Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, as the Lakota prayer has it. We live in a world of relationship. My intention is to live always more fully within this worldview.

A panpsychic or animist world is alive. It is not only alive but sentient, full of meaning and poetic presence: some kind of innerness – mind, sentience, subjectivity – suffuses physical reality. This world seeks us out, even though in Western culture, humanity has monopolised the conversation; and capitalist economics depend on the exploitation of insentient, brute matter. In consequence, a world of brute matter is largely what we modern humans experience. But the living world draws us back into its being, invites us to choose differently, to sing up a living presence. As we re-learn to do this, that world gestures in response: animals and birds appear; breeze ruffles the trees; rain falls on an otherwise dry day; all in ways that are apposite and synchronous with our invocation. For these ‘moments of grace’ are not random: they carry a deep experiential authenticity. All my relations.

‘We remember that all things are connected… this is the purpose of the ceremony,’ writes Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan, ‘It is part of healing and restoration... the mending of a broken connection between us and the rest… [T]he words “All my relations” create a relationship with other people, with animals, with the land’.[i] This prayer has resonances in other traditions. Buddhists pray that all sentient beings be free of suffering and the causes of suffering. And in the Christian tradition, the late Pope Francis ended his ecological encyclical, Laudato Si: ‘Give us the grace to feel profoundly joined/to everything that is’.

I

The Rainbow Dance was finished. For three days and nights, while the drummers sounded the rhythm, we danced up and down to the big tree at the centre of our circle, fasting all the while, making prayer for healing of ourselves and the Earth. The weather was wild throughout the ceremony, with high winds and persistent rain, soaking our ceremonial robes and turning the dance ground into a muddy morass. By the end of the dance, we were tired and cold; but we could see the evidence of our dancing in the path each of us had worn from our place in the circle to the tree.

Now at last the sun had come out as we gathered around the sweat lodge that the dog soldiers had constructed while we danced – blankets and tarps over a ‘bender’ frame of hazel branches. The rocks were heating on the fire. When the air above them began to shimmer, it was time to enter the lodge. We took off our clothes and waited for directions from the Dance Chief. To my surprise, I was invited to enter first, to sit in the northeast, next to the fire pit: the place of choreography of energy. As I crawled in through the low entrance, I whispered the words ‘All my relations’, a rough translation of the Lakota prayer Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, which reflects the worldview of interconnectedness.

It was gloomy dark inside the lodge, the only light creeping in through the low doorway. I crawled round the perimeter to my place next to the still-empty fire pit, the ground soft and muddy under my knees, the smell of damp grass in my nose, feeling a nervous anticipation. From my place I watched my fellow celebrants as each in turn crawled, naked and vulnerable, through the low entrance.

It seemed that they were more than just physically naked, that each was leaving something of their everyday selves outside. I felt a surge of deep companionship, and as each crept in I honoured them, whispering to myself, ‘This is my sister, this is my brother, this is my sister, this is my brother…’ until we were all assembled and the door flap closed. We sat together in the darkness, the Dance Chief began the familiar sequence of prayers, and the sweat lodge ceremony began. All my relations.

II

Several years later, I am walking along the River Dart at Dartington in Devon. Ancient oak trees line the bank, and I walk among them slowly, savouring each step, matching the pace of the river and the stillness of the summer evening. I stand aside, once as runners pound sweatily by, again for teenagers out partying – laughing, flirting, utterly absorbed with each other. Once they pass, the trees draw back my attention: their huge solid trunks; the leafy branches tumbling to the river; their reflections, dark and mysterious, on the water surface. I listen to the birdsong, to the insects buzzing around my head, to the occasional plops of animal movements in the river.

After a mile or so, I find a companionable trunk to lean against and sit until late, watching the midsummer sun drop behind the wooded hillside. Walking back along the bank, remembering the animist maxim, ‘The world is full of persons, only some of whom are human’,[ii] again I find myself drawn into that ancient meditation, acknowledging each tree in turn: ‘This is my brother, this is my sister; this is my brother, this is my sister’.

I have dropped deeply into the world of trees.[iii] All my relations.

III

We left Dave’s car at the National Trust car park by the bridge at Respryn and walked upstream. The path follows River Fowey through grassland with many magnificent old trees – mainly oaks, with hazel and holly in the understorey. After a mile or so, we came to a wooden kissgate: taking this not only as a physical gate, but as an opening into ceremonial space, we offered thanks and gratitude, borrowing the Lakota prayer, ‘All my Relations’.

After a mile or so walking upstream, we came to a big bend in River where Dave has been sitting and swimming in ceremony, conversing with River these last months. There we made a little ceremony: holding hands and singing several rounds of The River She is Flowing; then offering gifts of water from our own lands.

Just as we finished, I heard Dave say, “We have brought on the rain”. I looked up, and sure enough, on this overclouded but quite dry day, a tiny rain shower moved from the far bank across River surface toward us. It lasted less than ten seconds, then just as suddenly it was gone. It was one of those gestures of the sentient world that would be so easy to overlook; yet it felt unmistakably an acknowledgement of our little ceremony. [iv] All my relations.

IV

A few days ago, one October morning before dawn, I leave the car by the roadside, then walk over the old stone bridge that crosses the River Frome. I stop as usual to look over the parapet at the water flowing past, listening and watching as it tumbles over the stones and boulders. On the other side of the bridge a metal kiss gate leads into a meadow and the path down to River. This I always take as the gateway or threshold, where I start the ceremony of my encounter with River. The kiss gate is awkwardly placed and demands attentiveness: I have to bend over and twist to my left to reach the catch and then step down rather further than my ancient knees are happy with, often into a muddy puddle. I slip past the swinging gate and allow it to shut behind me with a ringing clang, imagining this as the bell at a Buddhist retreat, calling me to mindfulness. It is at this point I say “All my relations” – sometimes I just mutter this to myself, but today I say it out loud to River and Tree and Crow and all the Beings around me.

I have done all these things many times over the past five years of my visits to River. Today the meaning – or one of many meanings – comes clearer to me. As I walk toward River I speak into my voice recorder, and what I say, with a little editing, comes out as a poem and a statement of intent:

All my relations, all my relations
I’m here
not just for me
not just to write a pretty piece for my friends.

I’m here because
knowing the world as a living being
knowing River as living being
is needed for the transformation of our world
is essential for proper relationship with our planet.

Put like that, it sounds over the top
even grandiose.
But actually
as I hobble along
in the darkness
on my old knees
over the green grass
on this chilly October morning
it feels pretty down-to-earth and grounded.

Drawing together the transcendent and the mundane

finding new meaning in the everyday presence of the world
is what this work all about.

For me, for us, for All my Relations.

[i] Hogan, L. (1995). Dwellings: A spiritual history of the living world. New York: Simon and Schuster, p.40.

[ii] Harvey, G. (2017). Animism: Respecting the living world (Second ed.). London: Hurst and Company, p.33.

[iii] Reason, P., & Gillespie, S. (2023). The Teachings of Mistle Thrush and Kingfisher. Australian Journal of Environmental Education. Special Issue Indigenous Philosophy in Environmental Education: Relearning How to Love, Feel, Hear, and Live with Place.

[iv] For a full account, See A Shower of Rain.