On the 18th March 2017 at 12.30 pm standing beside the river Wye beneath the road bridge from Hay I watched the water flooding past and realized that it had gone again. It wasn’t a great shock. It had been no greater than a ghostly presence from not long before I retired. It was sudden but completely undramatic. “Oh well” I thought, as I turned away from the river, “That’s it then”. I’d had plenty of previous experiences of sudden changes in my ways of understanding the world and where I belonged in it but it took a while to describe it in anything like useful ways.
Imagine a snake, or a dragonfly larva. Snakes shed their skins as they grow out of them and they begin to wear out. Larvae of all kinds go through a period of shape shifting and as pupae go through various distinctive stages known as instars before the final stage in which a butterfly, or moth or dragonfly emerges, mates and begins the cycle once more. Much as we might wish that nature stood still, it’s always changing. Seasons pass, crops grow and are harvested, young animals are born and pass through widely different life-cycles before they die. The soil; the earth isn’t an inert growing medium it’s teeming with unimaginably numerous interdependent life forms. From the window of our flat we see a small park, trees and the passing river. It’s never still for a moment. However we describe nature it’s hard to use descriptions like peace and tranquility with any honesty. Nature is not a static thing at all; things grow and change and – if we’ve any kind of living faith in anything; any attachment that you might loosely call spirituality – we have to learn to allow for growth and the occasionally major changes that come with it. Some people call losing their faith a tragedy I don’t agree. You have to lose the old, worn-out ideas and attachments in order to grow. Love cannot exist without the certainty of loss.
So I want to describe what I think are two key factors in thinking about these big changes in belief. Firstly, the image of skin shedding in snakes and the shapeshifting of instars isn’t just a fanciful metaphor. These natural life-forms (as we are too) have no alternative, and neither have we if you think about it. Human beliefs also have life expectancy. Religious belief is especially prone to calcification. There’s a gradual descent, for instance from sacrament to ritual, and from ritual to tradition then finally from tradition to habit. Rudolph Otto used the term “numinous” to describe the mysterious and overwhelming sense that floods our minds seemingly directly and not mediated by the senses or the intellect. One word that’s often used to describe such an experience is sacramental. Ordinary everyday things seem to glow with meaning even as they remain entirely themselves. But as these sacramental experiences calcify they lose their fascination and power to move us and become worthless as agents in the next key factor which is the change in perspective that comes at the same time. These powerful experiences don’t fiddle about with the natural world so it becomes more colourful or beautiful; what changes is the way in which we perceive it.
So why do we fight so hard to turn these religious or spiritual moments into stone? Why on earth would we want to freeze revelations until they become unintelligible, meaningless to anyone else. Traditions are the barnacles that police the boundaries of sacred space.
I sometimes seem to receive messages; dreams and waking dreams. I wouldn’t say that these sudden insights are frequent visitors and I’ve always thought of them as being perfectly natural – not hallucinations but just the deep parts of my mind making creative connections and expressing them as poetic ideas. For me, by the time I retired, the sacramental seemed to have turned into ritual where getting it right had become more important than entering the mystery. I frequently tag these pieces with the phrase “green spirituality”, which I’m afraid raises more questions than it settles. Most of the pieces are grasping at possible meanings for it and which I’ve yet to find myself. I’m not coming to this as an expert in any sense. What I’m certain of is that the West in particular is suffering from some kind of spiritual crisis which is eating away at our humanity. I’m just trying to find a way through the rubble, and one possible first step follows:
In the episode of Rick Stein’s Australia that aired on BBC Two on January 6, 2026, Rick Stein spoke with two Aboriginal women in Sydney who shared their knowledge of native food ingredients.They were part of the the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. But what knocked me over wasn’t a recipe or anything like that. It was the way they described themselves as being part of the earth. Doesn’t that perfectly describe our western estrangement from the earth. We know there’s something wrong, and we create libraries of books and films on the beauty and healing power of nature but the problem isn’t solved by sitting under a tree, reading a book or watching a video, because we should be working on mending that broken relationship.
But in spite of any misgivings we’re constantly bombarded with the idea that nature has healing powers. Go for a walk they say, and feel the power of nature. Perhaps nature’s a bit shy when it comes to sceptics like me, but in the hundreds if not thousands of miles I’ve walked fields and tracks both here in the UK and in Europe I’ve yet to experience that power unless I was actively engaging with nature at the same time; listening to and identifying birds; watching and recording wildlife – especially plants. Reading about them, studying them especially the ones in the middle of Bath and outside our front door. Like everybody else I’m excited when I read about aboriginal and first nation people and their connectedness with the earth, but First Nation peoples have a far more intimate relationship with nature than we do. It goes so much further than providing food and shelter. It includes an intimate knowledge of plant locations, special properties and healing potential. When a First Nation person goes for a solitary walk, friends and acquaintances in the plant and animal kingdoms crowd in on them. They even talk to them -which sounds odd until I think that we talk to our plants on the allotment, ask them how they’re doing? is there anything they need? and they respond – more water; more light; get rid of those bugs but leave the others. I don’t believe in the supernatural and I don’t use those voices to claim an unchallengeable religious advantage, it’s just a feature of the unconscious mind in some sort of resonance with whatever you call it – let’s provisionally say the Tao.
I do believe that underlying Nature, of which we’re a part, is some kind of rule bearing substratum. Doesn’t it strike you as absolutely miraculous that behind the mind blowing diversity of nature there lies a silent orderliness that can only be intuited and – it seems – and never fully described. “Whereof we cannot speak , thereof we must remain silent” said Wittgenstein. “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao” – said Lao Tzu It’s that fundamental orderliness without which science would not be possible and neither would the tools of the artist, the musician and the poet. We’re all – in Dylan Thomas’s words –“dumb to tell the crooked rose. My youth is driven by the same wintry fever”.
So, to try to be a bit practical for once; how can anyone move on from just liking a walk in the woods to developing that intimate relationship with nature which is the true source of healing and fulfilment. Well I’m sure there are thousands of suggestions out there offering suffering and discomfort in abundance, not to mention subscriptions. Ten years ago I leaned on the sea wall rails in St Ives at New Year and realized that I had no idea what kind of gull I was looking at. I made a stupid resolution that I wouldn’t pass anything, ever again, that I couldn’t name. I think that lasted just about long enough for me to cross the road and buy a bird book. But out of acorns, great oaks grow, and I changed the way I observed nature, started to photograph plants, bought books when I could afford them and began keeping rudimentary records. I bought a pocket lens and discovered that the closer I looked the more fascinating things became. There was no conflict between science, creativity and nature, because the more I understood the more beautiful nature became.
For the first couple of years I started to keep a secret journal; one which no-one else would ever see. But then, changing technology killed the software I was using and so I started this blog; tracking the long journey into the new. If anyone else can make use of it as a guide or a map then I’ll be pleased. You might well spot me one day on my hands and knees in the mud. I might be meditating or I might be examining a flower in great detail. I’m not sure I can tell the difference!
