Glistening in tiny raindrops that resemble silver balls of dew, Arachne sits queen of her web, which has appeared overnight across my doorway. Usually i wouldn’t turn an outdoor light on before dawn, as i am comfortable in the darkness and keen to take in as much of the night sky as possible before Aurora shimmers silver across the horizon from the east. But i’m not at home. I’m staying in a rustic retreat centre in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, south east Queensland, leading an intensive for ecopsychotherapy students. There’s no sunshine, though. The rain of our Australian La Nina continues. Hopefully there’ll be no more flooding, although Mullumbimby residents are meeting again, in preparation for ‘Severe Weather’.
The light goes on and i step out, carefully, mindful that each step is a moment in time, not rushing to see if there is any chance of glimpsing the sunrise through the clouds. And there she is; i see her just in time, so that the door doesn’t take out her web, she doesn’t feel panicked as her airy world is shaken apart, and doesn’t end up crawling across my face.
Because i was moving slowly, i don’t have to clear silky strands from my face and help her back into her broken web. Instead, i take the time to stop in awe of her beauty. I know i should go and help my co-facilitator set up the hall for our morning yoga session, but i can’t drag myself away from this stunningly beautiful vision. Tiny crystalline balls of water glisten in the electric light, across her body and web, which is a spiralling cage of death to smaller insects, but a geometric pattern of wonder to me. My door has broken one long strand, which connects the web to the ground, so when i finally walk away, she is working on repairs.
There is no dawn glimmering today, so i can’t perform my Sunrise Ceremony, and the heavy cloud cover means no Venus, Jupiter, Mars or Saturn (or Aphrodite, Zeus, Ares and Kronos) either. I’ve been tracking this predawn planetary alignment for weeks, as i perform my morning prayers at home. It is good to be visited by the gods and goddesses, occasionally.
Back inside for yoga just after dawn, then out on Country after breakfast. What do we find when we reconnect with nature? Participants speak lovingly of rediscovering childlike delight in little things, of the watercourses they visit when they are stressed and how much calmer they feel after some time there, or of a rock in a special place that recreates a feeling of stability and confidence that has been eroded by modern reality. We speak of encounters with butterflies and ducks, of when we sense a grander scheme of things, when facing the ocean or the sky, or how we get our breath back with a walk in the bush.
We start with reality. Where are we at today? We probably shouldn’t have to work to find solace in nature, but we do. So, we create that space, sharpen our ears, make time and allow ourselves to sink back into connection. Many find deeper rest here, some feel more enlivened. All note the way their sense of separation from nature is dissolved, how they return to a feeling of being in relationship with the land, other animals, the elements. The rain has its magical rhythm, even for those who have been traumatised by the recent floods. Tears flow, wounds are reopened and healed over again, genuine smiles come easy … the earth sings and we tune in.
We sit in the Temenos, the sacred and safe space where all sharing is valid, where our vulnerable, soft, sometimes broken animal selves can peep out and find comfort in others. We practise walking therapy, deep listening to each other as well as nature, not talking over or waiting to respond, but being there, offering authenticity and the ‘unconditional positive regard’ recommended by person-centred counselling godfather Carl Rogers.
We choose Sit Spots, where we can become more aware of changes in the natural landscape from day to day, moment to moment. We open up the doors of perception and come back to our senses in the moment. We draw the mind back from its monkey-like grasping and from the machine that captures us all, all too often. Guided meditations draw our awareness down into the earth’s hum, into our unique being and our universal flow at the same time, into animal totems old and new. We learn from nature, like we always did. It provides endless metaphors of healing, empowerment and flow; the grass bounces back after being trodden down, a river flows around the rocks that seemed like barriers at first, a gentle breeze brings us back to our bodies in the here and now.
We let nature tell our life story for once, and sing around the campfire, like people have always done. It is all so easy, smooth and natural, we wonder how we ever lost this feeling in the first place.
*NB: boundless thanks to the participants and my co-facilitator Charlotte Brown. All photos by the author. If you feel moved by these words, please consider Subscribing, Sharing or Liking this post.
Let’s begin with the comment from the inaugural post in this new thread. If Teresita is right and most of us know deep inside that we are doomed in the near future, what do we get out of either facing this probability head on versus not thinking about it too much? As Teresita writes, “In a very human aspect we all want to live our lives … as if nothing was about to happen. Love needs to be circulating. The risk of depression and apathy is very high if we accept this truth just like that.”
