ecology and in our culture. We are moving into a new era where the primary fabric of life, the global ecosystem, is collapsing. As this collapse continues to unfold in cycles of catastrophic climate change there will be vast changes in the way that we live and in the environment around us. None of us will be untouched by these changes. Rich, poor, old, young, we will all be affected profoundly.

On a deeper level this is something that we all sensed was coming. We felt the anxiety and fear of a collective angst growing day by day and we witnessed as humanity buried this fear by choosing to become consumers of a materialistic dream. Our community of spiritually conscious people has lived in hope of seeing the birth of a new era in which we could integrate the principles of oneness into global culture. We prayed for and worked towards the birth of a new consciousness where an understanding of the interconnectedness of all the living systems would become central to our culture. We saw the potential of a new era where the threads of love that are woven between the living earth and human culture would be remembered again, that we would learn from our mistakes caused by an addiction to material things and begin to build new ways of life that would be in tune with our earth and each other. But this has not happened. The opportunity has now passed us by. I wish it weren’t so.

It is now a period of transition on earth where the light that is at the centre of creation is dimming. In the choice that humanity has made collectively to refuse the potential of living in an era of oneness, we have set course for a very different shore. The gift of oneness showed us a potential future for humanity where we could collectively co-operate with the living wholeness that is sacred and essential nature of the earth. Oneness offered us true magic, inspired sacred principles for living a new story of collective cooperation and it contained the gifts of an entirely new culture that would be more harmoniously aligned with the soul of the world. But we chose to refuse the gift of oneness and we have now steered toward the opposite potential of oneness which will be greater divisiveness, perfectly played out in the dramas of a global pandemic. Lockdown, social isolation, forced infringements upon the sacred space of our God-given bodies, restricted movement and heightened control from a centralised power which is monitored by systems of artificial intelligence. Our new world is now the antithesis of the gift of oneness. The new world is like a dark spell, infused with the same patterns of a psychologically dysfunctional dynamic, where the potential to live a certain note of truth has been permanently damaged by our repeated patterns of denial, addiction and abuse.

The words being used to describe the radical shift in our climate are ‘irreversible’ and ‘unprecedented ecological collapse’.

The earth weeps
The impact of this decision to live a materialistic life that denies the sacred has had a catastrophic effect on the body of the earth. We have given ourselves permission to treat the earth as a soulless material object and this has enabled our global culture to utterly desecrate her body. When the earth is not respected as a living being, when the light in creation is not seen and respected, when the spirit realms are disrespected and sacred groves are torn down, then we cease to live, see and speak in a way that is sacred.

When nature is not sacred then our collective attitude is to see her as a resource to be consumed. We see this being played out in the world over and over again. The most recent story that illustrates this turn toward hyper-materialism is in China, where there is a planned relocation of more than 200-million rural people over the next decade into the 600 new Chinese cities that have been built since 1949. The removal of the farmers from the land will allow radical industrialised agriculture to flourish and ensure a mass culture of more and more city-based materialism as the rural people who are the caretakers of the earth are forced to become urbanised consumers. With the relocation of the people from the land there will be nobody left to sing the songs of love to the earth, nobody to protect the sacred rivers, no systems of traditional knowledge remaining to be guardians of the earth. This is what humanity has collectively chosen, being played out in the new Chinese vision. Of course, it is not only China, but everywhere.

The global result of this shift from sacred ways of knowing and living is now so perfectly captured in the narratives around climate change. Scientists who were issuing us with warnings about future environmental disasters are now mostly resigned to accept that we will live in a world where ecological collapse on a vast scale is guaranteed. The words being used to describe the radical shift in our climate are ‘irreversible’ and ‘unprecedented ecological collapse’. There is a raging fire of materialism that is burning our earth and yet humanity wants to continue to build cities and follow the materialistic dream.

Remembering the nature soul
In the face of such extreme materialism we have to dig deeper than ever before to hold onto our indigenous ways of knowing. In all of us there is this ‘nature soul’, that aspect of us that is connected to the living soul of the earth. It is now more important than ever to return to the innate awareness that we humans are not separate from our beloved earth. It is utterly critical that we remember that humanity is an intricate part of the very fabric of creation. We are the living, breathing, pulsating essence of life that flows between all living systems of the earth. We are closer to the earth than our own jugular vein.

