western cosmic shit in the southern hemisphere
I think reading a lot of woo-woo pagan-type books as a kid (we had a lot around, my parents are ex-hippies) and getting really into them and then always having to be like “…nah” when they would talk about the mystical symbolism of the flooding rains of February or whatever is a big factor in my “pfft, what is nature, what is its transcendence, all nature is culture” approach to the natural environment
like I’m obviously not saying a felt connection between the natural environment and your spirituality is necessarily colonial, but it’s inarguably the case that the way a lot of white pagans operate is Eurocentric
also in my super-limited understanding the way Indigenous peoples tend to conceptualise the natural environment is much less invested in the nature-culture binary, a conceptualisation that is often misrepresented as some kind of strong Indigenous connection with a transcendent Nature, or closeness to Nature… when it’s actually more like a lack of investment in ideas of transcendent nature that is tainted by and separate from rather than constitutive of humanity. Not because all Indigenous people can be lumped together, but because that whole Romantic Wilderness thing is a triple-A grade Western Enlightenment mentality thing
