Sacred Earth Activism Online Summit 2024: Building sacred relationship with the land through story
If we are to truly become Guardians of the Earth, we must restore the now largely severed sacred relationship that has existed between the land, story and human culture since time immemorial.
According to Helen JR Bruce, folklorist, author and oral storyteller, this relationship takes the form of a sacred spiral. She explained her rationale during a presentation at Sacred Earth Activism’s (SEA) conference at the end of January. To illustrate her point, Bruce also discussed her year-long pilgrimage walking the Girt Dog of Langport, a “land glyph” or “physical manifestation of folklore that is present and alive and physical” on the Somerset Levels.
“There’s a cycle at work here between land, story and culture: land feeds into story, story feeds into culture and culture should feed back into the land,” she said. “It should be an ongoing spiral, and some of the work we need to do is to strengthen the arrow from the culture to the land to ensure it spirals properly.”
Doing so would result in people having more of a vested interest in protecting and preserving sacred landscapes, or “storyscapes”, because they would become “embedded in the culture”.
“Story is created from landscape features, stories are told and become part an accepted part of the culture,” Bruce pointed out. “Once the story is in the culture, it has the potential to feed back into the land, so ‘this is the Dog and we can’t build houses on the Dog’s head’.”
Once restored, this land-story-culture cycle continues to inspire new stories too. This is because “storyscape is a sacred, liminal space” layered between natural features, such as soil type and vegetation, and human-created features, such as roads and canals.
“It’s sacred as it’s a place of connection, an in-between place where we can listen and experience these stories in our own personal way,” Bruce said. “It may be a place where we can speak too, speaking mythology back to the land. Hearing and repeating it is a sacred practice from my perspective.”
In other words, story is a “joint heritage between humans and the land”, she adds.
Telling story back to the land
Clues as to where these sacred storyscapes exist continue to live on in folklore and place names - and Bruce believes everyone can work with them whether they are a professional storyteller or not.
“It’s about the practice of learning a story and visiting the land feature associated with that story, bringing your presence, thinking about the story and speaking it back to the land,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be big and professional: you can just repeat the story in small ways.”
Doing so is important though as it involves “completing the circle and working on strengthening the arrow to allow culture influenced by story to feed back into the land,” she pointed out. “Letting the land speak to us brings us more into relationship with it.”
As to how Bruce lets the land speak to her when out walking the Girt Dog entails setting an intention and choosing to engage with a place in a receptive and sacred way . It is about “being open to experiencing what I experience”.
“That is one of the ultimate offerings we can give the landscape: to walk gently on it, to offer the landscape our attention and time, to allow reciprocity between us and the land so as to generate our lived experience as the source of all meaning,” she said.
Put another way, Bruce believes: “It’s mindset that’s key to unlocking our storyscapes and connecting us with our sacred landscapes”. As a result, when you start to build a relationship with the land, “it will begin to reveal snippets to you”.
“So, be present, live through it. Don’t look inwards or think about the day-to-day but walk as if you’re seeing the land for the first time. Be ready to be amazed and it will unfold”, she said.
Developing a relationship with the land
Boscawen-Un Stone Circle, discussed by Annie Spencer
Annie Spencer took a similar stance during her conversation with SEA co-founder Christa Mackinnon. Spencer is a ceremonialist and shamanic teacher, Rites of Passage and wilderness facilitator, storyteller and wisdom-keeper.
“Enough of us are working now that the land is starting to respond, but you have to be careful as the response isn’t always happy and friendly,” she advised. “It can be jolting as the land has been mistreated by us for a long time.”
As a result, Spencer recommended that those keen to build a relationship regularly spend time with the land throughout the seasons and at different times of day.
Stone circles are a good place to start as they have had a long ritual relationship with humans. One approach here is to walk “gently with gratitude and love”, saying ‘hello, and I remember’ and apologising for our ancestors forgetting them.
“It’s the same with the spirits of the land – if you don’t go and look for them and tell their stories, they’ll be forgotten,” Spencer warned. “We have to start paying attention so we can slip into their reality, or they can open up to us.”
Moreover, the more people who do so, the easier it will be for others to make such connections too.
But even if we no longer remember how our ancestors talked with their sacred stone circles, it does not matter. Instead, it is more important to “empty yourself out and trust”, “build the desire within ourselves”, meditate and truly listen, Spencer advised.
In other words, the secret is just to keep it simple. After all, “you and the rock are part of the earth, so somewhere you’re relations”, Spencer pointed out. It is worth noting that everyone communicates differently with such beings though.
“Some people hear messages, some have visions…some feel energy vibrations change and others feel it in their body and need to translate or respond to it,” Spencer explained. “Different rocks have different energies so find one you have a good connection with and always go to that one.”
Hearing the voice of the goddess
Ruin of Shepherd’s Hut close to Hespeck Raise, discussed by Harriet Sams.
One person who clearly heard a message from the land when in the bath at home one day in Cumbria, UK, was Harriet Sams. She researches, teaches, mentors and facilitates ecotherapy and archeo-therapy.
On heeding the “voice of the goddess”, which she called Brigid, Sams followed her instincts to the tumuli at Giant’s Grave, Hespeck Raise. Here she came across a young man graffiti-ing on the stones. On enquiring what he was doing, it became clear he was working for a mobile phone company that intended to erect a mast there “in the middle of a sacred site”.
Although it was eventually installed, Sams managed to delay the operation by fighting for an assessment. The mast was also only temporarily bolted down, rather than being permanently fixed, two or three metres from the original site and away from the sacred site’s “nexus”.
“It was a very powerful experience and taught me a lot about how it feels to have a relationship with a wounded landscape,” she said. “The mast helped me understand that, although development covers over the voice of the goddess, it’s still there underneath.”
This means that some sites may be “wounded and vulnerable” due to activity, such as mining or tunnelling. But they are still sacred, are still “speaking to us” and “don’t want to be orphaned” as they still “need to belong to the family of Earth”.
“The sites were teaching me to be in community and listen to the land that’s speaking even under all the destruction. It’s the same as people – just because they’re ill, you don’t turn your back on them. You want them to feel loved and say ‘we see you and cherish you’,” Sams concluded.