It is so easy to be drawn into helplessness when the tide of human affairs is rushing in like a dark tsunami that one can see will spell death to the natural world and to the principles of sustainability and oneness with the spirit of the earth. It is difficult to endure the witnessing of the loss of our wild habitats, the loss of traditional ways of living that are our models of sustainability and to see how we are stepping away, further than ever before, from the possibility of living in balance with the spirit of the earth. It is now more important than ever for us to dig even deeper and maintain our sacred ways of life.

The devic realm
There is something important that is not being spoken about in many spiritual circles and I would like to bring it into this conversation because I believe that it needs to be a part of our storytelling. We speak about the collapse of the earth’s ecosystem and the tearing down of sacred places, but nobody remembers the beings of the subtle realms that inhabit the sacred inner spaces of the earth’s subtle body.

We witness the desecration of the physical world but there is very little being said about the subtle worlds and the desecration that has taken place in this realm. As the body of the earth has been desecrated, so too have the sacred places in the subtle realms been destroyed.

The subtle worlds too will become filled with refugees who are confused and bewildered. The great spirits of mountains, forests, rivers, the infinitesimally small devic beings of flowers, fields and homes, these beings all will endure the same collapse of their habitat. They are invisible to the eye but their suffering will be palpable and they too will need places where they can be nourished, nurtured and loved. They too will need counselling and comfort from their loss of life as humanity destroys the sacred places.

When the sacred groves are being cut down, the ancient rivers being polluted, the migratory pathways blocked, where will these creatures and their spirits go? They are all a part of the body of light of the earth and they will need our hearts as a safe place to find refuge. There is radical simplicity in loving the earth and taking extra care to hold the light of the world soul in our hearts whilst we witness the desecration of her body. Those that can remember must hold the light, must bear witness to what is transpiring so that there are still some in humanity who see them, acknowledge them and who remain respectful to the ancient sacred ways.

Holding the earth in our hearts
It is vital to remember that, in our very own hearts, there is a place where the soul of the world finds refuge. We can hold the earth in our prayers and make our hearts a place of remembrance for our beloved Mother as she endures this suffering. Our hearts are connected by a golden thread in a web of light that is made strong by our remembrance of oneness. I believe that it is a radically powerful act in this time to collectively remember the earth in our prayers and hold her in this web of hearts connected by love. In holding her in our individual and collective spiritual heart we will also avail ourselves to bear witness to her suffering and pain. In holding this pain in our hearts we can share in her suffering, help her transition through this difficult time and soften her pain. We can remember her in our prayers, offer her gifts of incense and flowers on our altars, walk with deep respect and appreciation and simply remember our beloved Mother and acknowledge her suffering.

So let us remember to bring the Earth into our meditation and prayers and hold her in our hearts. Let us ensure that we are living with gentleness on the earth. The light of the earth can then rest in our hearts and receive the love that is so desperately needed to help her to transition through this time of darkness.

Originally published in Odyssey Magazine, Winter 2020

The original article was written for Odyssey Magazine, Winter 2021 edition.

Herbalism is a gift from the Great Mother. It is her promise to provide us with a medicine for every ailment. The Great Mother, our beloved earth, is filled with an abundance of gifts given freely to humanity for us to survive and thrive. Our very existence is dependent on the sustenance that the earth’s natural abundance gives to us and yet today we live in a world that is increasingly disconnected from this reality. As humanity grows more and more removed from natural ways of living it seems as though our feet float above the earth, ungrounded, lacking roots, disembodied. We live lives where our attention is scattered, our energy pulled outwardly into the world of endless distractions, forgetting to return to the source of our being, the source of our sustenance, our Mother Earth.  

We have forgotten that we are intimately connected to the earth and that this is the natural birthright of each human being. Every breath of air, every meal, every drink of water is a miracle of creation which is a seamless wholeness that embraces humanity.

