There are no privileged locations. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere. All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look.
—Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put
Spiritual writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder describes the almost universal experience of transcendence in the natural world:
One of my favorite questions to ask people is whether they experience the sacred in the living world. Everyone I have ever put this question to has, near-immediately, answered “yes,” even if they would not call themselves spiritual or ever employ the word sacred. The affirmative answer to that question is also always paired with a specific place or experience. I’ve heard countless stories of what I’ve come to think of as axis mundi experiences: encounters that have pulled someone into a deep experience of felt belonging upon the tiny bit of Earth that they find themselves upon. It’s often very simple: a passing deer or a bathing bird that somehow opens a window into their sensory being, and, from there, the relationship flows freely, not between I and it, but I and thou.
We encounter the sacred by paying attention to the life around us and the ground beneath our feet:
I define “sacred” as that which pulls us beyond the bounds of our individual selves, envelops us within mystery, and gives us a glimpse into the vast, entwined, eternal network of living beings that we are in relationship with. A simpler way of saying it: the moments when we are most fully human via our awareness that we are fully entangled, down to our nuclei and electrons, in the Earth and the cosmos…. The living world can illuminate this understanding in the forms of awe and wonder, as well as in the forms of grief and loss. And such illuminations can arise spontaneously into our consciousnesses, precisely because this sacred truth is always present everywhere upon the Earth, whether or not we are aware of it…. They are the moments when that sacred reality comes into focus, inviting us to orient ourselves, even if briefly, to the particular, small bit of the cosmos where we have placed our feet. Perhaps this has happened for you upon reaching the summit of a mountain, or while sitting beneath the boughs of an old growth tree, or simply while hearing the voice of a bird you recognize from your childhood home.
Which is to say: whatever we believe (or don’t) about God and gods, about holy texts and pilgrimages, all of us hold within ourselves the potential to be pinned in place by a sacred pole. And in this time when there is so much disconnect from the living world, so much separation, in this time of razed forests, deserted pockets of warmed oceans, and the echoes of extinct species, orienting ourselves around these fixed points becomes more crucial than ever.
Reference:
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, Mother, Creature, Kin: What We Learn from Nature’s Mothers in a Time of Unraveling (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 7, 9.
Graham Mansfield, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Just as bread, wine, and water reveal grace in sacrament, so too the natural world invites us to be relaxed enough to receive the abundance already present—where even a quiet day without fish becomes its own communion.
Story from Our Community:
Listening to the silence in my sanctuary, there is an absence of birds singing, the quiet silence of the morning, the quiet within my mind, my heart, my being. Stillness. Perhaps it’s time to buy more bird seed to hear the choir of my friends again. The silence is coming through my heart as a smile.
—Tom S.
