Take a moment to envision the core of the Earth as a cauldron bubbling over a fire. What would happen if this fire were extinguished? This sobering question is raised by Rev. Wendy Van Allen in her book, Relighting the Cauldron: Embracing Nature Spirituality in Our Modern World. Unless we face the fact that modern living is unsustainable, we are on the path to extinction.

Fortunately, as Rev. Van Allen illustrates, we have available to us a rich repository of nature-based traditions that can help us create a new paradigm for living on Earth.

As an ordained interspiritual minister and an active member of the Pagan community, Rev. Van Allen is deeply aware of the commonalities and wisdom embedded within different nature-based traditions. In Relighting the Cauldron, she shares her insights about these traditions and issues a call to all of humanity to embrace the sustainable ideas of nature-based spirituality. The related meditations and practices she offers are designed to help us along the way.

The fact that fire is mentioned over 50 times in Van Allen’s book may be one of the reasons why reading it can conjure up feelings of sitting around a campfire, sharing stories about our experiences with the natural world. Rev. Van Allen helps us understand the significance of such stories.

Relighting the Cauldron gives us hope. It speaks to the possibility of revisiting that time when the world was exciting, when the fire burned brightly. While the book identifies ways in which modern humanity is endangering all life on Earth, it also assures us that it’s possible to recapture magick (as Rev. Van Allen writes it) and move toward a new level of human evolution and a deeper relationship with the rest of the natural world.