The Earth Remembers: A Birthright Rediscovered

On 28 August 2025, during a shamanic journey in the Oxfordshire countryside, a mountain in Malawi that Andy Martin had not thought about for over a year reached across the world and pulled him back. A being he had never met was waiting on the granite summit: tall, slender, with a distinctive elongated head, wearing a bark loincloth and carrying a staff. Asked his name, he answered: I am Mukanda. In the pan-Bantu languages, mukanda means the writing, the message that must be set down.A week later, a friend produced a pen-and-ink drawing made in 1977, from a physical encounter with the same figure on the same mountain. The two drawings, made forty-eight years apart in different dimensions of reality, matched.The Earth Remembers is the story that followed. Part autobiography, part comparative study, it traces a lifetime of landscape across five continents: a childhood in Malawi among the Yao, the rainforests of Borneo, the frozen Ob in Siberia, twenty-two years in the Cairngorms, the Sahara at dawn. Alongside it, Andy sets six indigenous spiritual traditions: the San of southern Africa, the Aboriginal Australians, the Penan of Borneo, the Yao, the Khanty and Mansi, and the buried traditions of Britain and northern Europe.What emerges is a single argument, made from evidence and from a life: that the capacity for direct spiritual experience is not the province of specialists. It is a human birthright, built into the organism, and recoverable wherever the relationship with the living world is honoured.Includes three original poems.Listen, Remember, Return.