I am a sacramental ceremonialist on behalf of Gaia
About Me. As a solitary only child I had an inchoate yearning to live a spiritual life, although I never embraced mainstream Christianity with much enthusiasm. What I did embrace was the wild, green natural world of the canyons and mountains of northern New Mexico, where I grew up. I wandered these lands from a very young age, feeling safe, happy and endlessly fascinated.
As a young adult, I finally concluded that there was no room in any institutionalized religion for the authentic, wild wholeness I was seeking. I began to study nature-connected spirituality and ceremony with Native American teachers. Eventually I was called to the earth-centered Celtic and Western mystery traditions of my own British and northern European ancestors. I also made a serious, 20-year study of the sacred rainforest plant teacher Ayahuasca—the so-called Vine of the Soul— and spent almost two years living in a spiritual community deep in the Brazilian Amazon. These disparate paths, all rooted in the living wisdom of Mother Earth, have been the foundation of my enduring, reflexive connection with the land, with the physical and spiritual being of Gaia. My entire life has been dedicated to deep inner exploration, grounded in land-based practices and philosophies and an ongoing love affair with the Green World of Nature.
One consistent context for my own thinking has been the field of deep ecology—a multidisciplinary philosophy, eco-theology and social movement that sees the earth and its living systems as an immense, interacting whole, with humans no more important or deserving than any other species. I was fortunate to sit at the feet of early deep ecologists such as John Seed and the late Dolores LaChapelle beginning in the early 1980s. From them I learned that this profound reconsideration of humanity and our place on the planet necessarily leads to the realization that for the vast majority of human history, all humans—the ancestors of each one of us—considered the land to be sacred, and lived on the earth in respectful, sustainable ways. Thus, the seeds of humanity’s transformation, so needed today, are already within us, deeply buried perhaps, but nonetheless part of our basic nature.
I’ve also followed and supported the important work of my old friend Bill Plotkin, the author of Soulcraft and Nature and the Human Soul, and the founder of Animas Valley Institute in Durango, Colorado. Bill has masterfully synergized deep ecology, wilderness guiding, and psychology and psychotherapy into his own groundbreaking, experiential work in nature-based soul initiation and the re-wilding of the human psyche.
In the Celtic and Western mysteries arena, I’ve known Scottish author, teacher and visionary RJ Stewart since 1993. I’ve always felt a resonance with his radical conception of Earth Light—the fertile light within the body of the sacred land. All ancestral traditions are anchored in this luminous underworld realm and its powerful forces and beings. Through studying with RJ I’ve increasingly come to understand how disrespecting and dismissing the spiritual realms of the sacred land have led to humanity’s tragic sense of separation from Nature, and thus from our own nature.
My Relationship with the Green Christ. I began connecting explicitly with the eco-spiritual being of the Green Christ in Avalon— the misty “summer country” of Britain that even today, as Glastonbury, England, holds and nourishes many profound Mysteries of the Sacred Land. I went to Glastonbury on pilgrimage several times in the early 1990s, and after 20-some years of subsequent spiritual journeying in other directions, I returned there in 2018.
Avalon is where, it is said in one mythic stream, Jesus’ uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, arrived after the Crucifixion and established the first Christian church. Joseph brought two vessels with him, one containing Jesus’ blood and the other his semen. He buried these vessels in the verdant hillside of Glastonbury Tor, a place already sacred to the indigenous Britons for millennia. The red waters of the Chalice Well and the clear waters of the White Spring flowed side-by-side down the Tor then, and still flow today. So from the beginning, in the ancient land of Britain, the sacred waters of the Christ flowed in union and harmony with the waters of the Lady of Avalon and her Mistress, Mother Gaia.
How much of this foundational story is literally true, no one really knows. (It is known that the early Celtic church, up to its subsuming by the Roman church around 600 AD, was deeply and uniquely connected with the Earth and the Divine Feminine.) But when I walked the sacred green lands of Avalon almost 30 years ago, I began to sense a presence there—a verdant, joyous expression of Nature’s exuberance and generosity—a generosity founded in the endless natural cycles of birth, growing and flowering, maturing and ripening, declining and dying, followed eternally by rebirth. I somehow knew that this living emanation that I was meeting was a being known as the Green Christ. Here, finally, was a vigorous, fertile, earth-centered alternative to the emaciated Jesus suffering eternally on a cross in the desert wastes of Judea.
The Green Christ continued to be with me, in a personal inner realm of consciousness, throughout my subsequent decades of spiritual seeking in North and South America (various stories of which will be periodically included in this blog). When I finally renewed and deepened our acquaintance during a vision quest in the Sonoran Desert in late 2017, it felt like meeting an old friend. Within a year, the inspiration for this blog and website emerged.
As I continue to heed the Green Christ’s promptings both to develop myself and to present his message, I consider myself primarily an emissary of the Green World. I am not a religious or historical scholar, nor am I a theologian. I don’t even call myself a Christian! I’m simply a human being whose life from an early age has been one of following a deeply committed, nature-connected spiritual path—a path that has been both challenging and rewarding beyond measure. I have been tempered and prepared, and now am ready to follow the Green Path wherever it takes me and to bring my Master and Brother the Green Christ to everyone who is ready to hear and heed. I consider myself to be working on behalf of Gaia, and whatever she wants me to do, including bringing this message to the world, I will do.
Click here to visit my companion website, www.gaia-blog.com, where I offer additional earth-centered material from the perspective of Gaia, the sacred Feminine force that generates all living beings and the Earth herself.