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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hi, and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz, and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. It's a podcast for edge walkers like you. Who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation and this emerging new and yet very ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with Earth. What it takes is humility and deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
Let me begin with a quote from Wendell Berry in his book, the Unsettling of America, where he addresses how America has become so disconnected from our sense of belonging to the land.
He says there can be no such thing as a global village. No matter how much one might love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. That's the pathway to feeling as if you belong to the land in a way that isn't just about the land belonging to you.
Robin Wall Kimmerer says that those of us who are not indigenous to the land can choose nevertheless to belong to it. And I like that idea, but it really is difficult to belong to the land when the land does not belong to you. There's some states like Rhode Island, where 98 point something percent of the entire state is owned privately.
So in order, unless you own land, you have to trespass to even stand on it much less develop a deep sense of belonging there. I've mentioned before how often I've moved for jobs mostly, but just as often at the whim of the landlord. I've never owned land. I've never owned my own house. I have had to move several times, 49 altogether, because as an adult I've lived mostly in Southern California and in, you know, in and near Seattle and the cost has always made land ownership something unreachable for me.
So living as a tenant, I've been displaced several times because the landlord decided they wanted to raise the rent or use the house in another way. And what the tenant needs or desires is not really part of the decision in our capitalistic system, where we have laws that are skewed to benefit the land owners.
When I moved to Bellingham, Washington a few years ago, I was able to deeply connect with the place and the creatures of the place that I talk about in my book, Church of the Wild. The deer and the raccoons, and the heron and the eagles, the barred owls. I felt a sense of belonging that I'd never experienced before.
But after the pandemic, the landlord, the house where I was living, wanted her second house back. So I was given notice to move again, and about that time I began to pay attention to the history of displacement in my family. Recently I visited the land where my mother's father's ancestors lived in the north of Scotland.
They were displaced by poverty and a system of land ownership that allowed only the wealthiest, the aristocrats, and mostly the British who weren't even living there to own most of the land. Once the land of Scotland was not owned. It was lived in and sung to and grazed upon and families were buried within.
The Glens were woven of kinship people and soil and water and ancestors belonging to each other, but then can the laws of ownership. The crowns united with Britain and the maps were redrawn and the chieftains of the Scottish highlands became landlords and their kin became their tenants, and communities became private estates, and the old ways of belonging were actually outlawed.
The bagpipes and the tartans were banned. The Gaelic tongue was silenced, and the clearances began around the middle of the 19th century. Whole families were burned from their homes so that sheep could graze where children once played, the people were scattered, including my own Sutherland ancestors. They were scattered to the shores and the cities of Scotland, to England, to Nova Scotia, to America, and they were silenced. And by the 19th century, only a few hundred individuals owned most of Scotland, many of them absentee English aristocrats who saw the highlands not as a home, but as hunting estates that they'd visit once a year.
My guest today is Alistair Macintosh, and he is one of the leading voices in restoring land to the people who live there. He articulates how the loss of soul happens when people are exiled from their place. The land reform movement in Scotland is not just a story of kicking out absentee British lairds, but the land reform acts there are about returning land not to individuals to buy and sell and rent out like we do in America, but rather they restore land to the care of the entire community in these community land trusts.
And there are over 500 of these trusts throughout Scotland that have returning the land to the habitants of the land. Alistair is a Quaker, a theologian, an activist, a writer, and a community organizer. He is also a true elder. He introduces a concept of communal ownership that's foreign to our culture in America that reveres private property.
It makes me wonder, perhaps it is possible to belong to the land without the land belonging to you. Alistair shares stories of mentoring and activism and a call to remember what has been dismembered, and we explore how the loss of language and land and soul can be healed through humility and love and grounded action, and revealing that even in these times of unraveling, the earth is still calling us home.
[ transition music plays]
Ah, Alistair Macintosh, I am so grateful that you are here with us, and I'm so grateful that you can share even just a snippet of your wisdom of your life, your work, your relationships, and all that you have done to bring our whole world into a different consciousness that is necessary. So with gratitude, welcome.
Alastair: Well, thank you for having me on your podcast.
Victoria: I read Soil and Soul about 15 years after it was published, and I was absolutely transfixed. I'd already started the work that I'm doing and it was just one of those books that I've underlined and exclamation pointed and hearted all through it, and I wish we really had a whole week to talk about your profound observations, not just in that book, but in the Riders on the Storm, and your Poacher's Pilgrimage is beautiful and you've done so much more than that. I've just spent this week reading and rereading just two of the documents that are on your website, and so I encourage people to go to that website. You're so good at documenting the work that you do, but when I read Soil and Soul, I was just, I don't know. It was like this profound experience of the way that you observe the world, your theological insights, your exhortations of the transformations that need to happen in our culture, and even just your literary capacity, your acumen. You are one of the most brilliant people I know. Sorry to be so direct about it, but I'm really, really grateful.
