Where the Wild Calls

This essay critically explores the longing many of us feel to return to nature. What if relationship with nature is not a trend, but part of our human inheritance? What if wonder, ritual and reverence are closer than we think? Through personal story and reflection, this piece invites you to remember your place within a living, animate world and to join a practical Move with Nature week starting on May 1st!

(* an earlier version of this essay appeared in Feminism and Religion, full details below)

For 40 years now, nature has been my conscious sacred place. As an 8-year old, I started to pray to Mother Earth even though the protestant tradition in which I grew up only recognised God the Father. I went outside in my inflatable rowing boat to seek solitude on a small island in our local park. I practised rowing and walking quietly to not break the sacred silence. I collected herbs to brew infusions in my thermos flask. I sung to the moon, and danced my love for all creation back through my moving body. My dad taught me how to read animal tracks, and my mom put up with examining owl pellets at the kitchen table.

Over the last 20 or so years, I spent many days and nights at Neolithic monuments, dreaming and time traveling in ancestral burial mounds and stone circles all over the UK, Ireland and more recently Brittany (France). This nature-based practice evolved naturally at first, and later incorporated my trainings with the Scandinavian Centre for Shamanic Studies and the School of Movement Medicine.

Nature is where I reconnect most easily with the sacred, and listen to the whispers on the great web of life. Nature, for me, is a strong place of prayer, solace, awe, reverence, gratitude, joy, guidance, reconnection, healing and transformation.

This way of connecting to the mystery feels as the most natural and innocent thing in the world to me, even though much of our north-west European indigenous pre-Christian, nature-based traditions have been lost. Some were incorporated into Roman or Christian spirituality, others thoroughly annihilated during the witch burnings.

However, seeds of wisdom survived tenaciously. Roman conquerors described druid practices at the time of their arrival. Christian monks recorded stories handed down through oral tradition. Perversely, through awful books like the Malleus Maleficarum that the Inquisition used to capture witches, and their recorded ‘confessions’, we glimpse what such nature-based practices might have involved. Also, family craft and community traditions have been passed down through generations.

These ingredients are remarkably similar to contemporary ‘shamanic’ practices, including ways to communicate with animist nature and the spirit world, relationship with power animals or familiars, the use of dancing, drumming and sometimes hallucinogenic plants to induce vision, and healing practices using the four elements water, earth, fire and air.

*this paragraph diverts from the original article

On one hand, we see a renewed interest in relating to the natural world. Research increasingly shows that being in nature can reduce stress, support mental health, improve immunity, restore attention and enhance overall wellbeing. Growing awareness of ‘nature deficit disorder’ (Richard Louv) highlights the cost of too much time indoors. Ancient practices such as forest bathing have become trendy again, inviting people to slow down and experience the healing presence of trees and landscape.

On the other hand, this ‘return to nature’ is criticised by many. Some see it as a romanticised activity, disconnected from everyday technological reality and advancements. Others consider this as a meaningless and pitiful recreation of traditions that have been long lost to time. Religious studies easily dismiss nature spirituality as eclectic, post-modern or even consumerist product without substance because of its selective inclusion. Finally, some reject these practices through the lens of cultural appropriation, colonialism, and white privilege.

Although these are valid concerns to keep in mind, they need not end the conversation. I like to return to experience, because our relationship with the natural world cannot be owned by specific traditions.

Existential questions are of all times and places. We will always seek ways to communicate with the mystery, even though how we do that follows on from culture. I believe however, there is a place before cultural context, where nature-based spiritual practice is self-evident: connecting to earth, moon, sun and stars, to the seasons and the cycles of life, and celebrating life through embodied practices has been done since the beginning of time.

What if lighting a candle, sitting by a fire, working with plants and animals as teachers, belong to all cultures and all times?

What if no-one owns stories of eagle, mouse, wolf, seal or butterfly, but these creatures simply help us remember the sacred nature of all life?

What if we can honour our collective ancestry through a rich tapestry of cosmologies that strengthen rather than divide each other?

What if no-one monopolises access to nature and the sacred, and we are collectively responsible for honouring it, together, in right relationship, in the best way we can?

What if these practices are written in your own spiritual DNA, and you too can reconnect with the seen and unseen dimensions of nature, right here, right now?

If something in you longs for this kind of remembering in community with others, I’d love to invite you to join the first Move with Nature Week in exactly two weeks time, from 1-8 May 2026.

This is all about restoring relationship with the living world around you, through 7x simple movement invitations that you can do anywhere, anytime, and 2x Zoom meetings at beginning and completion.

If modern life has made you feel cut off, strung out, or stuck inside your mind, this invites you into another rhythm. A chance to breathe, move and remember that you belong to a larger dance. This is what I instinctively developed as a child, to express how I was touched by the wonder of life, and I would love to share it with you.

You do not need to be fit, spiritual or experienced. You don’t need to believe in anything. You don’t need to know ‘how to dance’. You only need curiosity, and a willingness to meet yourself and the land with attention and imagination.

So, if you like to meet nature as your companion, mirror, teacher and if needed, mutual medicine, I’ll see you there!

Join Move with Nature Week

This post reworks an earlier essay Who Owns the Sacred? A Personal Search beyond (European) Indigenous Knowledge published on the Feminism and Religion blog on January 17, 2020 and republished March 19, 2023.

If you’re yearning for conscious movement in community too, here are some Wild Soul Ways:

Move with Nature (exploration week to rediscover your kinship with the wilds)

Moving Through Time: Neolithic Pilgrimage as a Path to the Ancestral Mother (talk at the Wisdom of the Mothers symposium)

Avebury Summer Solstice Retreat 22-26 June 2026, UK, in person (women only)

Wild Soul Qi Studio (4 classes weekly, live on zoom and via replays - 14 days free!)