We are now approaching the end of the Celtic year, and the start of a new one. The harvest has been gathered, the wheat has been threshed and the grain stored or milled. The fields lie fallow, the ploughed soil now shades of Ochre, Umber and Sienna, catching the glints of cobwebs in the low early morning sun. For a land-based society the time for the end of one cycle and the start of another, and the liminal space between the two years is a time when the dead can be contacted, a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and a propitious time for divinations, a time for the superstitions, myths and supernatural tales to be told around the fire. Samhain is a festival of the dead, and as such forms part of a common practice amongst cultures right around the globe to honour the dead.
Is it reasonable to suggest that as a culture as we have increasingly lost touch with the earth, with the soil from which our lives depend, we have also lost touch with our relationship with life and death as passages of transformation? How can we prepare ourselves for such events, and how can we integrate these events into our lives when our culture no longer accords such value and import to life, and is so fearful of death? Even Mindfulness training as it’s taught in the West from Buddhist teachings has deviated and omitted the meditations in the Charnel ground, watching the corpses burn as a reminder of our impermanence. In fact, all of our major life transitions are either medicalized or celebrated with large amounts of alcohol – a Central Nervous System Depressant.
By life I mean the very essence of all that is us and is around us from an animistic perspective, to feel it in our bodies as the seasons turn, to know that we also have our cycles; that as surely as the Earth spins, she has her rhythms, and we too are held within these circadian, diurnal and cosmic revolutions, as opposed to the fake, sterile, linear uber-immortality of our Western techno-lives. We too will die at some point. It is through our corporeal bodies that we fully realise our sensorial self, our wild and savage self, and by being attuned to our bodies we also fully recognize their ephemerality, their transience, and their fleeting existences here. By being fully alive we embrace death as part of life.
I have had my own share of contact with death, the loss of family members, my own recent close brush with death on a mountain, and friends who have lost loved ones recently. What always struck me about death was its’ finality. One minute you’re there, the next you’re not. You are somewhere else – maybe? I am not afraid of death or dying, and I live each day as fully as I can in case it may be the last. I fully rejoice in all those simple miracles that make up life: to share life with others, to breathe in the air, to see another sky, to taste, to feel the warmth of the sun, the soft liquid juice of the raindrops, the smell of the moss, lichens and fungi on the forest floor and the glory of the trees. Sometimes that’s enough – more than enough, to give thanks and to be connected in the consciousness that witnesses and experiences all these sensory and bodily-felt sensations, the eroticism of organic life, of which death is a part.
Living within an animistic world-view feeling everything glowing, spinning, vibrating with life, imbued with that consciousness that is everything, we can never feel alone. We are the progeny of the Sun, rocks, trees, and rivers. In Nature everything is in exchange, in relationship, and death is an inherent aspect of this vitality of life and movement. Death is never the end, just a transition from one state to another, the energy is never lost in this system – 1st law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
I’m passionate about being a vibrant member of this living community of Earth, to contribute something, not just consume, I do not resist death, as to do so would deny life, deny Nature, and deny that eternal cycle of conception, gestation, birth, growth, death, decay/decomposition, rebirth. I want to be able to say as Mary Oliver does in her poem
‘When Death comes’:
…When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Samhain (Hallowe’en, All Hallow’s eve) still has a charm and an endearing quality in our lives, like many of these ancient rites that have largely lost their meaning and significance since becoming ‘christianised’, then commercialised, then ultimately Disneyfied.
If we can gently come back to the cyclical wisdom of Nature and insert ourselves into that equation, then we maybe can celebrate life and death, acknowledge our loss, and on the day of the dead, go and visit those relatives who have passed, open up their tombs and burial caves like the Ancient Greeks, let their spirits have a stretch, make a big feast to share with them, bring the kids along too and play and laugh and sing.
We are an expression of Nature, not separate and our rejection of death leads to a constriction of self towards life, but by embracing death we can expand, ‘we become more vibrant beings, and in doing so we become part of the ongoing cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth that has perpetuated life over aeons’.
Apart from the spiders I see outside my window with their pearly webs, I am conscious of 2 presences in my wanders at this time, the ever present and industrious Woodlouse who’s main task in life is to break down dead and decaying matter and make it palatable for the next set of organisms, and of course at this time of year – no coincidence, the fruiting bodies of fungi popping up everywhere to relish the damp, warm weather and maybe to join in the festive celebrations of the dead, after all, it’s their harvest too.