You're an activist and a global citizen, a Scottish citizen, and a very spiritual Quaker. And so all of those things wrapped together as one of the unique things that you bring, and I want to really focus in this conversation about the spirituality of place that seems to be foundational in everything that you're doing. You know, your description of where you grew up in the Isle of Harris and how you were born at a time that was still pre civilization or pre capitalism, and watching that transformation and then being committed to holding onto what was so deeply rooted within you.
So I just thought maybe we'd start with sharing a little bit about how the land where you were born has formed you and how that land themselves raised you.
Alastair: Well, first of all, I wasn't born on the Isle of Lewis.
Victoria: Oh, okay.
Alastair: I was actually born of a Scottish father who met my English mother when after the second World War, a young medical graduate from Edinburgh University, he got a job in Doncaster, in Yorkshire. And so I was actually born there and spent the first four years of my life in a coal mining village called Antho, where steam train would shunt up and down all day long, taking the slag to the slag heap, and my mother would dash out to pull the washing in so that they sm from the steam train, wouldn't mar the washing.
But my father was desperate to get back to Scotland. He had rich in both the Highlands and the lowlands of Scotland, but especially in the Highlands with family connections with the Isle of Lewis. And in 1960, when I was four years old, we moved there and you know, one of the first things I said to my mother, she'd often tease me about it before she died, was when I saw the hills of Lewis and the mountains down in Harris.
I said, oh, look how big the slag heaps are. Because that was my,
Victoria: that was your orientation
Alastair: you know, and industrial landscape. And so, actually, I got adopted into that landscape and equally important, the people of that place.
Victoria: Yeah.
Alastair: And so that was how I learned to connect with where I grew up and became immersed in that place.
I still feel very deeply immersed in it. It's always there in me, the hills, the lochs as we call lakes, the ocean around looking across to the snowy cap mainland hills about, oh, about 35, 40 miles across the sea. That was what I grew up in. And with people who are immersed in working the land and fishing on the water, gathering seaweed, both for fertilizer and for local seaweed factory.
Going out fishing, hunting for deer and rabbits and what have you. All of that kind of backdrop.
Victoria: And I remember you said there's few sentences that stick out for me from your story. You know, when people would come back from fishing and they had extra fish, they just stop at their neighbors. There's an ethos of sharing and having a community sense of identity.
Alastair: Oh, absolutely. Interestingly, I think it's often the case in rural communities, you have a very strong sense of individualities, but also a very strong sense of community. I call it communitarianism. People say, oh, it sounds communist, all this sharing. I say, well, actually that's a particular political framing.
We would see it as communitarian.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Alastair: We would see it, and the islands have a lot of religious people. We would see it in Christian terms a bit in the Acts of the apostles where they would share things together. So yes, I would go out fishing and if I did well with the sea fishing, so from the age of about 12 or 13, I would take a boat out alone onto the sea and land had a whiting, flat fish, floundered and such.
And if I had plenty going back home, I would stop at houses and share them out. And similarly, my father, who was the parish doctor, he would often come back with milk or leg of lamb or lobsters or all meat, cheese, sometimes vegetables. So it was so windy, not many people grew. That was the way it worked.
Victoria: Yeah. And I think there is something to that, that you were able to experience that as a young person, and now what you're doing is bringing back that sense of communitarian identity and commitment. It's something that in America is very, very foreign. I think maybe in some smaller rural communities it might still be there.
But I know for me, like I have no sense of that. I've been displaced. I think I told you, I was just in Scotland researching my mother's father's ancestors in Northern Scotland, who were displaced several times through the clearances and and whatnot.
Alastair: In case, yeah, that was particularly bad clearance up there and especially over towards Sutherland.
Victoria: Yes. Her last name is Sutherland.
Alastair: But I think, you know, I think you do have that in, certainly in rural America, can't speak so much for urban America. I think it's something that has to be recognized and brought out. This past week. I've twice been out at sea fishing for mackerel in my inflatable canoe, which sounds like a joke, but it's actually really good. It packs into, I can pack two of them into the back of the car with all the gear, just a small car, but I've been taking people out. I live in a hard pressed urban area of Glasgow called Govern. My wife and I have been here for the past 21 years and I take people out, so they get that experience.
On Saturday, we caught eight mackerel because it's just the end of the season and last night I took somebody else out and we caught nothing. The end of the season has really come as my son once said, so he said, if you don't, if there's not some time, when you catch nothing bad, then it's not fishing. You got to be prepared to accept it as a journal.
What I like about the mackerel is that they come in Big Shoals during the summer month. On one night out, we got a, we got 104 one night. And then that feeds out. That gives several feeds to the people in our workshops, in the local project we're involved in here. But best of all, it connects them in nature and it connects them in with that community of sharing, which we are rekindling in urban areas as well as rural areas.
