This Direction Matters More Than You Think 🌿

When Alanna handed me the pendulum

This is a compelling follow up to my last email 4 days prior. If you didn’t read that — you can do so here. I added an audio version for your listening pleasure. Enjoy.

Sometimes, when the right teacher touches your shoulder at just the right moment—something transfers.

Not knowledge, exactly.

Not facts.

But a kind of knowing.

A felt-sense. A subtle alignment. Like something dormant inside you suddenly wakes up and remembers what to do.

That’s how it was with Alanna Moore.

I’d already studied permaculture for years. I knew about all the environmental factors influencing growth, designing with zones and creating epic compost—I thought I had the whole map.

Then she handed me a pendulum.

And suddenly, the map had layers I’d never seen before—deeper layers. She called it Sensitive Permaculture.

It wove in the spirits of place. The unseen relationships. Fairies, devas, the land’s intelligence—not as metaphor, but as reality. It was grounded, but not just in soil. It was rooted in relationship.

And Alanna?

Well, she might be the most eccentric woman I’ve ever met.

Sharp as a blade. Humble to a fault. Kind of witchy in the best way—not that she’d ever call herself that.

Her hair was often a little wild, like the wind had a fondness for her.

She was so sensitive she couldn’t fly without wearing a full silver garment over her head. Not for fashion. For radiation protection.

She’s electro-sensitive. Airports make her sick. Cell towers, too.

But don’t mistake the quirks for weakness.

She’s an absolute force. She taught me more in a few days about tuning into plants, trees, and landscapes than I’d learned in years of reading.

And what stuck with me most—was dowsing.

She placed her hands on my shoulders once while I held the pendulum.

“Just feel,” she said. “Wait. Let it move.”

And it did.

Not because I forced it, but because I was entrained. My field linked with the tree, or the soil, or the question—and the pendulum responded like a compass needle finding true north.

It’s funny they used to call it “water witching” in the South.

There’s something to that. It’s not magic, but it’s not not magic either.

It’s tuning.

I started using the pendulum to orient trees for transplanting. I’d hold the sapling in one hand, extend the pendulum in the other, and slowly rotate the plant.

When the alignment was right—it would swing.

The feeling in my body was undeniable. Like an out-breath. My nervous system would sigh. Everything would soften.

I’d try moving it back the other way and instantly feel tension, a subtle anxiety.

Like the tree was saying, no, not there.

Over time, I didn’t need the pendulum anymore.

Now it takes seconds.

I can walk onto a site, hold a plant, and feel its orientation snap into place. The signal is clear. My body is the dowsing rod. The tension tells me everything I need to know.

And what’s wild?

When I come back later, and I look—really look—at the way those trees have grown, I see a kind of geometry unfold. The branches stretch in harmony with their neighbors. There’s a flow, a coherence.

As if the tree already knew where it needed to go, and I just listened long enough to hear it.

This is divination. Not fortune-telling — not pattern recognition — but pattern-listening. Root-level knowing.

You’re not imposing.

You’re not instructing.

You’re asking.

And you’re trusting the answer.

Are you willing to trust me?

In service to the greater harmony,

Ray “Whispers from the Roots” Lee Bacon

PS. Let me know what type of articles, emails and the like that you want me to write more of. I read every comment. Thanks.