The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature

Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms—rarely if ever in simple straight lines.

Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences.

A real relationship with nature is vital for our magical and spiritual development, and our psychic and spiritual health. It is also a vital base for any work we do to heal the earth and transform the social and political systems that are assaulting her daily.

But a windbreak is also a great teacher, for me, about nonviolence. How do we respond to strong forces—anger, rage, even physical attack—without becoming violent in return? How do we respond to what might be well-meant but harsh criticism (whether well intentioned or intentionally hurtful)? If we become a wall, shutting out the energies coming at us, we may actually strengthen the anger of the opposition. On the other hand, if we simply brush off or bat away criticism, the opposition may expand its criticism to include our reactions. But there’s a third alternative: if we can learn from the trees, we can take in and transform the energy coming at us. We do this by staying calm and grounded and centered, by listening rather than responding, by swaying with the wind and letting it blow itself out.

I don’t believe that everything in our lives is a matter of choice. In New Age circles, I often hear people say, “We create our own reality.” That’s a shortsighted and simplistic misunderstanding of how reality works. We don’t choose all of our circumstances, or our range of choices. The poor don’t generally choose to starve, nor do the oppressed choose their oppression, and the casualties of war don’t choose to die. But we can choose how we respond to the circumstances we’re presented with.

The essence of nonviolence is choice: acknowledging that we always do have a choice about whether or not to use violence, and posing an expanded range of choices to those in power. In fact, we had a broad range of choices we as a society could have made in response to 9/11. The soldier at the checkpoint could have chosen—and eventually did choose—to let the group of men he was detaining go home to their village. No court in the world would have convicted the police officer on the horse for refusing an order to trample a young woman—and, in fact, the order never came and the police instead withdrew. It was clear to me, in each case above, that the authorities were saying “I have to” in order to absolve themselves of responsibility, to avoid choice. But as I thought about those incidents, I began to become uncomfortably aware of how often I said “I have to” to myself.

Systems change in response to forces that disturb their equilibrium. External forces, changes in conditions, new energies, and new challenges can shake up self-regulating cycles. So one way to change a system is to stir it up. That’s the role of protest and direct action, and it’s the reason why stronger forms of action are often necessary to bring change. Sweet reason, gentle persuasion, and dialogue that doesn’t challenge the functioning of the system often end up becoming incorporated in the system’s own efforts to maintain equilibrium.

Instead of closing our eyes to meditate, we need to open our eyes and observe. Unless our spiritual practice is grounded in a real connection to the natural world, we run the risk of simply manipulating our own internal imagery and missing the real communication taking place all around us.

You don’t have to be a black-flag-waving anarchist to be outraged by this shortsightedness. Anyone who loves capitalism should be especially maddened—-because solutions and alternative sources of energy do exist that could enable us to transition swiftly from our fossil-fuel-based economy to one that runs on clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming.

I use “Witch” to identify with the heritage outlined above, to place myself firmly in the line of outlaw healers and purveyors of unapproved wisdom. And I use the word “magic” for much the same reason. I could say “sophisticated non-mechanistic psychology,” but that term lacks the same ring. Magic is a discipline of the mind, and it begins with understanding how consciousness is shaped and how our view of reality is constructed. Since the time of the Witch persecutions, knowledge that derives from the worldview of an animate, interconnected, dynamic universe is considered suspect—either outright evil or simply woo-woo. But whenever an area of knowledge is considered suspect, our minds are constricted. The universe is too big, too complex, too ever-changing for us to know it completely, so we choose to view it through a certain frame—one that screens out pieces of information that conflict with the categories in our minds. The narrower that frame, the more we screen out, the less we are capable of understanding or doing.