 |
| Photo Doug P. |
As a child I lived in a suburban city thirty years young outside of Detroit, Michigan. Although the town was spotted with shopping malls and car dealerships and subdivisions, it enjoyed a unique space edging up against truly rural, farm-centered communities, especially during the period when I was growing up. My particular subdivision was located on a dead-end cul-du-sac, bordered to the side by a strip of woods and backed up by a lush marshland filled with cattails, red-winged black birds, larch trees and willows. I spent endless days exploring these habitats, observing them and listening, and even at that young age - communing with them.
My first interactions with the Otherworld were here. When I was a child I was a firm believer in the tangible reality of fairies, not only because of the stories my mother told me, but because I would interact with them. In the woods and in the marsh, I could hear and feel and sometimes see them for brief moments. I would build them houses and take them offerings and a strange phenomena began to happen where I would find small toys appearing in my home and around my yard that did not belong to me, nor could have been left by neighbors or other children. My parents once accused me of stealing, but I was equally bewildered as to where they had come from. I was, and still sometimes am, convinced that my playmates were leaving them for me. Before the age of seven or eight I did not have many human friends, but I never felt lonely among the company of the elementals that I met on my journeys.
 |
| Photo by Author |
Magic comes naturally for children, or at least it did for me. It was crushing and tragic when I grew older and society taught me that these things weren't real, and were more likely the product of an overactive imagination and some combination of loneliness and trauma. By the time I was ten, I knew that a continued magical connection with the land had to be an active and continuous choice, and that I must work to prove to the spirits I once easily communed with that I was still worthy of their attention.
My grandparents sold their acreage near Ann Arbor when I was six to move into a home they designed in rural Maine off the Bay of Fundy. Although the distance prevented more frequent visits, their new cliff-top hamlet overlooking the briny, frigid waters of the bay, enshrouded with fog and sea salt and pine resin stirred me more than anywhere I had yet had the privilege to enjoy. More than anything, it was loud with spirits. I could viscerally feel the teaming of life in that place, even as I grew into adolescence and easily interacting with non-human ecology became more and more difficult. When I was ten, during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years, I announced to my parents that I was going to spend the summer in Maine and learn to "live off the land". In my own head, although learning the basic skills of homesteading was certainly related to my larger goal, this truly meant "I am going to Maine to initiate myself to Spirit".
On my grandparent's Maine land, there is a huge pink granite boulder that juts out of the forest and into the sea. At low tide you can walk beneath it, but at high tide you can sit on the rock and dangle your feet into the icy water and feel as if you might be swallowed by the hungry waves. Seals come to visit, peeking their round faces out of the water for glimpses of the land, and its common to find tree nuts and lobster shells mingled together in the crevices of the shore where land, sea, and sky meet. "Pink Rock" became a landmark to my family mostly as a place to easily gather seawater for cooking, but without being able to define it in such terms, I recognized it as the sublimely liminal place that it is. It was there that I devoted my first initiation.
At ten years old I didn't know much about formal ceremony or ritual structure. I had not yet even encountered Wicca or any better known school of neopaganism. I just did what I felt drawn to do. In the week proceeding, I had learned how to sew. I didn't know why but I knew having a special garment for this ceremony was important. I had my grandmother drive me the thirty miles into town to bring me to a general store that still sold fabric. I chose a marbled blue and lavender cotton that had little tendrils of grey throughout that reminded me of calm waves caressing the stones on the shore nearby. I spent all week stitching a dress to wear to present myself to the land that would symbolize my commitment, my first communion. When the time came, I put on the garment, and made my way barefoot to the Pink Rock. I stood on the rock and felt the sound of the waves crashing against the granite wash over me, naturally letting my body become one with my environment and the land. I remember I said some words, some sort of pledge. I may have sang a song. My actual actions are hazy in my memory. I remember listening, half expecting a disembodied voice to respond to me as if in conversation, but what I heard was the voice of the earth.
Baby witch me might have been disappointed that I couldn't make magic happen in the way I thought it should - the magic of Harry Potter and Hollywood and fantasy novels. I had not yet learned that the magic was there, powerfully there, the whole time. I had not yet learned that when interacting with nonhuman spirits, one shouldn't expect them to respond in a strictly human sense. I hadn't yet learned that one's own body and its currents of sensation and emotion are just as valid, and, in fact, sometimes more effective ways to communicate with systems that don't use syntaxtual language. I did not ask for anything, certainly not anything specific, what I was there to do was to dedicate myself to a lifetime of engagement with entities and forces beyond the human world.
Country is the Austrailian Aboriginal peoples' term to describe this understanding and connection to the environment. The term Country encompasses all layers of the physical existence of an ecosystem, but also the psychospiritual relationships, human and natural histories, all the routes and paths and journeys it might allow through it, and the endlessly shifting meanings the land may have to cultures, communities, individuals, human and non.
 | |
| View from my grandparent's porch at the Maine house at high tide - Photo by my mother |
On my grandparent's Maine land, there is a huge pink granite boulder that juts out of the forest and into the sea. At low tide you can walk beneath it, but at high tide you can sit on the rock and dangle your feet into the icy water and feel as if you might be swallowed by the hungry waves. Seals come to visit, peeking their round faces out of the water for glimpses of the land, and its common to find tree nuts and lobster shells mingled together in the crevices of the shore where land, sea, and sky meet. "Pink Rock" became a landmark to my family mostly as a place to easily gather seawater for cooking, but without being able to define it in such terms, I recognized it as the sublimely liminal place that it is. It was there that I devoted my first initiation.