So, let’s focus on attention and awareness. I want to face the truth of what is coming, so that i can live and die as consciously as possible. How to avoid sinking into depression, apathy, anxiety or fury, when we see that the human race is about to be culpable for the extermination of most life on earth, as the hothouse explodes into action over the next few years, if not decades? One way of thinking this through is to think in terms of investment and reward – a strikingly capitalist, or at least materialistic metaphor i know, considering we are talking here about values, psyche, heart and soul. But i’m going to try and stick to the here and now, the realities of our physical existence as much as possible, while we can. There will be time for the spiritual possibilities later.
Let’s roll the dice. Life’s a gamble, yes? We never quite know what the result of our actions will be. Let’s say we focus some attention on an imminent, planetary extinction event. What is the reward for this path? What is the reward, or possible set of outcomes, for avoiding this? Preparing the mind for chaos seems to me more valuable. What will we do when societal breakdown becomes one of the realities between now and then? When people are hungry, homeless, shocked, destitute, desperate? They will be looking for answers where there are none. The least we could do, as thoughtful people with the courage to look ahead, is to be ready with whatever little shreds of wisdom we can muster, like bits of flotsam on the flood.
I believe the horrors will be worse if we don’t prepare our minds, our hearts and souls for what seems inevitable. I want to live and die like a beautiful social primate, capable of self-awareness and generosity of spirit. We are all going to be challenged more than we can yet even possibly imagine. A bit of preparation can go a long way.
*NB: I’m going to try to keep these meditations short. Please Like, Share and Subscribe. Please leave comments, suggestions for the dilemmas we need to discuss, questions, debates, interventions etc.
Image: La Bête de la Mer (Tapisserie de l’Apocalypse) / The Beast of the Sea (Tapestry of the Apocalypse)
The second of my two very vivid childhood dreams reveals why I am not crushed by the other one, where our world crumbles away beneath our feet. While that dream foretold the extinction event we are currently experiencing, this one reminds me that no matter how much terror, anxiety, depression or grief we experience, there is wisdom in the shadows.
In this dream, i am a boy, wearing a classical toga and leather sandals. I run across the desert sands to an enormous dome building. I am very comfortable here and climb some stairs, which wrap around the dome to a flat concourse. There is simple, unreflective joy in my heart – the kind we experience so easily as children and so rarely as adults.
Suddenly, something moves in a shadow to my left. I look back, jolted by a ripple of fear in response to this movement. Out of the shadow of a stairwell an old man appears. We stare at each other for a moment, while I am frozen to the spot, wondering what will happen next, still a little scared. He smiles. There is warmth in his eyes, knowing emanates from his visage; he is comfortable in the world and wants me to feel the same.
At his smile, my childish innocence and faith in life instantly reappear. I turn back to run along the rampart. As i do, i look more closely into the clay bricks of the domed wall. There i see tiny capillaries in the wall, which i had never noticed before.
The renewed depth i discover in my vision, as a result of this apparition, works to balance the joyful innocence of the boy. Importantly, out of the shadows appears not threat, but comfort; the wise old man of archetypal power contains a frisson of danger, as true gnosis (or inner knowing) always has. But with his smile I do not fall into fear, but into an edge of discovering the unknown instead; it is the mystery that lasts and draws me along.
The Old Man expresses that wisdom or spark in us that is beyond the comforts of everyday life, what we have become used to, the personality we identify with. He is not an emissary of conventional religion, like the priests who promise hope for our lives after death if we obey their holy writ. He obeys only the imperative that is crystallised in the image: the archetypal Old Man brings wisdom from the realms beyond what we are thus far aware of; that is the whole point. Jung became wise enough through his contact with the archetypes to know they bring together a wide range of possibilities.
Coming out of the darkness, he brings wisdom – and we never needed it more than now, as we face the catastrophic, combined realities of anthropogenic climate change, ecosystem breakdown, increasing political instability and the widespread extinction event that has already begun. However, it would be facile to claim that out of the darkness (of what is happening to our planet right now) a light will come. I write of my dream now not to promise a new dawn, or comfort us with any other simplistic metaphor designed to avoid taking responsibility for the ecocide our species is responsible for. Empty hope and cheap consolation do not honour the untold suffering that will be visited upon humanity as we begin to discover what crop failures, superstorms, megafires and freakish flood events really feel like. The extinction of so many of our animal cousins and plant kin alike deserves more. It deserves awareness.
We can develop deeper awareness by looking into the Shadow, seeking the wisdom that arises from our place of not knowing. This is how the Mystery Schools found faith in gnosis for over 2,000 years. Yet, while we explore our own inner realms and Wizened Old figures, staring into the darkness without guidance can lead to despair. For as Nietzsche so presciently wrote, when we stare into the abyss, it stares back into us. What do I find when I look into the shadow, of myself and of my race? Something tells me that, if I look deeply enough, I will find not only what I fear, but what grants me greater insight, too – and perhaps even an element of solace.
