Cascadian Cunning Ways

Bioregional Craft is the wise way of those who work with the genius locii. By genius locii we do not mean guardian spirits in the conventional sense attributed by classics scholars to individual households. Bioregional Craft views the bioregion, literally “life place” and its internal ecoregions as intelligent and sentient beings, aspects of greater beings and intelligences. The bioregion, ecoregion and gen loci are part of our larger ecological selves. A practitioner of Bioregional Craft learns to see his or herself as part of a larger whole and works their magic from the perspective of self and nature as one and indivisible and, by working synergetically with other-than-human-persons of place is the foundation of establishing a regional cosmology. The gods, spirits, and so forth that are embodied in Bioregional Craft are perceived as aspects of a larger being; mountain lakes, deserts, swamps, and forests are aspects of an even greater body expanding spatially even into the greater universe. At its root, Bioregional Craft is animist in nature and not anthropocentric, humanity itself fulfilling or betraying at various points its own ecological niche.
Shedding the skin of Old World relational dynamics, many of which are no longer relevant to those in the New World, those engaged in Bioregional Craft establish their own relationships with place and people of the place. For example, instead of rowan (Sorbus spp.) which does not grow natively in the Pacific Northwest bioregion, the Cascadian conjuror - Skookum man or Skookum woman – would work with Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) or Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), relating synergetically and intimately with native beings through tactile means, sharing themselves with the bioregion, as place, with other-than-human-persons and establishing healing, balance, blessing, and bane. In common with other folk traditions such as English Cunningcraft, German Braucherei, the Troll Doctors of Scandinavia and even the Curanderos of Central and South America, Bioregional Craft is deeply relational – borrowing where needed from precedents and adapting to locality. Bioregional Craft, the way of those wise in the land, is as old as any tradition in the world and may be said to be the primordial origin of all shamanic and animist traditions, arising independently in every place where humans have interacted on a deep level with Nature mindfully. As a primordial tradition, Bioregional Craft seeks empowerment from the Earth itself as the supreme initiatrix.
Those that are Land Wise practitioners of the Craft of the life place know this...
Our bodies are composed of the soil beneath us...
Our arteries the streams that trail through our forests...
Our blood the rain that falls upon our face...
Our breath is the wind itself,
Our mind the four corners of creation...