Yet so much of our magick is made indoors in our houses or apartments, and in our imaginations on transcendental or akashic planes. We visualize being in a spring meadow, or sitting beneath a towering oak, or circling in a sacred forest glade. We imagine traveling to power places on the astral plane. Much of this mental work is an inheritance from our ceremonial magician forebears, whose concepts of magick were deeply influenced by biblical theology and patriarchal culture. Although they were certainly among their culture's avant-garde and strongly influenced by the Romantic era, which embraced Nature, they were also products of their own Victorian culture, in which the desires of the body were largely suppressed and denied, so they confined most of their magick to the head.
The common approach to Witchcraft, and to making magick, is to imagine the Air, the Water, the Sun, the Earth. But magick can't just be imagined, it has to be felt, and lived, and embodied. You don't need to imagine divinity when you are standing in the midst of a redwood forest, or diving with ancient tortoises near the Great Barrier Reef, or helping to harvest a field of golden corn, or dancing naked beneath a full moon. You can feel it with every fiber of your being. And so, when- ever possible, you should perform your magickal and ritual practices outdoors-cast a circle under the moon's light, ground and center in a forest clearing, purify in the sea. We make the best magick in Nature because Nature makes the best magick. Nature is magick, because it is the body of the Divine. And Nature's magick doesn't have to be imagined, it just has to be experienced.
Phyllis Curott, 'Encountering the Divine in Nature', in Cakes and ale for the Pagan soul: spells, recipes, and reflections from Neopagan elders and teachers, 2005, Berkeley: Crossing Press, pp. 82-87, pg 83
