About Deer Trods Tribe
Following the Deer Trods
About the Tribe
The Deer Trods Tribe is about working-with Nature, that’s all the unseen realms as well as the physical world we live in. It’s about some fundamental ways of thinking that make an enormous difference to the way we live our lives and enable us to reconnect with Nature.
These ways of thinking – we call them the Old Ways – are the bones of our land, the skeleton and framework that holds the way we live. Being part of the Tribe offers you the opportunity to learn these ways and so bring the way you to live in harmony with the rest of creation.
All around us we see Earth struggle with all the things we’ve done – habitat loss, plants and animals going extinct, pollution, unimaginable weather, fires, storms, floods, the results of climate change and global warming. People find that scary, don’t know what to do about it and although they would like to change it they don’t know how. The Old Ways offer you the opportunity to change so that you can and do make a difference.
Following the Deer Trods in the old ways we learn how the world really works … and our old ways are not at odds with modern science, far from it. I’ve been fortunate in this incarnation, I fell in love with a particle physicist (Paul) so I’ve had cutting-edge science with the cornflakes for the past 46 years! What Paul shows me of that world marries so well with my own background in the British old ways, complimenting and adding to it. So our old ways don’t separate us off from the everyday world – they add more to it.
If you would like to reconnect with the natural world, integrate your everyday life with Otherworld, and know-in-your-bones that you’re truly a useful part of the Wholeness – Gaia, as Sir James Lovelock calls her – being a member of the Deer Trods Tribe is for you.
Become a Member
Ancestral Ways
Our ancestors used to follow the reindeer through the seasons, spending the winter in the shelter of the forest, climbing to the heights through the springtime, spending the summer in the mountains, and then in autumn, as the nights draw in, following the reindeer back down to the forest. Grandmother Reindeer, with her long years of experience and knowledge, led the herd, passing her skills and wisdom down to other females one of whom would take her place when she chose to pass over into the Summerlands. And we humans followed the herd, learning from Grandmother Reindeer, and from all the rest of the herd too, right down to the youngest calf. We learned how to walk the seasons, talk with the animals and the trees, the mountains, rivers and the sea; we learned to know the spirit worlds too, and how to walk them as the deer do.
These skills weren’t lost when our people were invaded and our lives changed. Indeed, until the coming of the Romans and Christianity we all walked our paths, with our different traditions, without coming to blows very much. At first, when the Christians came, things didn’t change too much and we were not really oppressed but with the Norman Conquest that changed abruptly. Now, anyone not professing the Christians’ belief system were heavily and physically oppressed. So we went into hiding. outwardly we professed whatever was required to keep our bodies whole; inwardly we held to the Old Ways. We hid in plain sight, looked and behaved like everyone else, so they thought we had been stamped out, gone away, disappeared … but we hadn’t.
My family can go back that far. Name changes, place changes, but still in our hearts keeping the spirit of our ancestral ways. Now, since the millennium, those of us holding these old ways have gradually “come out”. We can again to offer the old ways to any who want to know them. Becoming part of the Deer Trods Tribe is one way you can join us.
