Progressing past Theory: Putting Regional Spirit Work into Practice
Years ago I found that I had put in hundreds of hours of research into local history, local ecology and species, local and ancestral folklore, local land features, herbal medicine, everything I thought I would need to start a consistent and meaningful practice with my local spirits. But I still only got to truly interact with the land in short bursts, by fishing and the occasional foraging trip. I've come a long way since then and I can happily say I broke past the wall of struggling to put local spirit work into practice. So if you're in the same spot, feeling like you have a solid research background but you just can't seem to get into the swing of things, this one's for you, with some basic ideas to start with.
Of course, learning about your own environment is very important, and the importance of intentional sit-down research cannot be overstated. But I notice that many people, myself included, hit walls at a certain point in the research - and that's because the history, the anthropology, all the various resources we read aren't geared towards practitioners (logically so) and thus do not provide us with any handles or clues on how this information could be applied in daily life. Sometimes not even in a fairly mundane and common sense! In my opinion, it's not worthwhile to try to use that information alone in search of connection, because it will keep you contained to your body. While being studious is worthwhile, and basic research is always pivotal, I would try to reserve deep study for only the things that you're most interested in at first, so you can make room not only for things you find a particular personal investment in, but also for practical and hands-on learning.
Because that is a balance that is not often well-struck in the broader community of practitioners. There's often a particular disparity between practical learning and theoretical learning, with some even making their priority on one of those two a marker of their identity, like those invested in the "revivalist/reconstructionist" dichotomy. In reality and in functional practice, everybody needs a healthy balance between practice and theory. That healthy balance won't look the exact same for everybody, but it should always be at least close to 50-50.
There's something to be said, before delving to deep in, about not falling too deep into notions of strict mundanity or strict spirituality. I have a longer form post explaining the fallacious and harmful nature of 'Mundane vs Magic' from various perspectives, but I cannot overstate how important deconstructing this is when trying to form a spiritual connection with your local environment. For us, by nature of what we are and how we perceive the world, we often find the magical contained within the mundane, or hidden behind it. You must not fall into the trap of neglecting all the physical and tangible features of your environment in favor of the pursuit of something highly esoteric and intangible. You have to effectively balance your instrumental and perceptive abilities with your spiritual and psychological experiences. Focus on the things you can already see and perceive, make them as native to you as they are to the land, so you can know them in ways that don't require your eyes - because seeing the spirit world is about sight unseen. It's about zoning in on the picture that appears when your eyes aren't focused, rooting down in the shadows in the periphery of your vision. If you're looking for it, you'll never find it in a way that satisfies.
I recommend trusting your senses, and that includes your gut. Don't let anxiety or compulsion set the tone, but try to keep a keen eye on it. If you see something out of the corner of your eye, no matter how fantastical it may have looked, take note of that, acknowledge its existence, because in being perceived by you it is already real enough to be important. And similarly, if you enter somewhere and you're genuinely taken with insurmountable bad feelings, just go! Listen to your gut, temper any anticipation with reasoning and healthy emotional coping, but don't ignore big feelings and intuitive interpretations.
It is also good to remember that nature and the spirit world are not strictly outside, but also within the context of your home and even yourself. Your house spirits can be some of the most compelling spirits to regularly find yourself around, as they often do know you quite well or will come to know you quite well. Every house has its own spirit, the spirit of the structure, which in my experience is often a pleasant one. Not every house has an occupational house spirit (e.g. a Celtic brownie), but in many traditions they can be lured or negotiated with, so you can certainly acquire one of your own and build a very meaningful relationship with them.
But what makes up you is also not to be neglected. Something I talked about in another post of mine recently was the benefit I found in attempting to deconstruct the perceived boundary between self and not-self. I always experienced a very rigid border between my self and the rest of the world, and it lay in my skin - but I understand now that I am not separate from the world and the world is not separate from me. We bleed into one another and are indistinguishable on a greater scale, and that realization has given much depth to my spirit work, because I am not just asking something external to engage with some mythical "me" that I cannot even personally define, I am intentionally putting myself forward in ways determined by my goals, and making space for the world and its creatures to respond accordingly. The cosmology of your faith system can be a source of inspiration on how exactly you can do this in a way that applies well to your practice. For me, I found a lot of value in experimenting with the roles and abilities of the various parts of the self described in heathen cosmology.
