I think that more people in the occult community should do outdoor sports (hear me out)
Rock climbing and mountaineering drastically shifted my perspective and understanding of the way I interact with and interpret spirits.
You can be exhausted to the point of tears, bruised, bleeding (limestone is sharp) and the mountain will be as it always has been. The rocks will not work with you, are are working with them. You asked to be there, you came to the mountian and asked to step on it, and walk with it.
Ive tried surfing, got my ass kicked by the smallest wave exerting hundres of pounds of force without any effort.
From a witchcraft perspective, we seem to recognize huge forces of nature as great and powerful when there is something obviously drastic happening, like a thunderstorm or tornado. We know that there is danger but we talk about it like reckoning rather than simply a process of nature. The storm is not angry at you, personally, it is just a storm (and all of the energy and power that comes with it is also indifferent to you).
Plants don't grow for us, anyone who's had an uncomfortable brush with poison ivy can tell you that much, they just grow and we can learn to use them and work with them, but they would grow regardless.
And this is my opinion, based on my expiriances, but interacting with nature in such a way that youre trying to accomplish a goal (like summiting a mountian or climbing a rout or rafting a river or skiing a slope etc) really helps put it into perspective that its not just the large terrifying forces of a thunderstorm that are indifferent to you, its all of it, and that is why you have to learn to work with it through that lense of choice.
You are choosing to try and work with the spirits around you, not the other way around.
Of course you dont /have/ to be an ultra marathoner or mountian biker to come to this conclusion, but I think that there's something about the direct goal oriented physicality that, when relying on the features of nature specifically, helps to put it into perspective.
(This is also a reason why I love survival stories, it really puts the indifference into perspective. I highly recommend the two podcasts National Park After Dark and Tooth and Claw for fun survival and animal attack stories)