Neil Jordan In morte sumus Therapy Today 2017
1. Emminent historian Ronald Hutton disputes the origins of this festival and feels that there is insubstantial evidence for a Celtic New Year celebration of the dead. See Hutton, R. (2024). The Celtic New Year and Feast of the Dead. Folklore, 135(1), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2023.2282282.
In these early Autumn days Blackberries glowing purple in the soft, warm light of a low sun, I experience a strange sense of nostalgia – it happens every year and has done since my early twenties. It’s a feeling that’s hard to describe, fleeting memories fused with a yearning for another time, another place, maybe a realisation deep within my body-clock that winter is soon approaching, and a mourning for those halcyon days of summers past.
Equinox is a time of change, of weather fronts – zones of transition, turbulence and borderlines, places of instability and fluctuation, merging and separating – a time when the warm earth cools and the sea becomes warmer than the land.
It is also at this time of year that I feel a deep call to migration and peregrinations of various kinds, maybe heading south to eke out the last few rays of sunshine, alongside an instinctual drive to harvest, and prepare the nest for the coming darkness, and the Celtic New Year at Samhain.
Nostalgia means a longing to return home, but how do we define home in a time of so much transition, transmigration, and global communication – of refugees, survivors, people displaced by war, drought, famine, political persecution, economic factors and religious, racial or sexual persecution. Where is home right now and how do we define our place to be?
When I was younger I had an old hardback book of black and white photos from the turn of the 20th Century. I was really struck by a portrait shot of a man who lived in the Meon Valley in Hampshire at that time. This is a place where I also lived for a while working on a Nature reserve close to Selbourne where Gilbert White wrote the Classic Natural History volume ‘The Natural History of Selbourne’. It is a valley steeped in traditional farming and land use and villages that arose from ancient settlements. The most striking aspect of this photo was the man’s facial characteristics. His face radiated a wildness with such strong features and deep eyes, and yet also a soft, calm expression within those weathered lines. The caption underneath described him as a descendent of the original tribe that had sailed up the estuary and settled this valley. In other words his family, his bloodline had lived in that valley for at least 2-3000 years. That photo was taken just over 100 years ago, and its remarkable how much has changed since then. How many of us can claim to still be living where we were born, or raised, or how many generations have been present in this place we call home.
I am a second-generation refugee and finding my home, my roots has been a lifelong pursuit. Living in Devon close to the moors and the sea serves to anchor me to the land here, gravity draws me towards the bedrock of all existence here. In the woods and valleys and remote places I feel home, nowhere more so than the blessed River Dart. I posit the idea that the soul can find home in such wild places, that a part of us can dwell there without recourse to comforts or material effects. The soul just abides, it stays somewhere for a while and experiences the energy of that place, so that when we physically go there we feel this uplift, this sense of healing and completeness, or ‘coming home’.
In forest bathing we like to think of the forest as our ultimate home, the origin of our species and the environment that forged our physical shape and our physiological and psychological functioning. It is where we built our first rudimentary homes or nests. One of our closely related arboreal cousins the Orangutan builds both day nests and night nests. The nest building practical skills are a tradition passed down from Mums to their offspring who stay with them for up to 7 yrs.
Supporting our participants to find home, to sit on the earth and breathe in and out naturally, to nestle into the embrace of a tree buttress is such a powerful archaic activity that can bring about a calming effect. One of my colleagues Dr. Ronen Berger developed a programme called ‘making a home in Nature’ to support individuals with trauma in a Nature therapy context. Our Den building as children also taps into this primal urge to create shelter and safety, to hide from the elements and consolidate our positions.
Can you incorporate some home or nest building activity into your practice this autumn?
It arose in the world in the same way as a finch’s wing,
a cricket’s song.
Wherever you are right now,
the part of you that’s awake and reading this
is in nature.
There’s a temptation to think of ourselves as separate
here in the warm quarters of civilization.
But our thoughts?
Our thoughts echo from an ancient wilderness.
Jarod K. Anderson. Field Guide to the Haunted Forest.[1]
Animate Intelligence is the original AI according to Jeremy Lent in his wonderful book ‘The Web of Meaning’ and he suggests that if “we truly honour the animate intelligence within us, it’s natural… to similarly honour the animate intelligence emanating from all living beings Embracing our shared domain of intelligence can lead to a potent sense of being intimately connected to the animate world.”[2] If we can think of intelligence expressed by Nature as a form of love, and love as a form of intelligence it offers us a way to connect with all life within the Cosmos. Love is life expressed at every level within both the human and ‘other-than-human’ world. When we recalibrate our perspective of autonomy and surrender to this Divine Intelligence, life’s mysteries become accessible to us.