I have written before about how we can find this, even when we realise that we are enmeshed in, and therefore part of, the system that is destroying the earth. With the dream of the Old Man, I recall that there is wisdom beyond courage; beyond environmental activism, beyond righteous indignation at the failure of our leaders, beyond the sad but inevitable realisation that the world as we know it is now collapsing beneath our feet.
The Old Man does not forgive the evils of transnational corporate greed, which have ensured our downfall; nor does he forget the corrupt media that sells the stories of the military industrial complex. But neither does the archetypal Old Man want to beat us up with guilt, since we have failed to stop the madness and destruction. He understands that the evolution of technology, the politics of power, the fact that we were born into this damnable system without willing it, the way we were sold the modern mythology of work, profit, holidays, breeding up and finally retiring to play Scrabble or bowls … all of this is beyond our power to change, except to the extent that we can make better choices.
The better choice we could make right now is to transfer our values from the damaging system of capitalist profiteering to the timeless tales of power, wisdom, grace that remain available to us in our dreams, our myths, our symptoms and even in our nightmares. The Mystery School lives on, because it is a representation of the ancient wisdom coursing through our veins and dancing in our DNA right now.
There is no future – the kids doing tang ping have figured it out – but there never really was. What is left to us now, beyond apathy and resignation, is deepening of the soul, refining of the spirit, transformation of the self. Nothing good will come of our planetary death throes and no amount of hand wringing, sobbing or admission of guilt will alleviate this awful reality. Rather, i will recall the wisdom of that old man and consider the life of the butterfly as my guiding metaphor. We crawl away to create a cocoon, withdraw within it, and dissolve into goop. These old selves must die.
Every traditional culture teaches that part of us passes over to another realm. With an ear on that wisdom, i have faith that my soul will crystallize into a new lifeform, in a new dimension, where i will find the strength to grow, until i am ready to break out and fly free, on another adventure. One day i will be that old man, looking out from the shadows, unexpectedly frightening the children i meant to comfort, while helping them to see that looking into the depths will deepen their vision, their insight, their capacity to look more clearly into who they are and what their relationship to the earth is.
*Thank you for reading my Nature Calling blog. If you got something out of these words, pleaseShare, Like and Subscribe to the blog (upper right corner). It really does help to keep the juices flowing.*
Images: Featured Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash;; clay Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash; Painting of a sea monster by Carl Jung, from his Red Book; painting of a fire serpent by Carl Jung, from his Red Book.
One of the two very vivid dreams I recall from my early childhood in the 70s was a warning about the current times. I think of it sometimes, as it informs me about how to steady myself for the extinction event that is currently escalating on our planetary home.
Although very young when I dreamt this, I am a bearded man in the dream, standing on a granite pavement, with my two children standing innocently next to me. It feels very Atlantean; we are part of an advanced civilization, proud of our place in the world. I had been in some kind of committee meeting, inside a marble hall, and had come out for some fresh air and to see my children. Suddenly, without warning, the ground began to rumble beneath our feet. In no time at all, the pavement was crumbling away, and I begin to lose my footing, which seemed so secure just moments before. I instinctively reached down, grabbed both of my children in my arms, and pulled them up to my chest. It felt good to have them so close, even as the world collapsed into an abyss beneath our feet.
And that’s it. Like so many dreams, it simply ends, having appeared to my young mind from … from where? Nothing in my early childhood offers a reliable compass for this vision. It is a spontaneous irruption from the collective unconscious, a pattern of longing, shock and adaptation, an archetype of life and death arising out of the storehouse of human myth and symbol.
But the imagery says so much – and its visionary power goes a long way to explaining why I have always known that the world as we know it would end in my lifetime. Now that we are seeing evidence of this everywhere, it is time to draw upon the endlessly fascinating world of myth to try and navigate the tumultuous seas that are crashing down upon us, as runaway climate disaster is matched by unstoppable ecosystem breakdown, all in feedback loops of their own.
So, what can the great stories from the collective annals of culture tell us about where we’re at now and what we can do about it? What wisdom can be imparted by studying the ancient ways, as well as waking up to the limitless miracle of the moment (which is really where myth points, endlessly).
The end of this world has been a consistent image in world mythologies, from Biblical revelations to Mayan calendars, from nuclear threats to Kali Yuga. There is little point in running over the false starts and fake prophets that have predicted that The End is Nigh! So, just as my MA tracked the way that our dreams link us to the mysterious worlds of myth, let’s return to its life changing power and see what can be further divined from it.
