You need to feel the beast. You need to sit with her long enough. Walk through her often enough. Pause in her carefully enough. Till her rich and subtle being rises in you. As she rises in the old oak tree and the twisted birch and the dark winter pools and the flight of the crow.
You will not be able to name her or explain her, but she will rise in you nonetheless. There is the universal Tao, the Tao of the mind. And then there is the moist, dark, green Tao of this land, the inscape of this wooded, stream-carved place.
And the beast is not a fearful thing. She is not the beast of horror films and books. She is the animate presence of this nearby, more-than-human world, the living, visceral stirring of this dark soil.
Image mine.
