‘Walk so quietly that the bottom of your feet become ears’
A note from our founder:
‘I didn’t grow up in the countryside, and spent the first 30 years of my life living in cities. I always felt ill-at-ease in the clamour of urban environments, and even as a child, used to feel a longing for home - somewhere peaceful. As a teenager and adult I tried lots of ways to escape my disquiet - drink and drugs, parties, lots of travel, but I always came back to the same feeling of being lost.
When I was almost 30 I worked on a film about hunter-gatherers. As I watched the footage of tribes in Brazil, the Congo and Borneo, I was struck by the way they lived in close relationship with one another, and with the forests that were their homes. They found their food, their clothing and their shelter from the land close to them, and in return they took care of it and honoured it. I realised that I did not know anything about the land I’d grown up in. I couldn’t name the trees or recognise the plants. I didn’t know what was poison and what was medicine. So I decided to learn.
That learning continues to this day. Studying foraging and tracking has taken my deep into many worlds, immeasurably enriching our human world. The many wonders I have found along the way not only satisfied my intellectual curiosity about how we can live in right relationship with the earth, but also helped to soothe my soul’s longing to find a home in the world. As I learned about the trees, plants, rivers and animals, I learned that we are born into a world that, while challenging and sometimes frightening, is also full of medicine, gentleness and almost unbelievable beauty.
I started Plant Listening because I believe that all people should have access to our real home - the natural world. Without it we humans get lost and look for nourishment in the wrong places. I know that I did, and still do. With the support of nature’s abundant medicine we are given vitality, with the examples of the animals we learn to move through our lives with courage and dignity.
Learning to walk in this way, moving slowly, looking carefully, allows us to recalibrate the senses and notice all the subtle signs we otherwise miss. Both we and the world come back to life. I hope you find our events helpful and that we can help support you in some way. The gift of this is that once learnt it is a tool that can be feely used for the rest of your life.’
May we all walk in peace,