Introduction to Learning how Land Speaks

The fields are misty as I walk toward the riverbank as dawn breaks; birds are singing in the nearby wooded hillside. When I reach my ‘spot’, that narrow finger of land, no more than a meter wide, that reaches out between the Rivers Frome and Avon at their confluence, I pause to take in the light shimmering on the surface and the dark reflections of the willow and alder that line the banks. I drop my bag and walking pole, then pause, waiting for the moment to approach. When the time seems right, I bow, imagining the boundaries of my separate self softening, flowing out to become part of the wider whole; I introduce myself with my everyday, Medicine and Sacred names; and I call for teaching from the Four Directions. These ceremonial gestures serve to further separate me from the mundane and to open myself to new encounters. Once I feel I have properly arrived, I take out my flask of tea and breakfast cake and offer some to River, as an Australian Aboriginal elder might throw a small handful of sand into the river to announce themselves as being there with meaningful intent. Sitting quietly, I try to clear my mind of rambling thoughts and offer River my attentive love.

At the present time, which many call the Anthropocene, the underlying Western worldview is beginning to shift in profound ways. For the first time in centuries, the idea that we inhabit a profoundly silent and dead world of objects is challenged by perspectives that assert agency, life, and meaning to animals, plants and even the Earth herself. The late, great James Lovelock called this Gaia, and the eminent French sociologist Bruno Latour the living Earth as actor. Of course, this view has long been self-evident to Indigenous people across the planet.

These views draw on a fast-growing body of evidence from biology (discovering sentience and experience in all life forms) and from Indigenous writers, historians and story tellers, who tell us that humans have, for most of their history, experienced the cosmos as suffused with life, animated with persons of all species with whom they could relate in order to keep the world alive. In the western philosophical tradition, this view is represented by panpsychism, which has a long, and partly repressed, history in the West.

Together with my immediate colleagues and many others across the planet, I have been exploring pathways into experiences that connect us to a world which reveals itself as profoundly alive, sentient, and communicative. Our work is goes beyond thinking about a new worldview, it moves into engagement with the world as sentient, as a two-way, subject-to-subject interaction:

What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response?

Many of the ills currently experienced by human societies – violence toward each other and toward the more-than-human world of which we are a part – have their roots in the atomism and mechanism of a worldview that remains rooted in an essentially Newtonian perspective, despite many developments in our understanding of the nature of the physical world and of life processes.

It is not enough to understand the world differently; we need also to develop practices and disciplines of participatory presence as members of the community of life on Earth. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it succinctly: ‘As we think, we live’. If we take this statement seriously, we can see these questions of worldview are of profound significance.

Philosopher Freya Mathews shows how, ‘the presuppositions and beliefs we bring to our encounter with the world act as a kind of invocation – they call up reality under a particular aspect or aspects, so that this is the aspect that reality will reveal to us in the course of the encounter’. Similarly, Richard Tarnas asks us to imagine ourselves as the cosmos. Not the mechanical cosmos of conventional modern cosmology, but rather ‘a deep souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence’. Would we be more likely to reveal ourselves to those who treat us as a lifeless object, plundering our secrets; or to those who treat us respectfully as a living presence?

We reach for a view of the world, not as a barren, strange place for humans, but a shared community of life. As one participant in our inquiries wrote:

As soon as we want something from the natural world, we don’t see it in its wholeness, liveliness and loveliness and perhaps we miss out on the effects this seeing brings, all the nourishment and fulfilment. It’s as if there are two different worlds operating; the one that is used by us and the one that is a creature in its own right. 

We have initiated and led a series of co-operative inquiries with Human persons and Rivers over the past few years. These posts will draw on this experience. I intend to post weekly to begin with, alternating between theoretical perspectives and illustrative narratives drawn from my own inquiries and those of my co-researchers. The next post will be a brief description of living cosmos panpsychism as articulated by my philosopher colleague Freya Mathews; see also Freya’s subsequent post The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos and Ontopoetics Part 1 and Part 2.

I made a video that supplements this introduction for the Pari Centre here.