I think of myself fundamentally as a poet of landscapes: wilderness, cities, and the surreal shifting landscapes of the mind are taken up and treated in my work. Other writers might choose to focus on social issues, on vignettes of moments, or on portraits of people; my own concerns, however, have to do with context and interaction — an ecology encompassing different cultures and religions, past and present, texts and intertexts, gods and animals, men and women. That focus in turn arises out of my own spirituality, which takes up and understands all of these as potentially sacramental; all things are able to mediate the sacred, and all things are beautiful in their own way. Today I will try to elaborate a little more on this.

I believe, fundamentally, in a variant of naturalistic pantheism: I believe that the entire cosmos is unified and intrarelated, and that what we conceive of as “sacred” is simply an aspect of this ultimate reality to which we always have access. I do not believe in souls, or in a creator god, or in a cosmic consciousness, or in any kind of supernatural/spiritual “substance” (though I will use all of these concepts as metaphors if I feel like it). Science, to me, is the key to understanding the universe and its physical workings. But I also step away from the purely physicalist view to emphasize the importance of subjective psychological experience: what goes on in the mind matters as much to me as what goes on outside it. The subjective mind is the proper domain of meaning, magic, emotion, gods, angels, spirits, demons, and other experiences of the numinous; none of these has any objective, independent existence or substance. But I find it unnecessarily impoverishing and reductionist to focus on these exclusively as the result of electrical signals in our brains and chemicals in our bodies, even though that is what they undoubtedly are. I prefer to place my focus, instead, on the products of our imaginations rather than on the processes which make them tick. Mine, in other words, is the spirituality of an anthropologist, artist, or student of literature, rather than that of a physicist or a biologist. The principles are the same. The foci are different.

Spirituality for me involves a sense of the unity of all things, understanding that everything is part of a single cosmic reality. It is simply an understanding of the universe and our own place in it. Everything unfolds, arises, ceases. Everything, including both those things which are inside and those which are outside our heads. And that is why I feel free to allude to gods and spirits and quasi-supernatural powers and to tell stories about them: they serve as personified metaphors which help us to engage with reality. In the realm of science they do not exist. In the realm of story, however, they definitely do. And story is precisely the means by which just about all of us humans make sense of the world and our place in it. Story enriches, and hopefully makes us wiser. (In a sense, then, my own religious space is fairly similar to that of the writers Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, who remain atheist/agnostic even while writing fantasy fiction and maintaining humanist value systems.)

The spiritual is always already there in the material world; it does not exist in some esoteric, rarefied supernatural environment separate from our own reality. We are not somehow separate from the spiritual world; rather, we are always already spiritual beings by virtue of our materiality. All we have to do is wake up to this and acknowledge it. This involves coming to as deep an awareness as we can of the world surrounding us, apprehending it through sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, emotion, and imagination. (The various arts help to enhance all of these.) And the more aware a person becomes of the world encountered through these seven aspects, the more spiritually aware he or she also becomes.

I speak of this sometimes as a nature-based spirituality. But I speak of something very different from the simplistic understanding of “four legs good, two legs bad”. There is a popular belief in our society that nature is good, nurturing, and sound, while humanity is evil, destructive and rapacious. I reject this dualistic, adversarial perspective, drenched as it is in notions of original sin and human guilt. We — and all our cities and technology — are always already part of nature, and try as we might we cannot escape it. Like the Monkey King, we cannot jump off the Buddha’s palm. Nature made us what we are and gave us the impulses we have, and even if we were to build a world of metal and plastic and machines — a world where nothing organic is left — it would still be perfectly natural. And no matter whether we kill, abuse, wreck, devastate, love, honour, dream, or restore, we cannot escape who we are and what we have evolved to be.

Nature itself does not care. It creates, sustains, and destroys; it is both nurturing and vicious, placid and violent, harmonious and chaotic in equal measure. As far as nature is concerned killing is as sacred as giving birth, and death is as honourable as life. The fall of every sparrow might be noted, but the sparrow still falls. It will not be resurrected, whisked away from death, caught in a safety net. I am not saying we should take nature as a model for morality; human morality needs to have solid human principles behind it and to be based on human needs and circumstances. Nor am I saying that ecology is unimportant. But let us not kid ourselves that we are “saving Gaia”: Gaia needs no help, and does not care. The planet will one day be swallowed up by the sun anyway. We, in fact, are the ones who need saving from the effects of our own impulses. We are doing ourselves a favour by preserving the ecological balance; our concerns, frankly, are for our own survival and the survival of the things we hold dear. Nature itself does not give a damn about what we do with the planet; after all, sooner or later there will always be another planet and another sentient species. (As if that mattered either.)

What matters to me, then where spirituality is concerned? First, the perspective that everything in the cosmos is fundamentally interrelated, fundamentally one; second, the understanding that the spiritual and the material are one and the same; and third, a belief in the power of story, culture and imagination to help us relate to and understand the world around us.