Contemplative ecology

Every leaf holds a lesson; every stream, a story.

Stillness awakens the symphony of the wild.

When you slow down and examine a garden or park, you notice things you might have missed.

A bird building its nest, ants on their trails, or flowers turning to face the sun.

This way of paying attention to nature is part of contemplative ecology.

It means noticing and connecting with the natural world around us.

Think about how you feel when you walk through a forest or sit by a stream.

There’s often a sense of calm that comes over you, right?

This feeling is why contemplative ecology combines quiet observation with plant study.

It’s like getting to know a friend.

The more time you spend together, the deeper your connection grows.

Be present and pay attention

This approach changes how we see our place in nature.

Instead of thinking of ourselves as separate from the natural world, we start to notice how we’re part of it.

Trees supply the air we breathe.

Soil grows our food.

Natural cycles provide our drinking water.

Noticing these links makes us care more about the environment.

Observing nature can teach us things that books alone cannot reveal.

For example, watching a garden through the seasons.

This shows us a partnership between plants and insects.

Sitting quietly by a pond reveals how different creatures share the same space.

These firsthand experiences help us understand nature’s patterns.

Reading about them could never do that.

This deeper understanding can change how we treat the environment.

When appreciating nature, we are more likely to consider how our actions affect it.

It’s like developing a friendship.

Once you care, you want to look out for their well-being.

This way of connecting with nature isn’t good for the environment—it’s good for us, too.

Research shows that spending time in nature can reduce stress and improve mental health.

We must pay careful attention to our surroundings.

It’s as if, by slowing down and tuning in to nature’s rhythms, we remember our own natural pace.

Contemplative ecology says nature isn’t a resource or a problem.

It’s a community we’re part of.

By observing and connecting with nature, we can improve our relationship with it and find ways to live that work for both nature and us.

On the shoulders of many

All creative work is influenced by others, both those we know and those we do not.

What follows is an acknowledgement of the people, ideas, and traditions that have shaped this work.

I offer my sincere gratitude and thanks to all those, known and unknown, who have made this work possible.

As with any creative outpouring, Domei stands on the shoulders of many.


Prelude

Domei arrived slowly, over forty years of contemplative practice and the steady work of undoing myself.

The conditioned human.

I gave it a name. Not to claim it but to share something already alive.

A practice shaped by time, silence, and the subtle pull of things wanting to be remembered.

Just a way of meeting the world quietly, again and again.


The thread itself

It gathered over years of attention, hunches, mistakes and watching what stayed.

A living current of relation, slowly woven through contact.

Between inner life and outer world. Between body and place. Between memory and moss.

Giving it a name was a way of marking what had long been forming so it could be shared, spoken, and deepened.

This practice is not complete. It continues to unfold. Each time I return, it meets me anew. And for that, I give thanks.


The roots

At eleven, my English teacher read Richard Bach’s  Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It landed deep. A bird who refused conformity. Who followed the quiet call within.

That story gave me early permission to trust what I sensed, even if no one else could see it.

Domei is that same refusal to be pinned down, polished, or explained away.


Alan Bain (1931–2006) was a British esoteric teacher who practised as an independent Catholic priest and bishop.

He was known for integrating Christian mysticism, Kabbalah, and grounded inner work.

For many years, he mentored me. His clarity and discipline helped shape Domei at its root.

Through him, I entered Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. A path of wakefulness within ordinary life. Not retreat, but attention in action, in the everyday.


J. Krishnamurti challenged me to hold no ideology. To let belief be fluid, not fixed.

He showed that truth isn’t something to possess, but something that lives in direct perception.

He asked us to see without filters. To meet the world without the distortion of systems, methods, ideology or inherited thinking.

His voice sits quietly beside Domei, as a reminder to stay with the real, and resist the comfort of answers that close down inquiry.


The mystics

I learned from HildegardEckhart, and the Desert Fathers that silence has weight. That presence can be prayer. That sacredness doesn’t require language; it only requires attention.


