This person asked me about nature essays I would recommend. I've been thinking about this and realized that many of the authors whose essays inspired me are also problematic. I first read everything Thoreau wrote. I fell in love with Walden and his interest in plants, like in his journals, really gave me a push toward botany. His transcendentalism, the spiritual understanding of the living world is part of what I loved. Also, I've read a lot of Stephen Buhner. I don't agree with all of the things he said everywhere but his in-depth love of and understanding of the living earth speaks to me. But there are so many wonderful essays. Emerson's essay Nature seems like an essential read. I don't love everything about how she writes but Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is worth a read. Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac is a great classic. I loved David Kline's insights in Great Possessions although I can't find a good quotation to pull out for you. And more local people have said things that changed the way I think. Marcia Bonta comes to mind. I've been influenced by the writings of Freya Mathews. I have books of nature essays by pagans like Pagan Visions and personal essays like When the Wild Comes Leaping Up, and books about the earth like The Rebirth of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake, plus the whole genre of books about nature and psychology, especially about children like those by Louv and Chawla. I don't think you can separate nature from psychology and whatever Western writers mean by shamanism. To me the land is psychoactive and the poets and mystics are seeing truth while scientists are also seeing truth. The earth and nature are alive and multi-faceted and as Thoreau implied or even said, learning the species and how they interact is as much about spirit as it is about matter. Anyone who spends enough time in nature gets those moments when it reaches you directly and I chronicle and save accounts of those experiences as well as things people see happen in nature after the death of a loved one. I've even written about that a little. So it's hard for me to pick a favorite. It's like that Zen story about the butcher when a woman asks him for his best cut of meat and he says, "Every cut of meat in this store is the best cut." They're all best in their own ways and the more of them you read the more it changes your understanding of what the world and nature are. And the more time you've spent out there observing nature the more all of them inform you. tl:dr I like many many, all for different reasons.

I’m not a witch but to me this still says something essential. When you’re ready your being is a match that dragged over the earth ignites a flame.

Hi. When I started the blog it was going to be something different from what it ended up as. I was just going to post quotations about the earth and the land and all living things being sentient and able to subtly communicate with people if they open themselves to it. So Geo=earth and psych=mind. The mind of the earth and landscape was going to be the topic. But then to make it more interesting at first I started to reblog other people's pictures, and after looking at them I realized I could probably take some I could add. I've posted before about my depression and how looking for beautiful things and scenes to take pictures of helped me. But the answer to your question is that it was the original intent of the blog to talk about the earth's mind. I like to think that in a way my pictures still show a little of the earth's spirit. 💚

Thank you for this, very much. I had to wait a while to answer because I had to let my thoughts process. This is such a good example of the kind of random effects and coincidences that have happened to me in connection with these childhood moments, the post you saw being just a link in the golden thread that was leading you to some part of your journey. The ways I came to think and write about those experiences were full of little threads leading from one thing to another, sometimes almost sideways or something catching my attention as it was barely brushing by, other times being beaten over the head until it got through my thick skull, oh! I guess I'd better look into this. The childhood moments, when you have them, come with the vision or conviction that you're a part of everything and it's all connected and then it goes on through your life demonstrating that in subtle and not so subtle ways. And each time it happens we have the choice to brush them off or else to allow our version of the world to include that bit of magic, to keep an awareness that something bigger and more wonderful is going on here even when we can't see it. I was fortunate to have spent time with descendants of indigenous people here, the Lenape people for whom this was a sacred homeland and spending time on the landscape with them permanently changed the way I understand it, in ways that would be hard to put into words but it has affected what I notice. I think all along I have been, not altogether on purpose, trying to take pictures that show the potential of the landscape as a source of mystical experience, to show places as having a hint of mind and spirit as well as celebrating the beauty and life I see. This blog started as a place to store my quotations and then the pictures followed sort of as illustrations to go with them, as if to say "This is the land that can give you an otherworldly experience, no chemicals necessary." Sorry! I have wandered far afield from your message! Thank you for writing. 💚

“When viewing a landscape, the seer sees not just the hills or rivers but a living world in which the sound of the waters, the wind through the trees and the movements of animals are meaningful…. A land-feature has power to reconnect the physical and unseen sides of reality, becoming a threshold where past, present and future fuse into a single focus for knowing and understanding.” —Caitlin Matthews in The Bright Knowledge.

—Stephen Harrod Buhner, in Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of the Earth.

David Ulrich, in To Honor the Sacred, in Parabola Magazine.