The communion of inquiry and practice

Four of us, members of a larger panpsychic inquiry group that has been engaged in inquiry with Rivers for six years, continue to meet regularly to share experiences. Over the years of inquiry together, we have a growing feeling that our relationships with Rivers mean that we are more than a human support group, but part of a wider intimacy. This post reaches tentatively for an understanding of the nature and qualities of the group in itself.

The group has long been valued, with member describing this in a different way

Luisa: The group became a shared practice of opening spaces and moments of connection with the other-than-human world. Throughout the months we were visiting River weekly, it became a ritual, a commitment or discipline with a friend, that grew into a cycle of giving and receiving. And with our encounters, we created a sort of melting pot of experiences where synchronicities lined up and meanings were created. It slowly evolved as a textile, a recollection of different fabrics that all together created a shared space of making sense. Each of us bringing into the fabric different questions, fears, visions, experiences and connections, that then became amplified with the response of the inquiry group.

David: The intimacy and opportunity to meet with the panpsychic world and with other human beings in a deep, rewarding, and opening way where I was able to discover so much more about the world around me as well as the world within me; where I could touch things about myself and my relationship to the non-human world and aspects of the human world I hadn’t been with before.

Dave: I’m feeling that I need this Sangha… It’s about approaching these moments of sitting or pilgrimage or whatever practice it is, where it could be that the world is going to speak back, the illusion of separation drops away. I still need the Sangha to support that dharma. Yeah, being of being on the road, together with you.

At a recent meeting, we shared recent experiences with River. Luisa offered drawings and other visual images from her encounter with Manzanares; David, writing and photos from an encounter with an Oak tree; Dave, some spontaneous, scarcely edited writing from the River Fowey; Peter, writing from the Avon. When we had heard from everyone, we paused, quite taken up with listening to each other’s stories. Each seemed to convey different yet related aspect of our encounters with the more-than-human world, and so we felt an intimacy between us human friends, and also with all the Lands and Rivers we had encountered. Once we had finished, Dave picked up the feeling:

What is it, when we do these things? We each have a little adventure. We try to… ‘capture’ is not the right word, is it? We try to give it a vessel. And then we show it to one another. It’s really a very sweet activity, isn’t it? There’s a vulnerability, isn’t there, in offering it to one another. It’s really lovely.

How to describe this feeling? It could be said that, even though distant, we see what our fellows see through our own eyes; we know what they are noticing, and maybe what they are not noticing, in these little pieces of the world we know so well. And as we listen to each other’s narrative, we feel a resonance with our own: we know those skeletal winter trees, the thin sunlight on the water at the arrival of dawn. It is more than similar words, we feel into each other’s experience. Through this, we affirm our individual, first-person experience, and go beyond this to create a community of human fellowship that supports a more fully participatory worldview that runs counter to the dominant narrative. Our world is no longer one of separate things, of brute, insentient matter, but alive and relational in its essence.

In this way, we are extending the qualities with which we approach Land and River to our fellow humans. We treat each other’s offerings as serious play, one might even say as sacrament, noticing the sense of communion between us. And just as with River, we often experience ourselves in a liminal space between the everyday and the sacred When we share our experiences with River or Oak, we remain in relationship with them and they remain actively engaged with us; we have not left the more-than-human world behind.

We often find ourselves returning to traditional religious language to express this. We have remembered that ‘where two or three are gathered together…’ a sacred presence is more available. We have often referred to ourselves as a ‘communion’; we spoke of ‘dharma practice’ and ourselves as a ‘sangha’ (at the same time, wondering where the Buddha resides in all this!) David draws on Quaker practice and terms to describe his sitting by River: silence, attention, waiting: ‘Catching the wave of timelessness is like finding the threshold through which to enter a group unconscious, where I can be with the other-than-human beings’. And this return to religious language is seeking something lost in secular culture.

Dave, in particular, re-describes[i] our shared practice in traditional religious language:

… a group of people praying together is worshipping. And I suppose we’re kind of trying to invent a liturgy together… a co-creative, spiritual practice for entering this liminality. And coming back was having had one’s prayers answered… or even not having a prayer answered is having your prayer answered! You can’t really lose. You just got to turn up! The only way I can think about is just steeped in mythic language: Divinity, Prayer, Liminality, Threshold, Worship, Sacred.