I mention that my dream felt Atlantean, knowing that the original inspiration behind the myth of a lost but highly advanced civilisation can be found in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias. In the latter, Plato tells of the fast and furious fall of the legendary Atlantis, when “there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune … the island disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
An entire civilisation disappearing in 24 hours is a classic ‘warp’ of mythic time, which is often elastic enough to stretch out towards the infinite (which we can experience when we practice timelessness) and back in towards the intimate (which is how we experience time in an embodied sense). Plato’s 24 hours can remind us of the riddle Oedipus answers to destroy the Sphinx at the gates of Thebes, unwittingly ensuring his own downfall: what creature has four legs in the morning, two during the day, and three at night? A human, whose life passes so quickly from the face of the earth that it may as well be one day – from crawling infant, to free standing adult, to the elder holding themselves up with a crutch – our entire lives pass as quickly as a mote in time.
This also makes sense in another way: the entirety of large-scale human civilisation – urban settlements built on the profits of agriculture and colonisation, magnified a hundred-fold with the industrial revolution – has risen and will fall in the blink of a geological eye. Our moment in the sun has been brilliant and short-lived. Like Atlantis – both the one Plato claimed was already an ancient myth in his day and the imaginative one that has been dreamt up many times since – we are now crumbling into the sea. And as in my dream, it is now happening very, very quickly. Technological development and ecosystem destruction have been increasingly rapid in postmodern industrial culture. But as I never tire of pointing out, the exponential pace of this machine was set in motion during the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago, when we changed from treating the life around us as kin and instead started to think about it as a set of resources for our use.
And now, we are visiting panic time. Mental health issues are skyrocketing – a pandemic is highlighting and magnifying this, because we mammals don’t flourish when we are socially isolated – but we can expect this to continuously escalate, as the true horror of what faces us next becomes increasingly apparent. We don’t need old time prophetic predictions anymore – a hot house earth is now a matter of scientific certainty and will spell the end of the world as we know it (certainly for the beer and skittles reality we in the affluent west have enjoyed over recent decades).
The only thing left to do is to prepare for the best possible end we can, to draw near those or that which we love, resist the urge to become frantic, let go of our sense of entitlement, practice meditation and breath work and become proficient in dealing with grief. (I’ll keep practising environmental activism, btw, but the days are gone when we might have dreamt we were going to make any real difference to the near future of the planet.)
It’s time to spend the rest of our lives building relationship with the sliver of our consciousness that remains connected to the eternal spark of life. Paradoxically, the practice of seeking to awaken to the timeless can deepen our awareness of the moment, as we experience life in the body, in the here and now, this unrepeatable but soon to pass opportunity to be exactly who we are. Breathing in connection with all that is connects us to the spirit of life that emerges out of the universe and falls back into the ultimate matrix upon its death. Like everything else, we are the flourish of a brush stroke, the coming into being of a certain kind of energy, the passing of a firefly in the night.
My childhood dream is like a lifetime’s memento mori, a reminder that death awaits us all. My guiding metaphor for the awakening I seek out of it is the life cycle of the butterfly. We have been crawling along as caterpillars, but now it is time to create a cocoon, withdraw into it, and dissolve into goop. These old selves must die. This applies on multiple layers and across differing contexts of our lives; I recently emerged from a 5-year apprenticeship to nature spirit, guided again by my dreams, this time to leave the city and live a coastal life far away from my academic and other urban pursuits. This whole period of life, including work and parenting and being in the world in my way, was like a cocoon compared to my previous existence. But I also feel like every night is another cocoon, out of which we emerge renewed; as is every meditation sit, every relationship breakdown, every opportunity for change.
No matter what the context, we can see in nature that there is a basis for trusting that the goop of our dissolved self will re-crystallise, that a new being will grow and build strength, that eventually, after a long, dark night of the soul, we will break out of one cocoon and fly free to another dimension of ourselves. This is the cycle of energy that gives rise to religions: all that lives must die and out of death comes new life. Quantum physics tells us the same thing – life is energy and it is never completely snuffed out, just transformed. To believe that this is what happens to us, to our bodies and consciousness, when we die makes just as much sense as any other faith, like the one that states that consciousness arises out of physical matter and life is ultimately meaningless. As the world crumbles away around us, which myth will you choose? To hold onto the last vestiges of your sense of entitlement; to party as much as possible; to forgive and expand; to prepare for another dimension?
Every traditional culture teaches that part of us passes over to another realm. With an ear out for that wisdom, we can live for the moment and experience the vibration of a living, intelligent cosmos. If we do so while practicing compassion for the suffering of all beings, we may even realise some small measure of liberation from the confines of the self along the way. The possibility of spiritual liberation in itself should be enough to inspire us to reconnect with the ocean of eternity, beyond the iron cage of reason and the isolation of the individual.
