All of these things become ingrained, they seep into the land, the streets and so it is no real surprise that these places have their own genius loci. All of the events that are happening now will also become ingrained in those places where they occur. We can affect the spirit of place, our actions. What we do and what we don’t.

Samhain approaches. We enter the dark. Some hate the passing of the summer but I am ready, though summer already feels like a distant memory. A Ghost. We find ourselves in the twilight of the year, in autumn and already dusk has fallen. We stand on the brink of nightfall and as we head towards Samhain we find ourselves in that liminal time and space where the ghosts feel closer, the nights colder and darker, our moods a little more melancholic.

The sites where the heads of ancestors were buried were no doubt seen as especially sacred. As places where the living and the dead, Thisworld and Otherworld, the people and the gods met. Each would have its stories passed down from generation to generation and rituals surrounding it. It is likely that, at liminal times, such as Nos Galan Gaeaf/Samhain, the seers of the Setantii tribe would commune with their dead and their heads would speak again.

Northern rains come slow and stay for ages. A particular type of torture. It doesn’t wash over you, it shoots arrows at you from all directions. You don’t feel its wetness on your skin, you feel its bite on your bones.

It's pretty obvious now that Climate Change is just secular paganism.

I don’t blame Mother Grundy for wanting to piss off and live in the wilds, to turn her back on a society that turns in on itself instead of standing together. I feel like that sometimes too, but of course, nowadays many of us don’t have the luxury of doing that, of escaping to live in the countryside, after all, the land is no longer free and belongs to those with deep pockets and corrupt.

As the ravages of Empire play out, cultural recovery may become our goal again in the future — and we may find ourselves by choice or necessity living in small localized kinship groups once again, looking to our own ancestral traditions for a template to survival.

Trees are such beautiful creatures, are they not? And wise too. If you listen with a wild ear, if you watch them with wild eyes, they will share their lessons with you.

Sounds awfully romantic, doesn’t it? But as lovely as it sounds, it is also true.

Soon the leaves will unfurl and the cherry fruits will begin to form and grow, ripening in the heat of the summer months. But that time is not yet here and the blossoms are still at their best. Perhaps Hanami is one of the best mindfulness practices, the most easily applied.

Our land is dying; our neighbors are dying; everything sacred is being hunted down and destroyed. But tonight, at this moment, all I can do is pause to feel gratitude for the rain.

I write a lot of stuff about folklore, I know an in part it is because I am something of a nerd. I always have been, preferring to nose through old and forgotten books as well as newer tomes than watching tv or any other distraction of the modern world. But there’s also something else that folklore offers and in a way that is lost to the modern world. It’s the stories of our ancestors, passed from generation to generation and the knowledge of them. It’s the history of the people as opposed to the history of the politicians and the controllers of the world. It’s a shared knowledge of the world around us both physical and spiritual. Folklore is more than just old stories, so much more.

Certain gardens are not retreats, but attacks—attacks on the kind of world that says it is meaningless to do something so small, so local, so specific.

We invite you to engage with your community about how the ideas presented here can transform your community and your practice. A land acknowledgment is just the first step of imagining and co-creating a better world where the lands, waters, animals, and human beings can thrive.

The night before last, winter’s breath had kissed the land, glazing everything with a layer of frost that caught the silver glow of the waning moon that still hung in the early morning sky, making everything shimmer and glisten like stars fallen from the heavens.

The Crackland in Rio— Portraits of people from the drug scene in the favela Maré.

I awoke early as I often do, whilst everyone else still slept. Even my old girl kept her eyes closed as I crept from the bed, snuggling back beneath the covers for a while longer. I went downstairs, avoiding the boards that creak and the steps that groan, a hangover from the days when my babes were indeed still babes.

Wherever we find ourselves in the world, we can build a relationship to the land, to nature, right there. We can meld the knowledge of our ancestors to the land and in doing so, we make ourselves stronger.

Finding ourselves and rediscovering our closeness to nature is just the beginning of resistance. Gardening teaches us self reliance, it teaches us to work for ourselves and the joy that comes with eating produce grown with love and care. It highlights the symbiotic relationship we have with the land.

I am an animist, and trees most definitely have spirits. If you spend time outside, you’d do well to spend at least some of it beneath a tree.

Norman Borlaug and William Vogt are, respectively, the Wizard and the Prophet in the title of Charles Mann’s 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Mann presents Borlaug and Vogt as archetypes, representatives of two different visions of humankind’s relationship with the natural world: the one viewing nature as a something to be bent to the will of humankind, the other viewing nature as something to which humankind must bend.