Ecological Re-Membering: Taking our Place in the Web of LIfe
Feb 9
9 min read
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A Vision
A Poem by Wendell Berry
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy....
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground....
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
Winters in the 70's on the rocky shores of Lake of the Woods were often bitterly cold. Just looking at something the wrong way could cause it to break in those frigid temperatures. The neighbourhood where I grew up backed on to the edge of a vast boreal forest, this was my childhood playground.
My fathers love for the outdoors was an even greater extension of my wilderness oasis. There was always an expedition of sorts being planned, an adventure into this expansive landscape of my innocence.
Winter was the time for ice fishing where one would drill a hole into the ice, drop a line down with bait or lure with the hopes of somehow convincing these unsuspecting creatures of the dark cold watery realm beneath ice and snow to take the bait, only to be pulled through a tunnel of ice into our world. I knew many of the fish clan, where they lived, what they liked to eat, and how to coax them into our world.
My father would spend countless hours pouring over maps at the kitchen table with his fishing buddy and best friend in this ice fishing pursuit planning their next foray into some unknown small lake that was or could be a hidden bounty of fish. How they decided on what lake to go to was a combination of studying the area, listening to others who spoke of these magical fishing holes and an intuition that spoke to them in a language beyond words. As a child and co-conspirator, I was in awe.
One little lake that we frequented often was only accessible down a set of railway tracks from a main road. It was a good hike in, with the final leg through the bush and snow. It would take at least a good hour to hike in with all our gear, ice auger, fishing tackle, food and everything required for the day. For a child, it felt like quite an ordeal through deep snow and sub zero temperatures, we were tough, and although I can remember the challenges, the moments of tears, it was the most formative moments of a young child's life. Nowadays this would be considered a privileged nature based childhood in light of how many children grow up in today's westernized culture disconnected from the wild world.
When I think about these experiences, I reflect on the thread that has been so intricately woven throughout my life. That thread speaks to an aliveness that I have always felt in nature, a dialogue, a part of something other than our human world. It is an unwavering love I have for the wild.
There is also profound heartbreak that I feel at this moment in history on this planet. I have spent my life in wonderment of the beauty that surrounds us to only witness the destructive forces of our culture accelerate the devastation of forests, lakes, mountains, meadows, oceans, desserts, rivers, moose, deer, jackfish, salamander, owl, bobcat, and all that contribute to the diversity of life on this planet.
In the midst of the hardship that is before us now, there is also a possibility, a possibility that we may envision a future where we will once again re-member our place within the web of life, like that of our ancestors who knew the world as animate, alive and with vast intelligence. (1)
In today's westernized culture we are conditioned to believe in a world void of aliveness where our minds are subject to a "metaverse", where our day to day lives are reflected to us by the machines. We lack the basic connection to the very being (Earth) which gives us life. Our children are accelerating this dis-ease and suffer from increasing rates of nature deficit disorder as children are being separated from the wild community and increasingly live in a virtual reality. (2)
In these modern times, we wake to kings and queens whispering their prayers to the machine. (3)
We pay homage to the ghosts in the machine for whom we know nothing of. It is only prospering a select few who are hoarding unimaginable amounts of wealth on stage for the world to see in the corridors of power, control and obsessive greed. The eight wealthiest (white males) hold as much wealth as 3 billion of the poorest people on this planet. (4)
Let that sink in for a moment ….
There is something terribly wrong here.
Did you fill the streets with protest when democracy was stolen? (5)
With the advancement of artificial intelligence, planetary destruction will accelerate in the never ending hunger, a hungry ghost to power the machines. (6)
How on earth did we get here?
10000 years ago something happened in the human communities of the old world. We had lived for tens of thousands of years in direct relationship with the more than human world. Our languages had no words for nature, we were nature. Our development and maturity from birth to death was reflected in and driven by the forces of that which surrounded us. We are unique in that way, an evolutionary twist where the moment we are born, we forget the unique gifts that have been woven into the very fabric of our being. A blueprint of how we are to live our lives into the world, how we will take our place in our communities, human and wild, our ecological niche. This requires a healthy ecocentric, soulcentric culture where we must be guided carefully and initiated into our maturity so we may become whole humans. (7)
For our ancestors, everything was animate and alive and an intelligence flowed through everything. This is not limited to just those beings we perceive as alive, but also what we call “things” or “it” where they too are expressing a life force that is all part of this intricate web of interconnectivity, taking their place, their unique ecological role.
As a part of this web, all things alive or not alive (from our perspective) have agreements with each other that have been negotiated over millions of years. Our hunter gather ancestors were no different, they had intimate arrangements with the wilds that gave them everything they needed for life.
However, the agreements changed when some human communities decided to steal the plant and animal children of the wilds to live with humans. These were unsanctioned marriages between humans and the plant and animal peoples. Although the wild was angry for such disregard for the agreements that had kept a natural order of things for so long, humans and the wild were now in-laws, related so to speak. With this union, new communities emerged through the domestication of plants and animals and we entered into the agrarian age.
This was a precarious relationship that offered many powerful gifts for our emerging agrarian peoples. It was not without intelligence or purpose that these incredible gifts and new ways of being were available to our emerging societies. We are part of an evolving story, we are part of life on this Earth, a living being within a living universe with intent, purpose and divine intelligence. And we are part of that aliveness, and with this newfound marriage between humans and the wild we were given a sacred responsibility. We evolved from a hunter gatherer culture to that of a sacred seed carrying culture.
