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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: 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 the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and this emerging new and yet really ancient story that's grounded in kindred and sacred relationship with earth. All it takes is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
So a foundational precept or belief that's underlying all of wild spirituality is that the earth and all of her beings and all the systems are sacred. But what does that really mean? There are a whole lot of different ways to conceptualize this mystery.
Some believe that God or Gods, I guess, speak through nature, that they can hear God as they pay attention to a tree or another place within nature, and that they can connect with God more simply and more directly through that. And others believe that nature herself is the holy presence. And I guess somewhere in between that is where I fall.
In fact, I would say now that the presence of the holy is found in that in between. That relationship, that space between all beings and all things where love dwells, where you can feel the otherness of each other and also the connection. That's sort of the mystery of love. I think that's what logos means.
It means conversation that living with one another, that in between that back and forth thing, that relationship being, which isn't a noun, but western languages are rooted in nouns and it makes you wonder how much of the holy is lost when we try to fit everything into a noun. The separate things, when holiness and sacredness and love is a verb, it's the thing in between.
It's the relationships in between. It's what connects the nouns. That's important in all of this understanding. Our ancestors, all of us, if you go back far enough, they understood this and they lived this, or at least they lived in cultures that inherently knew that their relationships with one another, their survival, the land and the creatures of the land and the weather and all that is alive and dying, and alivening again on earth is sacred.
They knew that it was built into their daily life, and it's important for us to understand that these great, great, great, great, great ancestors of ours are part of us. That we have inherited that deep connection with all that is, and that we know it. We know it beyond knowing that it all is sacred, it's important for us to connect not only with the names of our ancestors, like on ancestry.com, which is interesting in itself.
To seek, to learn and feel into the reality that our ancestors had deep relationship with particular lands. Lands that we've almost all of us have been exiled from homelands that through displacement or violence or depletion of resources, or just through intentional severance that is necessary to support a colonizing, imperial and industrial culture. You have to disconnect people from the land in order to take it from them.
The reality is that most of us are severely and tragically disconnected, some of us longer than others.
Every year. I've been gathering with people at Ards Friary and Donegal Ireland. It's at the northern end of the Republic. There's something really magical about that place. The Ards forest, the beaches and the sea, people whose ancestors are from that land can feel it right when they get on the land.
Even people whose ancestors aren't from that land can feel something magical. There's something magical about that place, and I've noticed that there's been a rise in interest in Celtic spirituality over the last few decades. Many of us, many people are longing for that sense of belonging to the land, belonging to a culture, an intact culture, and they're looking to explore what does it mean to know that I am part, I am descendant from people who are indigenous to a particular place.
We're longing for that sense of belonging, and I think our connection with the places of our ancestors is part of our understanding what having a sacred relationship with the land really means. It's more than a definition. It's like what Jacob said when he awakened from that dream that, that connected earth with heaven in the Old Testament. He awoke and he said, this land is holy and I didn't realize it. He realized that he was not separate from the land, that God was not separate from the land. And we learned that in the same way by experience, by investing in relationship, by living in deeper, more respectful relationship with the land.
And that's how we discover and experience what sacred relationship means. My guest a few weeks ago, Four Arrows, says that all of us, all of us are indigenous to earth. We all belong. We all actually belong here on this planet. And yet with a knowing that humans are constantly intent on taking land away from one another.
I know my ancestors were brought here to displace the native peoples that were already here. It's an awful and devastating history, and I need to look deeper than that. I need to own that and grieve that and do what I can to reconcile that and to look deeper, that my ancestors also were exiled from their land.
My ancestors also were deeply connected with land that was slowly depleted and they needed to leave. It is important for us to learn not just what the history books tell us about the wars and the empires that are rising and falling, but to recover wisdom from our ancestors and from the land herself and from our own past.
And it's with that orientation that I want you to meet a friend of mine. My wonderful guest today is Sean O Gaoithin. A new friend that I met at Ards Friary in Donegal a few years ago. Sean is the lead gardener at Glenveagh National Park, which is the largest wild park in Ireland. He's also a third level hedge Druid and Sean approaches his spirituality and his work and his life through lenses that he and inherited from his indigenous Irish ancestors and all of it naturally integrates relationship with the wild ones in his place with everything that he's about.
We jumped right into our conversation talking about the forests of Ards, where the monks there are rewilding their 300 or so acres of forest and shoreline as they transition their land and the retreat center into a center for ecological spirituality.
[ Transition music plays]
Hello, how have you been?
Sean: Great, thank you very much.
Victoria: Aww and all is well at the forest?
Sean: Uh, yes, I was over there last week. The trees are growing. It's just lovely. All's good. The trees are growing. Just lately I was over there just having a check on it myself, and I was over there previously a couple of weeks previous to that, and we were doing a little bit of work on just keeping the weeds down from around the trees while they just established themselves.
And we had very dry weather last year. They were slow to grow, but they're all good. I'm quite happy they're going to be fine. It's just gonna take a little bit of time. In five years there'll be something to really see. It just takes them a little bit of time to get to, so, so I imagine by the end of this year it's gonna already start looking like a forest.
It's just, it's a little bit disappointing when people. Because we had lots of people involved, all kinds of kids groups and Ukrainian women and volunteers and monks, everybody out planting the trees. It was such a joyous thing to be involved in. So it's a really beautiful project in that we have taken concrete steps and it's, it's difficult.
It you, you would think it'd be very straightforward, but there's a lot of bits and pieces have to be put in place to begin the work of restoring nature. There's, I suppose there's quite a difference between Ireland and other places in the world because Ireland is a very old inhabited landscape and we lost our wild forests a long time ago.
So. That's a bit of an eyeopener for North Americans. 'cause you still have wild forests, you know, incredible nature all around you. You have amazing access to these marvelous, you know, wilderness places. So wilderness means different things in different places, you know, so,
Victoria: yeah, and I mean, when I was there, the times that I've been there, I think I saw one wild animal and the whole month I stayed in Donegal. I saw a rabbit out of the corner of my eyes.
