Grounded

From the author of The Oak Papers comes a beautiful meditation on how to foster a profound and healing spiritual communion with the natural world, exploring how the sacred can be accessed by looking to the past, to our ancestors and how they tread through their worlds.

“Canton's writing has an exquisite, somewhat dreamlike quality.”—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees

When James Canton walked into Suffolk’s Lindsey Chapel, it was the beginning of what would become a new journey in his life—hours away from the bustling city of London and distant from the years in his early twenties when he traveled from Egypt to Argentina. Standing inside the quaint chapel, Canton realized that his past cosmopolitan desires had been replaced by an intense yearning to understand the history of the place he called home, a burning curiosity about the past and the spiritual ways and beliefs of the people who came before us.

In Grounded, Canton retraces his steps into the places where our ancestors have experienced profound emotion, otherwise known as numinous experiences, to help us better understand who we are. Through lyrical meditation, reflection, and a thoughtful consideration of the ways and beliefs of the people who came before us, Canton seeks to know what our ancestors considered to be human, and what lessons we can learn from them to find security in our contemporary selves. Steeped in literary and folklore references, Grounded is a powerful exploration of the power of nature to soothe, nourish, and inspire the human soul.

How can we reconnect with a more profound, ancient way of seeing the world?

• A Personal Pilgrimage: Follow the author’s quest for meaning, from a quiet Suffolk chapel to the ancient tomb-shrines of Wiltshire, as he seeks to understand his own place in the world.
• Ancestors and Spirituality: Discover how the beliefs and sacred sites of our ancestors, from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages, can offer profound lessons for finding security and peace in contemporary life.
• The Numinous Experience: Learn to recognize places of deep spiritual power—the numinous—and understand how these encounters with the sacred can soothe, nourish, and inspire the soul.
• British History and Folklore: A lyrical exploration steeped in the stories and folklore of the English countryside, weaving together history, nature, and memoir to reveal the soul of the land.