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August 25 - 27:
Returned to Ozette, the stretch of northern Washington coastline where I performed the funeral for the trees, for a three day backpacking trek.
Sacred Sites: Nature Spirits
The concept of working with nature spirits has appeared here and there in the pages of Old Ways over the years. Back in 2004 it was featured in an article called A Spiritual Ecosystem and other articles have focused on interacting with the fae and working with the spirits of trees.
One area that has been neglected is calling upon the spirits we see mirrored in the environment.
As you walk through nature, you'll see people, animals, and faces reflected in the landscape around you. There's a place in northern Montana where every rock seems to mirror a distinctively Native American face. In the California Redwoods, there's a certain tree we return to every year with a wrinkled old visiage peering from it's trunk. And in the midst of The Faerie Grove, various mossy figures emerge from the earth.
A wrinkled face peers out from a tree in the California Redwoods.
To truly embrace magick, we need to let go of the concept of coincidences. From a spiritual perspective, everything happens for a reason. That also means that the various natural faces that capture our imagination aren't just random outcroppings - in a spiritual sense, there's a process behind them.
The profile of a woman's face looks off to the right on a remote beach.
I wrote an article back in 2005, Stones, Spirits, and Shamanic Journeys, that discussed how to connect with the spirit of a stone and the concept of using shamanic journeying techniques to travel into that energy. The same concept applies to anthropomorphic features in the landscape as it does to the stones in the article.