The inheritance we forget we have

A Gaelic word, dúchas in Irish Gaelic and dùthchas in the Scottish, crops up time and time again when I'm researching for Eden Rooted. It speaks of kinship with the land - a sense of belonging to a place and responsibility toward it, a way of life with it and a longing for it. It's not a uniquely Celtic idea. You find it the world over: from the Andean concept of ayni, to Māori kaitiakitanga ... and in the universal pull to get outside into the green and breathe.

Science is catching up with what those traditions have always known, with epigenetics, biophilia, and biocultural research all pointing toward the same thing: that this deep, far-extending and often unrecognised element of our existence is biological inheritance that causes trouble if it is not expressed. We are shaped by our shared evolution and our relationship (or lack of it) with the living world.

Even those of us who feel more shaped by being uprooted than rooted can nourish that relationship and bring it back to life. Find out the stories of the land you're on. Pay attention to the small things that can be witnessed even in the tiniest urban spaces: swifts playing in their bonded pairs, a spider twanging rivals off her web, a bee landing beside one of his dead kin and inspecting it, nudging it, doing a slow flypast - and then leaving. A sparrowhawk that makes the park go still when she nips a sparrow out of a shrub - perhaps to feed her young. A slug (the slimy but unsung hero of earth’s waste-disposal service) eating a discarded cucumber in the back alley with the neat, side-to-side concentration of a child delicately nibbling a corn cob, helping to transform it back into soil to keep the cycles and our shared inheritance going for future generations. Nurture that relationship by giving in ways that make your happiness hormones sing - whether for example it’s giving the gift of a bee spa or forming a deep relationship through creating a naturalistic garden.

Mundane or dramatic, it's completely absorbing, and in times of rising eco-anxiety that absorption that links us back to the land is healing for us all.

Give dúchas/dùthchas a chance!

For more information about Eden Rooted and making an everyday relationship with nature that works for you, click on the link below:

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