Frank Cook (1963–2009) was an American ethnobotanist and educator who travelled widely to study traditional plant knowledge.

He encouraged me to teach before I believed I could. His quiet trust was catalytic. Without him, Domei would never have taken its first public breath.


Stephan Harding (1953–2024) was a scientist and ecologist who studied nature and taught at Schumacher College. His work was entangled with scientific research, intuition, and deep ecology.

Stephan attended one of my sessions at a small festival. We hadn’t met. Afterwards, he said: ‘We’re drinking from the same well.’

He was the first to name the depth of what I was offering. That quiet recognition gave me permission to trust what I was doing. To continue. To deepen.


Goethe taught me that perception isn’t passive. It’s participatory.

Not a means of capture but a relationship. To see something clearly, you must enter into a felt sense of contact with it.

His practice of exact sensing, approaching phenomena without dissecting them, remains one of the foundations of how Domei invites us to see.

This way of seeing has been preserved by many within the Goethean tradition.

One significant influence from Goethean science has been the work of Craig Holdrege. He teaches that to understand a being, we must meet it as it lives, not as it is measured.


Forest dwellers

In the forests of Southeast Asia and India, I was guided by people whose names I have since forgotten. They lived with the land. They demonstrated it to me through walking, movement, and pauses. Not teaching. Just being.

They revealed what becomes possible when we come to our senses. When attention is full-bodied. Their way of living lives quietly at the heart of Domei.


The quiet shapers

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve taught thousands in my workshops, courses, retreats and walks.

Before I had words like Domei, these quiet participants helped shape what it would become.

Their questions and silences. Their ways of being with plants showed me what mattered. They were and are co-weavers of the practice.


The plantworkers and nature connectors

I stand alongside many others. Plant workers, deep ecologists, community activists, artists, and quiet teachers.

The ones who try to walk with integrity and deeply love this animate earth. Too many to name. Each one left a trace.

For every exchange, every challenge, every shared wondering, thank you.


Pauline Oliveros taught me that listening is more than hearing.

Her deep listening practice expanded her awareness to include all sounds, internal and external, without judgment.

I carried that into the whole field of sensory attention. Not just ears, skin, breath, gut, eyes, feet, memory.

That’s how Domei was named. From two Gaelic roots meaning ‘deep’ and ‘to listen.’ Listening with the whole body. A presence that meets the world as it is.


Adrian Harris is an ecopsychologist whose work straddles the fields of embodiment, ecology, and consciousness studies.

He mentored me through a crucial period of reflection. Quietly listening and reflecting back as I struggled to find the right words to describe what I was experiencing.

He asked questions, and mirrored what mattered. He encouraged me to codify the teachings that would become Domei, and strongly encouraged me not to rub myself out of the work.


And the plants, always!

And through it all, the plants.

The hawthorn. The chickweed. The moss on a Dartmoor rock.

They taught me to return. To slow down. To be present without needing anything.

They remain the centre. The source. The reason.

I live because of them.


Updated: 4th July 2025

Solara – A new word for a world on fire

Traditionally, the 21st of June is the summer solstice. I used to honour it in one way but now find myself speaking of it differently.

Over the past year, I’ve been quietly rewriting the seasons; the celebrations, the solstices, the equinoxes. Giving them new names.

Not to discard the past, we are shaped by it, but because the old words no longer speak to the world we are entering.

A world that, in living memory, none of us has inhabited. A world that is, quite literally, on fire.

I call this day Solara now.

A name that rose from the old Latin sol, meaning “sun,” but it carries more than etymology. It carries weight. Radiance. Risk.

Solara isn’t just a celebration. It’s a reckoning.

An acknowledgement of the sun not as a symbol but as the source of all energy, all weather, and all growth.

The brilliance that ripens fruit and chars the soil.
The heat that wakes seeds and withers crops.
The force that makes life possible and makes it precarious.

We’ve long bowed to the sun in myth and ritual. But Solara speaks to a different knowing. A scientific clarity.

