nature based paths – Feminism and Religion

Move Your Spirituality: Transforming Symbols into Embodied Knowing

A question I’ve been exploring for most of my life is: what changes when we move our spirituality, or let movement become our spiritual practice? In this essay I offer some characteristics of a moving spirituality that I explored in my PhD and later in my book Dancing in the Muddy Temple: A Moving Spirituality of Land and Body.

Dove in the Branches. Image by Andy Murray

Movement is about Connection & Transformation

First of all, movement adds a different language for encountering the sacred. It’s not just ‘sitting still and emptying the mind’, or ‘dancing ecstatically’ (did you know that ecstasy means something like ‘having the god within’?).

Instead, it is a way of searching for and communicating with the layers of the seen and unseen world.… Recently I even start to see it as a way of encountering the mystery in the space between, between objects, emotions and thoughts.

Meet Nehalennia: My Return to a Dutch Sea Goddess

In Zeeland, the southern, sea-kissed part of the Netherlands, a severe storm in January 1647 exposed a sanctuary to the Goddess Nehalennia. The altars and images found a new home in Domburg ’s church, until that burned down in a fire in 1848. Water, wind, fire, weren’t kind to the Goddess! Years went by, until a fisherman hauled up stone fragments from the depths in 1970 near Colijnsplaat.

This lead to a large research project by the University of Leiden in collaboration with The Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, or RMO) that since recovered around 300 objects including altars, sculptures and roof tiles. Based on this, they were able to reconstruct a full Nehalennia temple at Colijnsplaat in 2005. 1)

Read on about my journey of meeting her, some of her background, and how she set me on my path of goddess archetypes…

Sleeping Solo in a Stone Circle by Eline Kieft

What twenty years of pilgrimage taught me about ritual, place and the slow cultivation of perception…

Ever since my first shamanic training in the UK and in Sweden in 2005, I felt called to seek out prehistoric ritual landscapes. Over the past two decades I slept in Neolithic burial chambers, welcomed the dawn from Bronze Age stone circles, wandered among standing stones on remote islands, and returned to certain places often enough that they became companions on my journey.

In this post I share some images and insights from my latest overnight solo adventure at the sacred site of Machrie Moors, on the Isle of Arran, Scotland, and how my practice of spontaneous immersion grew into a deep way of listening.

Going to Machrie Moor

Unlike the better-known circles of Avebury or Callanish, Machrie rarely appears in guidebooks outside Scotland, and perhaps because of that, it retains a remarkable intimacy. Sheep wander freely between the stones, the wind rolls in over the hills, and the landscape seems content in itself.

Set between sea and the dramatic outline of Goat Fell (which in the morning light appeared like a reclining goddess, see image below), the Machrie Moor complex consists of six stone circles in open moorland. There are also several other smaller menhirs that seem strategically placed like signposts leading into the site, which you can’t see from very far because it’s in a valley.

She Changes Everything She Touches: A Reflection on Love and Loss, part 2 by Sara Wright

part 1 was posted last week, you can read it here.

How much I like clipping by hand. Surprised by this realization I feel satisfaction rising. I was bored by this task as a child. I am delighted to meet a bevy of fat nubbly toads who appear out of the overgrown ground covers and in between sun warmed stones. Both child and ‘old woman’ feel happy that none will get mowed down by a polluting gas guzzling machine. The Peace of this Land that we belong to steals over us. Less is more. I’ll tackle the patch of bracken later, or maybe not until tomorrow. In this weather accomplishing one simple chore a day is enough.

Well not quite. I am creating a serpentine path of fieldstone that stretches from my front door to meet the path that climbs the hill. My original intention was to have someone ‘more professional’ do the work, but they were too busy so here I am, an almost eighty-one-year-old woman, creating a mosaic out of cracked stone! ‘I am the artist’ I say, as I carry a few more irregular rocks down from the huge pile sitting in front of the garage eyeing the mosaic for the perfect fit. Illumination strikes when wind hits the stones. Blowing seeds, withered crabapple bits, pine needles and leaves into the cracks I see what is happening. Small plants like violets, creeping charlie, ground ivy, and catmint will find niches in the soil that is being created before my eyes. Mosses will follow in the shade. Ah, Nature is going to help me craft a unique and imaginative fieldstone floor. Each time it rains the stones flatten out becoming more stable. That same feeling of satisfaction steals over me again. Vaguely I think that I may be doing something else besides laying stones in an artistic way and trusting that Nature will fill in the cracks, but I am not clear just what this might be. All I know is that it doesn’t matter how long this project takes. Process has taken precedence. This much feels just right.

Nature and the Body Were Never the Enemy

Reflecting on the contradictions of modern life, this essay explores how both wilderness and female embodiment became culturally suspect within Western thought. Drawing on themes of estrangement, relational ontology and kinship, it considers how practices of attention, presence and nature connection may help us return to a deeper sense of belonging.

