Soul Intent Arts -- embodied soul tending through Nature Learn more about her publications at www.kelleyharrell.com.
Kelley is an author, lifelong deathwalker and animist, and the founder of Soul Intent Arts in North Carolina. She teaches others to ethically build a thriving spiritual path as fit, embodied elders, who upon death become wise, capable Ancestors. Her work is Nature-based, and focuses soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral healing, and deathwork. Kelley is author of:
Runic
Book of Days - 2019 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner
Life Betwixt - Essays on Animism in the Everyday and Shamanism Among
Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
Real Wyrd - A Modern Shaman's Roots in the Middle World
Gift of the Dreamtime Reader's Companion
Gift of the Dreamtime - Awakening to the Divinity of Trauma
Your ancestors didn’t need a calendar to feel the shift in the wind, but maybe being in deep relationship with a system of timekeeping based on ecosystem helped them feel more here.
My book, Runic Book of Days, is a devotional guide for the modern soul that craves that old, deep connection to here and now. No fluff—just the Elder Futhark meeting the rhythms of the earth, aninism-style.
• Align your spirit with seasonal tides
• Practical daily soul tending
• Learn ancient symbols for current living
How do you ground yourself when the seasons shift?
04/06/2026
It’s time to name
that something you’ve always known about yourself.
That quiet certainty.
The instinct you kept following.
The way certain questions have never left you alone.
That feeling that you were preparing for something.
Most people learn to set those things aside.
But they are often the clearest clues
about your origin story.
The world doesn’t need you to become someone new.
It needs you to recognize the truth
you’ve been carrying all along.
We don’t just inherit genes.
We inherit unfinished stories.
We inherit the hopes our ancestors carried. The losses they never had space to grieve. The survival strategies that kept them alive. The horrific things they did. The horrific things done to them.
These things move quietly through generations until someone learns how to listen to them.
Sometimes the questions that follow you through life are not only yours.
They belong to the story you arrived inside.
And understanding that story can reveal the work your life is asking you to do now.
If you’re ready to explore the deeper story you inherited,
schedule a Born for This session.
Protection is relationship.
Animism is protection.
In an animist world, safety doesn’t come from domination or control. It comes from connection.
When land is treated as kin, people listen differently.
When animals are recognized as nations, we move with more care.
When rivers and forests are understood as living communities, responsibility grows.
Protection emerges wherever relationship is honored.
Animism remembers something many cultures have forgotten:
The more relationships that hold a place,
the harder it becomes for harm to survive there.
The opposite of safety is disconnection.
And disconnection cannot sustain animism.
A living world depends on relationship.
Relationship depends on presence.
Presence depends on safety.
04/02/2026
Reincarnation is intergenerational trauma.
We always hear it put forward as deeds in this life being rewarded or punished by an imagined better or more difficult life in form, the next time.
What is it's not the mystical sense people imagine?
What if it's not about punishment or reward, but unfinished history?
What if it'snot about individuals at all, but entire collective repeating patterns? Not having learned history? Not doing better?
What if reincarnation is the fears that were never spoken?
The harm that was never acknowledged?
The survival strategies that became family culture?
What isn’t faced in one generation often appears again in the next, asking to be wintnessed and released.
Your life may be part of that turning point.
If you’re ready to explore the deeper story you were born into,
schedule a Born for This session.
Some families pass down land.
Some pass down money.
Some pass down safety.
The ability to move through the world without being targeted, disbelieved, or discarded is not evenly distributed. It accumulates across generations.
Protection becomes privilege when it is inherited by some and withheld from those
who do not inherit it.
And when a culture protects certain bodies more than others, it quietly decides whose future is worth investing in.
If we want a just world, protection cannot remain a private inheritance.
It has to become a shared responsibility.
04/01/2026
Every being has a unique gift. Some folx call that a purpose, though I think when we look at it that way we lose sight of it as something we are bringing to the world.
It's not for us.
It may fulfill us.
It may gratify us.
