Welcome to the News and Reflections area of the GreenSpirit website.

Music – Blue Pearl – Review
Blue Pearl is a ground-breaking new oratorio for choir, four solo singers and orchestra. It conveys a contemporary view of spirituality which transcends individual religious traditions, embracing humanity, and the earth, as a whole. ‘Blue Pearl’ is the earth, as seen from space: a unity; our precious home.…more

A Cosmic Walk Down Under by Catherine Hutchison
Catherine Hutchison writes about a workshop she attended on the Universe Story (the story as revealed by Science from the Big Bang to the present day) in Australia and why understanding the Universe Story is so important for our human evolution…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #7 – ‘My Journey into GreenSpirit’ by Janice Every
…A new role in a large complementary health and education centre in Letchworth opened my understanding further. I learned about energy medicine, experienced every type of therapy from homeopathy to hypnotherapy, medical herbalism to Ayurvedic medicine – and did training in some modalities myself. It was an amazing time of learning through experience. During this mind and spirit-expanding time, I was growing away from my evangelical church. I still loved the community it gave me, but my growing understanding wasn’t fitting comfortably with the theology of my church…more

Film – Becoming Cousteau – Review
This film is about the life of this incredible man, his personal journey and how it profoundly changed him. Early in his life, he had a bad car accident which propelled him towards swimming and diving to help relieve pressure on some of his bones. And this led to a life long passion for the sea and all of its ecosystems…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #6 – ‘Finding the Spirit’ by Joan Angus
From an early age I have felt more comfortable out of doors than in buildings. I was raised in a Christian family; my father was an Anglican Minister, and I was educated in an Anglican Convent boarding school. I accepted all I was taught without question, and did not really connect religion with Nature. But I was spiritually drawn to the natural world. Biology was my favourite subject, and I loved messing about in ponds in the holidays, bringing tadpoles and caterpillars home to watch as they developed into beautiful creatures.…more

“The Search for the Elves’ Cure” – a storybook for young GreenSpirits
Paths that change direction as you walk, mysterious green mists, friendly and not so friendly nature spirits, magical inscriptions, brambles that smother your path, eyes that follow you everywhere you go. Protected only by special herbs, Jack and his sister Ruby face all of these and other dangers in their quest to find the Elves’ Cure. But are they prepared for the greatest evil of them all, the shape-shifter?…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #5 – ‘A Gradual Awakening’ by Sky McCain
After I had been wandering for nearly 25 years in the wilderness without a personal spirituality, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics piqued my interest in the relationship between science and spirituality. Subsequently, I attended a week’s seminar with Fritjof at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This experience was the beginning of a gradual awakening and led me to a whole new world of thought and experience through the doorway of his next book, The Turning Point. I can still feel shockwaves of the “Aha!” as I turned a page and first read about the Gaia Hypothesis. Yes, yes; a living planet became the hub of so many connecting spokes. Of course, this explained why I had always felt so fascinated when standing near and looking at massive stone formations and clouds, listening to bird song, talking to trees and especially my childhood farm experience.…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #4 – A Gradual Unfoldment, and Twisting and Turning Path by Santoshan (Stephen Wollaston)
From an early age I pencil-sketched reams of pictures whenever I could, quite naturally discovered ‘art as meditation’, cherished quiet moments in my parents’ East End council house garden, ran energetically around with friends and my family’s dog in local grassland parks and nearby exquisite densely wooded regions of Epping Forest, and enjoyed family outings to the sea or countryside. I would lose myself for hours drawing, being in amazing and magical green spaces, creating, playing music when I took up bass guitar at 13, or simply staring wondrously at the shapes of mesmerising morphing clouds and the gyrating activity of bees hopping from flower to flower while they made intriguing buzzsaw-like sounds…more

Film – Minamata – Review
Starring Johnny Depp and Bill Nighy, Minamata is essentially two bittersweet true stories that become intertwined. Depp plays Life magazine’s photojournalist William Eugene Smith in his twilight years in 1971, who has become a risk for the magazine as he didn’t complete his previous assignment and drinks heavily. He is reluctantly persuaded by two people from Minamata to take on what was to become his last photo assignment in Japan to document a largely fishing community fighting for justice against a chemical manufacturer polluting local seawater…more

Latest News on Rewilding in the UK: Four out of five Britons support it!
An opinion poll commissioned by the charity Rewilding Britain shows that 81% of Britons support rewilding, with 40% strongly supportive and just 5% of people opposed.

Rewilding Britain defines rewilding as the large-scale restoration of Nature to the point it can take care of itself – restoring habitats and natural processes, and where appropriate reintroducing missing species.

Leading pollsters YouGov asked 1,674 Britons: ‘To what extent do you support or oppose rewilding in Britain?’ The poll, conducted last October, also found that 83% of the public support Britain’s national parks being made wilder, with areas set aside for rewilding. This huge level of support is significant as the UK Government has just announced a 12-week public consultation on how to ensure these national landscapes can do more for nature, climate and people…more

Film – Don’t Look Up – Review
This film is about a large asteroid heading for the Earth which would devastate much of life on the planet. The story is about a small group of scientists and helpers trying to alert the world about this impending catastrophe. They find so many obstacles in their way and are exasperated to find that a simple, clear, scientific truth gets distorted, manipulated or dismissed by vested interests…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #3 – ‘The Long Road Home’ by Marian Van Eyk McCain
As a young child, I lived in the city. And in WW2 my city, Plymouth, was one of the most heavily-bombed in the UK. So my early experiences were almost totally shaped by war – as I chronicled for the BBC WW2 History Archive. But the one thing that for me was not affected by the war in any way was my fascination with the natural world. I used to spend hours in our little garden, watching the birds and the beetles. I scooped up frog spawn from a pond in the park and put it in an enamel dish that I made into a mini-pond with stones and moss so that I could watch the eggs hatch into tadpoles and slowly become frogs. Most of all, I loved those very occasional times when my mother took me walking on Dartmoor or my great-aunt took me blackberrying along the Devon hedges…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #2 ‘My Healing Journey’ by Ian Mowll
I was brought up in the Evangelical Christian tradition. Whilst I felt the loving energy of a divine essence, most of the rest of the religion felt like a lot of rules and constraints. And so, during my adolescence, I questioned and challenged. I really wanted to find answers but to some, I was too much, and one person described me (in a prayer meeting) as “an attack from the devil” – which got a loud round of “amens” from others. And so, I left the safe shores of my upbringing and began a long quest for a spiritual home…more

Music – Luminosity – Review
The performance of this piece of music in October 2021 in London was inspired by the book The Universe is a Green Dragon by Brian Swimme. Therefore, it’s all about the amazing unfolding of the universe from the big bang to the present day…more

My Green Spiritual Journey #1 ‘Caring for All Creatures’ by Margie Schneider
I grew up in a steel town in Ohio, where industry rather than Nature played a huge role. I also existed in a very strict Byzantine Catholic environment, where I was sent to a Catholic girls’ school which was equally strict, and upon graduation I got married young, and worked as a secretary, and then later became a nurse. It seemed that even during my young adult years I was oblivious of the importance Nature should play in my life. As a result, the jobs I took and the religions I followed seemed to lack something for me, but I still did not realize what that might be…more

Any views expressed in this section are personal and are not written on behalf of everyone involved in GreenSpirit.