Having been a herbalist now for more than half of my life I have come to recognize the gift of my connection to the natural world, the great peace that it brings to be content with sitting in nature and watching the leaves of a tree dance in the breeze. It is a simple gift but one that is greatly contrasted with the reality of the world that so many of us face in this post-virus world of conspiracy and misinformation, hyper-materialism and a deeply ominous sense of pending ecocide. This for me is a daily reminder of the open embrace of our beloved mother who gives and gives without any need for anything in return.

In talking about herbalism I think it is important to begin with the simple remembrance that the earth is really our mother and that we are earthlings, living in the abundance of her endless generosity. Mother Earth, Gaia, Pachamama, these are some of the sacred names for this Great Mother who has given us everything we need to survive and thrive, including an entire apothecary of medicines for the body, mind and spirit. As a herbalist I have come to understand that in her generosity she has given us a medicine for every ailment and this is a privilege which we need to honor.  

A Lost Language of the Wilderness

Part of the mystery of being a herbalist is observing how one’s consciousness becomes woven into the living earth and that in this weaving there is an intimate embrace in which we learn to speak an ancient language of the earth: the language of wild medicine. 

To understand the origins and essence of herbalism, one needs to move out of the head and into the heart. There is no place for scientific reductionism in herbalism. This can only take you down a path where the mind gets its grip on things and then there is no chance of hearing the soft-spoken language of a plant. Being a herbalist means learning the ancient language of plants and to do this one needs to disengage the mind and enter through the heart. In learning herbalism there must be a softening inside, a space for feeling, an empty space for interspecies transmission of wisdom. Only the senses and intelligence beyond the mind can really fathom and integrate this communication. Herbalists are people who live in this awareness and who have a living, feeling, intuitive relationship to the plant kingdom and the spirit of the earth. Herbalists speak a secret language to plants and we love them as friends and teachers, learning from them and the Great Mother in a way that a devotee might learn from their teacher. Plants impart great wisdom to us when we are working with them, show us things that are beyond the reaches of the mind. Some of these things are mysteries that we cannot fathom but can only accept as deeply mysterious. They speak in a language that is complex, an ancient intelligence that humans have long understood, that has been passed from one herbalist to another since humanity began. They ask us to reach deeper, to feel more, to step outside of our comfortable zones of thinking and into the abyss of mystery and awe. In some ways I see herbalists as irrational because we are seeking a way to live an ancient relationship with the earth during an age of ecological devastation and scientific rationalism. But the heart knows only love and we are lovers who don’t see anything but our beloved plants. That is how herbalists come to know plants, through a language of love. 

Herbalism is an impulse, an uncontrollable passion, a need, a deep desire that stems from an inner longing. It is not the dry intellectual decision to study at university and accumulate knowledge from the great pharmacopeias. Herbalism comes from a deep inner longing that only a living relationship with plants can meet. Quite often it is through the process of becoming ill that people discover herbalism and learn the secrets of this ancient art. The fear of death, disease and the the stresses of daily life lead us to cry out for help, sometimes  in complete desperation and only then do we discover that the plants are responding to our call. Our call to them in our time of need is also their call to us. When they hear us asking for help they respond, because in doing so they get to live their purpose which is to help humanity. 

Herbalism is also a living lineage of traditions and teachings handed down from one generation to another, one teacher to another. There is a golden thread that connects herbalists across time and space in a very mysterious way and we somehow recognize each other by some familiarity that is beyond reason. Quite often a person will come to embrace herbalism through meeting a herbalist and realizing that a certain inner longing, a certain hunger for wisdom is fulfilled by the art of herbalism. The tradition is taught from one person to another, a transmission of the healing spirit, form heart to heart.

Herbalism is at first a hunger that only plants can feed, an empty fertile space within the gut that needs to be touched by the deep greenery of medicinal plant wisdom. Herbalism comes to you in a communication with the plant world, it reaches inside you with tendrils and speaks to you in your dreams until you learn to respond. As long as humans have walked this earth there have been herbalists who have communed with the greenery of the earth, spoken to the plants, attuned to the wisdom of nature, bowed down in deep respect to the plant kingdom.

