Belonging

In May 2022, Mike and I bought a half-built, abandoned house on a sheep-cropped hill in west Wales. Yggdrasil—an ancient ash named for the World Tree of Nordic myth—stands sentinel over the hill and the Cothi River below. From the beginning, the land’s request was clear: “More life, more life,” challenging me to put years of animist practice and enquiry into native traditions of land care and co-relating with all life into practice.

This is an old way of belonging, though that word doesn’t really hit the meaning - our Welsh word ‘perthyn’ is better, retaining an older remembering of the relationship available between people and place. It means ‘related’ - I am related to this place, the beings of this land are my kin, and I am theirs. This quality of belonging is being lost in our fast paced ever mobile lives, but our bodies and souls remember, and it takes so very little if we remember how, to plant roo