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This is a profound subject, about which much might be said.Some people relate to landscapes as they relate to people, as friends, even intimates. Other people have no sense of this.
Many people who later become involved in nature- and land-preservation have had moments in childhood that they describe variously as "everything seemed magical and like it was all one" or "for a moment, everything seemed perfect and I felt a part of it, like I fit perfectly in a perfect world." The poet AE, the theologian and environmental advocate Thomas Berry, and many others describe these moments in nature, moments which have colored their understandings and actions ever since, and often tie them emotionally to the place where it happened.
I have had such an experience. Many of you may have too. The outcome is often a tendency toward spirituality, a love of poetry, and a feeling of guardianship of the earth. You know who you are.
Well, indigenous peole recognise this pattern. The experience I describe above is interpreted by some of them as a moment of contact with a landscape being, or spirit of place: genius loci, wight, djinn, etc. Before you back off from that, consider whether you might redefine those words to mean only this, the thing on the landscape that creates this effect, that has given us those moments. And maybe those beautiful moments of reverie are the equivalent of an inadvertent vision quest.
I say this because I know people who trace the course of their lives back to these moments, which, despite their frequency and the strong impact they have on the individual, have no name or recognition in our culture. People in indigenous cultures perform vision quest to gain exactly this kind of wisdom and guidance. If we understood that this, and not our modern fancies, is what they mean by spirits, it might color our race's relationship with the land.
I once read an interview with a shaman, one born and raised in the indigenous group for which he was shaman, and he told the interviewer that he sees some Western people walking around with spirit helpers, but because they haven't been trained on what they are or how to interact with them, they sometimes do the people as much harm as good. In other words, some of us have connected with what these people call spirits, but we don't know it.
I propose that those people who have a strong emotional, almost magical relationship with a place or places have had contact with what the ancients meant by spirits. Which is completely different from what many of us think of when we hear the word.
Any comments from out there?
aluta
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road