Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology

Discover nature-based devotional practices for rekindling humanity's ancient covenant with the living world--one rooted in reverence and love--and restoring our sacred bond with Earth.

Drawing from decades of Sufi teaching, a deep relationship with nature, and the transformative power of story, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee guides us beyond today's ecological and cultural crises to the heart of the matter: our collective forgetfulness and the severing of our primordial bond with Earth. Following the entwined threads of grief and love, he explains how this moment of crisis holds within it the seeds of transformation and regrowth.

Remembering Earth blends reflection with practical guidance, exploring how remembrance, prayer, praise, and intimacy with Earth can restore our sacred relationship with the living world. Through a variety of practices in six key areas--Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer--the book guides you to an experience of radical belonging. Each practice is a doorway, inviting you from concept to communion, from observer to participant in the sacred web of life, offering an embodied spiritual ecology that moves beyond ideas into lived experience.

In a time of great unraveling, Remembering Earth offers an embodied, spiritual path of remembrance and kinship, guiding us back to the sacredness of creation and our place within the more-than-human world.

EMMANUEL VAUGHAN-LEE is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine, a Webby-winning and National Magazine Award-nominated publication exploring the intersections of ecology, culture, and spirituality. A Sufi teacher in the Naqshbandi tradition, Emmanuel leads retreats on Sufism and spiritual ecology worldwide. An Emmy and Peabody Award-nominated filmmaker, he has directed and produced over 20 documentaries, including Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Aina, Earthrise, and Sanctuaries of Silence. His films have been screened at leading festivals such as NYFF, Tribeca, SXSW, and Hot Docs, exhibited at the Smithsonian and the Barbican, and featured by PBS, National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. Before his work in film and media, he performed with renowned jazz artists and released two acclaimed records, Previous Misconceptions and Borrowed Time. His work invites a deeper relationship with the living world through story, practice, and devotion.

Review Quotes:

“We desperately need new ways of relating to the Earth that go beyond exploitation—this book has some remarkable insights to help in that crucial task.”—Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

“Remembering Earth is an exceptional book born of a remarkable life and mind. Reading it, I felt a sense of calm lucidity move over me: a clarity at what has happened to disconnect spirit from matter, and what might—must—be done to connect it again. At its heart is the recognition that, as Vaughan-Lee puts it, the work of reconnection with this memorious, wondrous Earth of ours is ‘not about learning something new but remembering something very, very old.’”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland and Is a River Alive?

“A cyclic meditation, always swerving back around, renewing and replenishing itself—a song for the breathing Earth. An incantation fed by both anguish and astonishment, by the author’s steady wonder at the unaccountable beauty of the many-voiced biosphere, and his bottomless grief at what’s so needlessly being lost. Vaughan-Lee is a Sufi mystic whose heart pulses with ardor for the divine Beloved, and in the final third of this book he offers a clutch of deceptively simple practices for falling head over heels back in love with the wild, spherical immensity that ceaselessly sustains us.”—David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal

“An exigent cry for remembrance and affirmation of the sacred nature of Earth and our raveled relationship with Her. Wary of the dark, extractive side of New Age culture, Vaughan-Lee offers ‘a different way,’ an adaptable vision ‘grounded in the real’ that calls for individual commitment and draws on both existing and fresh ways for embodying a spiritual ecology and for reigniting our ancient relationship with the place that is our home. When you are ready, open your eyes. Turn the page.”—Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

“In our time of deep divisions, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee reminds us that we are all weavers, and love is the thread. In this time of loneliness, he offers the embrace of a bountiful and beautiful world—flowing rivers and maple trees in autumn. In a time of unspeakable cruelty, he offers healing. In a time of deep disappointment in humanity, he offers an urgent vision of our better selves. In this time of endings, he tells a sweeping new story about a future that is both necessary and possible. These are great gifts. I am filled with gratitude.”—Kathleen Dean Moore, PhD, author of Great Tide Rising and Wild Comfort

“In a prose style that spirals heavenward like a red-tailed hawk riding a thermal, Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee pours forth perceptions that remind us all to renew our bond at a heart-deep level with the guardian holiness that is our glorious living Earth.”—David James Duncan, author of Sun House, The Brothers K, and The River Why