We are learning to re-define the term intelligence – the dictionary describes it as ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’, but until recently our mechanistic Westernised perspective has applied this term solely and hubristically only to human forms of intelligence. (Anthropocentrism) Only now are we beginning to realise that our own intelligence is but an iteration of a much larger unified field of cosmic intelligence, which expresses itself in non-centralised ways, it is pervasive and weblike as Taoists will attest, more akin to our nervous systems and mycelial networks which brings us to another key aspect of understanding Nature’s Intelligence and how systems and patterns repeat at scale – fractals.
Fractals and spirals show up at every level of existence from micro (DNA helix) to macro (spiral galaxies, hurricanes) and point towards infinity and never-ending complexity. (See the wonderful documentary about Benoit Mandelbrot and fractal iterations on Amazon.)
We can learn so much about ourselves by contemplating Nature’s vast intelligence, and asking: how can it simultaneously express both chaos and order, simplicity, and complexity within the same self-regulating and balancing system?
Learning how to comprehend this complexity and our place within it can lead towards our salvation as a species. Contemplating the mirroring of the complex vastness of the Universe at micro and macro scales both within us, and other life forms, can point the way to re-unity. Darwin remarked that “the marvelous complexity” of organic beings is, that “each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.”[3]
Our own unique consciousness/minds are fractal representations of the evolving mind or consciousness of this Divine Intelligence. Life is suffused with a mathematical precision of simplicity, complexity, and beauty. Mandelbrot’s Fractal Geometry maps out this fascinating mathematical pattern-making in Nature from snowflakes to river deltas, clouds and galaxies.
Animal Intelligence and sentience.
If we can return to that definition of intelligence which can also mean ‘to collect, to gather, to come to know or understand,’ and see now that plants and animals have been doing this since the first single-cell organism and that ability to “acquire and apply knowledge and skills” is definitely applicable to plants and animals of every order and type including single cell bacteria and slime moulds.
Recently a group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. Bees have elaborate ways of communicating new sources of nectar through their ‘waggle dances’ which show the position of food sources relative to the Sun. Bumblebees have been shown to enjoy play.[4] Sperm Whales have clan specific dialects and share a language as old and complex as Sanskrit.[5] Anyone who watched the incredible ‘My Octopus Teacher’ could not fail to be moved by the intelligence, curiosity and dare I say it ‘warmth’ expressed by the octopus. We rarely pause to consider the breadth and depth of inteligence and consciousness that surrounds us from the animal and plant world.
Plant Intelligence – The Forest Mind.
In last month’s newsletter we looked very briefly at the evolutionary hierarchy of the human brain and cascade of responses that take place in response to both stressful and (Kaplan’s) restorative environments.
We now know a lot about the brain and its evolution, but we don’t know everything yet, like where exactly is the seat of consciousness, or even an agreed definition of consciousness, and how are brain and mind separate? Jarrod sweetly reminds us that our brains are in Nature.
But how have human/animal brains and consciousnes evolved in comparison to ‘plant consciousness’? Are there parallel processes of emergence?
Plant neurobiologist Stefan Mancuso studies what was once considered laughable – the intelligence and behaviour of plants. His work is contentious, he says, because it calls into question the superiority of humans. Mancuso looks at “how plants are able to solve problems, how they memorise, how they communicate, how they have their social life and things like that”.[6]
In a plant, a single brain would be a fatal flaw because they have evolved to be lunch. “Plants use a very different strategy,” says Mancuso. “They are very good at diffusing the same function all over the body.” You can remove 90% of a plant without killing it. “You need to imagine a plant as a huge brain. Maybe not as efficient as in the case of animals, but diffused everywhere.” This is how we need to think of forests, not just as connected eco-systems but as a giant dynamic intelligence with multiple communication channels, and layers and levels of consciousness collaborating and contributing to a functioning sentient whole. (A forest aware of itself as Forest, as expression of life and intelligence).
One of the most controversial aspects of Mancuso’s work is the idea of plant consciousness. As we learn more about animal and plant intelligence, not to mention human intelligence, the contentious term consciousness has becometricky.“Let’s use another term,” Mancuso suggests. “Consciousness is a little bit tricky in both our languages. Let’s talk about awareness. Plants are perfectly aware ofthemselves.
“My personal opinion is that there is no life that is not aware of itself. For me, it’s impossible to imagine any form of life that is not able to be intelligent, to solve problems.”