Of course, what feels like the very most central aspect of (bio)regional spirit work will always be the individual spirits. There are many different kinds of beings that occupy a given region, and they all carry equal amounts of potential for spiritual significance to you, personally. I think going out into the world with an open mind in that regard can prove extremely important. People are prone to neglecting creatures they cannot easily relate to or don't view as living beings, and while for many working with herbs and animals is in that regard much easier, do not completely overlook the quieter neighbors you have. The grasses, the rocks, the fossils, the buildings, the dirt, all have their own existences wherein lessons can be found. How exactly you decipher them is something that will always come down to your tradition and your prerogative, but here are some helpful methods I have learned.
A big source of inspiration for myself has been the awareness that in the Germanic language area - where I'm from - pagan practice and religiosity was much more directly bound to the landscape. Before the migration period, which forced believers to decouple their religion from the specific land they were on, individual land-features and landmarks were a central point of focus in practice. This is something that can be extrapolated to fit practice in the modern day in various ways.
Explore your local surroundings and familiarize yourself with notable landmarks. This can be as obvious and accessible as historically significant buildings in the area, which I also highly recommend, but also things like visible mountains, interesting trees, big patches of plants, any notable feature of the land that stands out to you and you feel a particular way about. You can build relationships with them, and come to them for particular purposes. Folkloric accounts of magic places can serve as a great guide for what you could look for and potentially even how you might look for them. Examples of such landmarks and their use cases could be:
Naturally occurring holes, through trees, through stones, through mountains, through hedges. They can be passageways, portals, entrance gates, and all other functions you could give to what is essentially a huge hagstone; cf. Odinstones and holes in trees, and their uses for healing diseases or enchanting objects. Different kinds of entrances may lead to different kinds of places.
Make grand land features the objects of your worship. Grand or special trees are fantastic places to enshrine, and the biggest hill or mountain you can see is a fantastic metaphor for some kind of Otherworldly destination, like the folkloric 'going under the mountain' as an understanding for the afterlife or the Otherworld. Big rocks, waterfalls, anything that strikes a chord in you.
Water of any kind is a fantastic magical ally. Visit the ocean like you would visit your mother if she is near you, and talk to her as such. But lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, creeks, all are invaluable. Flowing water is like the blood of the earth and can be magically applied as such, nevermind the fact that many of them act as metaphorical spirit highways. Lakes and ponds and the likes are not only densely inhabited by interesting spirits but also fantastic divinatory tools and portals to the Otherworld in their own right.
Rings and groves, as well as crossroads can be portals and divinatory objects as well, but also great places to enshrine, great places to frequent, to gain favors, or to perform sitting-out rituals.
Buildings should by no account be excluded from this list either: historical landmarks as equally as local haunted structures and the subjects of urban myths are all good places to try to make connections with spirits, to honor as significant, or to even just visit once to have that understanding of them.
Not all landmarks have to be usable. Sometimes the value is just in having been there, having seen it, and knowing what it is like. The power of familiarity is a great one when it comes to regional magic, and sometimes information about a certain place reveals itself much much later - but you can only learn it if you have context for what that place or feature is like.
Exploring does have its risks: people, animals, plants and land features can all do harm. Make sure you're adequately prepared for wherever you're headed to. Always at least have water and a way to contact help if you need it, no matter what kind of environment you're headed into. Also be aware that exploring your land can put you into contact with spirits who may not immediately want you there or respect your presence, and especially in rural areas there may be a risk of such things as elf-shot or other otherworldly diseases. Carrying protective items is a great idea to ward this off, but also be prepared to research spiritual cures for ails you contract after your explorations, especially if they seem unusual or don't respond to normal medical treatment.
