Dreaming the Land

How can I express what this great Ash means to me? This English language I share with so much of the world has lost the animacy that once suffused its vocabulary. In my mother tongue, Cymraeg, words survive that honour interbeing and the delicate sensations of our connection with all life; by using them, like spells, they bind us anew.

As we tip into polycrisis, we will need more of our ancient, tried-and-tested human technologies to keep us sane and keep us bonded, and thankfully, many are already reinvigorating them: from the exponential rise in pilgrimage to the adoption of fire-centred circles as spaces for convening community conversations, counselling and mental health support groups, and progressive business strategy meetings. As we feel the overwhelming, natural urge to escape those self-imposed ivo

Deep is the magic of fire-tending through dark hours, of giving a night’s sleep as an offering: a sacrifice for a prayer’s flight. It effects change. Things that were ordinary are no longer so; we commune with a night and its fathomless wisdom, with all its tides, hoots and howls.

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