For a time, there was a beautiful richness in this new way of being between humans and the wild. Cultures flourished, and new never before seen plant / animal / human communities spread, we were fulfilling our end of the bargain and embraced our new found seed carrying ways. (8)
However with great gifts come great responsibilities.
As old and new ways merged, we created more and more beauty in the world, however the abundance that followed started to create a sickness, where along with all of our rich ceremonies and ways of fostering relationships with all of life, a fragmentation crept in, an addiction to wealth and power.
This created an amnesia and a separation from what we had valued as sacred and holy. And so, to support this addiction a new era was ushered in, an era of great forgetting. A forgetting of our agreements, a forgetting of our relationship with nature, a forgetting of how we as humans need to be initiated into our true adulthood.
With this forgetting we became sidetracked with the pursuits of wealth and power. We forgot the beauty and reciprocity of our earlier days that had facilitated a form of sacred farming where we were realizing our ecological responsibilities that had transformed our communities.
These gifts have given us modern culture, an absolute necessity in our ecological development. We are seed carriers and the ways we have evolved our technologies is no mistake. Our sacred responsibility is to tend to life, to support life, to increase the biodiversity of places, to create never before seen combinations of beauty and maybe seed life beyond our planet. (9)
Unfortunately because of our amnesia we are running around like a wild pack of teenagers who have these super powers bumping into other roaming packs of teenagers. There is bravado, ego, high emotions, angst, winner takes all attitude, engaged in a high stakes game of egocentric behaviour. There is a complete disregard for anything or anyone who gets in the way.
From what was once a marriage between our peoples and the wild, has become a culture of slavery, hierarchy, power, control and greed. We have been showing off our gifts to each other in this adolescent display, beating our chests, flexing our muscles. This has gotten us to where we are, a necessary step on our evolutionary path, unconscious but necessary. It has shown us the possibilities, and opened the way for what could be a healthy global community.
We are being asked to mature as a species and take our place in the web of life to honour and fulfill those agreements we made so long ago. Our time of playing around is over, and there will be consequences for our juvenile behaviour, however like any good initiation, great visions await us on the other side of this journey.
I do have faith that we are where we need to be, and as things continue to fail and break down we will have to make some very conscious choices as we navigate our way "through" this crisis. As eco-psychologist and earth elder, Joanna Macy, states in the documentary Choosing Earth: Choosing Life “Honey, we're going to have to go through this."
To facilitate these conscious choices , I believe that we have to actively engage in a process of ecological remembering. Remembering our place in nature is of utmost importance as we move into this next stage of human development, the great turning, the long dark, the great simplification. (10) It will require an ecological awakening (11), and involve raising eco awareness. All these contribute to ecological consciousness (12) which will help us navigate this tumultuous process.
My earliest nature experiences help hold me in these times, where I am actively remembering how to be nature. For me that little ice covered lake in the heart of the jack-pine forest held me and showed me something divine.
After our long hike into this winter wonderland, punching holes in the ice, building an on shore fire, and carefully setting up our fishing portals, it was a game of waiting for the invisible beings to bend the birch twig branch frozen into the snow from the murky depths. There was a collective silence in this game of waiting where all you could hear was your heart beating in the deafening sound chamber created by the insulating properties of freshly fallen snow.
I would lay on this blanket of softness in the middle of that small little lake looking up into endless bluebird skies. The coolness seeping into my body from below, the warmth radiating in the bright sunshine from above. The dark waters of that mysterious lake holding me, suspended between worlds on a veil of ice.
Small black dots would come into view, with the sound of echo can, raspy call as
invisible forces kept these black winged ones effortlessly afloat, as Raven glided in circular motion, jet black feathers glistening in the warmth of the winter sun. In this moment of grace, where one is connected to everything in that silence, in that absolute radiant beauty, that moment of pure divinity, I am nature.
Resources
1) Wendell Berry - “A Vision” It’s hardship is its possibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Berry https://berrycenter.org/
2) Richard Louv - Nature Deficit Disorder
3) The Machine - Firedog Medicine Blog Post
4) (a) Choosing Earth Documentary https://choosingearth.org/
b) David Korten - When Billianores Rule the World, blog Jan 27th,2025 https://davidkorten.org/when-billionaires-rule-the-world/
c) Brooke Harrington - Trump’s “Broligarchy” of Tech Billionaires | The Daily Show https://youtu.be/DvCmBOenfsQ?si=deEg8ItIqgdxgIq3
5) Hieroglyphic Stairway by Drew Dellinger. Httpe s://youtu.be/SDCoraFSeGQ?si=uR7hJgMkh5lYbSzB
6) Nate Hagens https://youtu.be/Mh6iuXmJ6uM?si=98sUIUFnOhWj8zDs
7) Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul https://www.animas.org/books/nature-and-the-human-soul/
8) Martin Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic https://floweringmountain.com/product/the-unlikely-peace-at-cuchumaquic/
Martin Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
https://floweringmountain.com/product/secrets-of-the-talking-jaguar/
Martin Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart
https://floweringmountain.com/product/long-life-honey-in-the-heart/
9) Stephan Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm https://www.amazon.ca/Plant-Intelligence-Imaginal-Realm-Perception/dp/1591431352
10) The Great Turning: David Korton https://davidkorten.org/great-turning/
Bill Plotkin, A Fourth Dimension of the Great Turning Part I
The Long Dark: Francis Weller, Preface in the book Choosing Earth by Duane Elgin
10) The Great Simplification, Nate Hagens, https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/
11) Bill Plotkin, Ecological Awakening A Fourth Dimension of the Great Turning Part I
12) Diana Monteiro Toombs, Ecological Consciousness and Awareness
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