Another skill I practiced over time that I found a lot of value in was just spending quality time with the land. It is its own entity, on top of housing many others, and I noticed that I did my best meditations on it when I completely plugged into it without any distractions. I always loved spending time outside and appreciating the outdoors, this much is true, but I would often still be listening to music, or reading, or generally otherwise occupied with a task of my own, not really related to the land. I've found a lot of pleasure in completely allowing myself to be absorbed into the present, wherever I am. Where I live, because it's so rural, this amounts to me laying in the sun and listening to the wind and the birds, or at night the owls and coyotes. I also like fishing for this reason, or foraging trips and hikes. But elsewhere this could be the sounds of a park, the voices of passersby, the babbling of a creek. If sitting still or napping outside is something you would find difficult, tasks oriented toward or in service of the land can be a great way to achieve the same thing while still keeping your hands and conscious mind busy. Picking up trash is a great one, looking for bones, general exploring, climbing trees, birding, et cetera, all can be good.
And do not underestimate the power of play! Dance, sing, chase the occasional squirrel, hop and skip, jump over things. Climb stuff, find chalky rocks and draw on other rocks with them, gather sticks and build a little hut, feel everything you see, look for funny shapes in the clouds. Solemnity loses its meaning when it's not contained to serious rituals, you must give it meaning by contrasting it with complete lightheartedness.
Something not all people will be willing to do, which is justifiable because we do not all live in the middle of nowhere, is talking to the land. I personally don't mind looking insane, I am anyway, so I walk around chatting up every tree I see, but it can be as simple as asking for safe passage or saying thank you for things you see or find. I recommend doing these things out loud, even if just whispered.
When you give yourself honestly to the land, in all these ways, it will give back. It may take time for it to take effect, but you will see: you will encounter more animals, see more interesting things, find more meaning - you will feel like the land speaks back to you. How you "hear" it will undoubtedly vary person to person, but it will come. If you build that connection by taking initiative within it.
A wonderful and easy habit to consistently maintain that will prove extremely valuable for building long-term connections is an observation habit. When I created a pocket notebook for myself for this purpose I never went back. Making a habit out of observing your landscape and your experiences within it has countless benefits. It is a fantastic record that you can refer back to regularly, to see the patterns in the behavior of the land as well as how they might change over time. It also helps you to start noticing connections and coincidences that might prove useful for divinatory purposes or general understandings of the environment and how it is being engaged with, such as animal migrations and behavior, seasonal patterns, auspicious moments for particular kinds of spirit work, etc.
You should tailor your notes and inclusions to your personal interests, but good topics to start with are wildlife observations, weather observations, spirit observations, thoughts during meditation, visions and notable daydreams, coordinates or relative locations of features that stand out to you, ideas that struck you while exploring, and general feelings.
Doing this is also a fantastic mindfulness practice: it gives you a chance to offload your thoughts while you're on the go, so you do not need to remember all your experiences and try to process additional information on top of that. You can put your thoughts and observations down, with all the relevant information you want, and move on. It keeps your mind clutter-free and open to new things, and it can also act as a great way to prevent needing to use your phone if you find that needing to Google things or take photos is distracting or takes away from your experience.
A method I enjoy for full days out exploring is to draw a dividing line to imply a new day, note the date, weather, and anything else you deem important (e.g. lunar phase, personal cycle, holiday, etc), and take all my observations under it, so I don't need to write down the date and general conditions under every individual observation. I also use my pocket notebook to store information that I find useful: mine is modular, so on any given day I can easily include whatever little booklets or whatever I need, but generally speaking I have the big four lunar phases in my monthly calendar spread, the tide charts stuck in the back, as well as various little prayers, booklets on invasive plants, etc.
If you would be interested in a more elaborate post on how I do my own observations, formatting, important information to include, etc, let me know, I'd be happy to.
By the token of observation, this extends to my hard rule of GOOGLE. EVERYTHING. If I don't want to use my phone in the moment, I write down what I'm perceiving to the best of my abilities (this is a skill you will have to practice, but it's a very good one), and Google it later. But I feel no shame in using my phone either; when in a rush, I take photos of what I see but don't know, I use the Merlin app to identify birds and bird calls, I google every creature and thing and phenomenon I've never seen before, all of it. Just a cursory search will reveal to me at least the name I can call it by, so I can more easily note it next time. Trying to reduce friction can prove pivotal here. The idea of having everything very neatly noted down in a notebook is very idyllic, but is it really achievable? Will you truly take out the notebook every time? I will tell you right now, after a decade and a half of consistent journaling: you will not. Allow yourself to let apps like Merlin or iNaturalist, or just your camera, take some of the work off your hands. Make it easier to record MORE things by doing it faster and easier, so you can use your time for other things and not spend it regretting that you didn't stop in the middle of a literal goose-chase to write down that it had a white bar on its wings.
