As a child I was rather sensitive to the world of spirit and the voice of Nature. Fortunately, the chasm of my childhood beliefs in God, spirits and communication with non-human beings was not subdued, and thus never ceased. Each year the contemplation of unknowing grew within me – a questioning of what God may actually be: Nature, a man in the starry heavens above, energy? The sublime abyss of my ponderings greatened during trips to timeworn Catholic sites; a guest of my adored and devoted Irish Roman Catholic grandmother. Saint Winefride’s Well in Holywell Wales soul-fully swims from the depths of my memory. Savoured moments of dripping deified water, peacefully cascading the silence with awe and humidified holy essence. Soft ripples on magical watery surfaces mirrored upon slippery ceilings, like galaxies peeking through enshrined boundaries. Churches with carvings of green men, encapsulated by rays of radiance gilding their shadowy grace. Shafts of sun softening engraved edges of magnificent mythical beings that creep upward on pillars of pious presence, thus animating my curiosity and surrendering my heart to a venerated sense of sacred. A feeling so delicately embellished by holy water, overseen by the eyes of the gracious Blessed Mother Mary; who still to this day captures the earthy core of my curiosity. In her transparency, enshrouded by stone, the immaculate Mary’s angelic watery gaze gleamed, serendipitously, through her natural spiritual beauty. Such visits to sanctified sites invigorated my imagination, they still do, and wistfully made me wonder – Why could I sense an unusual energy in these sacred places that sweetly demanded serenity and stillness, placidity and respect? What was here before the church? What lies beneath my pink buckled feet? In a sense, it almost felt I was being absorbed into the mystical presence of these divine spaces; floating in a sublime elemental energy of limitless potential, laced with love and natural powers. Not brought up with religion, I was blessed to be an innocent welcomed invitee; intuitive only to the pulsing core of the loci that safely held my curious youth whilst my grandmother seemed lost in an altered bliss of golden adoration.
Special childhood memories away from terraced Birkenhead streets. I was always better suited to the country in the presence of olden trees.
An array of glimpsing numinous happenings and inexplicable loomings in Nature and innately beautiful bygone buildings ensured my viewpoint of God’s natural quintessence never stagnated. Sustained by many a strange occurrence and hours spent as a child reading stories out loud to non-human beings – perkily narrating poems and tales to Welsh springs, trout, snowdrops and wild rabbit burrows. And in a Wirral dell, where I had my first ever inexplicable interlude with an olden knotty hollow oak. These experiences merrily stole the pages of my first whimsical interspecies stories. My belief in something otherworldly never dwindled like the burning flame of today’s Samhain fire, next to which I write part of this green spiritual story under the watchful gaze of a barn owl. Nor did it waver in the winds of time, regardless of how many leaves withered and fell. Instead, it grew greater with every ineffable, incomparable moment; like the first time I met Ugandan mountain gorillas in Bwindi. Their haunting eyes and echoing chants took my breath away, exhaling heavy thoughts of female primatologists – Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey – who had lived in admirable harsh thorny isolation and determination, experiencing themselves the extraordinary. I hoped one day that would be me. Or, when I saw the grandeur of the almighty Milky Way, as I lay alone next to the Zambezi River on an island I frequented regularly after my voluntary working day. A Southern African soundscape added ambience to the skies’ revelation. How small I felt in isolation at the feet of magnificence. Its unexpected exquisiteness inexplicably terrifying me into awakening; surpassing the naivety of city-supressed inner senses, once held back by the human veil of street lights. My soul now freely fading into the black, blazing luminescent reality of the heavens; yesteryear hidden by terraced Birkenhead roofs, cement and ceilings lit only by Venus on a hazy amber horizon and the alluring beacon of Birkenhead Priory. What else did I not know nor experience whilst tied into the chains of society? What lies hidden beneath the shroud of manipulation? What forced forgetting did my early ancestors endure? Where is the truth of the ancient past today? Such questions were, and still are, the precedence of my soul’s purpose. And as I aged, ever-evolving notions and devotion flowed into my moral fibre like the paint of an unfinished composition, entitled ‘oblivious knowing’.
An isolated stream where I often sit alone and write co-creatively with Nature in peace and tranquility.
In work-related travels of my late twenties, Amazonian tribes emanated unmistakable and incomparable intelligence of co-creation and oneness. Encounters of their indigenous ways began re-aligning my spiritual view; a wholeness between humans and all beings, animate, spirit and the seemingly inanimate held in the omnipotent hands of Mother Earth. Partially blinded by science and practical ecology, a sadness somewhat overcame me. Natural systems and structures, a colonised view of desperation and righteousness, statements of ‘it’ and ‘them’, unknowingly controlling, saving, reporting and educating flashed in front of my eyes. The harmony of ‘us’ and ‘we’ entered my life thereon and into the wildlife conservationist and community worker within me. A damaged helix colonising my internal decedents’ frame began to fade, demolishing the floors of dilapidated habituation.
Outlook from my isolated abode taken this Samhain in autumnal glory.
Settling respectfully into the ancestral Celtic realms of my soulful Spanish husband, I was conceived into a new life of silence and solace; birthed as an apprentice of the Asturian mountains, a hermit to the forest. Surrounded by wildwoods, bears, wolves and waterfalls, I entered into wholly union with Nature where I spoke my soul to the stars in solitude; hiking and sleeping alone timelessly. Daily solar veneration ignited and awakened my dedication to all that is, as reverence rose in ritual to the rising sun. Each morning in lost sensory blessings, seconds of silence reverberated through valleys like the quiet interior of a holy medieval church, scented by the swaying of divine odors, en-chanted by the soft hum of a phantom Gregorian choir. In explosions of air and ceremonial birdsong, solar quintessence interrupts the peace casting rays and leaving shadows that rouse the supposedly inert, bringing life and vigour to the landscape, and me. Away from the overdose of addictive city stimuli, I devoutly learnt from Mother Earth hypnotised by her sweet musing, movement and cycles; a Nature Mystic, a Seer in the making maybe.
