This is just a lovely discursive piece of writing from Shaker
A very great deal of this matches my own life experience. Apart from a few years living near the Great Wen back in the 1990s I've lived in the countryside my entire life - being immersed in the seasons, stopping to pay attention to the natural world, are as fundamental to me as anything has ever been. There would scarcely be a life worthy of the name without it, for me. In many ways I live as 21st century life as any urbanite - laptop, smartphone and all the rest of it - but I go out of my way to keep my roots in nature constantly well nourished. I don't see anything difficult about this; the great 19th-early 20th century nature writers such as Richard Jeffries and W. H. Hudson are heroes of mine, but so are Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane today. Obviously I have the advantage of living a rural life; I'm not saying it would be the same for anybody living in the middle of Leeds or Bristol. Perhaps (I don't know) if you're brought up in such an environment you're less likely to feel such an intimate connection to land, landscape and nature anyway. I can't imagine I'd be the same person I am if I'd been raised in Leicester as opposed to rural Leicestershire. Many who live in cities and the larger towns can still have "access" to nature by getting in the car (or better still, on a bike), but with the aforementioned exception of three years down south, all my life it's been a case simply of putting on my coat, selecting my favourite stick and stepping out of the front door.
Every so often atheists get asked what religion they would adopt if they had to choose one. Many say Buddhism for obvious reasons; it's non-theistic, has much about it to admire, the Theravada tradition especially (unlike, say, Tibetan Buddhism) has relatively little with which a sceptical, rational Westerner can argue ... many don't even consider it a religion at all. For me the best things about it - vegetarianism; meditation and so forth - are things I've pursued for other reasons for many years without taking on board any of the other specifically Buddhist baggage. I'm not one and don't call myself one. If I had to choose then some sort of pagan path would be the obvious choice - a path with nature (and English nature at that) at the very centre of it makes the most sense to me by inclination. I don't think I can see what an overlay of religion or spirituality would add to what I already do and have done all my life, but that's just me and could, of course, possibly change in future. I can't, and therefore don't, call myself a pagan any more than a Buddhist as I'm not entitled to without adhering to a whole raft of other beliefs worthy of the name. But it's undoubtedly where my sympathies lie.