I will however warn you against 'plant ID' apps and the like. They are garbage. That would be an example of taking the sentiment too far and forsaking quality and personability for complete convenience and commodity.
There was a time, ages ago, where everything a person took in and put out was confined to their immediate environment. To varying degrees, this can still be true for us today, and becoming aware of that fact and engaging with it consciously can be a great aid in building meaningful connections on a local scale. You can start by making yourself aware of which things that you consume (in a broad sense: eat, use, absorb) on a day to day basis are in some way local to your area, and use those as a jumping off point on how you can localize your consumption even more. If you can afford it, engaging in local food is a fantastic way to physically make yourself one with your environment, as well as to learn about and sensorily familiarize yourself with your area. Seasonal food, locally grown food, local food traditions and dishes, famous and historic restaurants, all these are great ways to take the region into yourself, which is very rewarding and illuminative about local resources and history.
There is, of course, also the act of living off the land yourself: foraging, hunting, fishing, et cetera. They are not accessible to everybody, but if this is something you could try I would recommend doing it at least once. Even if it turns out that you can't stomach death, or that you simply do not find any value in it, the experience is extremely healthy to have had, and it teaches somebody a lot about life and death and the way that ecosystems and members of them sustain themselves and each other. I have written a little on some ethical considerations of animal death in spirituality before, if you're interested. Uncomfortable as it may be, I think truly being able to connect with an ecosystem does necessitate learning about the inevitability of death, including at your own hands. This not only in the context of you directly inflicting a death for subsistence, but also in how your consumption elsewhere, directly and indirectly, is causing death, and what moral and ethical lessons are in those deaths.
Foraging is well known as a fantastic way to get acquainted with local plants, and I cannot harp it enough, even if you have to travel a little ways to do it. It's a great opportunity to learn about them as individuals based on their habitats, growing habits, associates, and ecology. Pay attention to which animals use which plants, and how and where. It can reveal a lot about the nature of the plants and their relationships with other animals, and in turn you could look for implied instruction and clues about clever harvesting or potency in the choices animals make. It is beyond important, however, that you forage with care. Be mindful of what the ecosystem needs, and only take as much as you are confident you can use. It's better to start small.
In order to build even more meaningful relationships with the individual spirits of these plants, I recommend dedicating yourself to focusing on one plant at a time. A great way to do this is to use it and it alone in the form of a consistent base recipe, such as drawing a cup of tea of this plant two times a day for two weeks to a month. This way you can truly notice the effects it has on your body and spirit, take notes on your experiences, and cultivate a genuine connection with a given spirit. Doing this also ensures that you know which things have which effects when you start combining them, which is of crucial importance when noting the effects of medicinal or magical ingestibles of any kind.
The things you end up consuming may seem mostly irrelevant to spiritual pursuits, but in reality are not. Sensory understandings of your environment are valuable in their own right - there is great merit in knowing how things reared on local soil make you feel - but there are also many lessons about seasonability, and indeed about medicine and magical attributes of the things we consume, if you look closely. What grows when matters, and the times when people eat or ate things has big implications about the needs of the human body and how the land provides for them. Some Native American beliefs have it that the earth provides what we need in the specific contexts that we need it: that antidotes grow near poisons, and the right food for the right season of the human lived experience grows at the right time. I personally reject the notion of a perfect design, but I do think there is great wisdom to be found in this idea, and it is very worthwhile to explore those ideas and how they are reflected around you.