Sean: Nice. Yeah. But oh, we have them all right.
Victoria: Yeah, they're there.
Sean: Oh yeah. And there's lots of deer in and around yards and there's lots of deer up where I work up in Glenveagh National Park just at the weekend, just gone by, I was down visiting family down in Dublin and uh, I met up with a friend and we went for a trip for the day down into the midlands of Ireland, right down into the heart, right down into the middle of the country. So a couple hours drive outta Dublin down to this bog, this place, the level, you know, land and there's an ancient forest on like an island surrounded by the bog.
It's just one of these surviving. We have these little remnants of ancient forests and there were great big old trees. And I did all the characteristics of what an ancient forest is like here in Ireland. I also, um, I did a book on native woodlands of Donegal where it was kind of like a study of what we have here in Donegal and like it's up in the northwest of Ireland.
It's kind of like the Washington or Oregon of Ireland, the northwest. And um, it's one of the wildest of all the places, but it's also famous, Donegal is, for being treeless.
Victoria: Right.
Sean: And yes, we have some of the best examples of ancient forests in the country here in Donegal that are kind of just kind of quietly getting on with this.
And they're all accidents of all kinds of different things, all kinds of different types of fate that have meant mostly because they were privately owned for a long time, and the people who owned the patches of woodland protected them. So anyway, I did a book just raising awareness of what Donegal has, and that's been very, very successful.
So that was a really wonderful opportunity to, I suppose, just share good information about what is indigenous in this landscape. You know, we also have our Gaelic language and the names for these places and the names of the plants and animals are also a kind of, um, a doorway into kind of a type of cultural understanding or a cultural significance that's particular to Ireland.
So that was a lot of fun and, and really all I was doing was touching on a number of these different aspects. You could say they're all aspects of how we can explore the significance or the value or the understandings or what's particular about the indigenous flora and fauna in Ireland and what it means to us today.
And, and what I was encountering everywhere I went, when I was visiting these woodlands and the kind of people I was meeting and the kind of communities that I was connecting with, was that people are really interested in this stuff. There's an incredible hunger for this kind of sense of reconnection to learn and reinvigorate a deeper understanding of what's indigenous and why the particular biodiversity of this particular landscape is important. Because it's kind of, the assumption has always been that nature doesn't really matter that much. That what really matters is agriculture and human survival.
Victoria: And doing that, that's generations of undoing, you know? And I do think, I think it's more than just wanting to understand. I think the yearning is something that's built into being human, that we've been disconnected from the rest of the natural world for generations.
There's something missing in our lives. I think it's directly related to the epidemic of loneliness and the sense of disconnection from other people and other nations. That kind of othering that we do with people. We do in the extreme with the natural world, even using the pronouns of it, you know, that helps us to detach.
And so I think there is a yearning for that reattachment, that reconnection, which is actually a meaning of religion. Which, you know, religios means reconnection. And so you know, what you're doing is not just sort of academic or scientific or like intellectual. It's deeply spiritual. And it's, even before we talk about your druidic spirituality, it's like as we reconnect with our place and we reconnect with the indigeneity of not just our place but our people.
And for Irish, you know, for the most part, a lot of people are indigenous to that land. People in America are entranced with the idea of Celtic spirituality, Druidry, because we've been so disconnected. We are the descendants of those who have left and you know, moved into another indigenous people's territory.
And we're starting to wrestle with that for the first time in hundreds of years. But identifying with our own indigeneity is essential. Yeah. So the work you're doing has impact beyond Donegal.
Sean: Sure. Like you're familiar with the work and writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer. And like she's a huge inspiration to me, and I love that she's a biologist and a moss expert and she gets ecology.
You know, like I sometimes I find myself describing what my spirituality, it's some kind of flux, it's not a kind of a fixed kind of spirituality. Sometimes I find myself saying to people, you know, ecology is my religion.
Victoria: Hey, amen.
Sean: And straight away I'm starting to think I wonder, did I do justice to what I mean, because ecology for some people is just a type of scientific analysis.
Whereas like I think the word ecology and the word spirituality are basically interchangeable. They're the same, 'cause it's about connection and ecology is about the interrelatedness of things rather than of all beings. Not things even, but all beings. And its processes. And it's an unfolding process as well because, you know, for a long, long time I really grappled with what is native even, you know, and I mean native as in the native flora and fauna of Ireland, because we have a bit of a mixed up flora and fauna, like everywhere else, right? Actually it's all a bit mixed up. Like, um, you know, I've the good fortune of traveling quite a bit and had the good fortune to study in different places and connect in different ways to the botanical world, you could say.
So I trained in three different botanical gardens, uh, one in Dublin and then two in London, and got involved in an organization called Botanic Gardens Conservation International, which is about a thousand botanic gardens all over the world, working together to save the flora of the world. Like, there's the most amazing things going on all over the place.
And, you know, different countries and different botanical gardens are specializing in the orchids of the Amazon or the grasses of the Pampas in South America or whatever. And it's apolitical regardless of all the nonsense that goes on in politics and carry on with people competing with each other for resources.
The Botanic Garden world is completely apolitical and works together, so there are the most amazing people doing amazing work. I, I was at a, as a result of doing that book in the Woodlands of Donegal, I was asked to give a talk at a conference here in Ireland last year, and I just found myself eating pizza with this American guy and turns out that he just spent his whole life working for the American government restoring rainforests in South America.
And I was like, why don't we ever hear about these things?
Victoria: Yeah, right.
Sean: And he was telling me that in the course of his work, he restored about 300,000 hectares of forest, which is a phenomenal amount of forest. And I was like, so how did you do that? And there was a key species of tree that once they got it going, everything else followed.
Victoria: Fascinating.
