Author Manda Scott on Connecting to the Web of Life

We were delighted to welcome the bestselling author, eco-activist, shamanic teacher and dreamer Manda Scott at Sacred Earth Activism. Manda explored the subject ‘How can Boudica be an Inspiration for Present-day Sacred Earth Activists?’ 

Connecting to the Web of Life is vital if we are to create a positive vision for the future that resonates with people across all areas of society, believes Manda Scott, author of the best-selling Boudica series of novels.

But simply trying to copy how indigenous people do things or reconstruct our own ancestors’ ways of being will not cut it in an era described by writer Amitav Ghosh as the “Great Derangement”. A key challenge for those in the developed world is to not only learn from others but also find our own unique, apposite way of moving forward by interpreting everything through our own specific lens, framework and values.

As Manda explained “We can’t go back, so we have to go forward but take who we are with us.”

However, in order to bring about a “revolution, not of guns but of consciousness”, it is imperative that we learn to reconnect with the land. Doing so will not happen by “striving to be indigenous” though, but by understanding that “we just need to think like them”, the eco-activist and shamanic teacher and dreamer said.

“It’s about learning to listen to a tree or rock or mountain or red kite in a way that’s absolutely honest to us and the land,” she said. “My belief is that we need to connect to the Web of Life and ask ‘what do you want of me?’ and then do it. But don’t hang it on what your ancestors would do - sit with a tree and don’t clutter it with the past.”

Because “we’ve got till the end of the decade at most” though, Manda added, it is becoming increasingly important to get the message out to people who do not currently share or understand this worldview.

 “We need to find practical ways to help ordinary people do this because it’s urgent that we reconnect, and find many different ways to do it,” she pointed out. “We need to get your average Daily Mail reader who’s obsessed with the cost of living and immigration to reconnect – and if we can’t, it’ll be too late.”

Connecting to the Web of Life

It was, in fact, via her own connection to the Web of Life that Manda began writing her novels about Boudica, the iconic British Iron Age warrior who died trying to defend her lands in East Anglia against Roman invasion, in the first place.

The move was the fulfilment of a promise Manda had made to write about the British shamanic path while in circle with overseas indigenous leaders in the mid-1980s. Although it took some time, she found herself acting on the promise after her lurcher killed a doe on Newmarket Heath. Distraught, she was unable to rescue the kittens and so ended up going to nearby Thetford Forest to find solace.

 Here Manda came upon a huge hazel tree by which she sat and asked ‘what do you want of me?’ as she felt “it was the only useful question”. After being told the books were “what I was here for” and after arguing a lot “as I didn’t think I could do it”, she agreed to start researching them and, over time, the one became four.

 Her approach here was to dream the story into being each evening by the fire. “It was the equivalent of a journey without drums, just the fire,” she said. “And then I’d walk with the dogs in Thetford Forest and over the two or three hours we’d walk, I’d let what the fire had brought swirl in me till it created the narrative structure, and then I wrote in the afternoon.”

 Manda is now in the process of writing the fifth book in the series, ‘Dreaming the Wounded Bear’, but has so far been unable to finish it. This is at least partially because it is unclear to her at this point: “What is it that someone who fought a losing battle against the imperial power of the time could teach us now?”

Turning towards life

 Today, she pointed out, we are living at “the disintegrating end of the Roman Empire”, applying the Roman values of “see-take”, understanding “the price of everything and the value of nothing”, and finding ourselves “cut off from each other and the Web of Life”.

 “Those Roman values were used to destroy our indigenous culture, and we took those values and used them to destroy every indigenous culture we’ve met over the last 2,000 years,” Manda said. “But that culture is falling apart now…the current system politically and economically is dysfunctional and falling apart, so [the question is] how could we make sense of what we were in order to become something different?”

 Put another way, the challenge now is to “take our understanding of how our culture could be and take it forward” by combining the values of the Boudican world – which, like indigenous people’s today, focused on respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility - with our current technology.

 Doing so, she believes, will enable us to “carry the humanity of who we are with us” and create a “generative, regenerative culture we could be proud to leave to the generations that follow us - that’s our job now”.

 But to bring such a reality into being will require each of us to understand and acknowledge that “we’re part of the flow of life, and we’ve all got our different gifts and strengths” to enable us to play our part. In other words, creating change does not necessarily have to be about violent insurrection or revolution.

 Instead, as Manda pointed out: “All of the fighting that we need to do is about the inner warrior of ‘I don’t feed that which destroys. I turn towards life’. So how do I do that?”

Watch the interview with Manda Scott on the video below