... Slowly, I learnt that spirituality and religion are not the same. At 12, I decided to be a vegetarian, at 16, vegan, a commitment I plan to continue for the rest of my life. A commitment borne of love, I cannot comprehend how we can justify hurting animals based on anthropocentrism. This made me question how the rest of my beliefs have been shaped. How limited it is to define the worth of Nature solely by its utility to humans.

What is it to be 'green' and spiritual? To live according to the parameters of GreenSpirit, I muse that, for me, my journey is perhaps more in tune with nature mysticism, as I connect on a deep, inner level to the One energy and Source of Gaia and Life, including the myriad lifeforms that share this incredible, priceless planet with us.

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?

To me, green spirituality means having a sense of the sacred in the ordinary, everyday and miraculous world we live in.... ...But then, in my mid-thirties, I had what I could only describe as a spiritual crisis, prompted by an acupuncturist asking me if I felt there was a part of me as yet unknown. I felt deeply threatened by this question, but I couldn’t let it go. I started to have powerful numinous dreams, and to experience synchronicities which I couldn’t explain with my rational mind

...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.

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. There were chrysalides hanging from the ceilings, and baby frogs were found in the basement, having migrated from the playroom. These days out of doors became my contemplative times, when I would work through problems I had with family and friends, and come to terms with the emotional ups and downs of puberty. It was then that I started to write a journal. Expressing myself on paper was always easier for me than the spoken word, and my innermost secrets and thoughts could be spilt out onto the page where nobody could see them unless I wished it.

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.

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.

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.