The notion that humans are the apex of life on Earth is one of the most dangerous ideas around, says Mancuso: “When you feel yourself better than all the other humans or other living organisms, you start to use them. This is exactly what we’ve been doing. We felt ourselves as outside nature.” The average lifespan of a species on Earth is between 2m and 5m years. “Homo sapiens have lived just 300,000 years,” he says – and already “we have been able to almost destroy our environment. From this point of view, how can we say that we are better organisms?”
“And this is not an opinion. This is based on thousands of pieces of evidence. We know that a single root apex is able to detect at least 20 different chemical and physical parameters, many of which we are blind to.” There could be a tonne of cobalt or nickel under our feet, and we would have no idea, whereas “plants can sense a few milligrams in a huge amount of soil”, he says.
Far from being silent and passive, plants are social and communicative, above ground and beneath, through their roots and fungal networks. They are adept at detecting subtle electromagnetic fields generated by other life forms. They use chemicals and scents to warn each other of danger, deter predators and attract pollinating insects. When corn is nibbled by caterpillars, for example, the plant emits a chemical distress signal that lures parasitic wasps to exterminate the caterpillars.
According to Mancuso human societies and organisations are structured like our bodies – with a brain, or a top-level control centre, and various different organs governing specific functions. “We use this in our universities, our companies, even our class divisions,” says Mancuso. This structure enables us to move fast, physically and organisationally, but it also leaves us vulnerable. If a major organ fails, it could scupper everything, and top-down leadership rarely serves the whole.
Plants, by contrast, “are kind of horizontal, diffusive, decentralised organisations that are much more in line with modernity”. Take the internet, the ultimate decentralised root system. “I’m claiming that, by studying plant networks, we can find wonderful solutions for us,” Or take the ethos of cooperation. “Plants are masters of starting symbiotic relationships with other organisms: bacteria, mushrooms, insects, even us.”[7]
Plants constitute 80% of the biomass of the planet, have been around on land for around 500 million years, and in the Ocean before that for much longer. They have evolved complex mechanisms of communication, they have the equivalent of our 5 senses and they are masters at exploiting their environments. They are also our ancestors, without plants no humans. We are the biproducts of plant expression, we owe our lives to flowers, as Zoë Schlanger puts it in her book The Light-eaters “Our bodies are fabricated with the threads of material plants first spun. Likewise, every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.”[8]
In part 3 of this article we will look more closely at how plants have adapted to being rooted in the ground and the mechanisms and solutions they have devised by adopting a different approach to intelligence and survival – approaches that we can learn from.
[1] Anderson. J.K. Field guide to the Haunted Forest Crooked Wall Press 2020.
[2] Lent. J. The Web of Meaning 2021 Profile Books p.54-5
[5] Schlanger Z. The light eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth 2024 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0063073854/braipick-20
The main reason that we do this work is because Nature makes us feel better. We know how being in Nature positively affects our mental health. We have discovered the unique rejuvenating, soothing properties of just being and breathing in the forest, sharing our breath (and our thoughts) with the trees – they are great listeners!
When we simplify life and slow down healing happens – Our minds de-stress, our brains immediately respond and carry out a reset, or reboot.
Brain scans show that time spent in Nature is positively related to grey matter in the cerebral cortex. This part of the cortex is involved in the planning and regulation of actions as well as what is referred to as cognitive control. In addition, many psychiatric disorders are known to be associated with a reduction in grey matter in the prefrontal area of the brain.
“Results show that our brain structure and mood improve when we spend time outdoors. This most likely also affects concentration, working memory, and the psyche as a whole” says Simone Kühn, head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and lead author of the study.[1]
One of the key regions of the brain that has been studied to understand the impact of Nature v urban exposure is the Amygdala. This remarkable, small, almond shaped/sized structure at the base of the brain is responsible for many aspects of our survival mechanisms, stress processing and is associated with how we process emotions, and emotional episodic recall. It is the deepest most primitive part of the Limbic system from the Latin Limbus meaning “border” or “edge” and from where we get liminality.
The Amygdala and Limbic system form the head brain aspects of the ‘Savage Self’ hypothesis, drawing on present and past life memories to support survival of the individual, initiating defence responses to perceived threat.
The Amygdala has reciprocal communications with the Hypothalamus and the HPA or Hypothalamic-Pituitary–Adrenal-Axis. This is closely associated with our Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Enteric Nervous System (ENS) – Are you still with me? The Amygdala is also closely associated with our senses particularly smell and memory associations. The little Amygdala can basically trigger a chain of reactions based on fear and anxiety connected to our memories and recall. It’s the Vagus nerve that conveys the (sometimes false) information to the SNS switching on our fight or flight response.