Learning about the things you consume through active experience also gives you the opportunity to extrapolate this further; if you already have an understanding from your theoretical research about how 'correspondences' and folk-medicinal associations work, you can use those frameworks to logically deduce your own about the things you consume locally. 'Correspondences', to borrow from witchy lingo, should not be seen as strictly spiritual in nature, but held up in comparison to more 'mundane' features and attributes of the things we consume, like nutritional value, general benefits and detriments, chemical components, et cetera. This is well supplemented with intentionally ritualizing your consumption. You can start doing this based on its components, like for example using eating salmon as a way to gain cunning or foresight based on its folklore, or taking a smoke break with a state of mind that leaves you open to the calming effects being both 'mundane' and spiritual in nature, be that as one or in two separate ways.
There are also many ways to use your local materials that do not involve ingesting them, which is somehow both over- and underrepresented in the broader community in my experience. Overrepresented in the sense of one-time use in throwaway spells, and severely underrepresented as more permanent fixtures in your day to day life. The power of practical use cases for materials you find around you is severely underestimated, when in reality it has historically made up a very significant portion of the corpus of folk-magical practices. Natural materials were consciously used in construction, and though you are presumably not building your own house you can still engage in some of these practices like placing protective branches over your windows and doors, using particular rocks and stones as protection talismans, so on and so forth. Local materials can also be used to make various tools, from very practical tools like brooms and walking sticks, ropes, cloths, quills and utensils all the way to the much more arcane, like magic staffs, incenses, garb, and whatever ritual tools fit your fancy. Also do not forget about the power of wearing things on your body: dried berries have historically been used as beads, and bones, shells, teeth, pretty sticks, anything can be made into jewelry or other ornamentations.
Something else you can do - if with great care for the potential ecological repercussions - is promoting the growth of beneficial and magically useful species near your house. Stinging nettle is an amazing warding ally and I love having it grow near my house whenever possible, especially my door.
When you have familiarized yourself with your region and created an emotional bond with it, you can start engaging in reciprocity and putting a focus on utilizing your environment. But a healthy relationship with the milieu can't be achieved without common ground and mutual respect. For that reason, I recommend establishing a set of 'house rules'. Spirits have their own cultures, local groups of spirits have their own expectations and behaviors. Try to learn about the things that are often seen as rude by spirits in folklore and see if it is helpful for you to stick by those parameters. For example, I had to learn based on my interactions with my land that things like looking over my shoulder out of anxiety are seen as rude, that I am expected not to take pictures of things that beg my reverence, that I am to keep some things secret, that I can't return directly to my shrine after doing baneful work.
This is where your observation notebook can come in again: it is very wise to take note of adverse experiences as much as positive ones. Measure the way the environment interacts with you, how it appears to respond to you. If you suddenly find yourself lost on your way to somewhere, were you ever meant to be there? See what offerings get what responses. See which spirits appear when and where. See how things change depending on the time of day, your behavior, the weather. If you were having a very successful day, and that suddenly turned on you or all opportunity seemed to suddenly vanish, what might have happened to cause that?
When you try to assimilate yourself into spirit culture, spirits will often reciprocate that by trying to engage in your culture. This is how healthy relationships are fostered and how you can create working relationships based in mutuality and friendliness rather than obligation or tension - though there is room for tension and contracts in practice to be sure, but not to start with and not with your average spirit. I should add that this notion of engaging with the expectations and culture of spirits does also extend to animals: respecting them and their boundaries, trying to understand their body language and speak it back to them, et cetera. You will have terrible luck trying to foster relationships with local critters if you cannot even signal to them that you're not a threat.
Now that the land has given you so much, in the form of experiences, consumables, and mutuality, it's time to start giving back. A simple way to start giving back is in the form of offerings, but be wary of the trap of transactionalism. You can give back without giving physical things, and that is a good skill to hone. Some acts, because you were meant to do them and could not not do them, are not consumptive but often seen as such in the highly consumption-oriented frame of mind we are conditioned to be in. You are not taking from the land by being on it, you are inherently engaging in reciprocity by taking in sights and putting out appreciation, or breathing in air and breathing it back out. Being too oriented around physical taking and giving can cause problems not only emotionally but also practically; introducing foreign substances into the environment should always be done with caution, even if with good intent. Nevertheless, here are some ideas to start with:
Feeding animals is an obvious way to start. Animals can act as proxies for the divine, as messengers and intermediaries between various worldly realms, and as powerful spirit allies. But you cannot do this carelessly. Feeding animals should not be done for the sake of feeding them and nothing else, lest you create dangerous situations. Be careful to not accidentally condense animal populations in a certain area, to not bait dangerous wildlife, and to not accustom animals to being fed by people. It can and does get them killed, even in relatively domestic(ated) environs. Things like bird feeders or scheduled food left in the same place over and over will condense populations into a certain area, causing unusual inter-species interaction, promoting the spread of diseases, and discouraging healthy migratory behavior. Instead, make your decisions mindfully and slowly.