The truth is that every green leaf, every breath of oxygen, and every beat of this warming world begins with fire.

It is the sun that sustains us.
And it is the sun that could undo us.

Solara is the name I’ve given to hold both.

The light and the burn.
The gift and the warning.

I didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t sit down to craft a new cosmology. I just started writing and sharing.

What surprised me was how deeply the work around Domei had landed with others. It seems to name something many have felt but lacked words for.

Not a system, not a method. An approach. Just a way of coming back to the body, to the senses, to the world as it is.

I coined the word from Gaelic roots: domhain (deep) and éist (listen).

To me, Domei is a deep, sensory form of attention. It’s how I meet the world now.

Not through the mind alone but through felt presence. A body-based way of being that arose not from theory but from necessity.

And I want to be clear. Domei doesn’t replace other frameworks. It stands alongside them.

I’m not knocking mindfulness, or shamanism, or any other path. I’ve had some angry emails suggesting I am. I’m not.

I’m simply saying: this isn’t those things.

Domei isn’t mindfulness. It’s not plant spirit medicine. I don’t use the language of spirits in my work. That doesn’t mean others shouldn’t. It just means this is different.

I notice how brittle belief can become when people get triggered by that difference.

That defensiveness often points to something deeper. And I understand it. I’ve been there. I used to live from that place of righteous certainty.

But certainty is a dangerous thing.

I need something to hold onto, especially now, as war drums sound in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Domei is that for me. A thread I can follow through the chaos.

As an artist, I have to put this into form. If I don’t, it consumes me. The fire turns inward. It burns me up.

So I speak, write, and offer my thoughts, not because I have answers, but because I don’t.

I have a practice and know what happens when I don’t attend it.

In recent months, I’ve watched as people lash out, shaming others for not protesting against the war, not being loud enough, not being ‘on the right side.’

I know that place. I came from there. I was a street-fighting activist as a young man. Angry. Raw. Unprocessed. Projecting my own pain onto the world.

It took decades to recognise that. And part of why I spiralled into addiction was because I didn’t know what to do with that pain.

In 2016, I wrote a prose poem called Foraging as an Act of Reverence. In it, I said:

“If we protest, we must do so with a kind, loving, open heart. The exact opposite of how we might feel at the injustices done in the name of progress and civilisation.”

It’s not easy, it’s the hardest thing in the world, but anything else repeats the cycle.

I was violated as a boy. I’ve never hidden that. And for years, every act of violence I saw in the world echoed that original violence. I didn’t know it then.

But in recovery, I had to learn what forgiveness really meant. And it took everything I had.

Forgiveness isn’t about letting the perpetrator off the hook. It’s about turning the gaze inward.

Forgiving myself. For how I survived. For how I lashed out. For how I mirrored what I didn’t understand. And something strange happened.

When I truly forgave myself, my relationship to the past changed. Its heat cooled. The shadows lifted. I came to peace, not forgetting, not excusing, but peace.

That shift changed everything. Because until I made peace with myself, I kept re-enacting the wound. Kept seeing enemies in every direction. Kept projecting.

And so when I see people weaponising language, “You’re either with us or against us”, I recognise the fear beneath it. The pain. The powerlessness. I’ve lived that.

I’ve learned that it doesn’t lead where we think it will. Real change doesn’t come from shame. It comes from presence, kindness, and compassion.

The first step in the 12-step recovery model is admitting you’re powerless. That your life has become unmanageable. I don’t work the programme anymore (I have other practices I do), but I carry that step with me.

Because once I admitted I was powerless, not intellectually but viscerally, in my bones, something opened up; not despair, but acceptance.

And that’s what Domei offers me.

Not escape.
Not transcendence.
But radical presence.

A return to the body. To breath. To the more-than-human world.

And from that place, I can begin to meet the world’s madness with something other than my own.

This isn’t about having it all figured out. I don’t.

But Domei isn’t about perfection.

It’s about practice.