And I'll tell you a lovely thing Victoria, people say to me, well, all of that ethos is something of the past in the Isle of Lewis. It's how it was up until about 1970s that it died. But actually my wife and I, when we go back home on holiday, as we do now, we get plied with stuff from surrounding houses. I came home in the summer, which the car loaded was legs of mutton, bags of fish. All frozens, so we could take it into the workshop. It was a door just for ourselves. You know, so many things because it's a kind of infectious generosity, and it's not rocket science. We can all do it. If you're making something, make a little extra and share it around.
Victoria: It is an ethos built in there. When I was in Scotland or in Ireland a couple years ago, everywhere I went, somebody had a little gif for me.
I didn't have enough room for everything. I think there's something connected to this idea of fidelity to place of the 21 years you've been there, the, I've moved 49 times in my life, and for me, not displaced by physical violence, but by capitalism violence, uh, renting, not from Lairds, but from just landowners through most of my life, moving when I'm told by the landlord to move or moving because of a job, a financial reason.
So that's just been my life story. And so yes, no wonder this is a important to me, this idea. How do we belong to place when a place doesn't belong to us?
Alastair: Yeah. Well, I think, was it Wendell Berry who came up with that phrase, the unsettling of America? That kind of captures it all? It is a profound unsettling.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Alastair: I think we have evolved. We are features of place. That's our identity. It's where literally we are rooted. And so when people are unsettled, when people are forced outta their place, whether it is Africans being brought over as slaves, and then at the bottom of the social aisle, whether it's First Nations or Native American peoples being forced out of their place, often by the descendants of people who themselves were forced out, or whether it's us white folks.
Some of whom have ancestors who are also forced outta the place that we too have been unsettled. It has a very disturbing effect on the psyche. And let me illustrate that by reading to you. I've got a number of books, million of Poetry years that I can refer to as an evidence piece of some of what I'm saying because I don't want you to think it's just me that's saying this, but what I'm sharing is profoundly in the culture.
And this is from the history of the working classes in Scotland, published in the 1920s by Tom Junction, a celebrated text of Scottish history. And he describes the evictions of my own McLennan island ancestors, intrus Conan, which is basically the middle of the far north of Scotland, west of Inverness.
Listen to how he describes it. Here he says, the evictions of Clan McLennan Unru Conan by the Belfor trustees were carried out in the most barbarous manner. And to this day, the spot is shown with the dis men and women vouched together, freeing rather for merciful death than it should be driven further from the stress from the valley of their birth.
When the further of the late leader of the conservative party shall air to the estates, he directed prompt eviction of another 27 families. And to this day, a parish, which in 1831, had a population of 2023 carries only 445 people, mostly gullies and their dependents on a London brewer's hundred square mile deer forest.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Alastair: In other words, the London brewer, the wealthy industrialists of the family that gave us Arthur Alfa of the Alfa Agreement in with Israel was an eviction landlord who evicted many families to make way for his sporting estate so that he and his friends could go and shoot deer without any interference.
Now this is what we mean by the highland clearances.
Victoria: Yeah.
Alastair: The eviction of large numbers of people to make way for sheep or for sporting purposes. And then where did they go? They either ended up in the industrial cities and became the working classes. Or they went off to the United States, or to Canada or Australia or South Africa or American ships, where often they would be put in charge of people of even worse social status.
And then you get the dynamic kicking in by which the oppressed become the oppressor.
Victoria: Yeah.
Alastair: And nowhere does this show more clearly in my view than in Donald Trump's family because Donald Trump's mother, Maryanne McLeod, immigrated born in, when was it? 1912, immigrated from a village about 10 miles from mine in the Isle of Lewis in 1930 when she was just 17 years old.
And why did she immigrate? Why did were so many young people immigrating then? Because so many of the young men had been lost in the first World War, about one in five of the young men.
Victoria: Wow.
Alastair: A father 200 were drowned when she was just five years old, coming back from the war where the ship ran around in a storm on the way home, and then they had the tuberculosis and the Spanish flu, which picked out more.
And then the immigration started. Large number of young men leaving the island to try and make it in America or Canada. And Maryanne took a chance and she became a domestic servant, and fairly soon afterwards met Frederick Price Trump, where upon, unlike her sister, she forgot her roots. Basically, she left her roots behind and became and lived the life of a wealthy woman.
Donald Trump was a consequence. So part of my thesis that I put forward, especially in Riders in the Storm and also Poachers Pilgrimage, is that to understand what is going on in that aspect of North American politics, you need to understand that somebody like Trump intrinsically understands the mentality of people who've been through that.
