9:18pm September 9, 2014

How many of us are there?

The redwood forest whispered me into being.  It whispered its protection around my soul while I was still in my mother’s womb.  I’ve talked about the twin wombs I gestated in — my mother, and the ground under the Mother Tree.  And I can halfway accept this as truth.

The truth as I know it:  I practice a nature religion, for lack of a better word, and I wish there were better words for both nature and religion.  I didn’t set out to do this, I was not born into a culture that does this and I do not base my actions on neo-paganism or on other cultures.  I was pulled into it by my surroundings.  

What does this entail?  A lot of it is things I could never say, even if I wanted to.  But I can say that there is a tie to a specific place, a strong tie, a tie that doesn’t diminish with distance.  And that place has a responsibility to me, and I have a responsibility to that place.

As far as I know, I am the only human member of this particular place.  If you looked for anything resembling a congregation, you would find fungus and lichen and moss and redwood trees and slime molds and banana slugs and owls and redwood sorrel and above all — to me — the dirt, and the mist, and the moist dirt.  That is the environment that I am only one more part of.  I can’t explain it much further than that.  And I have tried.

I have heard from a small number of other people whose way of life ties them to a particular place.  Who were tied to that place by the place itself, not by their own conscious will, not by a fantasy they had, not by their own culture, not by someone else’s culture, not by something they read in a book.  But were simply called, by that place, to be a part of that place, forever, and to do things that connect them to that place.

I have heard from enough to know that there must be people quietly doing this all over the world.  People who do it by living in the place.  People like me, who do it in exile, and will probably never be able to move back.  Both types of people are important.  Neither one is better or worse than the other, although perhaps us exiles will always feel the loss of our homes.

I wish I knew how many other people do this.  How many other people live in the place, or live in exile from the place, but either way maintain a constant connection to the place, a connection that sustains them spiritually, but that also sustains the place spiritually.  This isn’t about feeling warm and fuzzy while hugging a tree, it’s about a relationship to the world that is as demanding as any other genuine spiritual path.

But how many other people are out there living this way?  And how will we ever know how many they are?  I have this imagining that we are all over the world, that we are doing something important, even if nobody ever sees us, even if nobody understands what we are doing.  That by maintaining our connections to these places, we are doing something to help maintain the places themselves, somewhere deep down on a level you can’t see with your eyes.

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