A local enchanted forest I frequent regularly; crossing the liminal space of its prominent boundary with respect and offerings.
No longer lost in self, I became found in the wilderness. Entranced and bewitched by ethereal lights, luminescent greens, unseen sights and wistful sprightly whirlwinds that encircled ancient hawthorn trees, and me; blowing away petrified cobwebs of conditioning. Echoing occurrences of the mystical began to unveil hidden affinities in a small array of inexplicable encounters exuding love, oneness and energy – that philosopher and psychologist William James would have called religious experiences or Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, may have termed hierophanies. Three ravens cawed wisdom from a peculiar stone and a dramatic cave seeped damp in Palaeolithic history eerily radiated secrets of Shamanism into my life. What are the lost shamanistic practises of these European lands? What wondrous magical roles did women hold in our Western ancient past? What secrets lay concealed beneath the bramble so carefully wrapped like a lovers’ embrace? What happened to the healers of ancient times gone by? Beckoned across cracking liminal shells of sacred sites, each breath I shared with this mountain spire always returns so selflessly and symbiotically with me. Enchanting fairy forests, named so by the locals, opened my soul and forgotten ecological inner senses to truths laid down in restless torpor, packed away into ancestral lore, ardently awaiting re-membering. Seemingly inanimate beings of Nature awoke with every entrusted interaction and curious playful participation I repeatedly made. Natural pacifiers struck the drum of my rapidly beating heart in moments of the extra-ordinary. In offerings, acknowledgement and prayer of song, more surfacing signs arose through the facade of this world and of an-other; the genesis of my re-communion with land returned to me. Kinship forged in repetitive patterns of time and trust – human and an-other – in innocent collaboration. Camouflaged beings began wailing their existence and secrets into my human veins; I returned to kindred family that resurrected the animism and prior pantheism within me. Guided by elements and elementals, I found myself momentarily residing within this land’s story scribing Nature’s word of peaceful positive energy. And thus, in the silence of solace, a green spiritual journey.
One of many venerated daily sunrises I admire in awe, usually with a cup of Yorkshire gold tea.
What really are these experiences of the extraordinary? Fleeting thoughts floating in the ether, memory captured in stone or perhaps a numinous genius locus! Or maybe the refunctioning of a dormant human inner sense or the manifestation of the sacred at an ancient forgotten feature! Such reveries demanded academic study from me and better understanding. The scientific research of knighted Biologist Sir Alister Hardy eventually propelled me into fascinating territories of Nature mysticism, spiritual evolution and mystical experiences in Nature – they’re not quite the rarity I’d expected. The Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre became a catalyst of liberation for me; I am not alone in my ineffable hierophanies. Scholars Paul Devereux, Paul Marshall and Claude Lecouteux wove threads of academic inspiration and evidence in-between many gaps of spiritual experience, still fully unforeseen; perhaps a scholarly mission for me waiting in the void of my ever-changing destiny. No paper nor contemporary wisdom, though, exceeds for me the spreading energy of living stories and knowledge omnipresent within branches of elderly trees; stretching to chlorophyll heavens and mycelium depths of rooted memoir and memory.
A close friend, an ancient chestnut tree.
Stepping away from the solidity of ground and hospitable oaks, something else is bubbling within me – the cosmic aether of a world-wide-web – a prism of potential, caught in a net of grievances and animosity. Although not the jungle of my preferred domain, its virtual space looms promising capability to dissolve the gritty membrane of blinded separation and dissociation; perils no longer hiding behind one-sided ideology. Perhaps, once endangered orchids of youth can push through the bindweed to bloom beyond the physical cage of a meticulously moderated greenhouse; regaining collective consciousness in a powerful re-invoking balance of harmony. Online treasures of indigenous wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge, like the documentary ‘Aluna – an Ecological Warning by the Kogi People’, helped re-green my spirit; shifting my trajectory and igniting my calling to mentor others on their own paths of green spirituality.
Sitting with my best friend Bow, a Carea Leonés, watching the world go by at one of our favourite resting spots.
I am a student of Nature alive and lost in living lore adorned by neglected forces and genius loci, comforted by the wide blue yonder of Gaia’s eternal celestial sphere. And in hopeful faith, immersed in the wilderness of these magical places, I sense the fortitude of future generations rising from the pages of Mother Earth’s book with utopian concluding chapters like a forgotten phoenix that demystifies union. I am healed within open walls of Nature’s sanctuaries bathed in graceful green divinity. And in balanced alchemy, I have one foot firmly rooted in Animism earthed with Paganistic energy, lightly dusted by fertile ashes of Druidry and Shamanism of European prehistory. The other foot loosely sways in lost secret lagoons of early Catholicism, Marian apparitions and Celtic Christianity. I am on an ever-evolving green animistic journey, where I can be me, safe in unconfined temples of forests and infinite mountain peaks; deus in all my eye can and cannot see. Western folklore and traditional cultures, Nature spirits and ancient European religions, viewed empathetically, will forever continue to intrigue me. And in the silence of solace, I live in the freedom of a green spiritual story where spirits are inseparable from place, and from me. This is my journey of ecological spirituality; a grounded pilgrimage and endeavour of being human and truly me.
Starting my daily solo hike from the cottage; preparing to get purposefully lost to find new memories.
Leah Black is a mystical Nature writer, wildlife conservationist turned spiritual ecologist, seasoned youth and community worker and an online Nature-based mentor and facilitator at ecoinnersense.com
Photos © Leah Black