At ten years old I didn't know much about formal ceremony or ritual structure. I had not yet even encountered Wicca or any better known school of neopaganism. I just did what I felt drawn to do. In the week proceeding, I had learned how to sew. I didn't know why but I knew having a special garment for this ceremony was important. I had my grandmother drive me the thirty miles into town to bring me to a general store that still sold fabric. I chose a marbled blue and lavender cotton that had little tendrils of grey throughout that reminded me of calm waves caressing the stones on the shore nearby. I spent all week stitching a dress to wear to present myself to the land that would symbolize my commitment, my first communion. When the time came, I put on the garment, and made my way barefoot to the Pink Rock. I stood on the rock and felt the sound of the waves crashing against the granite wash over me, naturally letting my body become one with my environment and the land. I remember I said some words, some sort of pledge. I may have sang a song. My actual actions are hazy in my memory. I remember listening, half expecting a disembodied voice to respond to me as if in conversation, but what I heard was the voice of the earth.
 |
| I don't have many of my own photos of the Maine acreage, so this photo is of similar land in Maine by R Wilson Photo |
Baby witch me might have been disappointed that I couldn't make magic happen in the way I thought it should - the magic of Harry Potter and Hollywood and fantasy novels. I had not yet learned that the magic was there, powerfully there, the whole time. I had not yet learned that when interacting with nonhuman spirits, one shouldn't expect them to respond in a strictly human sense. I hadn't yet learned that one's own body and its currents of sensation and emotion are just as valid, and, in fact, sometimes more effective ways to communicate with systems that don't use syntaxtual language. I did not ask for anything, certainly not anything specific, what I was there to do was to dedicate myself to a lifetime of engagement with entities and forces beyond the human world.
Country is the Austrailian Aboriginal peoples' term to describe this understanding and connection to the environment. The term Country encompasses all layers of the physical existence of an ecosystem, but also the psychospiritual relationships, human and natural histories, all the routes and paths and journeys it might allow through it, and the endlessly shifting meanings the land may have to cultures, communities, individuals, human and non.
Scholar Mandy Nicholson defines the Aboriginal concept of Country (Porter et al. 2020):
"Country defined by an Aboriginal person ismultifaceted, it includes the physical, non-physical, linguistic, spiritual and emotional. It includes self, and feels emotion as we do ... Country is family, incorporating its animals, plants, landforms and features right down to the smallest of things like a grain of sand.self, and feels emotion as we do ... Country is family, incorporating its animals, plants, landforms and features right down to the smallest of things like a grain of sand."
Twenty years later I have seen the effects of the devotional at Pink Rock. In moments where I forget that I am a single strand in a tapestry that is Country, I spin out. As an adult, certainly throughout my teens and early twenties, when my connection with the land becomes weak, it manifests as a profound wrongness. I become isolated and withdrawn and self-destructive. I become toxic to myself and the people and beings around me. The spirit world goes silent or maddeningly loud. I become limp. Like many of us, I become mired in the responsibilities of living in a post-Capitalist society. I doom scroll, I shop on Amazon, I watch TV, and I forget the vastness of existences beyond my own.
A teacher of mine once said to me something along the lines of "if you walk the wrong path things will continue to go wrong until you change direction". For a long time in my life I struggled and struggled to achieve things that did not fit. I had a fair amount of measurable success at the things I struggled for, but even in success I often found that the things I had fought for were wrong for me. Eventually it became clear that at some point I had turned away from what fed my soul, and that I was struggling to maintain a husk of a person I did not even want to be. At these times in my life, the moments where I was best able to see this plainly were the moments I was able to genuinely reconnect with Country (the earth, Spirit, the numinous, whatever you choose to call it). In returning to Country, I could once again feel myself as a thread in the tapestry, and eventually I was able to see that I had abandoned my commitment and my place in the universe.
 | ||||
| Photo by Doug P. |
Through a long journey of flailing to find a way to right myself, I have rediscovered how integral my connection to Country is. Since rediscovering a place (both inside and outside myself) where I can actively engage with Land, Spirit, and the more-than-human, my life has flourished. I find myself rediscovering places in myself I haven't interacted with since those days of running about the woods and marshes of my childhood. I find myself communing once more with the currents and motions I felt at Pink Rock. Country has allowed me to find my place, to develop my true role, and to find my true being.
The idea of Country extends beyond the natural world. Becoming stewards of our human communities, empowering authentic expression and care, and creating environments in which all people are able to thrive are all ways to connect with Country. In Country, we do not prioritize human life over nature, and we do not prioritize nature over human life. In Country, we find symbiosis.
Working with magical geography is not all good and noble and beautiful. Country is filled with suffering and sacrifice and blood. The earth can be cruel and harsh, but is never malicious. Country, in many places and aspects, is wounded too. Naturally I cannot shoulder this entire burden alone.
 | |
| Le Bagh Woods Cook Co. Forest Preserve at Beltaine- photo by Author |
So far the magical geography course has felt like coming home. Hearing elucidated concepts and wisdom I know intimately in the threads of my being, that I have become actively engaged with as part of my own recovery and rebirth, is more profound than I can describe. As I heal in myself, I find the need to facilitate healing in others, including the land, the Ancestors, and beings that make up Country.
The goal of "re-enchanting the world" is not one of mastery. The purpose of magic is not dominion, it is dynamic - an embodied harmony that stretches across all beings on all planes. In order to find peace, we must first find healing - in ourselves, in our communities, in the Land, and in the cosmos.