Only recently has herbalism become a commercial endeavor. It was once a way of life and now it has become a fertile place to prospect for natural compounds to make commercial medicines. It once was the domain of grandmothers in a kitchen, and now it is a brightly labelled and carefully packed product on a shelf.

Before there was innate knowledge of plants and their healing abilities. They came to us in dreams and visions, spoke to us about their properties and showed us where to find them. We prayed before we collected the plants and we gave thanks when we picked them. The practice of making a medicine was a prayer weaving the fertile depths of our Mother Earth with the Great Spirit. We used to leave our bodies and journey with the plants and the patient, go find help and advice in other dimensions with great teachers of the world beyond this one. There we would fetch remedies and be given insights that healed and restored balance to the spirit. 

Only later did we find out about such things as secondary metabolites and measurable medical compounds. It was only when the plants entered universities that we were told that they had discovered great phyto-medicinal properties and used words such as antibiotic, anti-viral or anti-coagulant to describe these things. Words that sounded more like warfare, a battleground where wild microbes waged war against the human body. It was only when science needed to classify, name and own what we have always known that they created words such as phenolics, alkaloids, saponins, terpenes and lipids in order to describe the medicinal properties of plants. Herbalism was never about this naming and classifying, categorization and hierarchical reductionist relationships. This was a mechanistic approach that did not see any of the deep and mysterious world of plant language that herbalists carried. The science of herbalism that we see today is a one dimensional description of a living art, a way of life, an endlessly complex and continually changing landscape of the inner worlds. The herbalism you will find in a book is not the herbalism that I know. I would be dishonest if I tried to convince you that it could be learned in books.

Herbalism shakes you to the core and forces you to look deeper than you are comfortable looking. It drags your awareness into the bowels of life where there is no place for the mind to make sense of things and then it speaks with you and shows you things. Science and the intelligent minds that are drawn to it try so desperately to classify herbalism, but how can you analyze a dead bird and know what it means to hear the birdsong at sunrise? Herbalism is a living art that takes you into some deeper place of fertile wisdom where the birdsong is alive within. This is where real herbalism offers its magic, when you surrender your human mind in order to hear the soft spoken words of the plant world. This is where the gifts of healing are given, a place of miracles and transmutation. Herbalism is not what you will find in the pharmacopoeia; it is in the dirt, deep in the roots of the fertile earth where your hands sink slowly, softly, to pull the roots of the wild pumpkin out of the mud. It is the conversation you have with the sun, the wind, the spirit of the mountain. It is the process of stepping outside of this world and into another space where magic is alive and speaking to the plant world, the spirits of the land. And when you are in that place, where words and descriptions no longer make sense to your rational mind, then you are being taught the art of herbalism, the ancient language of plants. 

But this tradition is now at great risk of being lost, along with traditional wisdom and wild places in this world.

The Uncertain Future

We have reached an era of mass ecological devastation. With the decimation of ecosystems comes the loss of vast treasure troves of medicine and the living communities of people who hold the knowledge of how to use these medicines.

There are two things threatening the herbal tradition: the loss of wild places and the loss of indigenous knowledge systems. 

On the Importance of Wild Places

For herbalism to continue as a tradition we need to retain our wild habitats. Undisturbed thicket, wild forest, desert scrub, these are the temples of a herbalist. This is where we meet our plant teachers and where the connection between the earth and humans is a vital part of a living tradition. Busy, built-up places where no wilderness survives carry a discordant energy that removes a herbalist from the ongoing conversation with nature. The teachings and practices remain but the spirit longs to touch the earth and to melt into the fabric of the wild. Wild places are habitats for an abundance of medicinal plants and they are also the homes of great spirits of the plant world, the non-physical beings of creation. The rivers, mountains, forests and caves are all home to the great nature spirits or devas who are living teachers in the subtle worlds. These devas have a living presence and they are an intrinsic connection that a herbalist must make before learning the secrets of the plant world.

