Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, a different vibration of chemical exhalation, a different polarity with the stars; call it what you like. But the spirit of a place is a great reality.
…Sacred trees and groves were considered as sanctuaries, and were often the location of celebrations. The ancient Irish built no temples. Instead, they treated nature as a temple. Trees were the oldest living things and were treated as sources of great wisdom. Fairy Thorns and Rag Trees were considered to be frequently visited by beings of the Otherworld. Mass Bushes served as the location for sermons and Monument Trees as the location for weddings, royal inaugurations, seasonal festivals, and other social events. Even today, there is a reverence for Fairy Trees; highway construction workers have diverted the course of their road so as to leave a single hawthorn standing.
We are so close to the Earth that we often forget – it is alive. And the language of its aliveness is what we call nature. When we listen to nature, we are listening to the Earth. Of course, such a conversation takes time, because we are too small to readily grasp what the Earth has to say. The vast Earth has carried us our whole lives. Can we thank it? It has held up and endured everything for thousands of years. Can we ask it how? It speaks with a thousand tongues, none of which uses words. Yet, to build a relationship with that which holds us up seems essential.
Basic to the Celtic tradition is the acceptance of personal responsibility and realization that all of us constantly shape and affect the land on which we live. . .Intrinsic to this notion is the Celtic interrelationship with the Otherworld and it’s inhabitants. The Celtic worldview is a magical one, in which everything has a physical, mental and spiritual aspect and its own proper purpose, and where our every act affects both worlds.
In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the un-manifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness.
Deep Ecology is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation. When the concept of the human spirit is understood in this sense, its mode of consciousness in which the individual feels connected to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is truly spiritual. Indeed the idea of the individual being linked to the cosmos is expressed in the Latin root of the word religion, religare (to bind strongly), as well as the Sanskrit yoga, which means union.
We have all but forgotten that life is a rich and mysterious coming together of many worlds. We have lost sight of what the ancient priestesses and shamans knew, that the forms of our visible world have their roots in unseen dimensions, and that it is in these unseen dimensions that the primal energies of life lie. In our forgetting, we have lost the wholeness of life, and we have cut ourselves off from the real forces that shape our world. But when we are present in life, free from demands or agendas, when we allow life to unfold according to its own inner principles, we open up a doorway again between the worlds. Within our consciousness the inner and outer, the visible and the unseen worlds, can come together and speak to each other, and our split-apart world can become whole again.
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.