The land's song is different for us all. It still whispers to me, bids me come, see in the day, bear witness to the newness of it.

The land remembers you.

The reason we are increasingly disconnected is because we are losing the places where we connect. Real places. Places with history. Places that bound up in a network of relationships. And if we are ever to find one another again, we have to find those places again.

What is it about a wooded country lane on a warm, still morning? Perhaps it calls to that part of us that craves something new and familiar all at once. Fool vibes.

As I write this, Beltane is so very close. You can feel it in the land, a surge of energy bubbling up through the earth and bursting forth with tremendous beauty, a mirage of sound, colour and scent. Spring is well under way now and where I live, the land is blooming.

The gulls have been awake for hours already, if they ever slept at all, their calls loud and abrasive in the dark of the winter morning. They suit this place. Their cries ring out, triumphant in the face of winter, or perhaps relishing in it. This is their place after all.

While a genderless society might be the ideal, we don’t live in that society, and until we do, opposing trans rights won’t help us get there. Gender is a social construction, but if we try to eliminate the category of gender outright, then the experience of transgender people living in a cis-normative society is erased.

What if we finally learned to see this land as a family, a home, a partner, instead of a blank canvas? People’s love of P-22 gave me hope that maybe, amidst all the wanton destruction and erasure, that kind of connection was possible.

The original heresy is the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether in heaven or a future technotopia. We embrace this heresy to make sense of that nagging feeling that something is wrong with the world itself. But the real reason we feel this way is because civilization alienates us from everything that makes us human.

And as the cycles of nature begin that inevitable unwinding, it tugs at the corner of our nostalgia and perhaps we return to that stage of reflection where we can linger over our experiences, all of those events and happenings that have touched our lives.

I feel at home on mornings such as this, want nothing more than to melt into the land, to glide through the woods unseen by human eyes, to breathe in that wood spice scent that only autumn brings. Even as my spirit craves this, instead I must retract my claws, disguise my wildness as I get ready for the day ahead, but for now, in this moment, this is enough.

Solar energy is potent. It fills us with energy and joy just as it does the land and the other beings we share it with. And perhaps there is something more, nostalgia tinged with the sweet taste of youths splendidly misbegotten.

The egregore of capital knows it needs the native body to dominate the land of which indigenous peoples are an intricate expression. However, the egregore knows its survival is at risk too — it fears the wooden stake of the peasant class.

Indeed there is something spiritual about working with the land, of running your fingers through dark, fertile soil, of working in sync with the cycles of the season.

Success to me means being able to live the type of life I want. Isn’t that each of us really want? And for most of us, this isn’t given. Just surviving requires a tremendous effort that leaves little time or effort for anything else. We have to push constantly against it.

Trees are symbols of this cycle, of this ever turning wheel. They signify the seasons, and show the incremental changes that occur as the wheel creaks ever onwards; the blossom of spring, the lush green of early summer, the fruits of late summer and early autumn. The dramatic colour show and loss that mark late autumn and the bare branches and evergreens of winter.

Stanton Moor is a beautiful place, rich in history, nature and, of course, magic. It is an early Bronze age burial ground with over seventy barrows and cairns. When you’re there on an early October morning you can feel how special this place is. The land is full of spirits, and you can feel them here. Perhaps these hills are liminal places, wild spaces where the veil is thin at most times, but even more so at this time of year.

There’s something special to be found in all the seasons, but my heart belongs to the growing dark. I find something soothing in the winding down, in the retreat, and as an introvert, it feels like coming home. And of course, there is a beauty in the slow decay that comes with autumn. The trees put on a colour show far more beautiful than any illuminations.

There’s a magic that comes with connecting to the land. It can be quite a controversial subject, the land. It’s one of those areas that has been subjugated by the far right, all that blood and soil stuff and of course if you live on colonised or stolen land, well, you know how that narrative goes. But I wanted to talk about connection to land today anyway, despite those things already mentioned.

The anti-maskers pitching fits at grocery stores are experiencing, first hand, the tragedy of the private.