And so he's able to appeal to that Scotch-Irish constituency, that evangelical Scotch-Irish constituency of his base, because it's innate, not because it's conscious him, but because it's innate in him. And that, in my opinion, is what gives them traction.
Victoria: You revisit that theme of the oppressed becoming the oppressor because that is what happens.
It's what's happening all over the world, always again and again and again. There's something you talk about in a sermon you did in the last few years where you talk about anticysigy, you talk about this necessity for the polar opposites to come together.
Alastair: Yes.
Victoria: And for their, I feel like that's part of the way through, that feels here right now.
Impossible. As the polarities are becoming more and more severed, that the way back has feels like a time in history where that is the next, that's what's emerging.
Alastair: Well, that's anti the word, anti-me against or pul to bring things together. It means that tension or holding opposites in tension. Which is why weak weakers would say we weak because so often we are holding opposites together in tension.
And the famous term, caledonian, meaning Scottish antis, is a term that the professor Gregory Smith introduced roundabout 1920 in his book on Scottish literature when he said, this is a characteristic of the Scottish psyche, that in one moment we will be the serious engineer, or I will be talking about the intricacies of navigating the sea while Maxwell fishing in a storm or something like that.
And the next moment he says, we'll be to on the horns of elf land in the mountains, you, the next moment we'll be into a world of fantasy. And we're holding those two realities together. But it's also very powerful because. I think it's a key to how you avoid hitting your enemy. Jesus said to love our enemies.
How do you do that? Well, you take them as they come and you hold them in the lightest we, Quakers would say, you say, well, this is how the person is. This is how Donald Trump is, and let's just try to understand how that might be. It's not about making excuses for them, it's about understanding them and hoping that we too might be understood
Victoria: because it's also within ourselves.
I think holding the paradox is the spiritual journey. It's holding the both and you, you within ourselves with other people, within the community, within an ecosystem. That is what it, it is about.
Alastair: So often we're divided within ourselves 'cause of our complicity in the various things we hate.
Victoria: Exactly.
Alastair: People say, oh, well it's all the capitalist system to blame.
And I say to them, well, what about the capitalist in you? And they say, well, I just has no capitalism in me. And I say, well, tell me, do you have a pension? Do you have any savings invested?
Victoria: Do you have a house?
Alastair: When you go online, do you find for the best bargain? That is the spirit that cumulatively drives it all.
And so it's partly down to the system, but it's also partly within ourselves. And if we deny one while pointing the finger at the other, then we're not helping to find a way forward.
Victoria: And that is the way forward is, is hold. That is the way to accept someone like Donald Trump for who he is. As you not accept it within yourself.
Those parts of you, if you try to deny him and look past him, you, you're stuck.
Alastair: Yeah.
Victoria: You're stuck.
Alastair: Yeah.
Victoria: And so to unstick, to get unstuck in our culture now is to see both of those sides. I'm really interested in, there was a story I heard and I included in my book, I actually heard about it from Robert McFarlane when he was talking about the a campaign on Harris resisting the Wind energy company.
What I got from it was, what some campaigners did is focus on how do we bring people's hearts back to their souls, back to relationship with the land. And so they had a bit of a campaign around belonging to the land, remembering the stories of the land, falling in love with the land again. And then that seems to me to be a foundation for all of the events that happened after that because of people aren't invested in their identity and their love for the place where they are.
The beings that are more than human, as well as the human community. It's really difficult to sustain the kind of, uh, negotiations and fight and tenacity that it takes to make this kind of huge cultural change. I'm interested if, were you part of that or are you aware of, of that kinda simplified?
Alastair: Well, I think you might be speaking about the campaign from Lewis who's been several such, did
Victoria: I say Harris?
I meant Lewis
Alastair: and certainly it's close friends of mine who were leading that campaign. But it's a very good example of anti ciy because on the wind firm thing, I felt completely divided within myself.
Victoria: Hmm.
Alastair: On the one hand, we need to get away from fossil fuels. But then how do you do that? You've basically got two choices, let's say.
How do you do that if the politics are such that you're not going to cut levels of consumption? Because the obvious answer is you start reducing your consumerism.
Victoria: Right?
Alastair: And unfortunately, not many people are willing to vote for that. We see that abundantly. We see the way in which climate change targets, so now being rolled back right across Europe and strongly so here in the uk.
Because people won't accept the politics of what low carbon living means,
Victoria: right? Because it means sacrifice for us. We're not into our own sacrifice.
Alastair: That's it. And people don't vote for austerity for the most part. And, and so you've got two main options. One is renewables, and that means an industrial scale of wind farms and solar.
And you've got other things as well like tidal, but those are the two main ones. Or it means nuclear energy. And I've just had the uncomfortable experience of being asked by the Scottish Wild Land Group to write an essay on the meaning of wild land. And I said what I just said in it. And they came back to me and said, can you expand please on the tension between renewables or nuclear?
