The Ghost in the Machine......

Well I see I have to defend my thinking again! Trouble with egocentric humans they think human all the time, their own very short brief time space on this earth allows us to judge ALL things mmmm!; minds so narrowly corralled within their own belief systems such as scientific understanding. ;) What they don't understand is that which appertains to something called deep ecology (woo-woo maybe) which is about nature, the natural world we all occupy. When I talk 'spirit' my mentors are Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and David Abrams. The 'essence' of place, the essence of trees, plants and stone, the deeper meaning, maybe its history, but all forms started somewhere.
Look at something intrinsically alive, a plant moving with the wind, now look at a stone, is it dead? or does it remind you that maybe trapped inside are sparkling quartz, fossilized creatures, that maybe the creative earth we live on has moulded that stone over millions of years into a form we see as having an 'essence' perhaps we should respect the world we live in and not anaylsis it to destruction ..
As for 'claustrophobic' encounters in longbarrows, again a human interaction of no importance to the longbarrow which exists in its own time of long ago, subjective and emotional responses are based in the individual.

I would have renamed this thread 'Spirit of Place' by the way ;)