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We’ve Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

Words by VERONICA STANWELL

Founder of Rooted Healing and MSc Researcher in Animism, Ceremony + Psilocybin

When deepening our roots, much emphasis is on our looking downward into the earth’s wisdom, into soil, water, place, into ourselves—as porous, webbed, rooted beings, into the endless flora, fungi and fauna who await to rekindle deeper relationships with us, and yet, rooting is about expansion, resilience and sustenance.

We are, of course, created from the elements of the sky.  Every atom in our bodies was birthed in the heart of dying stars—massive supernovae that exploded in the early universe, scattering the elemental foundations of life across space. 

We are literally made of stardust, our animate makeup mirroring that of the cosmos.  The carbon in our bones, the oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood—all were birthed in stellar furnaces, tying us to the ancient vastness of the universe.   

We are part and particle of Nature.  

Looking skyward reminds us that, even in our dangerous amnesia, we belong.

The constellations are pregnant with stories of place-making, supporting navigation and explaining the world around us.  In many traditional cultures across the world, the stars are known to be the souls of the ancestors.  The Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes speak of the Path of Souls, which describes the journey of the ancestors through the night sky, passing along the entirety of the vast Milky Way en route to the spirit world.

Over the past few weeks, I have regularly immersed myself in the vastness of Bodmin Moor in Kernow.  The lands reach outward in baron bracken-red and heather-purple stretches.  During a recent private retreat, we climbed to the top of the tor and spent most of our day amongst the granite giants, gently warmed in the autumnal sun.  Here, the treeless land gifts herself to the air.  Sat atop a giant, with my eyes closed, I felt the spirit of the ancestors.  The elementals.  Harmonic songs of memory skimmed the rocks and heather.

Our ancestors knew such places as rich in spirit.  This is why, I believe, there are so many stone circles across the moors.  I had found one on the other side of the tor and, after offering an old Cornish song in 3 anticlockwise circles, sat myself on the central, flat stone—the place of the hearth.  A profound sense of presence arrived as I felt every stone become inhabited by an early ancestor. A council of elders, concerned about these times of great change.

In a recent interview with the Zulu traditional healer Philiswa Makhaye, I asked about stone circles (as there are many in Africa too) and she offered an ancestral perspective that deeply resonated.  They are, of course, astrologically placed and demonstrate sun worship.  Our ancestors knew to look skyward to honour the cycles of life.  The stones offer deep grounding and protection for ceremonies that called down sky ancestors - the healing light of sun, planet and star. 

I plan to return to this circle, to lie back at the hearth stone and dwell with the night sky, praying for our collective wayfinding and liberation. 

Yet, as many of you know, there is only one place in Brigid’s Isle (Britain) where we can legally do such a thing.  

Dartmoor.  Bodmin’s swampy granite-giant-filled ‘land-sister’.  An ancient landscape that is at risk of land and sky access loss.

As Right to Roam says, “The night sky should be our commons - yet our ability to see and connect with the stars is increasingly at risk.”. 

Our access to the sky is crucial in our remembrance of the sheer fact that:

We are stardust

We are golden

And we've got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

May Joni Michell’s lyrics help you remember what is innately yours. 

Right to Roam invite you to dwell with the night sky and to give voice to that which belongs to all beings. For we belong to the garden, who is in constant conversation with the sky ancestors. These are the intuited threads to our Origin Stories and Original Instructions.

Let the stars guide you into the land, into your embodied cosmic origins, toward the first ancestors, and into a radical reclamation of universal belonging.

You can listen to Veronica and guests share on similar themes on the Rooted Healing podcast.

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