Someone asked me for some advice on connecting with living creatures/places. I don’t think I have any special expertise with this, however, here is what I offered, in case any of it might be useful.

I’ll say a few things, in case they are useful.

1. Passion is powerful in connecting with living places and creatures… our ordinary ‘every day’ emotions are often sort of half-dead. When we approach with these, we are likely to come away thinking the living world can’t hear us… or is actually silent/unapproachable. This is partly because emotional intensity is both our natural state and plays a role like an amplifier in transmission and reception of the communications of living places and organisms in nature.

2. Imagination is, I think, a central feature of our capacity to contact and relate directly with living places and creatures, and this includes ‘envisioning’ relationships and transfers of attention or ‘assistance’ or love. But there is a silent, ‘off to the side’ aspect of imagination which is one of the common ‘receptors’ that seems to me to be involved. It’s like a ‘listening mind that is usually overwhelmed by noise’, but when this is not the case, can become a receiver par-excellence for communications from the living world.

3. Language is deceptive; simple assertions of intent or wonder or love can be useful, but it seems to me that nearly all of what is going on in nature is a kind of ‘living silence’ that humans would think of as telepathic. Yet we have this backwards; us making face noises is »antipathic; all of natures silences are metalanguages that are more easily and naturally understood by an aspect of our awareness that is largely if not almost entirely non-verbal.

This doesn’t mean the verbal aspect of our awareness has ‘no place whatsoever’ in these relationships; rather, it should be understood that most of the living world communicates without a »specific language, and without the necessity of formal or verbal languages. There are some few exceptions. Effectively, ‘nature is profoundly telepathic’ (to put this in language moderns would both comprehend and misunderstand).