Discussion Questions for Clea Danaan's Voices of the Earth

To study Clea Danaan's Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality with a group, or to explore further journaling and personal growth ideas, here are some discussion questions to get you started. Each chapter also ends with project ideas and journal questions.

• What I call a "nature intuitive" just means someone who listens to the land and gains connection and wisdom there. In what ways have you heard trees, stones, rivers, and animals? In what ways do you doubt this channel? What helps you trust it?
• Opening to the rhythms of you body and the land can open the door to a lot of pain and discomfort. Sometimes you can ameliorate this discomfort: drink a glass of water, do yoga, water a tree, even organize an effort to clean up a polluted river. Sometimes the pain is overwhelming. How can you draw on community to seek healing for yourself and the land?
• Walking the path of an awakening human requires compassion and non-judgmental vision. In what ways can you be more compassionate towards yourself? Towards others? In what ways do you find yourself being judgmental towards others - me (the author), New Agers, Pagans, Republicans, big oil executives? Meditate on your judgment to see what lessons it offers you.
• Pages 51-52 list questions about Home. These would be an interesting discussion for a group. "What does it mean that you are in this spot on the global web?" (p 56)
• What gets in the way of your clearing clutter? What does this tell you about yourself?
• What plants are you drawn to? Herbs? Entheogens?
• How about animals?
• What is your quest as an earth ally? This can mean many things - we don't all have to go sit in a redwood tree for two years or start an organic farm. For more on your quest, see Bill Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul.

What is a Nature Intuitive?

In my book Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality I talk a lot about being a nature intuitive. I have to admit this phrase makes me a little uncomfortable (isn't that the curse of the author, to read our published words and cringe a little?). I came up with it in the interest of maybe coining a phrase or at least presenting my ideas in a neat little package. But the thing is, I'm afraid making it a neat little package is rather misleading.

A nature intuitive, as I mean it in Voices, is someone who talks to nature and hears an answer. Who listens to his or her keenest level of sensory perception - which is to say the five senses - to tune into the quantum sea in which we and nature exist. But of course we are nature, too. Everything is nature. To say that a tree or a rock is more "nature" than a person or a table is erroneous. We're all vibrations. We're all part of the great being some call Gaia - and also of God/the Creator/the Goddess/the Great Spirit, etc.

Not everyone's intuitive or psychic abilities are the same. They vary in degree and style. Some are mediums, able to clearly communicate with the dead (and their styles can differ from each other). Some can sense the future. Others may have a heightened intuitive sense but not be tuned in (yet?) to the afterlife or the future, for instance. Along these lines, some people will be more interested in, and therefore able to sense, the vibrations of the natural world than people. So maybe we could call them nature intuitives. But really it's all extended sense perception directed at whatever thing you want to sense. Everyone has this ability, or the ability to develop psychic senses.

I do think perhaps being surrounded by "nature" (i.e. trees, water, stones) helps us to slow the mind chatter, a crucial part of tuning in to extended senses. So learning to intuit nature energies might be an easy first step to developing one's abilities to attune to people, which we usually refer to as psychic.

So. Don't get hung up on the nature intuitive phrase (maybe you weren't - I hope not. I was). It's all about attuning, listening, focusing - inward and outward. I think you'll find that this ability will lead you to "nature" no matter what you call it.

Announcing Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality

March 1 is the official launch date for my new book, Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality (Llewellyn). Publisher's Weekly wrote, "the author's gentle optimism about human relationship to the Earth and earnest care for the planet in all its particularity is a welcome contribution to environmental advocacy." Voices is a prayer for the Earth, a guide for a new way of living on the planet - or rather, a very old one brought into modern culture - where we humans know the voices of the land, the spirit of the animals, trees, stones, and rivers, and in doing so are able to craft a world of harmony and respect for nature and each other. I offer stories of my own experiences with nature, including song birds, trees, Puget Sound, and even mama marijuana, just to name a few. Then I suggest specific ways you might deepen your relationship with the world through art, meditation, and practice. Voices of the Earth is a must for anyone who loves nature, is drawn to a spirituality of any path that embraces the land, and yearns for a more harmonious world.

You can purchase Voices through any independent bookstore (or any bookstore, for that matter, but I always suggest supporting your local indie!), or online at Amazon.com.

Read an interview with author Clea Danaan (that's me!) here.