The vineyards are quiet; the nights, cold; the goats, rowdy with too much rest. This is the time to sink into the sofa and seed yourself with Spirit, whether that be from meditation, dreaming, or from reading. These books are some of my own reading that I have gotten a great deal from this season, books which relate to Biodynamic farming and spiritual development.
My friend Katherine Presley recommended Tanis Helliwell's Summer with the Leprechauns:A True Story. When I started reading the book, I thought the book was entertaining. The more I read, however, I realized its beefiness. I strongly recommend it in this day and age that we need to learn differentiated ways of viewing energies of the earth and how to interact with them. It reads like a novel, yet offers concrete suggestions on learning to listen to presences that are non-human. In fact, I got so much from the book, I ordered the sequel.
Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns: A True Story of a Mystical Tour of Ireland is an account of one of those tours-from-hell that we all embark upon in some way from time to time, when everything goes against our plans! The mishaps of this particular tour Helliwell organized were engineered by the leprechaun "Lloyd" (not his true name.) By the second book the reader is well aware of Tanis' relationship with Lloyd and Lloyd's fun-loving yet deadly serious mission to help humans with their evolution. Lloyd says that he was originally solicited a hundred years ago by Rudolf Steiner to become a part of an evolving group of elementals who would develop some of the human traits to become conscious creators. They in turn were to help human evolution.
Both of these books provide wonderful teaching through a kind of storytelling and are an important seeding of purpose for those of us working with the Earth. Whether or not these particular ways of Helliwell's are yours, her descriptions nevertheless are distinct, are grounded in universal truths and practices, and invite you to develop your own relationship to the tree outside your window, the grass in the cracks, the path that sometimes is not what you planned.
Do you have your own discipline/methods of communicating with the non-human, whether that be of the earth, animals, plants, cosmos? What have you learned is most important for such communication to happen?