And I said, well, it's basically like this. You can have a nuclear power station. A footprint of a few football fields, or you can have an equivalent wind per plus storage capacity with a pump storage or whatever, with a vastly greater acreage of footprint. And I, I did calculations for the article concerned that's not yet published, but it's colossal, the comparison in footprint that involves.
And so it depends what you value. Do you value wild land? Do you value nature for its own's sake, or do you want to avoid what nuclear energy brings with it? And I point out that the nuclear power north thanks argument, which at one time many of us were signed up to is now exactly 50 years old this year.
The technology has moved on a heck of a lot since then. But the big thing is that we now know what we know about carbon dioxide that we did not know 50 years ago, and most of us did not know. And so I actually suggest, I don't come down saying we have to do one or the other, but I come down saying if we want to protect the countryside, if we want to protect the landscape, perhaps it is kind to the green movement to revisit the knee jerk reaction it has towards nuclear power in the way that the Finnish green party have done.
And they have decided it's better to have that kind of risk then to do what industrialization of the landscape is doing. So simply saying, not simply, but it's deeply complex. Yes, but saying it perhaps we need to reevaluate. Now we know what we know about climate change. Now we know how you know that it is carbon dioxide that has gone critical.
And are the issues of storage, are the issues of radiation effects on human health, are they really that much greater than what fossil fuels in the one hand are doing to the climate of the earth? And then renewables, on the other hand, arguably due to the human psyche, when you turn a pastoral landscape into an industrialized landscape where the fingerprint of humankind is all over it in highly visible ways.
Victoria: What happened in Lewis or what, what's underlying, what happened in Lewis is a third way. It's like this localized renewable, so it's not 10,000 acres of wind energy, for example, but it's one per small area
Alastair: that's, yeah. You see, we can do that. We've got these community wind firms in Lewis, which are putting huge amounts of money into small communities.
You were talking about a million pounds, a million and a half dollars a year just from having three modest wind turbines in a community. It's wonderful. That can only happen when the communities own the land. The problem with the mega scale is that this has typically been what is usually when landowners, private landowners who own vast acreage get into bed with a corporation,
Victoria: right,
Alastair: and then pump out the energy, and mainly for sending down to England.
Also, a problem with renewable energies is of course intermittency in that battery storage is very expensive. Pump storage has environmental questions behind it. You don't have the same stable base load, like when in winter you might have a Fortnite or so of calm weather. Cold calm weather. Where's your energy gonna come from then at the moment?
By burning gas, by pumping fossil fuels. Anyway, that's a bit of an aside, but I think the point you may be getting at is that the way in which the community tackled that one was much the same way that I tackled my part in the Harris super quarry Chaga back in the 1990s when the proposal was on the Isis Harris, which is the, the island I'm from is called Harris and the South and Lewis and the North two for the price of one divided by a mountain range, not by the sea, but in in Harris.
The proposal of a multinational company was to create the biggest road stone quarry in the world.
Victoria: Oh yeah.
Alastair: Shipping out the road in a national scenic area, and the way that I activated that one. There were different people playing different parts. I'm only talking about, my part here was by opening up awareness of what the land means and then finding a ready reception in the indigenous people of the place.
Some powerful local leaders of which can very much alongside not wanting to make too much of a public stand themselves, but very happy that I should be doing it and feeding me with material, feeding me with expressions like the gravel pit of Europe was one that was given to me. Or an old man pointing out that in the commandments, the 10 Commandments, it says, thou shalt honor thy mother and father so that thy des shall be long in the land that the Lord thy God has given you.
Mother and father. It doesn't mean nuclear family in that context, it means ancestors. Mm. And this is about connection to the land so that th days shall belong in the land that the Lord thy God has given to you. And so I was being fed this kind of stuff from old indigenous people and then using that and what I was writing and speaking about in the campaign, goodness.
And see this is about getting to the parks, that that all advertisement for a certain kind of beer, that it reaches the parts that other beers can't reach. When we're talking about the depth psychological and spiritual here, when we're talking about the poetic, but talking about reaching the parks, that conventional economic, cultural, environmental arguments on their own don't reach
Victoria: and both are necessary.
I, I like how you talk about that as well, about how. The shamanic, the bardic, the creatives, the poetic, the low road, the way to restore connection with soul, the soul of land.
Alastair: It's all about connection with soul. Yeah, it's all about connection with deep meaning. It's all about profound interconnection with one another and with all of life, that membership one of another as St.
Paul and a good day called it or Jesus used the metaphor that were all drenches on the vine or tree of life in Hinduism at man, the individual soul is ultimately one with German, the universal soul at managed value. Now at that, as it has it in Islam, all Muslims are with one body, same as imagery, as a body of Christ in Daoism will all.
