Just sitting

That is my suggestion this week. Try just sitting somewhere and just be. Spend however much time you are able to and just take a place in and experience it as fully as you can. Listen to the birds and animals, the breeze. Smell the earth, sink your fingers into it. Take your time (I know, I always say that don't I!)
Let the place reveal itself to you. As you sit, or even lay you'll begin to notice more and more. You'll begin to feel the place sink into your bones. If you're lucky you'll begin to feel a sense of the lands own unique spirit, if you're lucky you'll begin to feel the earth pulse beneath you.

Keep up a practise of just sitting and see how much begins to come to you.
Nellie x

Befriending a Tree

If you haven't got a spiritual teacher (and I suspect this is most of us!) then you could do a whole lot worse than befriend a tree.

In reality there isn't much information written and/or readily available on tree spirits (often mistakenly called dryads - the original meaning of 'dryad' referred to the spirit of an oak tree). This means that most of your work with tree spirits will have to be guided by your intuition. If you were looking for hard and fast instructions, sorry folks!

Befriending a tree will bring a whole new quality to your spirituality and will certainly add your connection to the spirit of the land. Trees are so very different from humanity and there is so, so much that we can learn from them.

How do you find your friend then? Are there any particular trees that seem to reach out to you - either spiritually or literally as you walk past they always seem to brush you with their branches? Is there a particular species that you feel an affinity with? These are good questions when searching for a tree to befriend. If you're lucky you have a tree growing right in your garden and it is already part of the family. If not, there are trees even in the most urban of situations.

I would start off by just showing the tree kindness. Water it during drought. Collect any rubbish that has been left at its base. Sit with the tree and give it time to get to know you - trees don't rush! Slowly you should start to develop a connection with the tree, and then who knows what it will teach you...

Adoption

One of the things I have found most helpful in helping me to feel connected to the land has been to adopt a piece of land. In my opinion this should ideally be somewhere that is neglected, somewhere that is in need of some loving energy.
My adopted land is a very small remnant of woodland that survives the urban sprawl. I get the feeling that it is just a tiny piece and all that is left of what was probably not that long ago a large woodland area.
The path that runs through this tiny wood goes to a new, posh housing estate and to the huge Tesco supermarket. There are no bins along this track, despite the fact that it is heavily used by supermarket pedestrian traffic and as such the trees and the plants are choking on discarded rubbish. The track way is also a favourite dog walking route and unfortunately not many of them (or so it seems) remove their dogs poo. While I don't pick up the dog poo (it might be offensive to me but I don't suppose the trees and the plants mind it much) I make sure that every time I visit that I take a bag along with me and pick up the rubbish that I find, and then recycle what I can of it.
It doesn't take me that long, and the feeling of acceptance I get for it is more than welcome. The feeling of connection that has come from this activity is of a very comforting sort.
I urge you all to adopt a piece of land and show it that humans can and do care. Some of us at least.

Letters Home

If you are struggling with feeling your connection to the land I have a simple suggestion for you to incorporate into your own rituals, rites or meditations. Use what ever format suits your personal practise best.

To help draw you closer the the land you can try writing a letter. You might want to write this as you would a formal letter or you might decide to take the same route as me and write a poem. I chose the poem format because I felt the creation in itself was an offering to the land and because the crafting of a poem takes more time and therefore in the crafting of a poem you imbue your words with more meaning. A quick scribble isn't appropriate either way you chose to go forward with it; you need to put real thought into your words and when you write them out you must really feel them - make some effort to make the paper look pretty.
Tell the land that you wish to connect with it and the spirits that live with/within it and tell the land why. Tell the land how much you think of it. In my case I was telling the land spirits about the garden I wanted to create and why, and I was asking for permission and assistance. Be open and be clear in what you are saying.
When you have your final draft and it's all written out lovely (I would suggest handwriting rather than printing from your word processor as something handwritten is more personal and again gives your words more power) you are ready to use it. Begin as you would normally begin your practise, but you must be outside. If you want to make contact with the spirits of the land you must at least show willing! Where you are will obviously effect how you perform any rituals or meditations, but with this side of things you're on your own; do whatever suits you and the circumstance. The aim is to release your words to the land spirits. You might chose to read your words out loud or you may recite them silently. The nest step is to physically release your words. You can do this by either burying your letter in the Earth or by burning the letter in a small heat proof bowl.
After you've done this you must keep your eyes open! If the spirits try to answer you make sure you are listening. Watch for anything that keeps repeating in your life. Maybe a certain animal will keep appearing, either in real life or you'll keep seeing them on the t.v, hearing about them etc. Maybe it will be a word that keeps popping up, or a phrase. It might also be helpful to pay extra attention to your dreams.

