Guided by Earth:Wayfinding from within the web of life

Justine Huxley reflects on natural navigation, instinct and the many fascinating ways that animals and non-human beings find their way. What would it look like to navigate through a landscape and through life - not as individuals but as part of the wider web of life?

I’ve always been fascinated by the business of how we find our way - through a landscape and through life. As a child growing up in the age when kids were allowed to roam free, I knew every street, every alleyway, every park and wood, every footpath and every shortcut. I loved maps and learned to map-read very young (by necessity - in a one-parent family in the days before sat nav, someone had to give directions to my mother whenever she drove somewhere new). I always had an innate sense of direction and could learn the lines of a landscape very fast.

I had a mixed experience of instinct, however. My body knew when something important was about to happen. I had many pre-cognitive dreams (about big global events and small, often irrelevant, personal things), and somewhere I always knew what was safe and what was dodgy. But there were painful experiences that blocked my ability to trust myself, and some decisions still have the ability to throw me into a dysfunctional tailspin. In my work with Kincentric Leadership, I hold a question around these themes of navigation. Clearly, any species destroying its own ecosystem, as humans do, has lost their way. So - if we were to climb down from our bizarre hubris and re-weave ourselves back into the wider web of life - how might that change our ability to sense, discern, be guided and wayfind - in every aspect of collective and individual life?

More than anything, I love the feeling of spending time alone in the wild, long enough for the thoughts to give way to silence, allowing the animal senses to start feeling sharp and feral. I love how everything begins to speak to you - a path will beckon, the wind will push you unexpectedly, a tree will flirt with you and make you notice something, or a V-shaped flight of geese will point you towards your destination. Something becomes aligned, and there is an experience of flow and magic unfolding. I don’t know much about Taoism, but this feels like it could be the invisible thread, the Taoist ‘Way’ - the path of simplicity, in harmony with how life wants you to move, that reveals itself when you are centred in yourself.

The basics of natural navigation can add to this sense of weaving oneself into something greater. To strengthen your inner compass so that with one glance at the sun, you can orient without thinking towards the cardinal directions. Or when the sun is behind clouds, to know how the flowers on a footpath or the moss on a tree or how the grass is brushed by wind can tell you where the sun rose and will set. And to see everything influences everything else - how the shape or pattern of the sun’s ‘glitter path’ on a lake reflects weather conditions, wind and the shape of landforms. There is an infinite wealth of information in the land that us modern humans have lost relationship with, stripping us of our full instinctual power. Then, when we hear a story of a Kalahari Bushman who can place his hand in the footprint of a leopard or an eland and know their state and whereabouts, this seems like an incomprehensible superpower rather than simply a natural side effect of being fully plugged into an intelligent, living Earth and one’s own bodily wisdom.

There are a million methods our non-human kin use to find their ways that we can only marvel at. The salmon, pigeons, sea turtles and others with magnetite in their brain, who can sense Earth’s magnetic field and orient over vast distances. The tiny sandhopper who possesses a sun compass in her brain and a moon compass in her antennae. The humble dung beetle who navigates by aligning with the stars of the Milky Way. The incredibly sensitive and detailed olfactory maps of dogs and wolves, or the herd and pack animals like buffalo and wild dogs, who decide direction as a group using a range of fascinating democratic voting systems. Not to mention the fragile but marvellous monarch butterflies who migrate thousands of miles over several generations with a mix of genetic programming and environmental cues. Our animal and plant kin sense, navigate, decide and communicate in deep attunement with Earth's rhythms—magnetic, celestial, olfactory, gravitational, and beyond. These diverse strategies speak to the incredible sensory richness of nonhuman life and reveal how intelligence can be entrained with myriad interconnected patterns, movements and intersecting cycles—deeply embedded in relationship with place.

We can draw on some of that intelligence simply by observation, as Indigenous people have always known, such as the Moken sea people who survived the Asian Tsunami. They saw how the water pulled back far from the shore, but also knew the meaning of the birds falling silent, and the animals fleeing inland.

For those of us who grew up in modernity, there is a need to free ourselves from the societal conditioning that interferes with our wayfinding abilities: the linear, intellectual, narrow, disempowered ways of being that give us access to only a fraction of what we really are. The work of rewilding our psyches can take decades and much commitment. Western values often mean the full power of our instincts, intuition and embodied knowing can be buried deep. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung knew about this. His dedication to reclaiming and reintegrating that which is judged and rejected, that which is buried in the shadow, led eventually to a ferocious inner wholeness, a fullness of access to his own unconstrained potential, that led others to describe him as ‘a force of nature’.

It's not just our relationship with instinct that needs liberating. It's also our conditioning to be an individual. In the more-than-human world, there is no such thing as an individual. We cannot live without the oxygen producting faculties of the rooted ones, the bees who pollinate our crops, without earthworms and microbes in our soil, without fungi who work in partnership with trees, without our gut bacteria who make our digestion possible, without water which is foundational to all life, or without the light of the sun. We exist in interbeing with thousands of other beings and processes. There are no single creatures, only flows and nodes and relationships in a web of becoming. Yet in our modern paradigm world, we are taught to think and act as individuals. Most of our collective decision-making processes are basic, binary and unable to operate effectively in a global world, where decisions affect not just whole ecosystems and nations but also planetary processes impacting generations.

Yet the unicellular organism, slime mould, can operate as a collective and use network optimisation to great effect. We are slowly learning how to sense into currents and flows differently, to set course and strategy by drawing on collective intelligence. Organisational psychologists have long known that tapping into as much human diversity as possible leads to more long-term sustainable decision-making. But we are still scratching the surface - the real missing diversity is our more-than-human kin, who have perspectives and wisdom we urgently need to restore balance and regenerate our Earth. Social biomimicry and nature governance are just opening up this world to us, showing us that making decisions alone or in a hierarchy is unhelpful; indeed, we need to unlearn all of our ideas of individuality and discover a new way.

Despite all my explorations into these themes, I am still challenged by certain kinds of personal life discernment, but I try just to dig deeper into the vast web of intelligence, sensitivity and interconnectedness of which we are a part. I’ve learned I can listen to the sparrows and crows in my garden to know things going on around me I would otherwise miss. I’ve learned when I’m lost in the mountains and dusk is coming, that if I can get my mind out of the way, my feet, in collaboration with the land beneath them, reliably know that it is this path here, the one through the woods, rather than the more obvious one across the fields, that will take me home. I’ve learned to discriminate which dream images that come to me on waking are psychological debris, and which are alerting me to some vital piece of information that the conscious part of me has marginalised. And I'm learning that decisions and course setting can emerge not from me, but out of the fabric of life. This is wu wei in Taoism (無為 or 无为) or action without doing. It doesn’t mean doing nothing, but rather acting in a way that is natural, unforced, and in harmony with the flow or the Dao —the fundamental, dynamic way of the universe.

And the real question behind all these musings is this. What might be possible if humanity as a whole could be re-immersed in these greater, interwoven wisdoms? How would it look if we were all skilled in listening to the more-than-human world, and to Earth herself for our guidance and collective wayfinding? How might we re-discover our way and our place in this universe of intricate, infinite beauty? How then might life - our life and the vaster life - unfold?

First published by The Real Farming Trust. Dr Justine Afra Huxley is co-founder of kincentricleadership.org and runs workshops and trainings on the principles and practices of co-creation with a living, intelligent Earth.