Our Sacred Landscape: An Animist Field Guide for Any Terrain

Walk your landscape until you hear it speak.



Our native land – the place where we live our daily lives – shapes our soul. It is our sacred landscape. Looking through both an ancient and modern lens, Our Sacred Landscape invites a direct, embodied relationship with nature in one’s own bioregion. Blending shamanic practice, sensory awareness, and grounded science, it guides us to rediscover the miracle of the ground beneath our feet – and its deep correspondence with the cosmos. Through a living radius around home – a symbolic “diamond” roughly 50 miles across – familiar surroundings become a field of vibrant discovery, relationship, and reverence. As intimacy with place deepens, so does meaning, purpose, and care. Structured around seven core realms – Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Spirit, Mammals, and Plants – the book offers practical exercises and experiential pathways for individuals and small groups. These are not abstract ideas but lived practices that restore balance between human and more-than-human communities. At a time when many yearn to move beyond a mechanistic worldview based on separation, this return to an ecological self is both essential and joyful. The result is a field guide for reawakening belonging, restoring reciprocity, and participating with a living Earth. "Many today move across the land without truly seeing it, without hearing her voice or knowing the names of the relatives that grow and breathe around us. Our Sacred Landscape is a good reminder, offered with humility, that the world is not made of objects but of relationships. It does not ask us to believe anything new, only to remember what has long been known. In this way, it helps restore the quiet, respectful relationship with the Earth that our ancestors understood, that many of us have forgotten, and that our grandchildren will need." Erjen Khamaganova, Member of the Council of Elders, World Union of Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners.