Nature Spirituality From the Ground Up: Connect With Nature Spirits In Your Ecosystem

by Lupa

Deepen your spiritual connection to the earth and rejoin the community of nature. Nature Spirituality from the Ground Up invites you to explore not just symbols of nature, but to bury your hands in the earth and work with the real thing.

This isn't just another list of totem "meanings" arranged in dictionary style. Instead, it empowers you to discover your totems and make them a part of your everyday life. And where most books just cover the animals, Nature Spirituality from the Ground Up introduces you to the totems of plants, fungi, minerals, waterways, landforms, and more.

Genres: Paganism, Spirituality, Nonfiction, Religion, Philosophy

243 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 8, 2016

About the author

"I am an author, artist, and wannabe polymath living in Portland, OR. I've been a pagan of various sorts since the mid-1990s. My primary focus has always been on totemism and animal magics, though in recent years I've been expanding into the general totemic ecosystem, working with plant, fungus, mineral and other totems. I've written several books based on my practices, and you can read my blog at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/blog as well.

Also since the mid-1990s, I've created ritual tools, sacred costumery, and other meaningful art out of hides, bones, beads, and other organics. It's been a strong part of my spirituality, and I even wrote a book about it, Skin Spirits: The Spiritual and Magical Use of Animal Parts. You can see what's currently available for purchase on my Etsy shop: http;//thegreenwolf.etsy.com

I am very involved in environmental and sustainable efforts. I volunteer with local environmental groups with tree planting and litter cleanup efforts, and I even adopted a small stretch of the Columbia River to clean litter, monitor flora and fauna, and do water testing. At home I do my best to follow Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (in that order), and many of my art supplies are secondhand or otherwise reclaimed, and everything gets used one way or another.

When I'm not creatively working or volunteering, I love to hike, go out dancing, read voraciously when I have the time, and hit the gym a few times a week.

Reviews

[Eli]

I chose not to give this a star rating, as my biggest challenge with it is that it just isn't my "thing." So giving it a lower star rating may not be fair for people whose "thing" it is.

First off, what I love: the early chapters of the book, which go into great detail about how to learn your bioregion. Lupa's questions for getting to know the denizens and features of your region are, imo, must-answers for anyone who claims to follow a Nature-based spirituality.

But then the vast bulk of the book (as I suppose I should've guessed from the subtitle, but I was hoping for a little more balance) is all about "the totems." And let me tell you, I am not a fan of this form of spirituality. I won't spend time arguing with Lupa's basic premise here, because it's her belief system, and a person's beliefs are very personal. (Though I do take issue with the assertion that some totems who are initially resistant just need time and patience to "come around." No means no, even when talking about supernatural entities.)

I will say this: I wish, oh how I wish, that Lupa had found words other than "totem" and "totemism" for her spiritual practices. Lupa does go to considerable lengths to make clear that she's a white person of European descent and isn't talking about indigenous totemism, which I appreciate... but then why call the practice "totemism" and the beings "totems" at all? My understanding is that most indigenous folks would rather have non-indigenous folks use different terms for similar spiritual concepts than have their terms appropriated to describe something completely different from what they use it for. Reading this book felt very challenging when every instance of the word "totem" made me twitch.

[Janis Hill]

I would like to thank Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. for providing me with a free ARC of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an open and honest review.

Sadly this is a DNF book as I just couldn't connect with the book and the author. I loved her passion and found her writing style easy to follow… there was just something about it that wasn’t for me.

I know other people will give a book a bad/low mark for being a DNF, but as an author myself I know how bad that feels. So I hope my no score is less painful. I’m not going to score this book as I don’t want to give it a bad score - as I don’t feel it deserves one. Nor do I want to give it a high score for the same reason.

Basically, this book was not for me. There is nothing wrong with the writing or the story; I just couldn’t get into it. From other reviews I have read, people have loved this book. To me that proves it’s good… for the right audience.

This does not make it a bad book, and I really want to emphasise this. Despite not liking it and not being able to get into it, I did see potential. I, the reader, and this book just weren’t matched and I refuse to mark it down because of my own faults. :-)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nature Spirituality" is a rare beast in the "witchy" space, a book about Nature Spirituality that puts much more emphasis on the ecology, rather than projections of ancient human tradition or personal view. Many natural resources and wildlife biologists, like myself, often struggle with folks who are more focused in mysticism, and Lupa, in this piece, attempts to bridge this gap far better than books that attempted the same before.

When next you wander the woods, if you're a more nitty gritty ecology type, consider using the reccomendations in this book to connect on a more spiritual level with the ecosystem around you. And if you're a more magic and mysticism type, use this book to really understand your ecosystem's functions, all the way down to microbe and soil, not just the big sexy wolves and redwoods.

[Leah Markum · Rating 4 out of 5]

I regard this book as a gentle read. I initially didn't leave a review because I didn't have strong opinion or analysis to express. However, it is worth mentioning that Lupa gives excellent qualitative descriptions about ecological topics like bioregions, along side descriptions to help you open yourself to seeing the world in a spiritual like. It's wonderful to not only think about the natural world as a home, but to break it down by address--I'm in the Beaver Lake watershed in the Boston Mountains, a part of the Ozark Mountains within the Mississippi greater watershed.

Some spirituality books can be too "off" for me, which is part of the reason why I describe this book as "gentle." Lupa's views or her narrative don't grate me and are actually close to my own beliefs. Applying the concept of totems as a lens to see the world with evokes a sense of history, personally and culturally. Maybe some criticize that it's cultural misappropriation, but once upon a time, no matter where your ancestors were, they likely worshiped totems. No one culture owned the idea. I think revitalizing and personalizing the idea is a good way to appreciate so much about the world--human and natural, material or spiritual.