A Practice of Return

In early August of 2024, due to some house repairs, I had to take down almost all of my altars and shrines of sacred things due to where they were located and the nature of the repars. These shrines were full of were things from places I had gone: vials of water, stones, shells, branches, dried mushrooms, dried herbs, sand, clay, and so forth.  These were treasures that I had been gathering them for almost 20 years of druidry. And I had many different altars: a water altar full of little vials of waters from all over the world, altars to various land spirits and deities, a nature shrine, an Awen altar, my primary working altar, a land healing altar, you get the idea.

As I took these altars down, I started putting the items in boxes with the intention of putting them back up after the house repairs (which would take some months) were finished. As I started boxing, my intuition told me to pause. Something didn’t feel right. I thought about these objects, sitting on these altars for years. I realized that many of these objects I took from before I deepened my practice of animism which is now centered on recognizing the soverignty of beings, respecting their rights and engaging in relationships of mutuality.  And that means I likely but I took these things from the land without asking permission. When they were collected, I hadn’t realized I should do so.  I am certain I collected these things with reverence, with respect, and probably with an offering–but I never actually found out if the stones, sticks, shells and other objects actually wanted to be here and not be part of the world outside. Thus, as i looked around at my altars and shrines full of natural things, I realized most of it  had to be given back.

I had the clear sense that I should not make any decisions immediately.  I chose to simply let everything sit in boxes sit in my studio until the repair work was done.  And because house repairs always take longer than you hope they will, for months the boxes sat. It was sad to look in my studio and seeing a pile of boxes rather than altars and shrines to center my spiritual practice.  But things took some interesting shifts in the Fall. I did all my rituals and spiritual practices outside and that opened up some new practices and experiences on my path and shifted things in interesting ways.

Eventually, winter arrived and the work on the house was done. I opened up a sacred space using AODA’s Solitary Grove and centered myself. I then pulled out the first item in the box. With each thing, I sat with them and let my intuition guide me to either place them in the pile to save, in a box to return to the land, or in a box to go to a new human home (especially for human-created things).  The work took some time. About 40% decided to stay, 10% was meant to move onto a new person, and about half wanted to be returned to the land.  I rebuilt my altars with what was left, and they look wonderful and feel energetically really great. I did a gratitude ceremony for the objects, infused them with healing and blessing energy.

I went down to the creek that flows behind our house.  The creek was high from a rainstorm the day before but not yet frozen. I took a few of the objects, and I returned them to the land. Some sticks and stones wanted to be returned to the river, others were placed on the land.  I did not return anything that wasn’t originally from that ecosystem or that didn’t come directly from the land.  I still had a lot in the box of things to return, but I got the sense that this would be part of my land healing work this year, and the process would unfold on its own time.

About two weeks later, I got the strong sense I should float an offering down one of the local creeks.  I had a beautiful natural grapevine and hemp spiderweb hanging I had made many years. I knew that was the piece to offer for this particular place–a place that was a rehabilitated wetland and AMD (Acid Mine Drainage) treatment site.  I took the spiderweb with me, and on my way home from work, I stopped by the spot I had visited many times before.

I was shocked.  I hadn’t been to that particular spot since midsummer, and in that time, at least 10 acres of the forest had been cut down and a more elaborate acid mine drainage system had been put in. I write and talk a lot about AMD, which is essentially perpetual toxic mine runoff from underground abandoned mines.  This pollutes about 5000 miles of waterways in my home state of Pennsylvania and the surrounding states of West Virginia and Maryland (which accounts for almost 90% of AMD in North America).  When it pollutes the rivers, they grow bright orange (from iron), acidic, and lifeless–and communities abandon these rivers and don’t spend any time there.  So I’m really in “ground zero” of this particular long-term ecological problem and one of the reasons that I work with rivers and waters so much.

In the long term, this AMD system was replacing an aging one that was failing and starting to pollute the river.  The new system with its big, passive settling pools will be extremely beneficial to the creek, the watershed, and the ecosystem. However, it was very harmful in the short term to this park and I was deeply saddened by how many plants, trees, insects and other life had to die in the place that was once a forest. There were piles as large as a house of roots and brush and branches from the construction. I cried. I made my offering to the river, just below where the treated water was released at the bottom of the AMD system. I walked around the settlement pools, singing songs of healing and blessing.  I invited some friends from our local women’s circle who, as soon as the deep cold breaks, will meet there for more healing and blessing ceremonies.

I still have a lot more offerings. As I feel led, I will return more stones and sticks to the land around me as offerings, imbued with blessings and healing energy.  All of these objects are so infused with blessings and healing not only from my recent ritual, but because they’ve been sitting on my altars and shrines, being part of thousands of daily rituals and hundreds of larger workings. It feels good to return them.

At its core, the practice of return represented a deepening of my commitment to developing relationships with nature that are mutual, respectful, and rooted in animist ethics.  The practice allowed me to take another step further away from the model of my dominant culture, the exploitation model where we take whatever we want.  I don’t want to have that relationship with the earth ever again, and I fully reject those practices and what they stand for.  So not only was I returning objects to the earth that belonged there, but I was also returning to the earth myself by committing to a more robust earth-centered spiritual practice.