Good luck,
Nellie x

Learning the Land - Part 4

Now this week is a fairly simple suggestion, though again it will take longer than a week to come to fruition (quite literally).

Everyone has heard the saying 'you are what you eat' no doubt, and it really is very true in quite a literal sense that goes much further than your health.
One of the things I have found to be most helpful in connecting with the land has been to grow some food and eat it. By doing this you are quite literally eating the land. It becomes part of you on a molecular and chemical level, just as you become part of the land itself when you die and the physical body decomposes (yeah I know, lovely imagery while I'm talking about growing food!) I'm talking provable science here again, and it's something you can read up on if you are so inclined :)
Everybody can do this. Sure it's best if you can actually grow something in the Earth itself, but if you can't it doesn't mean that growing your own as a method of connection is lost to you. Even if you grow in pots on a patio or window box - or even if you only grow something on a pot on your windowsill - you are still connecting to the spirit of the land. The soil is only part of the equation. You can still grow plants that are exposed to the air,and water them with collected rainwater, all unique to the place you live and therefore part of the whole. This will still bring you closer to the land and also its natural rhythms, which is also the point of the exercise. How can you expect to come closer to the Land if you don't know her natural rhythms? This isn't something you can learn from a book as each place will be slightly different. Optimum temperatures for growth will come at different times, differing length of daylight hours etc. Fruit, vegetables and leaves will be ready at different times in different places, and as part of your connection to the Land it's nothing but beneficial to know about when these things are happening.
So go get growing! Sure it might be getting too cold where you are, but you'd be surprised what can grow with just a little protection. At the least there are some salad crops that are suitable for growing during the cool times so long as you give them a little protection (cloches, bubble wrap, horticultural fleece - heck even half a plastic bottle upturned will do the trick).
If you can't grow in the Earth it's no big matter. Anyone can grow some herbs on their window. If you've got a sunny window you've got limitless choices of what to grow. If however you have window space but it's not very sunny, don't despair! Mint and sage for example will still grow for you (mint makes a lovely tea and you can get countless varieties to chose from. Sage is very useful for ritual and magickal purposes but that's a subject for another post! Again there are lots of different varieties - I grow pretty purple sage).
So grow something. PLEASE! Not only will it bring you closer to the Land in a local sense it will also help the Land in a global sense. Eating closer to home means there's that little bit of food that isn't being shipped half way around the world to your door. If you can try to source local food more frequently you really are doing the Earth a favour.
As a side note - plants are always cheaper to grow from seed and many cheap supermarkets often sell some of the more popular varieties seed packets quite cheaply. If you're looking for something a bit more unusual the best place is probably the Internet. Some seeds are difficult to germinate though so you might want to buy them as plants. Sage for example is supposed to be difficult to germinate. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, just that you should be aware of this fact. I grew Sage from seed the first time I tried with no experience what-so-ever so difficult does not by any means mean impossible! Other plants self seed prolifically (like lemon balm) so if you can find a friend with plants you can probably beg some for nothing, and other plants are so voracious (like all the mints) that they spread all over the place, and again if you've got a friend with plants you can probably beg some for nothing!
Good luck - please give this one a go if you haven't already!
Nellie x

Learning the Land - Part 3

- on a personal note, I hope you'll forgive the late posting, it's been a bit of a busy time of late. Also with thanks to Ellie from Wandering a Lonely Road for the award nomination; I'll be posting about this on my personal blog so I don't clutter the place up here at Working Spirituality. -



And onto our relationship with the land.

This week I'm going to suggest you really throw yourself into your research! The land on which you live has seen and felt so much before you or I came along. Find out all about the history of the place you call home. Does it correlate with any of the feelings and impressions you've been getting while spending time with the spirit of the land?

Use what ever you can get your hands on for this. Local libraries and history books are more than helpful, and access to the county records office will be invaluable (ask for help if you need it because they are usually staffed by wonderful people - note any rules before you go in as often you'll not be allowed to take pencils/pens into these places. However they are usually happy to offer photocopying services for any information you'd like to record). As ever the Internet is your friend with any research such as this. Be careful though, not everything you read comes from a trustworthy source so it's worth cross referencing to check if something is right.

Find out what the main economy of your land has been in the passing ages. Chances are this will have changed as time has gone on. Was your place mainly agricultural, was it the site of factories and mills, or a fishing port etc? How did life change where you are when the Industrial Revolution hit for example? How did people get by during the World Wars where you live? Did many of the men who went to war make it back? What ghost stories abound? Was there once a 'lord of the manor', does a manor house still stand? What religion did the people who lived on this land follow? What festivals did they celebrate? What ancient tribes once inhabited the lands? What happened to them? Where are the natural water sources and how have they been used in the past? Are there any battle sites nearby? All this and more is what you should aim to be discovering because these are the things the land has been witness to. These are the things that have shaped it and helped or hindered its evolution.

