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There’s an idyllic little valley in North Wales where my friends and I sometimes stay in the summer. Day and night the stream roars and sings with many voices down through the woods - oak and birch and hazel on the hillsides. Anyway, a while ago it suddenly occurred to me that after a lovely of day talking and drinking and playing music with people I hadn’t seen for ages, that I hadn’t really connected with the place. It happens! Even in such a wonderful location, the setting is easily relegated to a background for human activities. I decided that I needed to do something about this. I wanted to feel as if I was really there and show my appreciation. I wanted to make a connection with the spirit of the place! So I ran off into the woods, played my low whistle a bit, then stripped off my clothes and jumped into a lovely deep pool in that burn!

The next year I did the same thing as soon as I arrived. The same branch of the same hazel tree bobbed over me as I lowered myself onto the same water worn stones. Beautiful golden sunlight shone down through the trees. Head under the mini-waterfall! Aaah! And when you finally emerge from a cold mountain stream like that you glow all over and smile from ear to ear! Well, I’m sitting on a mossy stone in a contemplative and euphoric mood when what should I see but this enormous slug.

It was pale yellow and covered in black spots. A beaut! It waved its eyes at me and everted its little mouthparts. I was delighted and waxed poetic about how happy I was to see it. I was watching it make fairly rapid progress over its slab of slate when suddenly, I’m sad to say, a vision of very small, vulnerable courgette plants came to mind, followed not long after by that of old margarine tubs filled with beer and stones. Incidentally don’t, whatever you do sink them into the ground. A pitfall trap is as deadly to helpful small creatures such as beetles & spiders as it is to pests.

I wasn’t always a gardener. In fact a few years ago I would have told you that I didn’t have green fingers and it wasn’t my thing, but eventually I opted in – something to do with walking the talk. I had been Nature Boy, wandering around the urban, post industrial brown field sites as happily as my beloved moors or rocky coasts. Apart from being a life long naturalist, over the years I have also became a bit of an Animist too, I’m quite comfortable chatting to trees or birds or even rocks.

Originally Animism was a term used by ignorant, imperialistic anthropologists to classify "primitive" religion and belief, but the term has its uses. Essentially an animist is someone who recognises and communes with the beings, the other than human people that live in the world around us – the trees, the birds, the rocks and the wind, as if they were "alive, aware and responsive". In my case it’s not a matter of : "I believe in nature spirits" or something like that, it’s feeling a kind of presence in the natural world. If I say I believe in them, then you would quite rightly ask me what I concieve them to be & I don’t think I can answer that question! A long time ago, I decided that it’s more fun and more meaningful to relate to the forms of nature as people than just explaining them away or repressing such ideas as irrational, superstitious or just plain embarrassing.

More important than belief, if you ask me, is how we behave how we enact our values in this world. You might say that it is irrational or ridiculous to behave towards non-human things as if they were people, but I would say: "If more people actually did, the world would be a far better place, eh?" Mind you, human peope behave so badly towards one another maybe it’s naïve to expect them to treat marine mammals or forests or migrating birds with any kind of consideration at all.

The scientists who argue for an enlightened materialism point out that we don’t need religion or irrational belief in order to feel wonder and excitement at being alive in this world. They are quite right, we don’t! But our own self awareness is still a mystery that we have to live with and in the presence of that mystery & it’s place in this sacred world I have chosen a way of looking at things which may be richer, stranger and less measurable than theirs but has benefits for both myself & others..

In the end it’s a matter of personal feelings and how we choose to interpret them. Yes, it’s very subjective. So what? It’s a shame that people who feel the way that I do often keep quiet about it for fear of ridicule. (Talking to their favourite tree under their breath.) It’s also a shame that others are so gullible that they will believe the first bit of nonsense that they read in some book about angels or fairies and then go around preaching the latest craze as if it were a universal truth. That’s not to say, however that there is no such thing as an angel or a fairy. My question is: to what category of experience do they belong? There’s no need tying yourself up in self-referential knots. We don’t have to explain it! There’s a middle way. It involves allowing a feeling of presence or of sacredness, perhaps of not being alone, to arise naturally and to follow it to see where it might lead. To enter into a conversation with the Genius Loci, the spirit of the place.

Our culture presses upon us so much baggage and negative conditioning about any kind of spiritual experience. We are taught to be so cynical, but to call it scepticism: "Such ideas are crazy, of course they must be bogus!" but this makes me think of the words of Keats: "Beauty passes by, unheeded as the threshold brook." The art of conversation with the Genius Loci involves mainly one thing. Spending a bit of quality time with the threshold brook in a sense of curiousity and wonder, listening to what it has to tell us and then sharing our feelings - something of what we are, with it. For me this kind of exchange cannot easily be put into words.

Some might say that this isn’t genuine spiritual experience – usually they are the people who locate the sacred somewhere else, who have the idea that it must be only transcendental, not of this world. Or maybe those whose beliefs are dependent upon some kind of exclusivity. But they throw out the baby with the bath water, if you ask me! To experience life and everyday things as sacred and powerful is a constant source of inspiration. Nature’s beauty, aye, and its terror are part of this response.

