This post really resonated with me because I have always hoped that my spiritual practice would give me the capacity to connect with my home. So I thought I'd start this thread so we can all share our ideas on how we adapt our practice to work with our local spirits, geography, flora, fauna, etc.a dissatisfaction with the ‘traditional’ seasonal wheel that clearly did not sync with our lived (place-based) experience, a deep desire to meet and work with the Powers of our specific Place, and a willingness (even desire) to listen for or create new tools and practices that matched our experiential discoveries. We were, in a real sense, willing to craft a Place-based cultus ...
Our group identified a few areas of import, ones we felt were vital to our work. The first was developing, or honing, our observation skills, seeing again the landscape around us–which for most of us is urban–and looking with new eyes. Many committed to taking notes of significant occurrence, i.e., the cycle of plants, bird calls and flight patterns, celestial positions, etc. The second was a willingness and ability to use our witchcraft tools–or the tools of mindfulness and meditation–to facilitate deep listening, and a form of possession with/of the living land around us and the Powers we may encounter ... Since the practices most of us had been taught were built on a largely European model, we surmised that energies/beings/Powers/Persons we encounter in North America–a continent away from the Euro-centric myths we all know–and specially central Texas, could feel different, express themselves differently, or generally interact with our energies in ways unique and different.
I'll start: One of the things I did when I was still a little budding pagan was to walk around the area around my home (a.k.a. my college campus, since I was still living in a dorm at the time) and start learning how to identify the local weeds that grew on the sidewalks. I was amazed to discover all the medicinal and culinary uses of these random plants that I had never noticed before! That was the first several pages of my BoS.
Another adaptation I've made was that in my practice, I've changed the cardinal directions and their elemental associations such that East is now Water, since I have always lived my life next to the Atlantic Ocean (it follows that Air is North, Earth is South, and West is Fire - just makes sense in my head).
How about you?