Follow a nature-based religion

Deciding to follow a nature-based religion if you live in the midst of a city can be a challenge. Druids who live on farms or in woods, or even in the midst of suburban greenery can often step outside and immediately be in contact with the Earth. But those of us who are surrounded by concrete and live shoulder to shoulder with neighbors must make a conscious effort to ignore the pressing humanity and feel the rhythms of the Great Mother pulsing through our days.

When I first began reading works by pagans about the path, I was drawn to works that focused on their relationships with nature. Books that advocated cordoning off a corner of a room for meditation, or working indoors with candles, mirrors or pendulums were of little interest to me, precisely because escape from my room was a fundamental attraction of paganism for me. It was the gulf I felt, between my daily life and the rhythms of the Mother Earth, that spurred me towards our religion. It is perhaps why I was drawn first to Druidism rather than Wicca or other goddess-based religious practices.

So I turned to books that taught me how sit beneath a tree, how to notice the habits of animals, and those that spoke of vision quests in the wilderness. Many of them suggested that I plant a grove of trees in my yard, or grow my own food, or take long walks through the woods. All of them assumed that I lived deep in the forest, had leisure to spend weeks out in nature, or, at the very least, possessed a fair sized yard that could handle these great works of horticulture that I was supposedly developing. But few of these suggestions are practical, or even practicable, if you live in the city. I've never been much of the church-only-on-Sunday type and my hopes of getting to the wilderness proper to practice my "new" spirituality on a regular basis were few and far between.

Despite living in one of Washington, DC's most urban neighborhoods, I am fortunate enough to live close to what I consider one of the District's most impressive "monuments": Rock Creek Park. From my door, you can walk 4 blocks into a small patch of trees known locally as Klingle Woods. It borders Piney Branch Creek, which cuts through an old Indian quartz quarry and runs directly into Rock Creek. While the Park Service has been kind enough to carve out and laboriously maintain an asphalt bike and jogging path along the banks of what was once a mighty creek, it is the numerous small dirt paths that first gave me the connection I needed to the Earth.

There are many things I have been able to do and learn in this "urban" park that I never would have thought possible inside a city. I've sat beneath an oak tree and used it to plot the path of the sun over the course of the year. I've wandered over the hills, finding vistas where one can see only an occasional house, and imagining how Washington was in the days when the land was owned by the wind and the rain. I've found a meadow that is made for sun-worshiping in the depths of December and I've clambered through Piney Branch in search of quartz and the hoped-for Indian relic. And I've seen animals: eagles, hawks, deer, raccoons, and—once—a red fox. I know the paths through the forest almost better than I do the streets surrounding my neighborhood. So I am more fortunate than many urbanites—I do have a private wilderness that I can find any summer evening or early morning before work.

Despite my bond with this particular piece of landscape, there are large swathes of my day in which my longing for a bit of wild earth makes me impatient of the manicured tree boxes and flower beds of downtown. It once depressed me utterly to think of the way in which nature has been trapped, stuffed, and mounted for urbanites to "enjoy." The flowers seem little more than an architectural extension of the buildings at whose feet they sit and the trees reach their lonely arms across concrete and asphalt in a vain attempt to touch one another. I would walk on my lunch hour and wonder how the Earth would ever survive the indignities our species hands to her.

One week, deep in the grey depths of winter, I created a visualization or meditation for myself that I first practiced on a tiny triangle of green, pinioned between K Street, I Street, and Vermont and 15th. It is a tiny park with large oak trees, a statue of some random war hero and plenty of winos and sleeping bums. In the summer the place is covered with squirrels stashing away the leavings of lunch patrons and the air is filled with car horns and the occasional bubbly laughs of secretaries who have shed their shoes and are wiggling their toes through the grass. In winter, it is given over to the bums and hurrying walkers on their way to and from work.