Even a short exposure to nature decreases amygdala activity, suggesting that a walk in Nature could serve as a preventive measure against developing mental health problems and buffering the potentially degenerating impact of the city on the brain.
Studies and MRI scans have shown that as little as 1 hour of walking[2] in Nature can positively impact areas of the brain and in particular the Amygdala with women showing better results than men.[3] Being in Nature supports the brain to de-stress – the brain recognises Nature and reconfigures neural stress response settings for homeostasis.
One can immediately understand that the long term benefits of Forest Bathing and Nature Connection can help to regulate brain chemistry and decrease mental health issues that arise from recurrent trauma memories by creating a soothing environment that can switch off excessive Amygdala activity.
In our next article we will look at how Nature’s Intelligence – ‘The Forest Brain’ operates and look at how closely our brains have evolved in parallel with our other-than-human kin over millions of years.
Gosh, Spring is here, equal days, equal nights, and the Sun getting higher in the sky. Those very first pioneers of Spring are already doing their stuff – Primroses of course, and Celandines bright yellow sparkle, and now Alexanders coming on strong, Muscari, Blackthorn white sprays depending on which part of the country you are in, Wild Garlic is also very profuse down here, much earlier than usual. We all have our favourite first signifiers of Spring, what are yours?
In some ways it feels hard, or ignorant to celebrate the arrival of Spring when there is such unimaginable suffering taking place in war zones around the world, and a sense that we haven’t learned anything as a species, we are as destructive as ever, and it is the most vulnerable that suffer the worst atrocities our darkness creates.
The majority of us will never experience these levels of trauma, fear, destruction and loss, and sometimes we can feel powerless to change the world, despite our protests and vigils and prayers, we may feel angry, or impotent, or distressed – a kind of secondary vicarious trauma. It is vital that we make time to go to Nature, to earth our feelings, to give thanks for breath, for relative freedom: to rejoice in new life coming through, the perennial promise of renewal and hope.
In a recent Guardian interview psychedelic musician Jane Weaver talks about dealing with the grief of losing her father and how she was “looking under rocks and stones for the happy things… and how she spent an inordinate amount of time looking out the window in the morning at the birds in the trees…looking at simple things in Nature, like motifs or signs that everything’s fine – it brought home to me that you still have to live, you still have to appreciate these things”.
Sometimes we may feel guilty that our lives are relatively safe, or settled, but I believe that Nature would want us to celebrate another dawn chorus, another day to offer ourselves to the healing of our lives and our planet, with joy and curiosity and reverence for Nature’s unconditional abundance and grace. Nature proffers us this place of acceptance, of peaceful solitude, and a silent expansive quality free of the demands and constrictions of our busy lives, supporting us to come back to our centre again, from where we can be most effective and authentic. Nature soothes us. Those symbols and motifs speak directly to the heart and to the ancient solid Self.
“Out beyond the ideas of wrong doing and right doing, there is a field. I will meet you there” Rumi.
Every time we leave the confines of our homes and workplaces and head out into the woods we cross a threshold between 2 realms. We may consciously acknowledge that transition with a greeting, a gesture or ritual as we enter, or it may just be a feeling of relief, of loosening and softening the cords that bind, to fall into that gentle familiar embrace. Aaah! Home again.
The portal to the other world has been entered and I think part of the joy of being immersed in the deep wild forest is both the familiarity and the unpredictability – we don’t know who or what we may encounter on our way, including ourselves. If we can gently surrender to this unknown, to this as yet unveiled gift, we enter this inbetween land, a confluence of spirit and matter, and a meeting ground for mutual exchange. The threshold is represented both by a physical place, and by psychic space – stepping over is to accept the eternal invitation to the Divine dance.
Crossing the threshold can be a conscious or deliberate act of sublimation, a tentative immersion in the ‘more than human’ world, or sometimes we inexplicably fall into conversation with the imaginal realms – our half-whispered prayers and utterances heard from afar and answered when we least expect, we become some accidental Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole chasing an elusive mythical beast.
Sometimes sickness dissolves our psychic carapace, and we access these realms from our weakness and fragility, our sensitive vulnerability the perfect catalyst for en-trance. John O’Donoghue alludes to this: ‘Because we are so engaged with the world, we usually forget how fragile life can be and how vulnerable we always are. It takes only a couple of seconds for a life to change irreversibly. Suddenly you stand on completely strange ground and a new course of life has to be embraced.’
