Baby Steps back into Animacy

How Ceremony Powers the Rights of Nature Movement and Demonstrates Democracy in Action.

85 people of all ages and walks of life attended an Imbolc River Blessing in Stroud on Sunday 1^st February 2026 for a ceremony which took them on a journey into animacy and a shift from human-centric to eco-centric awareness.

A range of participants including activists, councillors, ecologists, environment workers, artists, musicians, story-tellers, lecturers, engineers, children, babies, octogenarians, druids, Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Shamanic types, and voters from across the political spectrum all came together out of gratitude for water and concern about the state of our rivers.

The River Blessing was held in a field within easy hearing of the roar of fast-flowing Frome as she rushes from source to Severn through the town of Stroud whose wealth was built upon the wool industry powered by said river. As I began the ceremony I made the point that the time has come for us to make amends with water and to say ‘thank you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, and I love you’.

According to Robin Layfield writing in the online publication Amplify:

“There is real power in a ritual and it felt vividly like we were all part of a spell that was being woven from all our hopes and fears and that our collective energy and will was being shared with the land and with the river and with each of us that stood there”

River Blessings are a form of Sacred Action on behalf of mother Earth and all of life. Ceremony brings us into presence and this gives us the opportunity to shift our perception from extraction from nature to relationship with nature. After 20 years of leading Fire Ceremonies and more recently three years of River Blessings, I notice the momentum and collective appetite is building as more and more people turn to earth-based spirituality for wisdom and nourishment.

To begin with I asked everyone to name their favourite water body and then we went into a fire ceremony. The Fire Ceremonies I am initiated into leading are in the tradition of Eduardo Calderon, a legendary healer from the north coast of Peru. In this type of ceremony we exchange energies with fire. We offer all of who we are in this moment and in return we draw warmth to fire our seed essence moving forwards. We offered up the heaviness associated with worry, anger and grief about our rivers and in return we received empowering warmth from the sacred fire. Jo McAndrews, a local choir-leader, led us in song and everyone sang and drummed with great gusto the wonderful ‘Oh Round Mother Earth’ by Theo Simon. At the start of the fire ceremony I also paid respect to Brigid (later known as St Bridget) the ancient fire Goddess of Imbolc; Goddess of poetry, healing and smith-craft.

We then created a living prayer together, harmonising waters as everyone poured some water they had brought from their locale into a collective jug, they also placed a flower onto an offering I had woven from local branches. This weaving of prayers and energies from everyone present is inspired by another tradition which I am initiated into: despacho. Despacho is known as the oldest form of conflict resolution in S America and I learned this from my teachers who live in Hatun Q’eros.

As we were creating this living prayer, we were singing a song (which I adapted from JJ Middleway) ‘I am water, that is all that I am’ which Jo led us into.

After we had created this living prayer, I told the story of meeting Shirley Krenak when she came to the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm post-COP in November 2021. A friend brought her from COP in Glasgow to talk to us, an audience of 400 artists, musicians, journalists etc in London. I wanted to tell her story and acknowledge the impact which she had on all of us at the Roundhouse when she invited us to say ‘I am Watu’. Shirley described how the Krenak tribe’s whole identity and way of life is 100% woven into their river Watu; how they grew up playing, washing, cooking, drinking, swimming in this sacred river. In 2015 the Samarco mining dam collapse severely contaminated this river and the Krenaks have had to adapt and change their whole lifestyle.

Shirley said to us ‘we don’t need your help, we’ve had your help for the past 500 years. We need you to listen to us. We are looking after the biome for your children as well as our children’. “I am biome” and she got us all to repeat “I am biome” back to her as well as “I am Watu”. When we did this the atmosphere in the Roundhouse was electrifying, and Shirley said: “that makes you feel powerful”. When I asked everyone at the ceremony to repeat ‘I am Watu’ and repeated Shirley’s words ‘that makes you feel powerful’ several people nodded in agreement. This is why at every River Blessing and at XR actions in London I ask people to name their favourite water by saying ‘I am river….’ This is such a profound shift: an invitation into embodiment, an acknowledgement that we literally are the rivers whose waters course through the land we live in. Out of respect for Shirley Krenak I want to acknowledge her for this profound teaching and baby step back into animacy. And her second very important wisdom teaching is that even though their river Watu is poisoned, they still identify with her.

“THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPLY MAGICAL about reconnecting with the land and the water around you, about acknowledging that we are all just a tiny part of this world and that no amount of tarmac, river pollution, AI or doomscrolling can take away our fundamental links to and our origins within nature” Robin Layfield, Amplify.

To finish our ceremony and in honour of Shirley Krenak and my Q’ero teachers we sang a Q’echuan song which translates to ‘Oh mother of the waters who brings us into life and carries us through’ and while we were singing this I offered some of our collected waters to the land then anointed each person with the prayerful water. We then processed down to river Frome where in the traditional way, two of the youngest, Tara and Luna, poured the waters into river Frome and I cast the flower offering, our collective prayers carried out to the waters of the world.

In reading this piece you will have noticed my acknowledgement of mentors and teachers whose practices inspired the rituals in this ceremony. I have often heard it said that anyone can create a ceremony and of course this is true. However it’s also true that we stand on the shoulders of others and it is respectful to acknowledge our sources, especially the indigenous wisdom-keepers whose unbroken connection with nature offers us a map back into animacy and right relationship with the living web of life. In my work I pay homage to these powerful yet humble teachers and I weave their wisdom into a deeper understanding about our prehistory and about our ancestors’ natural spirituality here in these lands. With these lineages at my back I feel supported and protected in leading ceremony into a return to oneness with all that is, under the power of mother earth and the sacred waters. Powerful experiences are born of depth of understanding and it is our indigenous brothers and sisters who I thank for this from the bottom of my heart.

I want to end this article with a quote from Robin Layfield in Amplify. Like many of the others present, Robin was unknown to me and so it is deeply nourishing for me to find that his (and others) experience completely matched what I was dreaming into as I put so much love, time and energy into preparing this ceremony:

“I CAME AWAY FEELING NOURISHED, REFRESHED, inspired and energised by the experience of being a part of something so special. There is something genuinely lovely and liberating about being able to voluntarily give up any questions that I was holding and simply to enjoy the moment in whatever way it connected with me. We spend so much of our lives being boxed away from nature that we lose our empathy and our affinity for it. This ritual, this blessing brought it right back to me and I could feel the fresh earth under my feet and the mud and the grass and the dirt, the fences and the trees, the rock and stone and louder than everything, the wild water tumbling down the river in her haste to get out to sea, carrying forward all of our hopes, dreams, wishes and aspirations” Robin Layfield, Amplify

Photos by David Johnson, Bards of Avalon, Sue Fenton

Read Robin's article here