The sense of being in the sway of the beings of the ecology is laid out with characteristic lyricality and precision by David Abram in his stunning work Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology where he describes the potent way beings influence that which is beyond them:

“To step into the shadow of this mountain is to step directly under the mountain’s influence, letting it untangle your senses as the rhythm of your breath adjusts to its breathing, to the style of its weather. To step into its shadow is to become a part, if only for this moment, of the mountain’s life. Just as shadows are not flat shapes projected upon the ground (but rather dense and voluminous spaces), neither are they measurable quantities, mere consequences of sunlight and its interruption. Shadows are qualitative attributes of the bodies that secrete them. They are time-dependent realms that change their contours with the hour and the season, momentary life zones where the shadow-casting mountain or boulder or body quietly envelops and gathers a range of other bodies under its sway. The shadow is a bounded space and time wherein the mountain is free to spread out of itself, making itself felt in all its unadorned frankness, drawing a cluster of other entities and elements into a common neighborhood–a zone of alliances and reciprocities enabled by the quiet shelter of the mountains shade.”

To be in a place is to be shadowed and sheltered by it in both its physicality, and its dreamself. We all know this feeling, as certain qualities of feeling and even certain memories are only accessible in certain places. This unfolding is happening not by chance, but instead as an influence of the entities around us. In my experience on the landscape as a person working with spirits, we cannot say we know a place or a being until we have seen them in all their times and faces.

This takes an attunement, and disciplined engagement over time: a type of fidelity that looks like love. Contrary to what we might want to believe, this agentiality and livingness of a place does not stop at some “nature” border, but instead infuses all space/place. William Blake’s poetry of encounter, written in both Felpham and London, shows us that the influence of Los Angeles is just as palpable as the influence of Mount Shasta, no theorizing required.