Sean: So that's where ecology is fantastic. Where if you get the kind of key reintroduction of a particular species back into a dynamic, the rest of the dynamic takes care of itself and all the other species return over time. Of course, it doesn't just happen overnight. So, you know, in my better moments, Victoria, I oscillate between despair and hope.
Victoria: Yes. Don't we all?
Sean: So I feel like I need to say that often to people who I feel I can maybe relate more. So I found myself saying a lot in the last couple of years that I just accept that as a spectrum that I live inside. And so there are moments of incredible inspiration and hope. And then there are other moments of are we going to get this right?
And I also, I'm more of a glass half full sort of a person than a glass half empty. And I absolutely believe that we can turn this earth of ours into the Garden of Eden. And all we have to do is decide to do it. And I'm saying that as a gardener and I kind of feel like, um, we need to train up a lot of gardeners.
I'm not talking about growing petunias, I'm talking about a type of ecological gardener. Most gardeners are very ecological. They understand all these processes. And of course I also feel that we need to step back and try and occupy less space and give nature more space. And that's kind of where the rewilding comes in.
So there's space enough for us to get it all right. You know, I'm just looking out on my own garden here and it's all indigenous trees. So I've turned my little base around where I live, into a little native woodland and there was just grass growing here 10 years ago. And now there's woodlands and there's trees, and there's birds nesting and the,
Victoria: in 10 years, that's so encouraging.
Sean: Yeah, it is. 'cause we also forget that. Well, well we think it just takes too long. So we're, we're impatient and we think we're not gonna, we don't have enough time. But like gardeners, I think learn that actually you can really work with time. And there are many, many, many people doing this same work all over the place.
That's the other thing that I've found by kind of motivating myself to get out there into the world and meet people and connect with people through different things like conferencing or different projects that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people, even just here in Ireland, who all want to make a contribution to protecting and cherishing the nature that we have.
So it's a very good environment in lots of ways. Also, small is beautiful, I think. Mm, that we don't have to kind of, um, do it all. I'm involved locally here at the local village closest to me with we're making a biodiversity garden, and that's all about weeds and letting the weeds go and actually creating habitats.
Actually, it makes all kinds of economic sense even to be doing these things because it's low impact, it's low cost and high biodiversity outcomes. So it's, it's kind of a win-win situation. So that's really nice. And people again, show up and are really happy to get involved in planting a butterfly bed or planting a little native woodland or creating a kind of a diverse hedge where multiple species can start to make their homes nesting.
Birds can arrive and make their nests and all that kind of stuff. So one of the things we did there was we planted a holly hedge. So, do you know the holly tree? Sort of a thorny leaf?
Victoria: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sean: Uh, an evergreen, and that's very much part of our indigenous flora. And we have these incredibly beautiful holly blue butterflies that are particular just to that species.
They're really magical. So there's all that wonderful anticipation as well, where by starting something now in 10 years time, you can just sit back and enjoy this incredible effect that it's having, you know? So I feel, um, there's a lot that we can do to sort out our own little habitat, whatever that is.
Victoria: Well, like Mary Reynolds talks about, another Irish gardener.
Sean: Yeah.
Victoria: And I love her book about acts of restorative kindness. You know, it's like where she says, just take half of whatever you have, even if it's a window box and you're in a high-rise apartment and rewild that for the others that were in community with.
I think that's part of it. It's like we're creating, we're remembering that we are part of a larger family, you know, that our kindred relationships expand beyond just our, you know, children and parents. And that matters. Like it's connected with all the other isms that we are suffering from. And I did wanna say, like something you said about the despair and the inspiration is that both, and that I'm experiencing as well, and that we explore in our, in our work is that both of those are holy.
You know, it's not like life is ever gonna not have despair because death is built into it, you know? And so like, how do we. How do we approach it? Not as if we gotta hurry up and get past this so that we can get back onto the hope, but to hold both of them with sacred presence. And that matters even for like the plants, like here, Holly can be invasive, you know, and kind of take over the whole, but even quote unquote invasive species, some of them, you know, like bindweed just kills everybody, like humans do.
And some of them just are really needed like the blackberries here, you know, they take over, they're invasive, but they're restoring the soil and it's like a bigger picture and we don't have enough knowledge. And that's why I think the knowledge is really important to know what to even do with that.
Sean: And then to, I, I, I also, I struggle with this idea of invasive species, because, well, I always start by saying we're probably the most invasive species
Victoria: we are. Absolutely. And so if we're gonna deal with invasive species with that much violence, then it's no surprise that we deal with ourselves that way.
Sean: Yeah. I also can't really subscribe to the idea of being hateful towards invasive species because they're just doing what they do.
And, um, where I work, it's a national park and for the last 50 years we've been trying to get rid of one particular species, a type of rhododenron, which is a huge problem in this part of the world. It's one of a whole load of things. There are actually hundreds of categorized invasive species, and most of them are just romping around the place, or even the idea of certain plants being categorized as weeds and others as wildflowers and others as cultivated plants.
Victoria: It's all about how it serves humans versus how it serves ecosystem.
Sean: And like, um, one of the things that I found incredibly helpful and growthful and something that I've really been able to work with and share with people is this idea of, um, declaring peace with nature and doing that through a process called Gaia Touch or Earth Yoga, which is a concept that was developed by this guy Marko Pogacnik, who is this Slovenian landscape healer.
Amazing, amazing character who did work here in Donegal landscape healing work way back in the early nineties, before we had what we called the peace process, which stopped all the killing and fighting in Northern Ireland and brought about a type of accommodation and understanding that nobody believed could, would've been possible, but by sheer hard, hard work by all the people involved, supported by all kinds of people all over the world, including American politicians, uh, and all kinds of people.