One of the things that this entire situation has made me reflect on is our relationship with stuff.  Humans today, growing up in consumer-based cultures, accumulate so many things.  More than we can possibly ever use, and still we accumulate more.  I wrote about this a lot in the Spring Equinox chapter of Sacred Actions, “Disposing of the Disposable mindset” – to re-evaluate your relationship with stuff and work to be much more intentional, to shift purchasing towards long-lasting, and to learn how to repair and stretch things longer.  I feel like this practice of return is another part of that.  As people practicing nature spirituality, we want to be close to nature even in our homes. And so we see wonderful things out in nature, and we gather them up, we take them home, and there they may be treasured or forgotten and collect dust.  There’s such a need to possess, to have something.  And there’s nothing wrong with finding treastures–to my ethics though, my treasure hunting has to be done in equal partnership with nature.  As long as before I pick up that shiny Stone or beautifully twisted Stick, I pause for a moment and ask, “Stone, would you like to come home with me for a while” and respect the answer given.  And also I work to  recognize that just becuase Stone wants to come home with you now, Stone may not want to sit on your shelf for the next 15 years–so check in with the Stone once in a while and make sure they are still happy being there on your altar.

Another insight is that this is part of how I am working on my own decolonizing and re-indigenizing practice.  As a white person with a long family history in this region, I have a lot of bad ancestral and cultural legacy work to undo, and a lot of unlearning to do.  As I have written about before, colonization is a complex thing for many white druids in North America, as I am both a colonizer on land where I live and yet practice a colonized religious tradition that we are all in the process of rebuilding. My intentions were good even as I gathered so many wonderful things. And while I didn’t have a problem with what I did then at the time, my current ethical system is in a much more robust place.  Part of how I feel I need to grow beyond these cultural legacies is to look at my past behaviors and learn from them, undoing the damage I may have caused to others inadvertently through our ignorance or intention. That’s what this feels like I’m doing.  And to me, that decolonization is a precursor to the reindiginzing.  Robin Wall Kimmerer talks a lot about this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass – how one of the important things we can do is indignize to place.  I feel like part of my relationship to place, then, must be the respect  for taking what I need or what is willing to be given.

And I’m not alone in feeling called to do this kind of work  I’m seeing other people, especially those that have foraging practices or that spend a lot of time making things from nature coming into this same kind of mindset. I’ve seen a lot of this work in the Natural Pigments community- such as here at Wild Pigment project.  And it is a similar story–well-meaning artists first start out really excited to forage for pigment-rich stones or clay everywhere and then build these huge collections of pigments, only realizing later that they took a lot without asking, and that they should pause and reflect, and perhaps return some stones.  And there is some great power in that return.

I’m not saying to do what I do, but simply share this story as a model for how I’m thinking about this Practice of Return and how it adds a deep layer.  As a druid, I fully support each person finding their own path. My ethics surrounding animist practice may be different than yours, and there is space for both of us. But I am saying that sometimes, it is useful to look at the ways in which we have interacted with nature in the past, when we knew less, when we were younger, when we were less wise than we are now.   It is useful to look how we have taken from nature, and what we are giving back, and finding ways to balance those scales.

One of the big lessons for me coming through this Practice of Return is that when I’m out in nature and see that tasty mushroom or shiny stone, I need to always take a moment to pause and take a breath.  It is a simple pause, a few seconds, the span of a breath.  And in that breath, I can take a moment to check in not only with my mind, but my heart and my intuition, and remember what I’m trying to learn and the human being I’m striving to be.  There is great power in this simple action–taking a pause before you act.

There are so many moments like these to deepen our relationship with the land. Returning these things has given me great joy, and it is a process that will continue into the light half of the year.  Perhaps I’ll share more of the journey later, but for now, I’ll continue the work.

Druid Garden Annoucements

And with that, I’m back to my regular posting!  But I do have some changes about how I’m going to be doing things, so let me share here:

New Posting Schedule and News for The Druid’s Garden and Land Healer’s Network.  Moving forward, I will be sharing a new post every other week rather than weekly. There are several reasons for this.

One is that I’m deep in projects for the druid community, especially as the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. AODA has been growing in leaps and bounds, and I am excited to grow our tradition in some new ways.  Additionally, I have a pretty full druid schedule this year with a keynote workshop at the upcoming OBOD Gulf Coast Gathering, supporting MAGUS in May with initiations, workshops, and rituals; offering a Land Healing event at Dreamland sanctuary in Vermont in June, and ongoing events with the Pennsylvania School of Herbalism. I also have another book releasing in October of this year!

But the other reason for reducing my posting frequency is, to be frank, I need to take my own advice to ditch the screen and embrace the green. I recently took a much-needed three-week break from technology, screens, and social media, and it really increased my well-being and happiness and drastically reduced challenges with managing my learning disability. Coming back online was hard. I realized that I need to have a lot less of screentime in my life to be functional and happy.

The Land Healer’s Network: Last year I released Land Healing and launched the Land Healer’s network–I hosted a number of zoom calls and grew our group to almost 400 people on Facebook! The zooms were great for those that were able to make it. However, a lot of people wanted to attend and couldn’t, so I always felt like people were being left out and it was hard to accommodate times around the globe. So, this year, I’d like to shift focus a bit and play to my strengths (writing, artwork, organizing) instead of being on the screen on Zoom. Thus, my plan is to coordinate rituals this year, including arranging a big effort to heal rivers globally.  I will share rituals and ideas for that around the spring equinox, and continue to put out regular content on land healing here on the blog and share my own work in my ecosystem. But I won’t be hosting any more Zoom calls this coming year, as they are not working well for me and many others.

Gratitude. With all that said, I’m not going anywhere and I’m excited to share many new things with you this year. I also want to end by saying that I really appreciate everyone who has been with me—whether you signed up to receive posts last week or 10 years ago. Despite the doom and gloom that is everywhere, I continue to believe that we are building a better tomorrow and I will continue to fight for a bright future where humans and nature live in balance and we restore the biosphere. It isn’t easy, and life is hard now, but I see the tides of the world shifting.  And I know you do too.  Keep up the hope, my friends.