It’s about showing up. Again and again.

In the mud. In the noise. In the not-knowing.

I don’t believe systemic change comes from railing and blaming.

It comes from stillness.
From compassion.

From daring to meet the whole of ourselves, the beautiful, the broken, the buried. All of it. Held, like a frightened child, in our own arms.

People write, ‘This is lovely, but how do we get real change’.

And I want to say that this is real change. This is the work, the quiet work, the root-deep work.

And no, it might not be enough to stop the fires.
But it might be enough to keep us human.

So, if you’ve been reading Domei as just another poetic framework, stop.

Go do the practices.
Step outside.
Sit with a plant.
Let your senses lead.

Don’t think your way in.
Feel your way forward.

That’s the only way any of this makes sense to me.

On this solstice day, the traditional time to gather glasswort/marsh samphire, after the tide has washed it twice, I’m off to a wedding.

The light has already begun its slow retreat. But today, there is sun. Kind of where I live.

May your day be peaceful.
May your weekend be quiet.

Even if the storm continues in the human world, may there be one place in you that stays still.

Domei practice examples

There’s something your body knows about being with plants.

It’s not complicated knowledge.
It doesn’t require training.
It lives in your senses, waiting.

The three practices below come from 30 Days of Domei.
They’re simple. Direct. Grounded in what you can feel right now.

No preparation needed.
No special place required.
Just you, a plant, and five minutes of shared presence.

These aren’t exercises to master.
They’re invitations to remember what your body already knows about being alive in relationship with the more-than-human world.

Start with whichever one calls to you.
Or the one that feels most ordinary.

Day 1: First Meeting

Find the nearest plant. Sit with it for five minutes as if you’ve never seen a plant before. Let your attention drift over its features. Notice what draws your eye. Discover five things you’ve never seen before. No need to name them.

Day 8: Quiet Waiting

Choose any plant. Sit beside it without trying to connect or learn anything. Just be its neighbour for five minutes. Let go of expectations. Notice what happens when you stop trying to make something happen.

Day 19: Ground Feeling

Stand barefoot near plants if possible. Feel your connection to earth. Notice how your balance changes when you pay attention to different plants around you. Let your body find its natural alignment with this place.


Category: Writing

Attention as kinship

There’s a moment when attention becomes something else entirely.

Sitting with a plant, your focus softens from looking at it to being with it.

When the space between you and the wild mint at your feet stops feeling like distance and starts feeling like connection.

This is what Domei opens. Not just awareness of plants. But a felt connection with them.

The kind that lives in your body, not your thoughts.

Most attention we’ve learned is extractive. We look to gather information. To identify and categorise. To take something useful away.

But there’s another kind of attention. One that creates connection rather than collection.

It’s the attention you bring when you sit with someone you care about. You are present without agenda, interested without needing.

The attention that builds relationship rather than accumulating facts.

When you practice Domei, you offer this quality of attention to plants.

Your attention doesn’t dissect or analyse. It meets. It connects.

The dandelion stops being a weed to identify and becomes a being to know.

Someone whose texture, scent, and way of moving become familiar.

Someone whose presence you recognise.

In this felt sense, you’re not alone in this moment.

You recognise there’s another life sharing this patch of earth with you.

This isn’t projection or imagination. It’s recognition.

The same recognition happens when you meet someone’s eyes across a room and feel that moment of contact.

Or when you touch your hand to an animal’s fur and feel them lean into your palm.

Connection that’s bigger than either of you individually.

Domei cultivates this with plants.

Through attention that receives rather than grasps.

That feels rather than thinks.

That connects rather than collects.

The same way you knew how to connect with the world as a child. Before you were taught that plants were background to human life.

Before, attention had become a tool for productivity rather than an act of relationship.

When you practice Domei, that original capacity for connection awakens.

The plant world stops being scenery and becomes a community.

The garden stops being yours and starts being shared.

Your daily walk stops being exercise and starts being a series of meetings with neighbours you’re learning to know.