We got a peaceful Ireland and a type of an accommodation where people sorted out their identity issues and came to a new kind of understanding where we can live and let live, you know? But, uh, anyway, Marko came back about 20 years after doing his original work to do more work, and at that stage, this is about 10 or 15 years ago, he had developed this idea of Gaia touch using gestural movements using the body as a kind of a communicator, a direct communicator. So instead of, um, dialogue, you know, putting ideas out or through soundings of whatever kind, that there's meaning and intent behind something as simple as a heart opening gesture where you can just do this. You know, and one of the great practices that he taught a group of people that I was part of was this idea of declaring your peace with nature.
You know, turning to the directions and doing a heart opening gesture where you're not saying anything, but you're, the thinking is that nature can see you.
Victoria: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sean: As much as you can see nature, we're constantly, I. You mentioned it in your book actually about, you know, how a very small amount of communication happens through words.
More through tone of voice or kind of sound, but the majority of understood communication actually is through body language. So we're constantly reading each other. We're not just constantly reading each other. We're constantly reading everything that's going on around us, whether we're reading up, whether it's sky or the land or the sea or the plants or the flowers in the garden, or whatever it is.
There's a constant conversation or communication between us. And then he also developed these ideas of our kind of, um, the part of us that's kind of deeply connected to nature is in our, kind of our backspace.
Victoria: Hmm.
Sean: You know, we have a whole sort of front space that we're constantly aware of what we can see in the mirror.
When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we can only see our front. We can never see our backs. Yeah. We have this very strange relationship with our whole reverse side. And what he suggests is that that's where our elemental self resides down at the kind of base of the spine. And we can, by reaching back and drawing it forward into our front space, we can reconnect with our sense of being connected because we are connected.
We've just lost these um, roots to connection. And what I love about it particularly is that just about anybody can pick up on it, they're not difficult concepts. And the other part of it all is that we are both transmitters. And we are also receivers.
Victoria: Receivers, yeah. Something that's what makes a relationship like Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about to think that we're the only ones doing this restorative work or we love the forest or whatever is just kind of arrogant that the world's been loving us or alluring us into relationship every day and we just are blind to it. And so as we awaken to something that's already going on, and so I love what this practice is as it's embodied, it's simple, but it's real.
It's not just symbolic, it's actually connecting.
Sean: Yeah. You're working with your own intuition, your own heart space, your own sense of your values and how you connect. It's a kind of praying with the body. I often find these particular places where I feel this is the place where I want to find my reconnection and I begin with my above, below connection, and then I turn to di directions and I take my time and I almost dance and innovate.
There's no correct or incorrectly of doing.
Victoria: Right? Yeah.
Sean: That you find your own way of, you know, don't try and copy my particular body movements or gestures. Find your own. There's one that, um, Marko developed and it's called the Millstones of Love. And you're using your, your hands, like they are the edges of two milestones, and you kinda make a complete circle, you know, going clockwise in a full circle and then you reverse the movement.
So if you're going this way, you go this way. And then reverse it. So in a sense, you've kind of, you haven't created a polarity that you've gone both directions in both ways. And that practice is about kind of wearing down and grinding down the walls. They're like psychic walls, these barriers that exist between us and our sense of being connected.
Yeah. So you're kind of actively working with your own space, your own sort of psychic space. But again, in as much as it works on you and your own sense of how you are in place and time, you can arrive very quickly at a kind of a timeless sense of space. And I think that's when you start to arrive in the kingdom of heaven, in your van, in the land of the ever young that the Celts talked about.
I believe that it's very available to us. It's kind of right in front of us, under our noses. And we have to, um, find our way to reconnect with this. Yeah. I have to find my way to reconnect.
Victoria: We have to. I noticed something when I was in Ireland a few years ago, I was doing some workshops and you know, it's a country that, as you mentioned, with the, with the peace process that's been deeply wounded by religion deeply.
And so, you know, I, I saw a statistic once, and I might not be right on these exact numbers, but it was like in 1979, 90% of Ireland went to church, you know, were Catholic. Yeah. And by 1990, like 20%, you know, like within, within our lifetime
Sean: had a huge, yeah.
Victoria: And so there was some reactivity and triggering just even using the word Church of the Wild, you know.
But at the same time, and I understand that, and there's, that's, that's real trauma that needs to be healed, which I think is being healed precisely by what you're talking about. As they, as people are reconnecting with not just the land herself, but with their ancestors, their ancestral connection with the land.
And so I, I remember one time there was a group of people and there was a, a young man who had some land in, uh, Northern Ireland, and he was very hesitant to talk about that. He had one day and he was, he was almost not, not wanting to say it, that one day he saw fairies in his land and he was almost embarrassed.
But when he breached that resistance, not only to the religion, but what was pre that religion, then everybody sort of opened up and it gave, uh, he gave permission to the whole group to. To just sort of, uh, free up to connect with something that's real, that, that has language, that's all, all religious language is like good enough at best.
And all of it is, is us trying to wrestle with words for the numinous realities. And so I thought it was really beautiful how, you know, this healing is deeply connected with reconnecting with the land.
Sean: Yeah, yeah. I don't go out looking for fairies or elemental spirits. I don't go, I don't set out to do that in my day.
There have been enough multiple occasions where I've had very extraordinary sense of a very animated nature or a very animated particular experience of place. So for example, at a waterfall. There's this idea that there's a particular angelic presence at these places and whichever way you want to try and kind of put that into some kind of a description where it's, uh, an angelic presence, it's an elemental spirit, the unification of air and water and light, and it's
Victoria: God, it's like all of them are just trying to approximate that reality of experience of deep interconnection.
Sean: Yeah, so like since I was quite young in my late teens. I took myself up to Scotland to visit this place, fin horn community where they were communicating directly with the nature spirits and basically the nature spirits were telling them what to do in the garden. They had this incredible dialogue going on.
It turned into a very, very famous institution. It still is a very famous institution. Huge amounts of people have been influenced by their thinking of kind of new age in a very broad sense, as far as I'm concerned, my own garden is the wilder it is, the more, it's a habitat for the elementals.
