Pagan and Place

Pagan and Place

"the original meaning of 'pagan' - ' an inhabitant of a particular place' - has encouraged a new focus on locality in modern paganism. A classical pagan was someone who belonged, some one who celebrated where they lived, someone who knew their local shrines, springs, hills, trees and neighbours, and could trace their decent from local ancestors. These pagans lived in both urban and rural places; the important thing was belonging to an area." Graham Harvey, from What Do Pagans Believe.

I think this is really a super grounding and important point... my life's focus has been on the subject of bio regional animism ( http://bioregionalanimism.blogspot.com/ ), I'm focused on locality, and cultivating relationships with where I live and all of its relations. So this statement in particular really resonates with me.
It feels to me that in Eco-paganism this is a large focus as well, and that's what I like about Eco-paganism.
Ive been doing research lately on beginning another project of which this above quote is some what a key to... which I want to call bio regional paganism. A bio-regionalist is near exactly how Harvey tells us of the original meaning of pagan. Its tied to place and land. In Kirkpatrick Sales Book the Mother of All: An Introduction to Bio-regionalism he quotes an Irish author known as AE... who's character in the book The Interpreters says... "If all wisdom was acquired without,” he says, “it might be politic to make our culture cosmopolitan. But I believe our best wisdom does not come from without, but arises in the soul and is an emanation of the earth-spirit, a voice speaking directly to us as dwellers in the land.” This idea really heavily influenced Sales as well as bio-regionalist, because it is felt by bio-regionalists to be truth because they have felt it for one... Sales actually titled his next book Dwellers in the land, and he talks much about what this actually means to be a dweller in the land. He then says...

"To become “dwellers in the land,” to regain the spirit of the Greeks, to fully and honestly come to know the earth, the crucial and perhaps only and all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific place, where we live: Schumacher says, “In the question of how we treat the land, our entire way of life is involved.” We must somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds. We must learn its ways, its capacities, its limits. We must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruits our bounty.

That, in essence, is bio-regionalism. "

For a full copy of The Mother of All: an introduction to bio-regionalism

A dweller in the land... is nearly synonymous with the original definition of pagan in my eyes... I believe that Paganism especially Eco-Paganism is like all living things growing, changing, living dieing, re-birthing and is going more and more towards a bio-regional relationship with its own nature, that is NOW focused... as those with pagan ancestors settle into the new lands, and become Dwellers in the land in Bio-regions that are out side of their ancestral lands, and as ancestry can no longer be traced to one ancestral place in the world people will begin to... belong, celebrate where and when they live, they will know their LOCAL shrines, springs, hills, trees and neighbours ( both human and other then human), and know that their ancestors at one time did the same in new lands as humans trekked across the planet, migrating to the bio-regions eventually made their life place... tracing not just their ancestral decent, but also their ancestral foot steps into how they become who they were as people of a place. With their own local deities, customs and ways of relating to their lands, to spirit, to life.
As people begin to see that in the protection of the land, they protect its people within ecological activism. As people change their life ways to match the needs of the life place ( or bio-region) in living more holistically and sustainably, they find out more and more what it means to be pagan, what it means to dwell in the earth, they discover what it means to inhabit a particular place, to belong to a life place to celebrate where they live today.