Each one of the hundred thousands things that unsold from the breaking of the Dao into the yin and yang and then returns to its roots once again, returning to its roots is destiny according to Lao Sue in the Dao teaching.
Victoria: And that's, and it's both. It's like you to have just that, just the return to soul without some kind of practical way of living within a relationship with the community, both human and non-human and more than human is anemic.
And to do the other, to try to just be focused on the political, the practical without that deeper soul connection is ineffective. I think on both what the, there it is again. That you talk about the both and having holding both together.
Alastair: No, you've got to have the material practical expression and the spirituals at felt.
Impression. In Scotland, we often talk of the three H, chief, head, heart, and hand. Keep your intellect together. Don't get pulled down. Conspiracy rabbit holes and so on. Learn how to think. That's what philosophy teaches. Learn. Develop your critical faculties and understand the limits of your own critical faculties.
That's getting your head back together. Head, heart, feeling. Understand poetry. Understand how that works. Understand how to see like an artist sees. And if you don't know, ask Associate with people who do know and then hand the practical doing things, making yourself useful. I say to so many people, young people, you know, I get young people say to me, how can I do the kind of activism you've done?
Or write a book like Purchase Pilgrimage or Soil and Soul. And I maybe, I've been on a creative writing course and I say, well, there's no point going on a creative writing course unless you've got something worth writing about. Get yourself alive. How do you do that? If you're a young person, make yourself useful.
Learn how to cook. Offer your services perhaps in a homeless hospital or something like that. I said to somebody the other day, get a first aid qualification. That's what he wanted to do. Learn bookkeeping. I did an MBAA Master's in Business Administration when I was 22 because I realized I wasn't very useful, so I made myself useful.
It's not rocket science, but you do. You need to get your act together and think about it. It's no good just having nice ideas and wanting a feel good experience. If you want to change the world, you've got to be able to make a practical contribution to it. We get people coming into our local projects.
The gal gave a trust in saying, oh, they want to be part of the boat building or whatever that's going on. And we'll say to them, great, there's the brush. Could you feed the workshop flow or could you chop the vegetables or do the photocopying? I call it the photocopier test, and quite a few of them don't come back.
And that's a great filter. It's a great filter. The ones who like mha Ma Gandhi, the young man went into the congress office and was about to be sent away when he said, I'll do anything that needs doing, and the head of the office stopped everybody and said, look at this young man. He's prepared to do whatever is needed to help India's independence.
If we have more like that, then we will become an independent nation. That's how we got to do it. Make yourself useful. Learn to feel. And learn to think and don't have the arrogance of thinking you already know these things. Because if you are young, especially, you may not, and if you are older, you may be stuck in your waves and you may be, you may have blind spots that young people can teach you about.
Victoria: Yeah. Learning how to hold that loosely unknown, what we think we know and to be open to what we don't know is really the pathway.
Alastair: Yeah.
Victoria: There's something you said about how at the darkest times, that's when the human spirit awakens and we see that there's these myths in our movies and cultural stories that when collapse happens, everybody starts fighting each other and we need to protect ourselves at the expense of our neighbors.
And yet when there's tragedy, when there's crisis, when there's darkness, that's when we. The human spirit opens up and loves one another, takes care of one another. It just, you just see it happening. Just happened. My daughter was in the LA fires and she saw a complete shift of everybody caring for one another all of a sudden, and there's something in our DNA that actually our human spirit awakens in these dark times.
And so it's one of the things that gives me some hope.
Alastair: Well, it's that, it's like that old adage when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and you have to, you have to learn that you, you don't just jump into it overnight. These things are lifelong processes and I get a lot of people say to me, things are so much harder today than they used to be, and they certainly are.
In the sixties and seventies, we had a lot more optimism and hope. We established we are golden and we've got to make it back to the garden as a Woodstock song. Ha had it. There's a lot more hope back then. But at the same time, I'll say to people. Consider this, which would you rather, if you are an activist, which would you rather, would you rather be living in a society where everything's great and there's not much needing done?
Or would you rather be where things are really hard pressed and anything you might need bring is really needed? Does God need more angels in heaven where there's already lots floating around playing harps and clouds? Or does God need the angels here on earth where there's maybe not enough hands on deck?
Where would you rather be? And my goodness, that gets people thinking, you know, perhaps we are privileged to live in difficult times,
Victoria: privilege to live in a difficult time. That's so beautiful and that gives us hope in the midst of this, that it's, yes, things will be different.
Alastair: Yeah, with a, can I just say with a little qualifications there?
Perhaps we are privileged if we are privileged enough not to be deeply damaged by what is happen. It is so important to be aware of our privilege and I've got a privileged education and so on. I'm stable in life and what have you. It's so important that in everything I say, to just remember that backdrop and then to use those gifts for the common good, not just to hold onto them for oneself, but also to recognize that by no means everybody is in a position to think and act like that.