So the less I do, the less I interfere with. I, I always feel like as soon as I've done anything, put back anything or tidied up anything in it, that I've, um, disturbed the energy of it in some way. So the wilder, more untouched, it is the more I feel it is a perfect habitat for the elemental beings. And the elemental beings are the beings that in a sense, they're the indigenous earth spirits of this particular landscape and this particular ecology.
And I do actually feel and believe, I don't, I haven't been able to articulate very much other than to say that I believe that there's a direct connection between the ecology of a place and the nature spirits of a place.
Victoria: Yeah. So, and, and I, and that goes back to something you said earlier too about, you know, finding your own gestures.
And it goes back to what we said at the beginning, just about how there's no 1, 2, 3 way structured way to do any of this spiritual work. Because every particular place, every particular community of humans, and more than humans, every particular person has their own uniqueness that is interconnected. And so if you are just gonna use somebody else's gestures, for example, then you're not in relationship with what the land that you are standing on is asking of you.
You know, in a way. And so it is a relationship that goes back and forth and back and forth. And so you have to always be open to the particularity of place and it's going to reveal themselves just as we reveal ourselves differently, that you're gonna reveal themselves in a very particular way.
That if you aren't open in that heart opening kind of practices help, you are not going to even know how to receive them. And yet we as humans are part of this ecology. And so we are built to be able to be in relationship with all. So it's just really a spiritual practice. To me. It's a spiritual practice of remembering and returning to relationship.
[ Transition music plays]
Sean: To go back to this idea of, you know, declaring peace with nature, I just found that was one of the most extraordinary, most powerful things that I engaged, tried to engage myself with, because declaring peace with anybody or any thing is pretty serious business because you have to deliver your peace and deliver your peace by maybe making changes to the way you do things in your life.
Like for example, just try and kind of help explain that a little bit. I also spent a lot of time studying Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy, and I really wanted to try and come up with a way of no killing gardening. Right. Which is incredibly difficult, right? Because it's inevitable that you're gonna have to put something back or pull something back or prune something.
But I wanted to really cut down in every way possible, the kind of killing for the sake of killing practices that actually a lot of the time people just take for granted, like, for example, using a lawnmower, um, because it doesn't really serve purpose other than to turn a very beautiful meadow into a kind of an ecological desert that supports the minimum of biodiversity.
Just by letting the grass grow, like you could cut it once a year or twice a year. And have just the most amazing biodiversity. So I was looking for those kind of things. And also ways to, um, you know, so that I would be able to kind of still find my way around the garden. You know, how do we keep a path clear without, you know, constant killing?
So there are things, there are practices that I'm working towards, and ultimately, actually, for better or for worse, I've decided that I'm just going for the woodland ecology to surround myself with the woodland ecology. Because when a canopy establishes it itself, the trees then regulate everything else that happens underneath.
And there really is the absolute minimum of gardening as such to be done. And like I have a lot of, uh, fruit trees, I have lots and lots of apple trees, and most of the apples just get eaten by the birds. And have loads of other kind of buried bushes, you know, currents and gooseberries and raspberries and they, the, again, the birds eat most of them.
And so I've kind of created a kind of a food forest for these creatures that actually having a nesting blackbird nesting in my garden and singing from the top of a little tree that I had vantage, that's for me really arriving as a gardener.
Victoria: Wow, that's so beautiful.
Sean: Rather than having the most exotic or whatever it is, growing in my garden. I'm, I'm actually, this sounds counterintuitive, but I actively collected weeds in my garden.
Victoria: I love that so much.
Sean: You know, a good weed is a, as far as I'm concerned, is a weed that establishes itself, doesn't take over, but happily spreads about and pops up here and there and has its own kind of existence.
And I can enjoy different things popping up in different places. So, you know, in a naturally ecology, grazing animals like deer are really important part of how the whole ecology is regulated. And in a garden situation, we become the deer, we become the grazer that goes out and does a bit of grazing to create enough of a, a new kind of niche for something else to grow or to prosper in.
It's fun actually to be able to do something like that. Like I've actually probably, I can't stop myself, but I ha I have, over the last 10 years, I've, I've established all the different trees that are growing in Ireland in my garden. So I have representatives of all the different types of native trees we have, you know, I have stacks of books like stacks and stacks.
That's only some of them on botany and, you know, a whole shelf full of books, just about weeds and the, the celebration of how important weeds are and how, what amazing medicine they actually are and how fundamental they are to the ecology, our ecology system.
Victoria: Yes.
Sean: So like we had a biodiversity celebration of biodiversity week in, um, our local national park where work, and we had all kinds of activities.
We had wonderful artists doing beautiful stuff with all kinds of visitors, kids, adults, people from different parts of the world being invited to write kinfolk messages and leave them hanging, you know, on these strings. And it was kind of like living poetry in the garden. So there was this really palpable sense of a kind of a spiritual, meaningful interaction between people and the place, which really kind of made such a difference.
But then kind of something that everybody sort of forgot about. Was it, it also happened the last day of that particular week was a couple of weeks ago, the local nursing home.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Sean: Make this effort to come to the garden every year. And all the people who work in the nursing home worked so hard to create this day where they can take all the people from the nursing home out to the garden and they lay on music and they have a picnic and they do all this wonderful stuff.
And they arrived and it was raining, and the midges were out and they were biting people. And so I found myself getting involved in helping them get off the bus in the wheelchairs and all the bits and pieces that they had to get. And for me, it was actually the most profound experience of experiencing biodiversity through human beings.
That we are biodiversity. That we have to. I was, and then after that happened, I was taking a group of people around the garden talking about the biodiversity of the garden and how the garden is another extraordinary type of habitat that supports incredible diversity and is such a joyful, happy place.
I just felt very deeply that we constantly map ourselves out of nature.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Sean: We just, I don't, it's so built into, we have to break out that and unlearn so much, I think. Mm-hmm. You know?