This is attention as connection.

Simple. Direct. Felt in the body.

Not a skill to master but a capacity to remember.

It’s not something you do to plants but something you share with them.

Against the bark

Sit with your back to a tree. Hands resting. Nothing to do. Twenty minutes or so.

You’re not meditating. Not trying to feel anything special.

Just being there, letting whatever wants to arrive. Arrive.

This is relational awareness.

Not thinking about connection but being in it.

When you first settle against the trunk, your mind might race through its usual catalogue of concerns.

The day’s tasks. The week’s worries. The body’s complaints about sitting still.

Let it all move through.

Don’t push it away, don’t chase it.

Just notice how the tree doesn’t seem bothered by any of it.

After a while, something shifts.

Your breath starts to settle, matching some quiet rhythm that isn’t yours but also is. The edge between you and the tree softens a little.

Not in some mystical sense but in the simple way that bodies respond to presence when given time and space.

The tree’s aliveness becomes obvious. Not conceptually, you already knew trees were alive, but in your bones.

Your nervous system recognises another nervous system, even one that operates on completely different timescales.

Your vertebrae against its bark. Your pulse against its patient growth.

This isn’t about becoming one with the tree or downloading its ancient wisdom.

It’s about practising a quality of attention that our culture has largely forgotten…

…being with rather than using.

Receiving rather than extracting.

Letting the world meet you halfway instead of demanding it bend to your will.

Twenty minutes of this, and you might find yourself moving through the rest of your day differently.

More aware of the relationships already happening around you.

The breath moving in and out.

The ground holding you up.

The intricate web of support that keeps you alive, moment by moment.

Relational awareness isn’t a technique.

It’s a way of being that emerges when you stop trying so hard to be somewhere else.

The world will teach you

Kneel beside a nettle patch. Not to harvest, though you might, later. Not to study or identify. To spend time. To be a good neighbour.

This is how presence begins. Not with purpose, but with proximity.

The nettle doesn’t need your analysis or your Latin names.

It requires your attention, the kind that arrives empty-handed and stays put.

Come most mornings for months.

Long enough to notice how the patch responds to rainfall and changing light. Long enough to see which insects visit when.

To witness the whole community of beings that call this small patch of ground home.

What emerges from this practice isn’t knowledge about nettles. It’s conversation with them.

You begin to recognise how their leaves catch morning dew, how they lean toward gaps in the canopy, and the soft percussion of rain on their serrated edges.

You notice the red admiral butterflies that depend on this patch for their children and the aphids that cluster on tender stems. The ground beetles hunt in the soil below.

This is ecological literacy written in flesh and chlorophyll rather than textbooks.

The nettle becomes a portal into the intricate relationships that sustain all life, including yours.

Through months of quiet attendance, you discover that the plant is never separate from its community, never isolated from the weather patterns and seasonal rhythms that shape its growth.

The world teaches everything you need to know, but only to those willing to sit still long enough to listen.

This isn’t passive observation, it’s active participation in the conversation that surrounds us always.

The nettle patch becomes a teacher not because it holds secrets but because it reveals the obvious truth we’ve forgotten: we are part of this community, too.

To know a place this intimately changes how you move through all areas.

You begin to see every verge, every crack in the pavement, every overlooked corner as home to someone.

The practice spreads.

On contemplating plants

On my 26th birthday, I left the church, resolving never to return. A profound experience transformed me, liberating me from a tradition I found too confining. 

Since then, I have experimented with and explored the practice of ‘being present’, mainly within Western and Eastern contemplative traditions that highly value direct experience. 

It’s why I like Taoism. A slow, quiet, peaceful philosophy of few words. 

After giving interviews on a few podcasts, I realised that although I was invited to speak about foraging, I no longer merely discussed foraging as a means to nourish ourselves with wild ingredients. 

I focused on the deeper meaning of the word fed and what it means to feed oneself.

I am taking the understanding beyond the usual cultural meaning of consuming the necessary nutrients the body requires to function correctly. 