The best way to do this, in my opinion, is to focus on specific individuals or groups of individuals, and build contextual relationships with them. For example, I have two families of jays (stellers jays and camp jays respectively) that stay in the forest around my house year-round. They are intelligent, not dangerous, and people do not tend to mind them, so there's not much risk in them approaching my handful of neighbors - but thankfully they do not. I feed them when they approach me and sometimes leave them gifts dispersed through the woods. They do not come very near each other most of the time as the camp jays are a bit afraid of the stellers jays, so they take turns asking me for food. They are my closest working animal allies, and I ask them to spread messages, requests for favors, and to help me find things I need (including abstract asks like where to go). They do not rely on me for food, I do not inhibit their migratory behavior, and I have not endangered them in any way. They would share their land with me anyway, so I feel comfortable engaging in a friendly relationship with them knowing these things and that I am not giving them any food that might endanger the local ecology (beyond perhaps leaving a few abandoned hoards that some squirrels will gratefully use).
In other contexts, like when I need a favor from a particular animal like bear, I may choose to leave a one-time offering very far away from any human settlements that couldn't be mistaken as intentional feeding by bear, and would be natural for bear to eat. This can be in devotion to a bear-god, for a favor or have a spell on the food that has a certain purpose imbued in it. These things have to be done with immense care and respect for the balance of the local system. Choose a few allies you can connect with somewhat naturally, instead of putting yourself at the center of the local food chain.
Nevertheless, building a working relationship with a handful of animals near you is a wonderful experience. You can also have shorter-term or different kinds of working relationships with other animals, through a variety of means: observation, augury, behavioral analysis, working with remains, mimicking and communicating with them, using them as messengers and proxies, et cetera. Small birds, mammals and bugs have close ties to the Otherworld, whereas bigger birds like corvids can be worked with for their intelligence and recognition, or birds of prey for their divine associations and excellent eyesight. Fish are excellent for communing with the dead, large animals for lessons in strength, so on and so forth. Naturally, the same value can be found in non-animal spirits like rocks and plants and natural features, but the means and experiences will be different. I could go into it if requested! I'm just trying to keep this post somewhat concise (a fruitless endeavor, clearly).
Naturally there is also giving offerings to those spirits that you cannot easily perceive with your own instrumental capabilities, and they too are worthwhile to offer to. However, just because you intend an offering to go to an incorporeal spirit, doesn't mean a corporeal one won't consume it - so the same rules of care and caution apply. But, of course, not all offerings need to be consumables. Other ideas:
Make art with what is around you. Braid grass into intricate patterns, draw on rocks and leave them in prominent places or throw them into the water, carve sticks, stack things if you can do so without disturbing the environment too much. Anything goes, even things that would be highly impermanent. Be creative and resourceful.
Offerings can also be reductive in a positive way. Picking up litter is something you should be doing regardless, but a very worthwhile activity is learning how to recognize invasive species and eliminate them. Doing so is even better if you can (and you should) learn how to utilize these invasive species whenever possible.
Steward your environment. Many places worldwide deal with things like tree illnesses or other natural afflictions that have gotten out of hand. Learning how to look for sick individuals in your environment is often pretty easy and a very valuable offering.
