The Dionysian Naturalist

Buddhist Pathways into Contemporary Nature Religion Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Revised chapter draft 02 • October 26, 2026 Learning to belong to a living world What happens when a person speaks in the voice of a threatened forest, bows toward the Earth, or learns to attend to a watershed as a community of which humans are members? These practices invite a change in the relationship between the person and the world. The living environment becomes someone or something to whom a response is owed. Across several contemporary Buddhist and Buddhist-influenced settings, ecological belonging is cultivated through such invitations. Learning to belong involves bodily attention, emotional permission, and opportunities to act with others. In “Doing Eco-Theology in the Anthropocene,” I situated the new American religions of nature within the search for spiritual responses to ecological crisis. “Walking the Earth Path” developed that concern through an emphasis on lived practice: the movement fro...

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We Carry Them Into This Room  Opening Invocation CLUE Fall Annual Workshop 2026 Sunday afternoon, October 25, 2026 By Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Spirit of Life, Spirit of Justice, love that refuses to abandon anyone who suffers, Holy One known by many names, and by no name at all: we gather now. Let us arrive. Let us breathe together. Between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Santa Barbara Channel, where fog lifts from the water and islands rise blue on the horizon, may beauty deepen our responsibility for one another. We gather on Chumash homelands. We honor living peoples, their sovereignty, and their enduring relationships with land and sea. May acknowledgment become listening, listening become relationship, and relationship become accountability and repair. We carry into this room our neighbors sleeping in doorways off State Street, and those living in vehicles: workers, families, elders, people with disabilities, making home wherever they can. They belong here as surely a...

TO THE INITIATE An autobiographical prose poem Dionysus cries out in the streets. In the squares he raises his voice. At the entrance of the city gate he speaks: “How long, O foolish ones, will you love being foolish? How long will sufferers continue in their suffering and refuse to hear my words of wisdom? Listen to what I have to say. I will make my thoughts known to you.” Secrets will be revealed to you—secrets known, forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again by those who have ventured beyond the boundaries of ordinary life. As the old initiates said, and Plato set down in the Phaedo : “For many are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the bacchoi .” Many carry the staff. Few enter the mysteries. Fewer still return from them. There are forces within us that civilization cannot entirely contain. We construct laws and institutions, prisons and churches, schools and bureaucracies. We learn to discipline our bodies, postpone our pleasures, regulate our desires, and make ourselves useful....