I remember the first time I felt a living presence in nature that spoke to me: I was a young boy and we lived next to a coastal wetland surrounded by bush. A wild place. In the afternoons when I finished school I would make my way into the bush with our family dogs and I’d disappear until it started getting dark. One evening I was watching the sunset at the edge of the wetland and the fish were kissing the surface of the water as the setting sun glistened across the surface and the birds sang their evening prayers. I was in deep conversation with the fabric of this place and a light was present that one could only describe as sacred, ethereal and holy. This was a natural experience for the mind of a child, a part of being human. The experience of connecting to this living presence is utterly simple. It is a transmission, a fertilization, it plants a seed that grows into something inside us, offers us a living relationship with the earth. 

The vast wilderness is the face of this presence. Each plant, each tree, each nook and cranny is a part of the great body of the wilderness, of our Great Mother. What is present in the wilderness is not just an extraordinary amount of biodiversity, medicines for every ailment and undiscovered cures for future diseases, but a treasure trove of wisdom that is embodied in the natural world. Here we can learn to connect and speak to the wilderness, learn to listen to its magical language and enter into a fertile relationship that grows the unloved seeds of potential inside of us. But if these spaces are no longer present in the world then we will lose the opportunities for ourselves and our future generations to have these important conversations with our Mother Earth. With the loss of wilderness there is the loss of an opportunity to converse with a deep collective wisdom that is present in nature. This intelligence in the wilderness also wants our co-operation, longs to converse with humanity and to share a closer relationship. The medicines in the wild are Her gifts to us to endure the hardships of disease and to experience the possibility of living in harmony with ourselves, our bodies, our communities and our relationship to the land. The wilderness deserves our protection. It gives so freely to us and asks so little in return.

On the Importance of Indigenous Knowledge Systems 

The wilderness is also the last crucible of traditional knowledge systems. In the same way that a herbalist needs the wild open spaces to connect to the earth, so too do our indigenous knowledge systems need to live in the wild places and take care of them. Humanity has co-evolved with the natural world and survived impeccably. Indigenous knowledge systems have been created by a relationship to plants and ecosystems that is interwoven in their entire way of being. These ways of knowing have been a cornerstone of building deep treasure troves of wisdom for survival and thriving as a species. Indigenous communities have been taking care of wild landscapes for thousands of years, deriving food, medicine and shelter in an endlessly renewable lifestyle that has kept the world in balance. These communities still exist in isolation, but for how long we do not know. Like the wilderness, these communities deserve our protection.  

The herbalists that are in these places of indigenous community hold and protect an athenaeum of wisdom from the plant world. They protect the very source of our deep inner wisdom of plant medicine, nurture the relationship with the plant kingdom whilst the rest of the world seems to have forgotten. These places and their people are important ambassadors between humanity and the natural world, they speak for nature, they are some of the few that still understand the language of nature and who can continue to give the gift of plant communication to the future generations. 

Seeds for the Future

When the ecological devastation of our planet reaches a tipping point in the near future, it will be a time for all of humanity to pool our knowledge and wisdom in order to survive. This will be a time when our indigenous ways of knowing and living will be of paramount importance. The medicinal knowledge that is held in these communities is not only for human benefit but for entire ecosystems too. Those that speak to the plants not only receive wisdom about medicine but also are shown how to sustain and nourish life on earth in ways that science cannot understand. 

The signs of imminent collapse are everywhere. When the herbalists and indigenous knowledge systems are eliminated, it paves a way for the world to be treated as a material object without feeling or sentience. Who will be left to remember the Great Mother and who will tend to the sacred groves?

The disconnection with the sacred will lead to more ecologically catastrophic decisions made in the name of progress and growth. More dams will be built without consideration of the living spirit of a river, forests will be cut down and entire species eliminated which contain valuable new medicines, the estuaries will be drained and the rivers will continue to be polluted, the floodplains poisoned until life can no longer sustain itself.

Who will protect the earth is there is nobody left to listen to what she has to say?

Indigenous knowledge systems, much like wild ecosystems, are deep treasure troves of wisdom, connection, medicine and sustenance. The art of herbalism is intrinsically connected to indigenous knowledge and the wilderness. It is a tradition which offers a direct relationship to the spirit of the earth, the Great Mother who is also our mother. So for those that are conscious, who are spiritually minded, who believe that this is the time to hold the light of the heart of the world, I ask that you will embrace and defend our ancient art and protect the wild ecosystems that nurture and sustain it.