Victoria: Yeah. I mean that, I mean this is generations and generations, thousands of years of unlearning. Yeah. And we've been disconnected on purpose for reasons of empire and control and taking over and owning land and all those kinds of things.
And so it isn't something that's easy. It's gonna take a lifetime and, but yeah. All the work we do in our lifetime impacts the whole, not only our own, you know, the youngers be who are, who are looking toward us as mentors, but, but it does make a difference. It we're shifting. I feel like we're a generation that is caught.
Like it happens every, you know, there's cycles, cycles of aliveness within civilization as well as ecosystems. And we're in a time of great that has been a lot of, over the last several hundred years, a lot of, uh, unconnecting, a lot of destruction, a lot of, um, you know, clear cutting and not caring. And now we're part of, I think it's a bigger movement than, than I think we see, like when you talked about the people that you've been meeting at these conferences and stuff like it, it is happening.
There is an emergence of people recognizing that this disconnection is damaging not only obviously to the planet, but to ourselves and to our species. And so our only way forward is in that way of rekindling that kindred reality that we are part of. And we are, uh, we have a particular role to play that is very nurturing, like.
There is always, when you said like the no kill gardening. The trees regulate. The trees regulate by killing, you know, like a, a lot of the trees underneath them, the babies don't make it. Yeah, because, but life is predation, like it is part of it, but it's about a responsibility and a, and an intentionality about a life and the wellness and the wellbeing of the whole in mind, which is not the human collective mindset, but that mindset is shifting, which is I think that return in a way, in a new way to a very ancient way of being in deep connection.
Humans being in deep connection with the land. And so like the work that you're doing is profoundly spiritual. It's profoundly emotionally healing. It's profoundly, obviously physically, you know, restorative, but all of those are not disconnected. They're all just deeply connected. So to say your religion is your ecology makes complete sense. I think we all kind of get this, whether we're connected with Buddhism or Christianity or Druidism or whatever, it's like, it is reality. Like religion is just a reflection of reality. And if it isn't, then I, then I don't give it much. Um, you know, it doesn't get much of my attention, but it's just, it's helping us as humans understand and live into essentially a loving relationship with all that is.
Sean: I, I feel like I should say something about, um, my druid journey. Uh, like a lot of people probably, but certainly for me, um, growing up as a kid in Ireland really was magical. In all kinds of ways. And so we, for example, we, my absolute and most of the kids that I knew our favorite time of year was Halloween.
You know, when it was just in our culture that that's when the fairies were most active. We got dressed up, we got to run about at night doing bold things. And it was this wild sense of being completely safe in the darkness and completely safe going off for the day. Our parents didn't con were one bit concerned about us be getting lost or going, going astray or anything like that.
We sometimes probably did, sometimes ate things that we shouldn't have and got sick and go to the doctor and all that. And then we have, um, in our culture. In our place names and in our fairy stories and in our legends and myths, we have this loads of magic stuff to do with Druids and the cycles of nature and why.
And the, even early Celtic Christianity in Ireland had this incredible sense of connection to nature, to wild and some of the most beautiful poetry from the early Christian periods, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth Century Ireland, beautiful Gaelic poems about connection with nature. These monks in these amazing situations where they're really in this perfect environment and creating a poem as the record of this perfection of sitting in the forest.
They would transcribe. One of their activities as monks was they would, they would make copies of the gospels or the psalms, the Old Testament or the new, the Old Testament, the most famous kind of copy being the book of Kells. But their, one of their activities of their constantly scribing, making a copy by hand of a sacred text.
And while they're doing that, a poem happens inside them and that gets written into the margin of the gospel that they're working on. So these are particularly just beautiful little indications of how this particular land, this particular culture, has produced a whole body of kinda inspirational work through an oral tradition, through a musical tradition, through the land itself.
Here, all the place names that we have, they all relate to mythological events. Druids, Kings, Queens, God-like creatures that lived here thousands of years ago. So it's a very animated culture, so it's really wonderful to grow up in all of that. So I also grew up as a Catholic and applied myself as best I could to Catholicism, but found it too old fashioned, I suppose.
And I explored Christian mysticism and then as I got older, I got more interested in Buddhism. And I liked Buddhism because it teaches self-responsibility that you basically have to sort yourself out sort of thing. And it's nobody else's project, but you're, you are your own project, but thing.
And then in the last 20 years, particularly the last 10 years, I really applied myself to Neo-Druidism, you could say, and trained with a neo school called OBODs, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids and that took me through my paces. And there's sort of three levels that you work on.
The bardic grade is very much about creativity and whatever your creativity is. It could be music, it could be writing, it could be painting, it could be making things, it could be anything like that. And so some people in stay just quite happy to stay in the bardic grade as a druid.
And then the next grade that you can work your way through is the ovate grade. And that's more around working with healing and sort of psychic, you could say, possibilities of, um, scrying, reading the clouds, engaging in conversation with nature spirits, developing that intuitive capacity to do those kind of things.
And then I moved into the druidic grade, which is about working with ceremony more. And um, I kind of knew that I needed to arrive at that stage. And it's a lot of fun actually in lots of ways because it just made me look a little bit much more detail at the richness of the culture that we have here and the particular that's indigenous to this place.
When I find myself trying to introduce, say, um, some new people to an old ancient woodland here in Ireland, I introduce the Woodland as these are the original inhabitants of this landscape. And that's just outta respect for the fact that they actually are, that they are the next generation of plants and animals that have inhabited this landscape for thousands and thousands of years.
They are, the continuation of what you could say was God's original plan for the place. So I spent a lot of time in natures, you know, I, I I love, uh, getting out into the woods, particularly wild woods, old indigenous woodlands, and I find them incredibly evocative places full of so much. They're full of the ancestors, they're full of all kinds of memories.