But it's not inherently *for* us, because that gift is the work we do here to leave it better than we found it.
How you came into the world
shaped the work only you can do.
The conditions of your arrival the very first time you ever came to this planet--matter.
The landscape that greeted you.
The questions that ganwed at you early on.
The things you noticed that others overlooked.
All of it trained your attention.
And attention is the beginning of impact.
There is a particular way you see the world
because of how your life began.
That perspective is not accidental.
It is preparation. It is agency, honed, with intention, or without. Probably both.
The runes are more than carvings, than wood and stone.
They are whispers from an ancestral ecosystem, inviting us to see that nothing truly ends—it only shifts form.
Connecting with the Elder Futhark isn't about fortune-telling; it's about soul-tending. By listening to these ancient patterns, we find our place in the web of community and learn to walk among without the heavy weight of fear.
When we stop fighting the seasons of life, we finally start living.
Join Runes for Change, and get a regular runecast, free rrunes classes, and be part of an awesome community!
Animism teaches that the world is alive with relationship.
Rivers are relatives.
Forests are communities.
Animals are nations with their own lives and purposes.
Patriarchy teaches hierarchy.
Someone must dominate.
Someone must be beneath.
But a living world cannot be reduced to a ladder of power.
When everything is alive,
everything must be approached with respect, listening, and responsibility.
Animism dissolves the logic of domination.
Which is why cultures that remember the world as alive cannot sustain patriarchy for long.
Which is why we try our best.
03/29/2026
Belonging is generational wealth.
Not the kind stored in banks or passed down in wills,
but the kind carried in relationships.
When people know they belong
to the land,
to their lineage,
to their families,
to their communities,
to the living world around them,
they grow with roots.
Belonging teaches a person that their life matters to others.
That their presence is part of a larger story.
Cultures that protect belonging pass down something more valuable than inheritance.
They pass down the knowledge that no one arrives here alone.
03/28/2026
How you came into the world
is how you tend the world.
It sounds simple, but it isn't.
You came into this world before this life, probably many times.
But your origin story began when this world began.
Born for This sessions offer you an opportunity to learn why you came here t h e f i r s t t i m e, and to understand how the world arrived at this point.
How you arrived at this point.
And when you know those two things, you can make entirely different choices for how you go forward.
How the planet goes forward.
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Contact The Practice
Send a message to Soul Intent Arts - North Carolina:
Soul Intent Arts - Embodied Soul Tending Through Nature
I’m Kelley Harrell, and I believe we can do better.
I believe we all share the calling to be fit, embodied elders, who upon death become wise, capable Ancestors. To fulfill that calling, we must respond at a soul level. Through actionable animism I teach others to find their unique spiritual paths in support of their quiet dead, healed ancestors, fellow humans, and peaceful coexistence with the spirits of the land they live on.
I’m an author, lifelong deathwalker and animist, and the founder of Soul Intent Arts on traditional Sissipahaw land in North Carolina. As an ordained interfaith minister, I teach others to ethically build a thriving spiritual path. My work is Nature-based, and focuses soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral healing, and deathwork.
Elder well, Die well, Ancestor well.
I offer classes, personal mentoring, longterm training through The Spirited Path, a one-year intensive study on the Elder Futhark--Reclaiming the Runes, and other classes. Contact me for mentoring sessions, or for information about The Spirited Path.
I am author of:
Runic Book of Days - A Guide to Living the Annual Cycle of Rune Magick
Life Betwixt - Essays on Animism in the Everyday and Shamanism Among
Teen Spirit Guide to Modern Shamanism
Real Wyrd - A Modern Shaman's Roots in the Middle World
Gift of the Dreamtime Reader's Companion
Gift of the Dreamtime - Awakening to the Divinity of Trauma
I’m a contributor to these anthologies:
Engaging the Spirit World
The Spirit of a Woman - Stories to Empower and Inspire
Nature's Gifts - Anthology of Prose and Poetry Celebrating Nature and Our Natural World
