At the Green Team, our mission is to provide transformational experiences for young people that support young people to connect with nature. We do this in many ways; from cutting back and burning invasive rhododendron to river dipping, creating clay faces or just laying back in a hammock and enjoying the view, all the activities that we offer give participants the chance to explore their relationships between nature, others and self.
One activity that we offer sparks excitement above all the rest – we use one of the most primitive tools available to us. We sweep the leaves away from the ground, collect sticks, gather them into bundles, sort them into different thicknesses, we stack them carefully, we gather in a circle, and we begin. The ancient ritual that humans have been practicing for thousands of years. We breathe new life into dead wood, the flames lick, the smoke curls, the air around us fills with that sweet tang of woodsmoke. Eyes light up, marshmallows are toasted and as we gather around our fire, stories begin to emerge from the hearth.
Ancient and Timeless Rituals
The simple timeless ritual of coming together and sharing around a fire never fails to inspire me. There’s some magic there that we cannot quite put into words, a felt sense of wonder and connection that ventures where words cannot go. The ritual act of creating a fire as a community is so rarely practiced in our modern culture, but a campfire offers a space for us to create a container within an outdoor environment – a group hearth where we can come together and co-create a community where we can be held in a space to explore some big ideas. We live in a time where we have technology in our pockets that commands our attention beyond our immediate surroundings, we are acutely aware of ecosystem collapse, social injustices, war, polarising divides between left and right. Now, more than ever, we need to find time to sit in a circle and share. To create and hold ourselves in ceremony for a short time and try to navigate our way through some of the challenges we face.
Joanna Macy and John Seed developed A Council of All Beings[1] through the work that reconnects. This draws on the fundamentals of deep ecology and of ceremony to explore grief and our relationship to all beings from across the world. As part of a ceremony, participants create a shared hearth and are asked to shed their human selves for the duration of the ceremony and instead speak with the voice of a non-human entity. As part of the experience, we explore the plight of these entities, the root causes of some of the challenges they face, address those causes, and explore gratitude and celebrate life. Within A Council of All Beings there is a chance for us to speak to some of the challenges we have in the world and explore our emotional responses to these crises. The space that is created can be therapeutic, emotionally driven and educational all at once.
I wanted to trial this activity with a group of teenagers, to see what would happen. I was working with a group of S6 students from Cliftonhall on a sustainability day, focussing on the Sustainable Development Goals[2]. We had carried out some conservation work at Almondell Country Park in West Lothian, caring for some saplings. In the afternoon, I introduced the activity and asked each person to consider which non-human entity they would like to speak on behalf of. We collected wood for our fire, lit it together, the smoke curled upward to a dark sky and then the rains came. Torrential, summer rain lashed down, through the trees, soaking everything. Our fire was quickly extinguished, but the space had been created already and our intentions set, so we sought out an indoor space to continue our ceremony. We carried our hearth into the warm and dry visitor centre of Almondell.
The Ocean, dandelions, puffins and pandas were all given a voice
Over the course of an hour, we had people speak on behalf of the ocean, dandelions, puffins and pandas. We touched on topics like plastic pollution, food chain collapse, animal agriculture and the Palestinian genocide… Each person could explore their relationship to these issues through the lens of the more-than-human being they were speaking on behalf of, we could understand the intersectionality of many environmental issues. Plastic pollution in the ocean is directly related to human overconsumption, food chain collapse experienced by puffins is linked to overfishing and our understanding of dandelions as a ‘weed’ to be sprayed with noxious herbicide is due to a human perception of what is and isn’t desirable in nature. A common thread that came up is that humans are the root cause of a lot of these issues. We discussed the challenges and solutions to these issues, shared our gratitude and appreciation for all that the earth gives us freely and how we might resolve some of these challenges by turning our gaze towards nature for solutions. It can feel strange to sit in ceremony like this, to see the world and speak out from the perspective of a dandelion, but this experience allows us to dig deeper into global issues around sustainability, and see the world through different eyes.
Lasting impact or just lighting a fire?
At the Green Team, our mission is to ‘provide transformational outdoor experiences that connect children and young people to nature, others and themselves’. I have no idea if this afternoon will have had a lasting impact on the young people that participated. I only hope that something of this will stick with them. Maybe they’ll remember the torrential rain that ushered us indoors, maybe they’ll remember sitting in the visitor centre at Almondell eating slightly stale caramel wafers or maybe they’ll remember how strange it felt to speak as if they were the ocean.
I only hope that something of this experience has lit a little fire within them, that the ancient, and slightly odd feeling of what it means to sit in ceremony will speak directly to the wild animal that lives in every human.
[1] https://workthatreconnects.org/resources/council-of-all-beings/
