Home

We let our feet take us out of the small local settlement and along a single-track lane into the North Pembrokeshire hills.

It’s the kind of lane with a rogue strip of moss and grass growing down the middle of it, running between old dry-stone walls and lichen-crusted hawthorn hedges.

We follow it up over the boulder-strewn shoulder of a mountain and then down into a valley heavily wooded with broadleaf trees.

At an unremarkable bend there’s a greenway branching off to the left.

We take this track and leave the tattered tarmac behind.

Trees line the way, arching overhead.

Buzzards and crows call from the high blue sky.

Echoes in forgotten tongues still sound around the neolithic standing stones incorporated into the banked walls lining some of the way.

On our right runs a little stream singing on its journey from a mossy spring higher up the mountainside down to the salty sea just a few miles away.

We follow the stream downhill, along a narrow ribbon of path, our own songs stirring in our hearts as we meander out of the constructed world and into the self-shaping halls of the whispering woods.

Oaks rise taller and older all around us, holly and hazel clustering beneath them amidst an increasingly jungly host of woodland plants.

The light takes on a dusky green hue.

The air is alive with a symphony of scents, and awash with a musical tapestry woven from singing water, birdsong, the buzz of insects' wings, rustling leaves, and the minute sounds of the soil.

A vibrant realm of self-willed nature enfolds us in its wild embrace.

We remove our shoes and let our feet feel the many textures of the ground beneath us as we walk, opening our awareness not only to the feel of the ground but also to the fact that the ground can feel us too.

We allow ourselves to notice our own presence transmitting through the permeable surface of the soil, down to its multitudes of insects and microscopic creatures, to the stones and the interwoven root systems of the trees, as well as to the badgers and rabbits and voles and mice in their dens and underground nests.

We are at each footfall communicating our life-walk to the intricate web all around us, each step spreading out like the flap of a butterfly’s wing through concentric circles of connectedness to all beings on the planet and beyond.

If we are quiet inside as we move amidst these interwoven subjectivities, if we are open to them, we find that whispers of welcome are offered at every step, fey voices call to us, sparkling their greetings to our subtle senses.

When we are soft inside, un-armoured, vulnerable, our hearts can register the myriad greetings we are met with, and naturally respond in kind: a subtle reaching out with our energy body, translated sometimes into an appreciative loving glance, the stroke of a leaf, a brush of cheek to bark, and a myriad tiny gestures we might not even consciously be aware of but which, at a subliminal level, token a natural affinity and spontaneous reciprocity.

Entering this field of entanglement, acknowledging our place in it, we can begin to feel restored in our relationship with those to whom we have long been strangers, marauders, conquistadors, alien managers.

With relief we find that there are no grudges here, only delight in renewed connection, as everywhere we turn we are met by the presence of living beings happy that we are here among them.

We have come here to enjoy this connection, to become present with our whole selves to the depth-field of embodied intelligence that flows through and around and between all living beings, to place ourselves once again in full contact with the mind and heart and body of Gaia, immersing ourselves in her elemental life so as better to experience our own.

Yes, the Earth knows us as we walk her textured surface, is aware of us, feels each breath we take, each beat of our heart, each thought that flowers in the inner jungles of our minds.

She is with us always, supporting us in being, on each step of our way.

We imbibe her soul-deep medicine as we walk this snaking path, filling our eyes with the contours and conjunctions of branches and leaves, stones and clouds. And as we do so, we let the labyrinthine lines and the flat, smooth, reflective surfaces of modernity dissolve from our psyches, no longer to structure thought and being.

Caught up in feral wonder, awakened to the aliveness and intricacy of the primordial dance all around us, we are reshaped, the vessel of our awareness softening, rounding and alchemising to accommodate a new wine, the sap-rich and moss-filtered soma that is clear as starlight, deep as earth.

All our lives we have been thirsty for this wine, yearning to rejoin this dance going on around us, aching to reweave ourselves into the vibrant web of connections thrumming beyond the edge of our narrowed perception, an otherworld somehow just out of reach.

The gentle awakening we’re experiencing now is only a remembering of what we have always known some way beneath the conscious layers of our colonised psyches.

We’re simply returning to the truly familiar, rejoining the paradise party that in reality we never left.

How does it feel to be known once again by knowers other than our own rational kind, minded by a kaleidoscope of more-than-human minds, experienced through the extraordinary sensory apparatus of countless wild beings and, through the combined sentience of all these, by the vast intelligence of the living earth herself, whose presence shines through all?

Yes, it feels like home.