This isn't something you can do in just a week of course, this is an on-going project. To know the land you have to be willing to keep learning. Ask the land about the things you find out and see if there's any response. Maybe, maybe not.

Good Luck!

Nellie x

Learning the land - Part 2

So once you've identified the places in your locality that might hold the energies of the earth a little closer to the surface so to speak, the next thing you need to do it visit them. Don't set out to do them all in a day - show the spirits of the place your respect by taking your time and not rushing.

Spend some time in each of these places and try to 'feel' them. You might do this by meditating, or you might do this by lowering your energy into the ground, or you might simply open yourself up to the place. Does each place feel different? How easy is it to feel the essence of each place - are some places easier than others? Which places feel special? See what feelings and images come to you in each of these places and slowly start to build up a connection with the land around you.

Once you've done this identify one, or possibly two, places where you think you can work with the energies present. Alternatively if you feel like your relationship with the land is really coming along, or if getting to other special places is difficult, you can start the next step in your own back garden. If you are planning on working your spirituality in your garden this is as good a time as any to start - just make sure you've got the hang of sensing the energy in the Earth first (this is why I have suggested you start off feeling the energy of special sites first - because for a beginner the land's energy is going to be easier to sense in these places).

Chose your site and find a place within it to leave offerings. I'm not suggesting anything elaborate - infact if your chosen place is the middle of a public park then I suggest that you keep things as simple and unobtrusive as possible. Keep in mind that this is not an alter to a Deity, it is a place to connect to the land and leave the spirits that possess it offerings. Maybe you'll opt for a pretty plate, or a shallow bowl if you're working in your garden, or possibly a wooden tray. Maybe you'll decide to simply draw a circle on the ground, where ever you are. Give it some thought and decide what seems appropriate to you.

As to what to offer? Try some wild bird seed, or a libation of water, some flower petals, or even a strand of your own hair. I prefer to keep things natural, but if you're working in your own garden and you want to offer statues or carvings and such like then that is fine too. The key thing here is that whatever you offer it should be from the heart.

Just let the land get to know you a bit, visit regularly and try to make it known that you are listening.

Nellie x

Learning the Land - Part 1

I claim to be no expert but I invite you to join me on my own journey in connecting more deeply with the land. For everyone this is an extremely personal journey, and so what is right for me may not feel right for you. So take my suggestions during this series of posts, tweak them, adapt them; do what feels right for you and the land you are living on. I'm going to aim to give you one activity or idea to work with every week in the hope that it gives you time to personalise these ideas/rituals, making them as formal or informal as you like, and giving you time to work through any impressions, dreams, visions, and impressions that might come your way as a result of your work.

There is nothing more important (in my humble opinion!!) than your connection with the land, your mother, your source. The Earth and the spirits that live within the land have so much to teach us - and what could be more fulfilling than learning from the forces of nature rather than spending all your time with your nose in a book? (though I do adore books so please don't ignore them completely)

As with all things worth doing, this is worth taking your time over. Show the land some commitment by taking it one step at a time.

So for your first steps with your land you will need some maps! If you live somewhere you've been born and grown up then you will likely have some resonance within you with the place you live, but if you live hundreds of miles from your birthplace there's no reason at all why you cannot become part of the land too. What you need is love. It comes down to that very simple fact.

So! Start off with a local street map, and an ordinance survey map is handy too (sorry I don't know the equivalent to this outside of the U.K. I'm talking about a very detailed map that you'd likely use should you decide to go rambling in the country side) Look for places that could have held special significance that's been forgotten from days gone by. Old track ways that have somehow survived urbanisation, old park land that holds some remnant of the wildwood; ancient fortifications and earthworks. All these are indications that a place has something special about it. Look as well for old churches that have been there forever - chances are they were built upon earlier sacred sites. Take note of any unusual place/road names that draw you too. Mark all of these places down and then just look at your map for a bit - is there anywhere your eye is drawn to without there being anything obviously special about it? Mark down these places too - your intuition could be giving you a heads up!

Now go do some research on these places you've marked down and see what turns up. When I did my research I found the starting point of an energy ley line which I was very excited about. I also found some old town/parish boundaries that still remained as public footpaths through new housing estates and held a real feeling of the Earth pulsing through them. I found some sites that had histories of various hauntings and the stories that went with them. It was all very illuminating!

So go look for the places around you where the Earths energies are closer to the surface and easier to perceive.

Good luck to everyone who decides to have a go with this. Be sure to let us know how you get on! We're all on similar journeys here and I for one would love to hear what everyone else finds!

Nellie x