Victoria: It's that liberation of the oppressed and the oppressors.
Alastair: There you go.
Victoria: It's all of that. Um,
Alastair: there you go.
Victoria: There's something I would love for you to just talk a little bit more about that. You mentioned, you called it the rubric of regeneration.
Alastair: Oh, yes.
Victoria: Yeah. Would you mind
Alastair: just, okay, so that's in a little book I did for the Schumacher Society, a Schumacher Briefing called Rekindling Community.
Victoria: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Alastair: And it's outta fentanyl. But the PDF is on my website, so if you go into the publication section of my website, you'll find that some of my books in all of my articles. So basically it's the, A name of the game is Community Regeneration, membering. That which has been dismembered. We need to memory bringing to consciousness.
This is what we, in Liberation Theologian, theologians call Conscientization, bringing to awareness a situation, remembering that which has been dismembered. Secondly, revisioning how the teacher could be, if we as a community were to own the local land in a community land first, what difference would it make?
What could we then do? And then finally, reclaiming what is needed to bring it about the remembering, revising. Reclaiming in order to affect community regeneration. And I'd like to say that kind of thing didn't come to me from nowhere. It came outta the experience of a young man spending four years working in Pap New Guinea and what I learned about community development from those people.
Victoria: I wanna hear more about that and more about everything that you're working on. And maybe we can just end with what is it you're focused on right now?
Alastair: Well, right now, Friday I got back from my own, I was running a week at Iona, A BIB, doing another one in early October next year there. And so I was part of a group running a week at the API in which my theme was mentoring.
I'm turning 70 next month, and when you get to a certain age. I find I'm getting more and more every day. I get emails from people who've read my books and have got questions, and I try to give time to those, especially if they're young people. And that business of mentoring, of hearing a, a person's situation, obviously within the limited time space you can offer and sharing from your own experience or asking questions that will draw them out, that kind of thing is important.
I'm also working with people in West Papua, the Indonesian side of New Guinea. I'm closely involved with them and right now it's on my desk. I'm right now working with the, laying out the translation of a text that I prepared with colleagues called Community Theology for Papua Land Conflict and Leadership.
Basically setting it in the context of their spiritual understanding. Looking at how you can relate those three issues together. The importance of land to them as an indigenous people, but where often their land rights are profoundly threatened, land conflict. How in community leadership we need to be able to face and understand the conflict and then the leadership that comes out of it.
Hmm.
Victoria: The complexities of all that.
Alastair: Yeah, so that's, that's basically what I'm working. I've got post English text and the Indonesian text now prepared. I don't speak Indonesia. I'm working with my colleagues who translate, and I'm just literally doing the layout of that Very practical things like QR codes to relevant pages and what can fit onto the.
32 pages of an asex booklet, that kind of stuff. But the roots of it came out of a series of five seminars we had last year with through translation with Village Community Leaders, where we looked at the theological pieces of leadership because most of them, ironically, because they, uh, heirs to what the Dutch Reformed Church set in place, they have the same kind of theology as I grew up with in the Isle of Lewis, so that some of them have been over here.
We can speak each other's language, even if it's not my theology, because I, I'm into liberation theology, but we speak the same language. So I'll take things like there's Moses leading the Israelites through the desert for 40 years and so on, and they're getting fed up of eating manna. Hankering after the food they had in Egypt, hankering after the consumerism like we might do today.
And God sends a plague of snakes amongst them and the snakes are biting and killing them and all the rest of it. So the people say to Moses, can you tell God to sort this out? So Moses gets the telephone line to God and says, can you sort it out? And God says, do this. He says, make a snake of bronze and put it in a pole and hold it up.
And whosoever looks upon it shall be healed with Moses does, and it works. Now, what does that say about leadership? What's going on there? In my interpretation, working with the pep ones. When conflict breaks out in the community, when dissatisfaction breaks out and the poisons of acro and backbiting and all the rest of it break out in the community, how do you heal it?
You fashion what is happening in the gleaming bronze that will shine in the sun and you hold it up in the pole and whichever of us are willing to look at our own psychological shadow in the union sense around the path to healing.
Victoria: Oh, beautiful.
Alastair: And they really get it. My goodness. It's like they've heard that story many a time in their churches, but they haven't thought about it like that.
So I take a number of these stories and interpret them like that. That'll all be on the web, I hope, probably next month. A lot of what I'm thinking about is, I think that's really important stuff in the Christian tradition. I'm very sheep, as you might have picked up by inter feast tradition behind me are all manner of books and Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, indigenous spiritualities, nie, religions, and so on.