This way of making sense also reflects Thomas Berry’s view that of the universe as its own cosmic liturgy in which humans participate.[ii] Dave reaches for his own expression of this:

I wondered for a long time, what prayer is, and come to the conclusion that it is making a connection with the ineffable. And the ineffable is what we’re talking about. This world is miraculous, and terrifying, and gorgeous and overwhelming. It’s always there, and we stopped noticing, for a very good reason – because it’s a bit too much.[iii] But in prayer – and here’s the mythos bit – we open up to God, we connect to God, whatever that means. I don’t mean a transcendental being outside, outside creation; I think it’s everywhere. So we can come back to the idea that what we’re doing is what has always been meant by praying. There is a certain stillness, there’s a pilgrimage, a journey, a sense that the sacred is all around, that it’s all this is, is the divine signature. You know, this whole language is profoundly spiritual, religious. And prayer is this connection making.

And this ‘religious’ experience seems to meet a need in many of us. At an earlier inquiry meeting, Ezekiel said

So much of my adult life has been driven by this longing for regenerative, healthy, earth-based culture. I’ve longed for that so deeply, it’s been a guiding force for me. And so, to meet other people that have vested interest, not because they’re getting paid to do it, not because there’s something to be gained by doing it, but just because there’s this desire to spend intimate time with the Land… I love that. You’re the people... that I want in my little village.

At a later meeting, we reflect further on the nature of our inquiry group as a sacred space. As Liz Bucar, who seeks to ‘re-imagine religions’, writes ‘…religious frameworks carry wisdom that secular culture keeps having to rediscover.’ Again, Dave expresses a similar view:

What leapt out for me was how much what we’ve been doing mirrors what’s authentic in in prayer and worship, and maybe what and where its origins are. I thought ‘that’s lovely, we’re doing something primordial, which eventually got turned into dogma and liturgy and nonsense. I think we are revisiting what’s basic, what’s primordial, what’s deeply in our collective nature. When we engage with the living container of the life world, we can fall into a state of mind and state of senses that calls up the same language which has been used – hijacked – by the religions. It’s that whole Jungian thing about myth and mandalas and the collective, I think we’re on that. We’re in that area.

My friend and writing colleague Helen Sieroda told me that on reading a draft of this post she was reminded of her early studies in comparative religion. She remembered that in the Vedic tradition, when a devotee chanted a hymn, there was no separation or sense of supplication, but rather a seemless participation. The prayers were a collaboration in sustaining the cosmos and keeping the order.

… actually the river needs to be speaking through us. We need to be speaking River. We need to be singing to the River. You know, singing our hymns to the River… [To ask] “Am I entitled to speak for nature?” That’s almost missing the point, because that you are sustaining the cosmos by speaking for nature. You are nature speaking for nature. And that is that there’s something powerfully creative and mystical and ancient.

Yet how far does this actually take us? Luisa agrees that all forms of artful, creative expression offer gateways to this shared practice. But are we only able to present fragments of our experience? “We’re able to hold some of it and share it… not all of it, but a fragment”. But Dave pushes back, re-emphazising the seemlessness of participation:

When you, Peter write, or when Luisa catches moments in her beautiful drawings, when the expression comes together, we [all] become enchanted… there’s a wholeness in that which is beyond striving. They are not fragments, then are they? They’re facets of a jewel.

And this in turn draws Luisa to reflect that staying with the images and words, playing with them, even when it’s quite frustrating, enables that transition from fragments to the facets of a jewel. And this leads her to another challenge:

And I also thought, “Am I entitled to speak for nature?... Can I speak on behalf of Rivers? Can I voice? Is that what they want? Are we sure? From where we are on our ‘broken hill’.[iv]

To which Dave replies, drawing us back again to religious language, Can you ‘speak with tongues of men and of angels?’ It seems as we attempt to speak for River, we must do so from a place of love.

[i] I borrow the term ‘redescribe’ from philosopher Richard Rorty, as a way to offer new ways to make sense of the world that are both informative and liberating.

[ii] Berry, T. (2009). The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth. Orbis Books.

[iii] It is not directly relevant here, but I am amused that just after I wrote this I read in the LRB of G.K. Chesterton insisting that we must ‘accept this huge impossible universe that stares us in the face… we shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage’. London Review of Books, 19 February 2026, p.3

[iv] ‘Broken hill’ is a reference to Leonard Cohen’s song If it be your will, which Peter had drawn on earlier in the conversation.