As I embarked on this journey a couple of months ago, I wasn’t sure where it’d take me. I sought a spiritual connection with nature in my quest for self-discovery and personal well-being. Studying traditional Buddhism, meditation, Zen, and dipping my toes into the world of witchcraft on a whim, discovering paganism and a spark that’s kindled since a young age, I happened upon a new world, though in truth, one much older than what I had always known.

Be it Wicca or heathenry, hellenism or kemetism, the neo-pagan (to include reconstructionist pagan) movement provides, at its core, a needle to thread through your daily life to something more ancient and untamed, something two thousand years of spiritual domination by Christianity has unraveled in the West: individual freedom and a sense of oneness with the world around us.

The origin of ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen’ are of the same idea: outsiders, country-folk, the people who lived outside the cities and towns. At first, pagan was used to describe Christians in polytheistic Rome, then as Christianity supplanted the old gods and Rome actively persecuted their worship, the cities became the centers of Christian faith and the tables swiftly turned. The last holdouts for the old religion were the farmsteads and frontiers of civilization, where the people had not forgotten their place among the trees and mountains, where nature still reigned unbridled.

The old ways inhabit a world where humans and nature are not two distinct, conflicting paradigms, but rather one harmonious entity. Do not fool yourself, nature may be cruel. The hungry wolves will not back from the calf for innocence’s sake. But, it is balanced, it gives and it takes. It embodies the perfect imperfect. The gods are this for men. They are forces of nature we turn to for guidance, wisdom, and aid. But just as nature may be fickle, spontaneous, unruly, chaotic, nurturing, and cruel, so too may the gods. They are nature manifest in beings we may encounter and interact with and begin to understand, and like us, are imperfect.

Thus, when we reach for that connection as modern pagans, we seek that same connection our ancestors understood. What was once respected and feared as a force of life and death, now mastered and maimed, we yearn for as a place of respite and belonging. Humanity may have forgotten the world, but the world has not forgotten humanity. She seeks us, she whispers in the gentle breeze with the amber fall, and pleads in howling winds with the thundering storm. We simply must listen as she calls us home.