I think that there's so much in the Christian tradition that has been warped and not understood and willfully manipulated in order to blunt it teeth. And so I'm really interested in opening that up. That's the kind of stuff I do when I, um, teach course at I Abby or something like that, I open up that liberation theology.
You are, you, you are into land and stuff about the land. I, I've got here the current issue of the St. Andrews University Divinity School Journal called Theology in Scotland. If you're listeners Google Theology in Scotland, it'll come up at the current issue and it's, it's a fee journal. It's, there's no paywall.
I've got two pieces in this. One is about prison reform because on Wednesday we're having a big session about prison reform in our local organization. But the other is called a light, and it's a lead paper here, A Light to the Nations Israel, Palestine, Scotland, and the Charter of the Land. And in it, it's based on a lecture I gave together with a Palestinian professor of biodiversity at Beth Legum University.
And I'm looking at what's happened to the land in both places in Israel Palestine as scenes of the lens of the Hebrew prophets, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, et cetera, and in our Scottish Highland tradition, as seen through the lens of our bar of the prophets. And if I can just give you a brief flavor of the kind of material.
Close connection between land and people and language. In this case, because this special issue is actually about faith and language, the close connection in so many of these Bardic poems, the land is adverse of the of the living person. So here is what my friend, my friend, the American Gaelic Scholar, Michael Newton's translation of a poem by Gillsburg MCee about the way in which the 1872 Education Act basically banned the teaching of children in their indigenous Gaelic language, children of gale tech, the Gaelic speaking areas, and I'll read it in English 'cause I don't have the Gaelic myself and neither will most of you're listeners.
Ala what terrible change could come into the galeta from all sides. If it's delightful, language is laid to rest because of the lack of people who speak it or inhabitants of the glens and peaks the lowland tongue. I English can't pronounce the names for things in places in our home and it can't understand or recognize them.
It is not surprising that Jaggy Benny glow, um, a mountain has a broken heart and that she keen sadly, since she cannot hear the sweet, gentle language of her beloved ale, folk and Ben lawyers will being sensed. She will be angry at the educational authorities. Since the deceived people, tre, putting them in English change Every Craig Precipice peak and cliff, they will raise a wailing sat call Covis.
Because the tongue of the homeland perished and there's just so much poetry like that. Here's, here's very briefly, here's a couple of verses from one by Murda McLeod, who died in 1914 from my own village, Louis Boston, in the Isle of Lewis I, and for the Isle of Heather, just two of the verses. Dear Isle, of all others a thousand times, blessed that bountiful nature has stored with its best to there.
My devotion shall be ly die and garlic be spoken till ocean run dry. O bits of honks of my boy who died Rome are scaling the rocks to the birds hidden home, the thick gloom of Glasgow, my happiness stole for the din of her hammers. I've deafened my soul.
Victoria: Hmm.
Alastair: There you see the trauma breakup there you see.
People who have to leave the island to work in the industrial economy and the din of her hammers has deafened my soul. We lose that sensibility of what ts Elliot in his ESI from the 1920s on the metaphysical poet calls a dissociation of sensibility that set in in English poetry around the 17th century.
The dissociation, the disconnection of sensibility of the ability to feel that loss of soul. And as our African friends would often point out to us, when a people become sick, the name of the game is calling back the soul. That's what we need to be doing today.
Victoria: Calling back. The soul in all these ways are so connected with land, so connected with heart, so connected with mind and and our hands and what we do.
Alistair, thank you. So much. I would love to continue this, and perhaps you can make time again in a couple months. I would love that.
Alastair: Thank you, Victoria, and go well and bless all your listeners.
Victoria: Ah, thank you. Many blessings, wild blessings of peace and love in all that you do.
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. They happen when we approach the rest of the alive world with reverence and an open heart. Each week I like to offer an invitation to wander in your wildish place and to do so with reverence and to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
And so this week, as you enter into wandering with your place, do so with an open heart. And let your feet remember. Allow yourself to remember what you and our whole culture has forgotten, that the ground beneath us is not a backdrop. It is kin wander, noticing the small signs of belonging that still are retained there.
Pay attention to how the soil remembers. The soil remembers stories. And ask yourself quietly, who walked here before me, who was taken from this place, and who still waits to be returned to this land where you live now? And also ask, how do I belong? How do I belong to this land? Don't rush to answer it.
Just listen. Let the land speak. In the land's own language, moss and root, broken fences and bird songs help yourself to remember that you are not here to own or fix or prove anything. You're here to remember, to remember what has been dismembered and when you return home, carry a small story that found you.
Maybe it's a story of a leaf or a memory that came to you, or a feeling that the land is even now remembering you back into relationship.
Stephen: This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth. And please subscribe to the podcast, leave a review and share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild. Music by Alec, Slater, and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm, produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds and hosted by Victoria Loorz.