Enshrine something. Building a shrine and ensouling it is one of the best things I ever did for my practice when it comes to my land. If you live somewhere you can do this, I highly recommend it. You can do this simply by finding a place that resonates with you and performing whatever ritual you like to hallow it, but if you need specific pointers I recommend something that has a good work surface or could be given one like a tree stump. I like to ensoul my shrine by giving it blood, so it can become its own living thing - I mix blood, water and booze for this purpose and spread it around while saying hallowing prayers. I also built a miniature dolmen to encourage spirits to take up residence in the shrine. The only non-natural feature at my shrine that stays there permanently is my ceramic offering well that rests atop the dolmen. My shrine is off my own land and actually deep in the woodlands of the local nature center, and the rangers there know of its existence, but respect it. If you can without danger, be open to people engaging with your shrine if they encounter it! There will be bad faith actors who may take things from it, but there may also be kind souls who will leave things. Such is the nature of a shrine. I use my shrine to worship at and do workings, but I take great care to always pack out everything I bring.
Education, of yourself and others, is a fantastic offering. Make people passionate about the land, teach yourself how to do right by it, correct misinformation when you hear it, get mad at people for being careless with the land. Donate to local education centers and organizations that steward the land.
And of course the aforementioned localization process should be ongoing. The land is always changing, so you always have reason to be exploring and spending quality time with the land and meditating on it, which is its own offering too.
When you have an established mutual relationship with your land and its inhabitants, you have a fantastic foundation to build off of, and from that point onward it becomes increasingly difficult for one talking head on Tumblr to give you ideas that are relevant to your personal practice and belief system. That said, I'll give some ideas relevant to mine in hopes of sparking some thought and inspiration.
I already briefly mentioned that it is very worthwhile to make local features the object of your veneration or worship. This extends to individual spirits, like individual tree spirits or other wights and ghosts you encounter. Venerating and honoring them is very fulfilling and can be a great way to bridge the gap between the highest of divinity and oneself that many people seem to struggle with.
Speaking of divinity, you can also absolutely find your gods in your local landscape and you should be looking for them. Many pagan gods have or had indweller qualities at one point, and taking your worship out of your body and mind and connecting it to things outside of you is excellent for your mental wellbeing and practice.
Using landmarks as conduits in rituals and for communication even with powerful spirits that aren't necessarily tied to your landscape in any way is a method that I found greatly improved my abilities. We are not supposed to do magic all alone with only our bodies and minds to use as tools. Even spirits that mostly exist within my practice as literary narratives or mythic ancestors, like the venerable seeress Weleda, I do my best work and communication with when I use the land to aid my trances. I use holes as metaphorical graves and beautiful trees as allegories for Yggdrasil.
I would like to note that the order in which I have placed these steps is not mandatory and you can and should deviate - within reason - wherever necessary. These are all important functions of local spirit work, in my opinion, but not everyone's process will look the same, and not everyone's needs are best acted upon in the same way. There is much precedent and historical account of, for example, going to entreat spirits you have no previously established rapport with for the sake of an immediate need - even if for long-term relationships that may not be the best solution. In terms of fostering actual connection with spirits more concretely, offerings and favors are the number one gateway, communication and familiarization should come soon after, personal involvement and cultural assimilation are a natural consequence of that, and from there you'll find you've already built something strong and beautiful to work from. As long as responsibility, respect, and the most current intersectional and ecological considerations take the highest priority in your practice, you can do whatever you want.
Though this post primarily focused on the other-than-human in your spirit work, community and humanity are NOT to be neglected when it comes to (bio)regionalism. People are also just animals, and they are certainly a part of the environment whether they like and acknowledge it or not. We are social animals and in order for us to function as best as we can according to our own natures we must engage with that. Make friends, do local things together, get to know the people around you, form bonds. Culture and community are great teachers, be they your own or others'. Either way you should heed them and pay great attention to them.
It's a bit ironic to provide more theory in a post about practice but what can I tell you, I love reading. So here are some helpful books in this pursuit.
Thrifted local field guides of all clades and orders;
Local authors, indigenous and not;
Ecopsychology, ed. Theodore Roszak, and especially his first essay therein: Where Psyche Meets Gaia;
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold;
Gathering Moss by Robin Wall-Kimmerer;
and I have an assortment of spirit work resources (mostly oriented around Northern Europe) on my blog, which can be found in my pinned post.
