Some people would say that Earth/Spirit Tending is the same as shamanism, and that there’s a fairly standard modern definition of shamanic practice that is well-known, but I believe I’ll begin with answering a bit from my own experience of this practice that I call otherwise, and invite you to share what your own ways are with this as well. Who are we now with this practice, and where are we going?
For me, asking what Earth/Spirit Tending is equals asking what it means to be a full human being. It is the most basic way of experiencing and realizing our true nature. It is a way of being; an attitude, feeling, behavior and knowing that we are an interdependent part of a vast mystery of consciousness that is dynamic and uncontainable. This practice informs us through each breath we take that we are beings with no beginning and no end; that our spirits and bodies are fluid, ever-changing expressions of a vast unity, and that there is endless creativity and variety in what the so-called physical can be and in how we experience ourselves and everything else; and that everything else is just like this too—-all is alive, inspirited, able to relate, communicate, and create together while shape-shifting endlessly from one adventure to another, both inside and outside of Time and Space.
The practice of this tending fosters a deep love for life; a conscious, mutually nourishing relationship with every part of creation—seen and unseen— where we act with respect, integrity, tenderness and honor; where we share our full selves with human, tree, water, rock, bear, fae, gust of wind, planets, stars, birds, sun, gods/goddesses, hint of moonlight, fungi, tutelary deities, and forms of consciousness we can’t even being to name. Earth/Spirit Tending is our intimate reciprocal connection to the fullness of Life in all its manifestations; it is the elixir of Eros running through us. It is both scintillating, ever-shifting dream as well as primal, grounded practicality. It is the feeling of unity of all that is and radiating the concomitant love into every part of our lives. It is knowing in our bones that the phrase, “we are all ONE” is not a metaphor, but rather the bedrock of our existence along with the understandings and actions that fall out of that knowing.
Now, most of what I just described as Earth/Spirit Tending many would define as animism—except maybe less extravagantly—and perhaps take exception to me muddying those waters. And they would segregate it, as they do shamanism as explicitly that extension of animism where someone intentionally goes into a trance state, takes soul flight into the spirit realms, relates to spirit beings and allows those spirits to use them as a conduit for certain energies. Shamanism is known to be that flowering from the root of animism and yet……. the line is so permeable, the energies themselves so alive, unbounded and non-conceptual, that i find it difficult to imagine a truly embodied animistic life not somehow flowing innately into shamanic awareness o Earth/Spirit Tending and relationship. But this is simply my take on it..
So although it is a somewhat rare way for humans to now be in the world, having a personal Earth/Spirit tending relationship to life is our birthright and is deeply coded in our biological/spiritual DNA. We are meant to go into all kinds of altered states; we are meant to live ecstatically; we are meant to relate consciously, naturally and consistently to non-human life forms as well as to the unseen world. We are made for that! We have simply been living for a long time now in a trance of forgetting.
And despite all the beliefs and experiences encountered within this way of life that can seem to some in modern culture to be so far-fetched and unrealistic, ultimately it is a very practical life orientation. It is not New Age-y, flaky, superstitious or ungrounded; it’s concerned with what works and does so through an experiential process that includes the lived acknowledgement that the unseen spirit realm and the seen physical world are always one reality, both informing the other and both being expressed through the other. We are all of it.
Earth/Spirit centered awareness is standing outside as night wraps around your body, feeling the thrum of the earth’s heartbeat in your blood, hearing the songs of your Ancestors rising through your spine, tasting the caress of sentient winds that have known waters, fields, ice, stones, deserts, starlight and forests and feeling the rapture, wonderment and un-answerableness of your question, “what does it mean that the earth is so beautiful?” and then living that mystery in the heart of your belonging.