They're full of all kinds of sequence and mysteries, and they're also still evolving.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Sean: It's not like they're fixed. They're actually have their own journey. So yeah, in the Irish tradition we have this idea of the cycle of the year and the cycle of the festivals that we particularly celebrate are the Celtic festivals of Imbolc in early spring, in the end of January and the 1st of February. Beltane at the beginning of May, or the very last day of April. Lunasa in August. And Samhain in November. And I, I was actually working with a group a couple of weeks ago and I was trying to explain to them that, you know, that the old conception of Ireland in Ireland was that the day begins at dusk, right? So the Celtic idea of a day is it starts at sunset and you go through the dark parts of the day and then into the bright parts.
Victoria: Oh, interesting. That makes sense, doesn't it?
Sean: Well, it, I'd say it does to me. And it's exactly the same with the year that begins at Samhain, which is All Soul's Eve, you know, all Soul's Day being the 1st of November or Halloween being the night before the eve, the eve of, so the, the festival happens, you know, the, in the evening before the day.
And that's when the fires, the sacred fires are lit. So, and I love that, uh, we have a very strong sense of a connection to nature, to the particular ecology of the landscape. And also there's this, we really have a very strong idea because Ireland is just a small island really. It's not a huge place and it's defined it being surrounded by water.
And it's like a Mandela, the landscape is like a Mandela. So we have a sacred center in the, in the middle of Ireland and we have these four directions corresponding to the four provinces, and there we still have those provinces and they go right back to what we call the Celtic period, which corresponds with what we call the archeologists called the Iron Age, which is about up to about a thousand BC up to around 500 or even 1,000 AD.
So the Iron Age lasted a lot longer in Ireland than I did in other places. But there were all these things, you know, an awful lot of the time I found that, um, I need to sometimes address what's not there as being as important as what is there. So it's the absence of things can make a big difference as much as what's present, if that makes any sense, victoria.
Victoria: It makes heart sense, not head sense.
Sean: Okay. Right.
So, you know, we have these amazing stories, uh, in our mythology and in our ancient manuscript traditions that these incredible stories that come down to us from the Iron Age period, pre-Christian Times. And there are these characters that are Druids and they have this extraordinary way of describing the qualities of the landscape.
So I work with seven directions. So there's north, so east, west, above and below. And within.
Victoria: I add one of them to it. I do between.
Sean: Okay. Right? Yep. So there's the kind of Tree of life, the vertical emphasis is your connection with the divine above and the divine below. They're absolutely fundamental.
And then it's really your symbolic, it's not really about the compass north and the compass south. It's what is in your north, in your south and your east and your west. So working with your own sense of your own east and west and north and south, and where you are, how you establish yourself in your vertical axis of connection to above and below, absolutely fundamental.
And I think that's like a gift from Irish druidism to traditions that we can, we have that to offer. And um, the story that I was gonna tell you about it, uh, describes this extraordinary character called _____, that's an Irish name, meaning the Trifoliate three keys. Which is sort of interesting because it sort of relates to Shamrock and the idea of the Three Leaf clover and of course the idea of the Trinity, Father, son, and Holy Spirit, or you could say Goddess, maiden mother and wise woman.
Victoria: There's all these, it was built into everything that is that triad.
Sean: So this guy, this guy kind of describes these qualities in different places and it's ka in the north, which corresponds to the earth and Ka is translated as kind of conflict or battling.
Yeah. And that corresponds with Ulster, which was the place that kind of battles and is famous for its warriors for a long, long, long, long type sort of thing. So that quality, but, but, but, but I like to try and reinterpret that as engagements rather than just fighting that it's about engagements rather than fighting.
Victoria: And there must, must have been more engagement than just fighting. It's just that the fighting is the thing that was recorded.
Sean: Of course. And, and then the quality for the east is blah, which directly translates as flowers or nature's plenty. Or you could say the economy of nature, or you could say the abundance of nature.
And that was fundamental to our ancestors because they relied nature totally to supply them with food, whether it was fish or nuts or wild animals or whatever it was. It was, it was the, also the, the acorns from the oak trees that fed the pigs, that fed the people. So that is, um, the sense of providing, yeah.
Being provided for the provisions of nature or the plenty of nature. And in a good, in, in our mythology, when we had a good king in ancient Ireland, everything was great and there was lovely sunny weather and there was plenty of really good harvests. And that was the kind of the correspondence. And then in the south, the quality is ces, which is music or coming together to be creative and share a session in Ireland is where people get together and sing and play music.
Yeah. Ses is that idea of coming together. So you could say it's warrior king, and lover, and then in the west it's wisdom and it's, this is the kind of quality. And then in the center is sovereignty.
And so the old Celtic idea of sovereignty, of course, was that the king, the high king, would marry the land, usually a young, the land was represented by a young woman, but I think in our time, sovereignty corresponds with a kind of personal integrity and wholeness that it, that's really what personal sovereignty is not.
It's not about being a king or a queen. It's about finding your center, orientating yourself to the qualities that you find in your north and south and east and west and above, below. So that's kind of a, you know, I, I love to be able to share that with anybody. So I was doing that with a group of people just recently.
We visited a bunch of different places around our sacred sites, ancient places associated with a lot of these stories and mythologies that we have. And it just, it gives really nice context to this particular little landscape of Ireland. And one of the most beautiful things I found by traveling with these people around Ireland was that my sense was that everywhere we went, there was this welcome for us.
We were kind of traveling as pilgrims in the landscape.
Victoria: Oh wow, cool.
Sean: Amazing. It was amazing. And we were going to tour places, you know, and we'd just do our thing. We'd just gather in circle and we'll do our Gaia touch and we'll connect with the place and take our moments in these places. And I was quite pleasantly surprised how well that worked.
Victoria: Well people, like you said, people are longing for that. I mean, they are particularly the tourists, you know, I mean, a hundred years ago, not too many people were touring Ireland, but now it, there's a deep yearning for that reconnection with ancestral indigeneity. And that's, that's, it's like a pilgrimage.