Hospicing Hope Continued by Sara Wright

Part 2, You can read last week’s post here.

Walking over to Hope’s gravestone early the next morning, I immediately noted the passionflower was still open. Very Unusual. But then, crucifixion and abandonment by someone this dog loved characterized the last two months of Hope’s life, the dark side associated with the mysterious power that permeates this wild vine and flower. When this passionflower started blooming profusely in the house months before ki’s time, I felt the threat looming…

A few minutes later after the sun cast her fire over the hillside where Hope’s body lay, masses of golden swallowtails dipped and soared around her grave. Oh, that’s when I felt Hope surrounding us with love. I am well she told me and flying with the butterflies as you can see…

The earth moved beneath my feet.

One month later swallowtails continue to fly around Hope’s grave.

Hospicing Hope by Sara Wright

9/30/2012 – 6/11/2025

6/12

Part One

Hope’s black eyes pierced my soul- body as she stood staring through me, ears erect. It was time. Are you sure? Yes. She lay back down. I immediately got up.

Walking helps me to process what I must do. A half an hour later I called.

A numbing drive, walking into a room lit with three candles, and a brief wait before the two kindly women appeared.

Hope washed my tearful face as I held her, reminding me that we would never be separated. For thirteen years she had showered me with kisses beginning each day and again at night before we slept. A long low sigh, before Hope took her last breath. Her body suddenly felt limp, heavy in my arms. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that her heaped up overflowing heart had ceased to beat.

Lucy, her twelve year old adopted sister peered anxiously at me as I looked down at her, eyes perplexed. Seconds later Lucy’s pencil thin tail went limp as the knowing seeped in. As usual we conversed beneath words.

A blurry drive home.

My Grandmother’s Pearls are Green by Sara Wright

“That move into mystery
is not an abandonment of
perception
into a cloud of unknowing.
It’s a move
into a different form
of knowing.”

Robert Macfarlane

I stepped outside when the sun was just rising over the horizon and low enough in the sky to create a play of shadow and light. This is my favorite time of the day to witness the astonishing beauty of the earth that is spreading her shimmering cloak around my feet… ‘oh, my grandmother’s hair, the words rose unbidden’. Chartreuse, plum, wine, lime, gold leaf and emerald canopies stretched across the brook blurring the leaves between birch, ash, beech and maples. The silvery water glistened, and I imagined myself flowing around those serpentine moss-covered banks listening to an ancient song that has been sung by water for more than 4 billion years. How I wish I understood what ‘ki’ was saying but I am no longer able to discern the language.

The Grandfathers, part 2 by Sara Wright

Yesterday’s post which you can read here, ended with this line from the Grandfather, “The young people will become confused and when all is finally lost then the Creator will return to restore not just the Tewa but all tribal peoples to the land.”

I experienced wild hope surfacing… I had heard words to this effect before but assumed that the people needed that story to go on. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure… something about the way this man talked to me made me believe him. He exuded a complex sense of deep humility, knowledge and authority. I thought about the ravages of Climate Change and the disgusting cross-cultural belief that the Earth’s job was to serve humanity. My rational brain went on overload giving me a thousand reasons why what he predicted couldn’t be true, almost as if it needed to win this round (ah, Patriarchy exposes itself – if you don’t win you lose). Yes, it was true that we were in a state of breakdown… he didn’t deny it but he also made it clear that this was not the end. First we had to survive the breakdown, and living through it is a challenge that some like me live with every day. These are dark times.

The Story of Changing Woman, part 2 by Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted December 7th. You can read it here.

Commentary:

I love this story because it demonstrates the evolutionary and eternal nature of Woman; her intimate relationship to Nature, her ability to give birth, to mother, to let go, her ability to endure, her need for animals and plants as companions and her willingness to stand her ground until she is able to get what she needs. Changing Woman matures from a passive figure who is acted upon by the forces of Nature into a self-directed female power who knows what she wants, and one who finds peace in choosing relationships with animals, plants and humans on her own terms.

Initially, Changing Woman is impregnated by the wind – the power of the spirit moving across the land – and not through sexual intercourse. Spirit and the Body of the Earth are the two equally creative aspects involved in her birth. The same holds true for her children, who are male, but conceived and birthed in a similar manner without the need for male insemination (no room for Patriarchy to enter here), suggesting to me that all three are parts of one spiritual/bodily whole that cannot be separated. As creative principles (beyond gender stereotypes) they work together as a triad to rid the world of monsters, to make the Navajo world a safe place, and to secure the matrilineal line. According to Navajo mythology securing the matrilineal line is primarily how Changing Woman saves the world.