Today I am sharing an email from a mentor and someone who shares a very similar attachment to place and spirit of land, Tom Langhorne.
More of Tom’s thoughts and practices may be found on his YouTube channel Fandabi Dozi and his website, tomlanghorne.com.
So without further ado:
How do you best move forward across an unknown land?
How can you travel swiftly and lightly, bearing only the necessities for survival and the simple life?
Is there a way to see the land beyond just a resource or an obstacle, but as an entity with a story to tell and as a home to belong to?
This is the opening of one of my videos that I filmed in 2021, titled: In a Highlander's Shoes [4-Day Expedition] - A Story of Survival, history and Land.
To date, it is the longest Highlander adventure I've undertaken, where I traveled about 80 miles across a variety of terrain in the Scottish Highlands, all with the clothing, equipment and the food of the 17th-century Highlander.
I want to focus on this final question of the intro to this video:
"Is there a way to see the land beyond just a resource or an obstacle, but as an entity with a story to tell and as a home to belong to?"
You could say, a sense of belonging, the sense of connection, is an essential human need.
Generally, when we think of belonging, we think of social belonging, we think of social connection. We're talking about family, friends and tribe, but something that I think is often overlooked is this sense of belonging to land and belonging to place.
Although it might not be as immediate a need as social belonging for our general mental health. I believe it is this lack of connection and belonging to place that has got us in this ecological crisis that the human race now find themselves in, and part of my work, a big part of what I'm interested in, is to find ways to help people feel more connected to nature and to the land around them.
Now, there's a fascinating word in Scottish Gaelic: dùthchas, and generally it can be translated as a deep sense of belonging to land and heritage.
It's a bit more complicated than that though, because it not only means a sense of belonging, but you could also say it means a sense of responsibility for the land.
Over the last few centuries colonialism has destroyed many indigenous cultures and people have been uprooted and immigrated all around the world.
So this sense of long heritage to land, having many ancestors living in the same place has been disrupted for many people.
Now we can't change the past. What's done is done, and even if people follow their heritage to the countries where their ancestors came from, it's not guaranteed that they will feel this feeling of dùthchas.
So what I'm interested in is finding ways, finding techniques, finding methods that we can feel dùthchas no matter where we are.
When I've traveled to different countries around the world, I've found simple things about learning about the indigenous culture, learning about the local edible plants, the wildlife, the geology, the myths and legends, the magical entities of the land all these things.
Just learning a few things can quite quickly make you feel much more at home in the place. Essentially these are methods that we can start to feel dùthchas no matter where we are.
Now I believe we can start to explore our own sense of dùthchas by asking ourselves one simple question, maybe a question you haven't been asked before, and that is where would you like to rot?...
Yes... Rot.
Where would you like to get buried?
Where would you like your ashes to be scattered?
For me, I like this idea that when I die, I will be buried in the Scottish Highlands and my body will rot back into the soil and go back to the land that I love so much.
Death is morbid to many people, but to me that is a comforting thought.
So is there anywhere that comes to mind? Where do you want to be buried? Where do you want to have your ashes scattered? And if that particular place comes to mind, that is where you start your exploration of dùthchas.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the email a big part of what I want to share with you is encouraging you with ways to reconnect with your history, your land and the people we share this world with.
I want people to feel connected and fall in love with the land they live in. To find ways to feel at home in it.
To know its stories, its past, its geology, its plants, its animals, its signs and language that it speaks in.
If people value the natural world as much as their own homes, then we are more likely going to protect it.
And we are more likely to find balance in our everyday lives..
Slàinte mhath
Tom
Most Excellent. Insightful.