And I. And I think people feel that sense of holiness that you were talking about a little while ago. That sense of deep reverence for the land that that is maintained in the soil. You know, it's like that connection is still there and you, even people whose ancestors aren't from that land feel it. I've talked to people who are from, you know, Eastern Europe who said when they get off the plane they can feel it.
There's something there. And when you are, you know, when your ancestors are from there. Mine are from Ulster. You know, it's like means warrior. It's like all there, my, my mother's all from Northern Scotland, so I can feel it. Like even before, you know, you're like, what is this?
This is something, and it's, um, so there's something real about, uh, you know, staying connected. Even as, you know, obviously the exile is part of the story. The collective story, the exile from our homeland, and then we exiled other people when we were exiled. I mean, it's just such an interesting, uh, invasive species story when you see it from that perspective.
And so I, I just feel like people wanting to connect with their own ancestry, and so many, Americans have their ancestors have immigrated from, you know, Scotland, Ireland. And, you know, I've done huge, I remember once I did a, a retreat where there were about 75 people there and I had them all share as part of the introduction, you know, where have, what, where's the land that your ancestors were deeply connected with?
And there was only one person who wasn't from Scotland or Ireland. It was fascinating. You know, so I think there's something in our particular, you know, as the descendants, our particular DNA, that's drawing us back to the land. Oh, I'm feeling tears come up because it's,
Sean: well, I think you're on the ball. I think you have it right.
Victoria. What I want to say is, um, uh, it's something else that I've kind of, it, it's a type of way of seeing that I've been working with for a long time that comes from Rudolph Steiner's, um, anthroposophy, that this idea of folk souls that, uh, nations of people have kind of an oversoul and there's an indigenousness to that, but there's also a diaspora to that.
Victoria: Yes, yes.
Sean: So I really do think that, and I also think that what's in there are all, as a kind of a, a gardener and a somebody who studied botany and kind of understands a bit about the flora of the world, that there is all these interrelations with the flora of different parts of the world. So there are types of oak here and there are types of oak in North America and there are very closely related to each other.
And in many ways they're similar and have the same ecology and all that kind of stuff. There's all this interconnectedness. On a biodiversity level as well as a cultural level. So there's all of these interconnectedness that do exist and can be found and are part of how we are related. So we are all related.
That's the thing. Mm-hmm. That's the point, right? Yeah.
Victoria: Yeah. That there, there it is. We're all related and we, we've disconnected from one another. And this is the time of, of return. It's the beginning of the time of, of return. I mean, it is. And we see it in all these different pockets all over the world. And that's, that's what this, you know, this movement, quote unquote air quotes is about, is returning, uh, to one another, to our own souls, to the land, to spirit, to recognizing that that interconnectedness is aliveness.
Oh my gosh, Sean, we literally could sit here all night. I know, it's,
Sean: I'm looking at the clock.
Victoria: I know.
Sean: Let's do this again. It feels like we just got warmed up.
Victoria: I know. Seriously, all that time, interrupting and right in the core of it. Oh, so much gratitude and excitement. I'm really, really grateful. Thank you.
Sean: Thank you, Victoria. No thank you. Really. I really, from the bottom of my heart.
[ Transition music plays]
Victoria: Encounters with the holy wild happen when we are open to them, when we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart. Each week I offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places of your home and to do so with reverence to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
And man, there are so many invitations that can be drawn from this conversation today. But let's focus in on this one, the Gaia touch. It's a way to declare peace with nature. And like Sean described, you're invited to go out and declare peace with your place. And you use gestures rather than words.
Gestures of opening your heart and using your body as the form of conversation. We are already deeply connected, so this simple practice engages us into dialogue of relationship. So close your eyes when you get to a particular place that's calling you and imagine the space behind you, that space that is part of you, but you can't see.
And imagine that your spine, the back of your head is already connected with all that is. It is as elemental as the stones. And the air and the wind, and then turning to all directions, create a gesture of open-heartedness as a declaration of peace and of blessing toward all the beings in each of the directions.
And I would add to that the a gesture of receiving the blessings that are returning to you from the others. Allow yourself to imagine that the trees and the birds and the water, the clouds, the holy presence, can actually see you and sense you and hear your unspoken voice of reconciliation and love.
Wild blessings to you, my friends, and to your people, and to your place, and to the whole interconnected web of life that lives in and between you.
Ethan: Hello, my name is Ethan Teed and I'm a guide for the Seminary of the Wild Earth Program at the Center for Wild Spirituality. I would like to share a brief encounter I had recently while visiting with an ornamental cherry tree on the land my wife and I are blessed to tend. It was in the middle of a practice of visiting with this tree for 30 days at a time, at least once a day for 30 days, uh, and making some type of offering to the tree herself.
This particular day I had offered, uh, a poem. That I'd recited out loud as I circled the base of the tree. And as I finished, I asked permission to lay my hands on her. And when I did, despite it being in the thirties outside, there was this incredible, warm, tingling sensation that spread from my palm as I touched her trunk all the way up my arm.
And as this happened, one of our cats from seemingly nowhere came bounding across the yard as if she felt this energetic connection and climbed up onto the arm, one of the branches of the tree right beside where I was touching. And we all, the three of us just sort of shared this. This moment for a couple of minutes before that warmth sensation began to dissipate, and I offered my deep gratitude to Fliday as the name that this beautiful tree and I have agreed she'll be called.
So this was a, a beautiful encounter with Fliday, the ornamental cherry tree.
Stephen: Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, please record a voice memo on your phone in a quiet space with a microphone about six inches from your face while speaking softly.
If you're comfortable, share your name and where on earth you're speaking from. Please keep it no longer than five minutes and email the voice memo as an attachment to hello@wildspirituality.earth, putting sacred conversation in the subject line. We'd love to share your voice and your story in sacred conversation.
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's 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.