I’ll still reach for my kids as the world crumbles beneath our feet. And I’ll still be thankful to feel their breath on my chest as we fall into the abyss below. That’s because the shadow of death does not seem a threat to me, but a promise. This is the ecomythic in action – inspiring compassion for all creatures, celebrating a living cosmos and an animate earth, within which we all dance, for that limited time we have allotted.
*NB: if you got something out of this post, please Like, Share and Subscribe. It really does help me to keep writing.
It was really refreshing to have a conversation with my mate, Dr Thomas Bristow, an expert in ecopoetics, and Senior Editor of the journal i am also an editor for, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature. Tom wanted to chat about what the Romantic poets – Blake, Yeats, Wordsworth, Byron and co – saw in nature, and in particular what they learnt from listening for the spiritual aspects of the earth. It was a fun yarn and we touched on many aspects of the subject matter, following a handful of questions, or prompts, in a free range flow. Tom called this chat ‘Romantic Vision’ and you can access the video of it here (no pressure, but Tom tells me this may only be posted for a limited amount of time).
But first, i must wonder aloud about the value of literary explorations, poetic conversations, appreciating the Romantics and attuning ourselves to our local ecosystem in an age of planetary destruction. There’s a point in the interview where i admit that Thich Nhat Hanh might be right: perhaps what we most need to do is to hear the earth crying. This is not a very good sales pitch. And it’s probably only true to a certain extent: we are also a miraculous incarnation of consciousness in a primate body, embodying the spirit of life in a fantastically rich way, a celebration waiting to be had. My point is that opening our minds to the Deep Listening that i suggest at the culmination of this chat is not necessarily going to make you happier, but it may very well help you to be liberated from some of the more innocuous yet pervasive limits of your mind. Worth a shot?
To get there, Tom and i talked over the resurgence of European myth in the 18th century, which inspired Romantic poets to personify or anthropomorphise the environment, as a means to address ‘nature’, to represent vast fields of energy, beyond the human scale, and to create textual events that trigger legacies of ecocentric writing and orality. If you’re interested in the historical development of Western consciousness, you might enjoy our riff on how Romanticism worked as a response to Enlightenment. My key term for this was the ‘suprarational,’ which i saw as an attempt to develop consciousness beyond the human, to include our ancient predilection for pantheism, or notion that intelligence is a quality of the universe, or another dimension, which arises with this one (or even as its prerequisite).
This reminded me of the intelligence we find in nature, which is revealed in the way plants reach for the sun, or animals know instinctively how to hunt prey or follow seasons or find their way back across entire oceans to their birthplace. I can’t help but feel that for all of our technological development, the modernised psyche is a truncated version of something that could be far greater, in scope, depth and alacrity. We need to incorporate reason into our toolbox but be ready for so much more, when we open our minds to a conversation beyond the merely human, with plants and animals and places.
“We are leaning our for love and we will lean that way forever” Leonard Cohen
This more open-minded consciousness could also perceive more beauty in the world and thereby require less stuff from human society and production. There’s more to say about how recognising spirit of place can help protect the natural world, but i’m writing that for the next issue of PAN, so i’ll keep the water nymphs and satyrs for then.
When we are alive to the ecomythic dimension of life, human consciousness opens up to what actually is arising in nature, which is other forms of intelligence. This can also be called animism, which indigenous people have always said is real, not metaphorical: spirit beings, spirits of place, and spiritual entities are all other types of intelligent beings, which exist but do not take physical bodies in this dimension with us. They represent life force, sometimes of that place, sometimes from beyond. If we want to learn from them, we have to put aside our historical, socialised self, and enter into a trance of timelessness, beyond our personal foibles and concerns. Even as we are thoroughly enmeshed in capitalism and colonisation, simply by being alive in the world today, we can turn our backs on the worst of it, the most obvious effects it has on our minds, and find ourselves as we also always were and are: trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth wrote in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
Any true Romantic knows how to love a storm
Tom asked how we get there. I can only humbly suggest we meditate in sand dunes, or under trees, or by a babbling brook (or, if you’re in urban lockdown, on a pot plant and its own mysterious urge to live). A great place to start is with Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, who made the practice of Deep Listening more accessible to the public, especially helpful for non-Aboriginal Australians living on this ancient land.
Then maybe, if we can quieten the voices of our humanity for long enough, we might be able to hear the muses still, as they sing the song of the earth, for those who will listen.
*NB: Please Subscribe, Share, Comment … anything! It’s much more satisfying to write these posts when there is a conversation going on, believe me.*
