Appendix A:
Recommended Reading
While it would be easy for me to say “read my other books” and leave you with that, there are titles by other authors you may wish to look into as complements to the material in this book. They’re not all necessarily focused on totemism, or even on spirituality, but they’re all books that in one way or another mesh with what I’ve shared here.
In addition to the following books, I also recommend picking up a good field guide or two outlining the flora, fauna, and fungi of your bioregion, as well as at least one good book on its geological history. If you can find material on the local or regional climate and weather patterns, add that to your bookshelf as well.
Ecoshamanism: Sacred Practices of Unity, Power, and Earth Healing by James Endredy: I was fortunate enough to receive a bit of training from James a few years ago, and if I were going to hand people anything as a workbook for deepening their relationship with their bioregion, this would be it. If you enjoyed the exercises in this book, Ecoshamanism should be high on your to-read-next list.
The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature by Starhawk: This is a great book for shaking people out of purely symbolic approaches to the four classic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Through essays and meditations, Starhawk ties the elements to their physical sources not in an academic sense, but by illustrating our interactions with them every day, even those we don’t give active attention.
The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age and Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, both by Richard Louv: A journalist and avid environmentalist, Louv makes very salient arguments on why nature is good for all of us, old and young alike, not just for sentimental reasons, but because the deprivation of time in nonhuman nature has some seriously negative effects on us. He’s not all doom and gloom, however; constructive and reasonable solutions to the problems are also addressed.
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability by David Owen: I’ve met a lot of Pagans and other eco-friendly people who fantasize about buying land somewhere to create their own little eco-communities, vilifying cities as cesspits of filth and devoid of nature. I offer this particular book as a good counter to that attitude and assumption, and it serves as a great pool of ideas for all of us green folk who live in urban areas whether by necessity or choice.
Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work that Reconnects by Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown: This book is full to overflowing with meditations and rituals that not only help us to reconnect with nonhuman nature, but to each other as well. Macy is especially known for her work in creating spaces to grieve for the environment and the world as a whole, and some of the exercises in this book are wonderful for working through despair and overwhelmingness in the face of our many challenges.
You’ll notice I haven’t included any totem dictionaries in here. After spending a couple of hundred pages encouraging you to make your own relationships with the totems, I’m not eager to point you toward what would be spoon-fed instant answers. If you must make use of books with “this animal means that” entries, remember that they are limited by their authors’ knowledge and biases as well as whatever a given totem tells the author—it may not be what a totem wants to tell you.