Instead, I wandered off script and down untrodden paths, exploring what ‘feeding ourselves’ means more profoundly, more contemplatively, beyond just physical nourishment. 

The podcast hosts loved it, it was a breath of fresh air. 

Recently, while exploring the interior of India, I met with some extraordinary people. 

People whose lives embodied much of what I had discovered over the past thirty years exploring what it means to be human in a world we barely understand intellectually, let alone know in a deep-felt way. 

The art of foraging is much more than a plate of food. 

When I teach, I give students a rudimentary toolkit and framework to learn about plants by directly relating to them. 

I usually use the term ‘primal sensing’ to explain how this happens. I need to be clear that my ‘plant work practices’ have nothing to do with shamanism or the New Age.

They are rooted in the foundation of all contemplative traditions. In a single word. Awareness. 

An awareness that has nothing to do with chasing the red herrings of ‘being spiritual’ or ‘being enlightened’. 

I find these expressions akin to bad-tasting candy floss. 

No, I mean awareness in the raw sense of enlivening your senses and turning the volume up a few notches. 

If we can get out of our heads and come to our senses, we can start noticing the beauty, wonder, and joy in each moment. 

My plant work is practical, and anyone can experience it.

There are no secrets. Just you, your senses, and this gorgeous planet you live on.

When we can do this, our lives soften, and serenity and serendipity walk us through life.

As a term, primal sensing never sat well with me. It was too clinical and academic, but it was the closest term I could come up with that described the practices and the experiences that followed. 

Then, while visiting India in 2024 and unplugging from most of my digital life, a word emerged that evolved into the perfect summarisation of what happens when we allow ourselves to be ‘fed beyond the plate’. 

For many of you, this direction of where my plant work is going will likely leave you scratching your head. 

You might well tune out and leave. 

And that’s OK; I’m letting you know now that this is where my work is going. I will still write about the edible and medicinal uses of plants, but interwoven will be the deeper work.

Deep connection with plants and the rest of the non-human world.

I started exploring the word Domei, a neologism (a word I coined myself). 

Words are important to me. They carry energy because a single word can express something precisely. 

I needed a word untarnished by religion, spirituality and all the usual navel-gazing. 

One that expressed the human as a sensory animal, a word that embraced all our senses. 

That word is Domei. 

Domei blends Gaelic Domhain (deep) and Éist (listen) to signify profound, immersive engagement with our surroundings. 

It embodies deep listening beyond the auditory, urging an embodied, empathetic connection with nature through all of our senses. 

I use the word listening here in its broadest interpretation; listening equates to feeling. 

Together, Domhain and Éist create Domei

In this context, Domei becomes an attention practice that involves using our entire body to “feel into” the wildness around us. 

In my work, I immerse myself in the plant kingdom and draw inspiration from what I discover through this immersion. 

It’s about tapping into the unspoken language of nature, where every rustle of leaves, every whisper of the wind, and every ripple in a stream communicates something about our existence. 

Nature as metaphor and more. 

This practice of Domei encourages us to step beyond our conventional botanical understanding of plants, inviting us to engage with the plant kingdom with an open heart and a keen sense of creativity and intuition. 

It’s a call to experience the world and to attune ourselves to the subtle feelings and shifts as we respond to the world and move through it. 

We start hearing the natural data signals, the feedback loop our environment is continually giving us. 

It is a natural sensory map showing us the right direction for our lives, all revealed through our internal guidance system known as the senses. 

Through Domei, we learn to listen not only with our ears but with our skin and bones, our breath, and the very fibres of our being. 

Engaging in Domei means sitting next to a plant or under a majestic tree and deeply feeling our connection to it. 

This practice is an invitation to dissolve the barriers between the self and the plant world, to become fully present in the moment, and to experience the unity and interconnectedness of all things. 

Domei is not just a practice but a way of being, a path to deeper understanding and harmony with the plant kingdom and the rest of the non-human world.