When the garden speaks and we remember who we are. During a particularly difficult period of my life, I was experiencing deep sadness as old wounds from childhood surfaced to be healed. One afternoon I sat on my patio, crying quietly among the plants in my garden.
As I sat there, I suddenly felt warm waves of thought and feeling coming from the plants around me. I heard them communicating clearly:
“We love you. We appreciate you. Thank you for loving and taking care of us.
The garden felt alive with presence. I stood and slowly walked from plant to plant. Each one, individually and together, bathed me in waves of loving energy. They thanked me for planting and nurturing them and expressed how much they appreciated my care.
I marveled as I felt their love pouring toward me. Their presence was like a healing balm for my wounded heart. I felt so loved, so tenderly restored to peace, as their voices echoed in a soothing symphony of reassurance.
The essence of the plants felt like nourishing liquid love. They reminded me that I was not alone. They supported me. They assured me that I was healing. They lifted me from a painful place of isolation.
Until that moment, I had been aware of how much I loved the plants. What I had not fully realized was how much they loved me. That realization was a profound gift.
In their presence I experienced the plants as pure love, and myself, and all of life around me as the same. We were living together in an ocean of love. Love was our very substance.
The plants reminded me of my true nature and helped me feel it again when I needed it most.
The Living Field In many traditions around the world, people have spoken of Nature Spirits — the living presences within forests, rivers, mountains, plants, and landscapes. These spirits are not separate from the natural world; they are the life within it, the consciousness expressed through every form.
In my teaching, I help people learn how to connect, communicate, and cooperate with these beings — the spirits in and among trees, plants, animals, mountains, rivers, and the living Earth itself.
When people begin to sense and communicate with these beings, the world becomes alive in a new way. Trees are no longer background. Animals are no longer lesser creatures. The land itself is no longer simply a background for human activity.
And in learning to sense them, something else becomes clear. We begin to remember that we, too, are part of this same living field.
The Curious Human Separation One of the strange habits of human culture is the way we speak about ourselves and other creatures. We call them animals, while we call ourselves human beings — as though we stand outside the animal kingdom.
But physically, we are animals. Biologically, we are animals. We share the same living Earth, the same breath, the same cycles of birth, growth, and death.
The separation exists mostly in our thinking.
Our intellect is very skilled at dividing, labeling, categorizing, and placing life into compartments. This ability has its usefulness. But when it becomes the dominant lens through which we view the world, it can create an illusion: the belief that humans are separate from the rest of Nature, standing apart from the web of life rather than within it.
This imagined separation has had profound consequences — not only for the Earth, but also for our own sense of belonging.
Remembering the Living Presence in All Forms Many of the beings we call Nature Spirits could just as easily be understood as spirits expressing through other forms of life, just as we are.
We are spirits inhabiting, or more accurately permeating and surrounding, human forms, much as other beings inhabit and express themselves through their own forms. The forms differ. The functions differ. But the essence of life moving through them is shared.
Each being participates in the great web of life, relating with all the others in ways that sustain the balance of the whole.
The Great Circle Many Indigenous cultures speak of life as a great circle — a circle in which every being has a place and a relationship with all others. This circle does not place one form of life above another. It recognizes differences in role, ability, and perspective, but not a hierarchy of worth. Each being contributes something essential to the whole.
Animals know this naturally. Nature Spirits know this naturally. Only humans have developed the idea that we stand outside the circle or above it.
Yet this separation exists only in the mind. In truth, we have never left the circle. We are one with Spirit. We are one with Nature.
In the physical world, Spirit and Nature intertwine continuously, expressing themselves through countless forms of life. The spirits who animate trees, animals, mountains, rivers, and landscapes are part of the same living presence that expresses through us.
We are all Nature Spirits in different forms.
Returning to Kinship When we release the illusion of separation, something profound happens. Loneliness begins to dissolve. The natural world is no longer an object or resource. It becomes a community, a living family of beings with whom we share relationship and responsibility.
We rediscover the wisdom that lives within the web of life itself — a wisdom that other animals and Nature Spirits have never forgotten.
This remembering restores something ancient in the human heart. We remember what our ancestors once knew: that humans are not masters of life, nor outsiders to it, but participants within the great living circle.
When we open our hearts to this kinship with all beings, we rediscover a sense of belonging that has always been present beneath the surface of our lives. These experiences remind us of the deeper relationships explored in my article Sacred Kinship, where I reflect on the profound bonds between humans and other species.
A Prayer for the Great Circle May we come out of loneliness created by our imagined separation from Nature.
May we return, in mind and heart, to the Great Circle of life—animals, plants, landscapes, waters, winds, and the unseen presences that move among them.
May the ideas of domination, hierarchy, and separation that have brought so much imbalance to the Earth dissolve in the light of our kinship with all beings.
And may the growing awakening of humanity help restore the harmony that our ancestors once honored: a world where humans remember themselves as part of Nature, participants in the living circle of Spirit and Earth.
