Book blog: Nature Spirits by Susan Raven

Why deep human-nature connection is becoming urgent

I invite you to tune in for a minute to the state of the earth, waters and air we all depend on. They’re getting rapidly more polluted: not only physically, but as this book argues, spiritually and psychically, by the intensity of exploitative, egocentric intent that seems dominant in our society, and in humanity’s thought field.

That’s why this book, and the idea of humans deepening positive nature connections, is so timely and important. I learned a lot about dialogue with nature spirits in my 30-plus years stewarding the magical forest at Hazel Hill Wood, but Susan’s book has shown me how to go further.

Susan’s approach is rooted in anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner, whose teachings are famously hard to access in the original. This book does a great job of explaining them clearly, and offering practices to apply them.

Steiner, like some other teachers, sees nature as guided by a kind of spiritual hierarchy, starting with the divinity, then archangels, angels, nature spirits, and elementals: other faith traditions would use different names.

My experience hitherto has mostly been in conversing with the angels of landscapes and sacred places, and with nature spirits, for example of a particular tree. This book is especially good at explaining what elementals are, why they’re so important, and ways to engage with them.

So what do elementals actually do? They are the operators and maintenance crews for natural systems. For example, they guide the growth of plants and trees, and humans: “They exist in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe; they are at work in the heat of our blood and the fire of our metabolism… Our apparently solid, physical form is infused with a life-enhancing, focused plurality of elemental beings.”

She describes elementals as working “at the junction between spirit and matter”: not only within plants, rocks, rivers, and throughout the natural world, but also within humans too. As the name suggests, elementals are often associated with one of the four elements: earth, air, fire and water, and each category has different roles and very different characteristics.

We get glimpses of the elementals, often in distorted form, in fairytales and myths, and they have many different names. For example:

• Earth elementals: gnomes, kobolds, earth spirits
• Water elementals: undines, nymphs, nixes
• Air elementals: sylphs, elves, lemures
• Fire elementals: salamanders, fire spirits.

This may sound a long way from the relentlessly materialist, left-brain culture we’re deluged in, and that’s the point. If you value real, heartfelt connection with people, nature, and the spiritual world, conversing with the elementals can help you, and it will certainly help them.

One of the key points in this book and in others I’ve read, such as Thomas Mayer’s excellent Answering the Call of the Elementals, is that the elementals urgently need human help. Look back at paragraph one above: the elementals’ capacity to sustain the functions, cycles, rhythms of Nature is being overwhelmed, and one of the few antidotes is human appreciation and witnessing.

Susan’s book offers clear ways to do this, and some inspiring examples of her connections with elementals and other nature spirits around her home in the hills of Mid Wales. So I invite you to suspend any doubts, and give this a try. The first few chapters are heavy going, so you may want to start with Chapter 5, as I did. What’s on offer here could deeply nourish your heart and soul, as well as the natural world which needs this so much.

Susan’s website is www.susanraven.com.