Threshold is often this cosmic ‘black hole’, drawing us into a vortex and spinning us out into uncharted territories and the terra incognita of the soul. We never return the same from a trip to the forest, consciousness is permeable, we don’t own it, it inhabits us, we are merely borrowing a morsel or fractal of it while we are here from the great swirling dust-clouds of chaos unfolding.
Think of your selves as being liquid, only liquid; (we are 60% water after all) fluid beings absorbing the forest rasps, clicks, drips and rattles; the complex quantum continuum slowing but never ceasing. That delicate micro-electric circuitry of plant cell-mycelial-fungal matrix, invertebrate hum and weathersong, all pulsating through our saline streams, currents and tributaries, our neural pathways re-aligning to source.
Inscendence
It is this ancient exchange of intelligences that forms our symbiotic relationship with the Earth, what Thomas Berry describes as ‘a descent into our pre-rational instinctive’ self. He urges us to seek ‘inscendence’ – the impulse not to rise above the world (transcendence) but to climb into it, seek its core. Berry talks about how our culture has entered into a destructive pathology, and suggests we sensitise ourselves to the spontaneities that arise within us, ‘not with a naive simplicity, but with critical appreciation.’ This is the role of the shamanic personality, and it overlaps seamlessly with the higher role of the Forest Bathing or Forest Medicine guide.
This shamanic insight is especially important just now when history is being made not primarily within nations or between nations, but between humans and the earth, with all its living creatures. In this context all our professions and institutions must be judged primarily by the extent to which they foster this mutually enhancing human-earth relationship.
…a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural word, a sensitivity that comprehends the larger patterns of nature, its severe demands as well as its delightful aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish so that other lifeforms might flourish.
–Thomas Berry, from “Dream of the Earth” (1988)
In a shamanic sense then we return to this notion of crossing between worlds, between 2 (or more) distinct energetic densities – matter as energy in different forms, moving from perceived solid to liquid and to ether. Consciousness as self-awareness within the corporeal form, and through our movements osmotically siphoning us from the density of concrete existence towards the lucid beauty of becoming the sacrament, not the priest, nor the recipient, but flesh offered as tender currency. Here we enter the language of ceremony, of ritual and rites of passage – of the initiate and the sacrifice of self we offer the woods.
Threshold personae
The winter threshold is I feel, particularly potent. I am drawn towards the valleys and the trees, and the leafmulch, the arching branches bare against the hollow sky, the architecture lean, unadorned and honest, winter cuts all down to the bare bones of life, and I like that simplicity, that stark monochromatic stillness. Even the sun is watered down and wan. The liminal is somehow more accessible without the technicolour glamour of the other distracting seasons. Here we stand naked and alone with nowhere to hide, being seen and tasted and bewildered in the beckoning silence. Here too the mind is stripped of artifice, our thoughts laid bare without judgment in the ‘isness’.
At the midwinter Solstice, all life pivots on a point in space, there is a quality of silence in the woods, we come into a pregnant stillness, into nothingness, into the presence of the spirits of yore, of our pre-rational past, who bear witness to a potent, hidden transformation under the soil. O’Donoghue imagines this metaphor and threshold of winter in a similar way: –
‘Within the grip of winter, it is almost impossible to imagine the spring. The grey perished landscape is shorn of colour. Only bleakness meets the eye; everything seems severe and edged. Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute. Yet beneath the surface of winter, the miracle of spring is already in preparation; the cold is relenting; seeds are wakening up. Colours are beginning to imagine how they will return. Then, imperceptibly, somewhere one bud opens and the symphony of renewal is no longer reversible. From the black heart of winter a miraculous, breathing plenitude of colour emerges.’
Thresholds, Rites of Passage and liminal spaces have been popularised in both anthropology and psychology following the work of Arnold van Gennap and his successor Victor Turner, and also the work of William James on mystic experiences. Van Gennap acknowledges the seasonal thresholds:
“Life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to begin acting again, but in a different way. And there are always new thresholds to cross: the threshold of summer and winter, of a season or a year, of a month, of a night; the thresholds of birth, adolescence, maturity and old age; the threshold of death and that of the afterlife — for those who believe in it.”
Part 2 of this article will appear in early January. Happy Mid-winter and Sun-return everyone. See you all in 2024. Lots of love from the team at Nature & Therapy Stefan and Primrose.
