What kind of education is most vital for our kids?

Recently, I had the pleasure of offering some stories as one of three speakers on the annual John Paul Memorial Lecture, presented by Trust for Nature, which focused this year on the human-nature connection (you can watch here). The final question I was asked by the senior ecologist Nicki was ‘If there was one thing that you could change that would improve people’s nature connection, what would it be?’ I often get asked a similar ‘one thing’ question during speaking gigs and I focused to hear the question afresh. Of course it won't be one thing that turns the tide of disconnection, but what would I start with?

What almost kills you with delight?

Yesterday was even busier than usual. It was my turn to cook dinner for 20 people (part of a larger village experiment my family and I have embarked on). I had someone pop over for an anchoring conversation about their life path, as well as the usual toddler care, washing up, work emails and school pick-ups. Oh plus I was hosting some friends for a wildcrafting circle that evening. On a day like that it’s easy to feel I don’t have time to attend to life outside these compelling tasks. I remembered the Mahatma Gandhi quote that always makes me smile “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”

What dreams have visited you this solstice week - in this time of deep quiet and stillness, of shimmering frost crystals, water snaplocked into tiny mirrors?

Winter solstice has offered me a recurring dream. I'm on a Vision Quest, but one beset by people, and I search for a place in the wilds to be on my own.

Solutions don’t generally come from the middle, they come from the edge. Mythologist Martin Shaw talks of this, of genius living not in the centre but on the margins. If we ignore what the Mexicans call ‘the river beneath the river’, the soul of the world, Martin says, then we’ll end up going around in whirlpools of our own neurosis, individual or cultural.

How can we stay alive to the magic of our homes?

I’m a creature of place. While some seem truly like global citizens, I’ve always been the opposite - a citizen of specificity. Of place. A citizen of a water catchment, a sheltering mountain, of plant friends and mottled morning magpies on my verandah. I’m a citizen of well trodden wandering trails and a swimming hole and a dusk emerging wombat across the road. I’m a citizen of parsley patches and berry patches and soil that is borne from my garden scraps. I’m a citizen of community, of neighbourly reciprocity and friends’ houses nearby that I make tea and toast in.  

How can we tune our nervous systems to the hum of timeless wandering day-to-day?

Last week, I spent a week in a place I count amongst my home country, near where my family holidays near Myall Lakes National Park. As soon as I arrive, my heart and hands rise to meet the screech of the little lorikeets, the sturdy blackbutt trees, majestic paperbarks behind the dunes, the spring dollar birds, the migratory whales, the skittling bug-eyed hermit crabs, the sacred headland. All the creatures. All my relations. I greet the place with the knowing that they know me, at least a little.

How do we make ourselves available to mystery?

Over the last 18 months I received a couple of dreams of an unusual kind. Rather than numinous and symbolic, these two dreams seemed instructional, both telling me that I should move to the Northern Rivers of NSW, even offering helpful details such as a monetary range that I should spend on a house in a community.

This time of year leads naturally to the question of what kind of ancestor will I be? What will be my legacy?

This autumn more than others, I’ve really felt the presence of the ancestors. It’s fitting that I would, this time of year. My Celtic ancestors would have celebrated Samhain, the ‘day-of-the-dead’ (popularised as Halloween), as autumnal leaves fell and dark descended for the winter.

It is often said that the four day solo wilderness fast that is known as Vision Quest is the ultimate act of surrender. Certainly the times that I have chosen to sit on the earth in this way have required me to let go in a very real way… as my physical energy diminishes, as the hours creep by under beating sun or driving rain. It’s surrender in a very visceral, unromantic way. There’s no other way through the eye of this particular needle.

However, while Vision Quest has strengthened my muscle of yielding, in the last few months something has required more surrender of me than even this ceremony - motherhood.

For someone whose life’s passion and deepest enquiry is about how to guide people through an initiatory stage of life, I sit writing on another very particular kind of threshold, one that I didn’t imagine I would experience in this life. Motherhood.

An evening with neighbours, flatmates and friends to discuss climate emergency provided Claire Dunn, with a set of guiding principles for resilience in the face of crisis.

I wake at first light and blink my eyes open. It’s too quick for the dream images. They turn on their heels and scurry back down the ladder before I can catch them. I walk upstairs and switch the kettle on. From the crack in the window…

How does one set intentions for the new year? Intentions that are a genuine movement of the heart rather than a ‘self-improvement’ decision? Instead of mind maps or mandalas, this new year I took the question out to the wilds for a day, and let the mysteries of nature and psyche shake it loose...

Have you ever had an encounter in nature that felt numinous; a direct communication to you from beyond the ordinary? Have you ever walked into the physical reality of a night dream you once had? What is your relationship how symbol and sign show up in your life?…

About ten years I found Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin in my letterbox. Opening to the first chapter I felt relief flood my system as he described with exactness the impulse I was feeling to dive deeply into the mysteries of soul and wild nature. Rather than a pathology, this is a vital phase of...