Leonardi/Environmental Spirituality, 2. Reconnecting with Nature and Spiritual Experience

This chapter examines the proposition that current attempts to reconnect with nature have the potential to be stepping-stones to spiritual experience. In order to do so it looks at examples of attempts at reconnection but also at some of the more theoretical ideas that are relevant to this. Examples include Forest Bathing and Forest Schools, Regenerative Agriculture and digital apps. The issue of whether secular reconnections can be equated with spiritual experience is examined in the light of ideas about the binary of culture and nature which is then brought into question in the work of such writers as Stengers and Latour. Stengers suggests that it necessary to acknowledge that we are sick through being disconnected with nature and Latour suggests that the language of folds is a means of understanding the reconnections that need to happen. If attention can be focussed on nature and lead to such developments then apparently secular attempts to reconnect even though taken out of their original spiritual context can indeed become stepping stones to spiritual experience as defined in the work of Jeff Leonardi, including a sense of the transcendent and the importance of relationships with both the human and the nonhuman.