Then there are the slugs. Awkward little beasties that they are!

When I started up in my allotment, at first I was on familiar ground. I’m a naturalist. I spent time mapping it and studying it to find out what was there, what was where and how it all worked, identifying as many plant and animal species as I could. Finding out where the soil was heavier or lighter or where frost was most likely to form. I’d go in the early morning and do my daily meditation there. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t just passively observing or communing with nature, I was participating more actively than ever before. Intervening! Deciding who should live and who should die! Disrupting, disturbing and destroying!

With the best will in the world, even if we embrace the values and practices of Permaculture and Forest Gardening we cannot help but do so. It’s not a garden without a gardener. We decide (to a point) what goes where, we encourage some species and discourage others. We discriminate. It’s a vital part of what we do. This is a bit difficult for a naïve Animist, with a bit of a Buddhist background: I’m going to kill you little slug - no don’t look at me like that! Sorry aphids, I’m going to have to squish you all! (Imagining the carnage close up, with screams.) Beer traps: well it’s their choice… they didn’t have to dive in there!

There was a thread on a Buddhist web forum about gardening & someone said, "Oh, you should grow this sort of flower, pests don’t like them!" The response to this of course was: "We can’t eat them either!" This is about about food production. It’s so easy to go to some supermarket & buy in loads of stuff without a moments thought about how it was produced. The simple & primal solution to that question being: grow it yourself!

Although we might waffle on about being "at one with all that lives" or something, all that live are currently disrupting, disturbing and destroying one another with gusto. If I knit myself a sweater out of sprouted lentils then what about all the suffering of the creatures who lost their homes and their lives so that the lentils could be farmed? You could go crazy! Or just ignore the issue. Or invent some philosophy and be self-righteous about it all.

Of course we try to be aware of these issues and to reduce our ecological footprint in all kinds of ways. We garden sensibly and sensitively. We only uproot, maim, destroy and kill when we have to, or by accident, and at least we don’t use toxic chemicals to do it. Some of the snails and slugs can be hand picked and transferred elsewhere where they can lead happy lives without causing any harm to baby courgette plants. All kinds of techniques may be used to prevent or deal with pest problems as nicely as possible. In all this, however, something, at least for an animistic chap like myself, is still missing. There’s still the issue of lording it up over nature. I grappled, for a while with a sense of hypocrisy. It wasn’t about what I had to do, as much as my attitude. I could catch myself calling the couch grass spirit a very naughty name in the garden, but admiring it elsewhere.

The threshold brook in the poem is, of course, a metaphor. I just happened to encounter a real one and discover how easily it was to let it pass me by. It is a metaphor for the various ways in which we become jaded. We may easily become desensitized to our environment. We may forget to take joy in everyday miracles.

My answer to all this is simply awareness. Our awareness of the issues may not seem to have a practical effect on our ecological footprint as it appears on the ground, but actually it does. Our awareness affects our behaviour & our manner & this ripples out into the society & world around us. There’s nothing esoteric about that, although we could debate the matter of degree. What kind of effect is one person’s awareness going to have on the governement or the destructive & over productive farming practices that seem to prevail these days? Well what are you going to do? Just give up on it all & be completely passive? Not bother? Awareness is the first step, beyond that we must do what our heart tell us is right.

It is vital that we don’t lose contact with why we are doing what we do and try to things in a conscious way. For some, this may be part of a spiritual path, for others not. Either way, let us honour all living beings with our awareness! To honour all living beings means to acknowledge their existence and their feelings, even if it is uncomfortable to do so and all to easy to dismiss them from our minds. We could justify our avoidance of the issue by telling ourselves that they don’t suffer, for instance. But we don’t know that for sure and there is controversy among zoologists about the level of consciousness that animals may experience.

Assuming that the will is there, it is all too easy to forget these good intentions. For this reason it is helpful to do simple things - to make little gestures to maintain mindfulness of our relationship with these other than human people. Talking to them - addressing them politely is one way, bowing is another. Bowing is not a sign of submission, it is a sign of respect. Creating a small altar or other physical focus for our feeings within the garden is also a reminder – statues of animals could, for instance, be local fauna instead of exotic ones, reminding us that our stewardship of this land affects the creatures with which we share it.

All these things take some effort and some are easier to get into than others. Some may already be familiar. They seem to come naturally to human beings irrespective of culture. We nod at magpies superstitiously – why? I’d say that it would be more meaningful to bow to the couch grass before you dig it out, and that’s not superstitious at all! It is about how we make a place for ourselves in this world and how we go about ensuring our mutual survival.

This is a long term project and these small acts deepen our relationship with a place over time. That said, you may be surprised how differently you come to feel about all this after you have practiced it for a while. It is natural to want to take it further, as many of us do, by praying, meditating, singing or playing a musical instrument in the garden or the forest.

If we honour living things then we must honour them whether we kill them, release them or let them be. Whether we cultivate them or uproot and systematically eradicate them from our plot. Then there is no contradiction. But we need to look within our own hearts and be honest that is what we are really doing. It is not always easy.

Barry Patterson, Spring 2003.