Imagine living life where that life is intimately connected to nature. Remember the feeling that you get when you see a butterfly for the first time since winter, or when you walk amongst trees on a forest path. Feel in your heart that desire of nature to speak to you, to connect with you, to love you.

I spent about 10 days in April hiking around Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco and attended the Wind Rock and Wave workshop led by David Abram, Taira Restar, and Ken Otter. We were a group of about 22 people from all over the world, some older, some younger. The focus of the workshop was to help us as individuals to get past the subject object duality that we in the West tend to see things with. David Abram spoke about how air and breath weave in and out of the world and us. The root word of psyche is to breathe, to breathe life. David was trying to have us experience the world of imagination that we consider to be strictly within ourselves is actually, like air or breath, weaving in and out of the world around us and wishes connection with us.

I’ll tell a short story of my experience in this regard. Our group had separated and each of us had gone in different directions. I had walked up a forest road and was standing on the edge of the road facing into a swampy area below me that surrounded a small stream that meandered into the ocean nearby. Standing there I settled my mind and my body and opened them to what was around me. The wind was blowing and so I first connected to the waves of air moving through the trees on the other side of the swamp. Each tree has its own particular dance with the wind. Then I noticed the old brown reeds in the swamp bending side to side with the wind. They moved more rigidly in a way and also in a playful dance. Bringing my gaze lower I noticed that the lilies closer to the bank where I was standing were bobbing their heads down and up, down up bowing to the playfulness of the reeds. Looking up I noticed a hazelnut leaf spinning on the edge of the leaves around and around and around it went. Up to my right looking over some old trees I noticed the moisture laden wispy clouds roiling around as they came over the ridge further to my right. Then right in front of my face a green caterpillar was bobbing up and down on the thin silken thread saying see I’m here to. As I stood there I was struck by the intensity of feeling that I had for all the gestures of play and relationship that I was receiving from nature. My heart opened to joy and I danced quietly with my body in response. Back in the group I related what I had experienced in an animated way and felt a certain sense of wholeness arise me in being able to share this freely with people. Later down by the windy seashore we all did watercolor paintings of what experience touched us the most. I did a painting of colors that were veiling together and called it orgasmic play in honor of what I had received while I stood on the side of the road earlier.

In this workshop I had a series of similar experiences but in different locations and in different forms. All of them connected me with a deeper sense of relationship with the world and in particular the erotic soulful quality of the world. During the workshop I kept having the image from the story of Psyche and Eros arise in my imaginal space. The image was of Psyche walking in the dark towards a sleeping Eros with a lamp that she had brought at the suggestion of her three sisters so that she might see whether his face was really that of a monster. As she lifts the lamp to see him a drop of oil splashes onto his shoulder and awakens him. On waking he says I had asked you not to look upon me and you have broken that promise, I must leave you now and he flees from her presence. The root of the word to burn is to kindle to create warmth, in my imagination to create desire. My experiences during this workshop were about kindling or having kindled a warmth of desire for the beloved, an erotic loving connection to the depth of relationship with nature.

I expressed this imaginal experience in an email to David Abram and he replied that the image that I was expressing had Eros fleeing the scene. Paraphrasing David, he suggested that it was his desire to have people be able to experience the mystery of nature, the erotic mystery of nature, the Eros of nature, out in the natural world. As air and breath weave in and out of the world and we humans, so does the erotic mystery and desire of the soul for connection weave in and out of the world and ourselves. Life breathing life. I told David in an answering email that I appreciated his grounding of what I was saying and connecting it to the earth of his work and of my experiences in the workshop. I had also suggested in my first email that there was something about Eros running off to his mother Aphrodite after being burned that was niggling away at my imagination. In our culture eroticism is often sexualized and isn’t held in a place of more creative energy. In fact erotic creativity or erotic connection to creativity is hard for us to get to because of the subject object split that we live our lives by. It leaves the erotic energy to be sexualized as the main form of erotic experience that we have in our culture. The niggling question in my imagination about Eros running off to his mother Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love, still remains for me something to hold and mull over.

As I have written elsewhere on this site the way humans see and experience life inside and outside of themselves has changed over time. Prior to the Renaissance people saw in two dimensions, in other words they didn’t see so much in subject and object or in perspective. There was still a connection with what was around and inside themselves, an embeddedness in the world of nature and in their psyches. Yet they lacked a certain self consciousness. So the further development of ego awareness since then has gradually created a separation or disconnection of me the subject from you or nature being the object. This separation also occurred between our egos and our inner world or psyche. As Carl Jung has said we have been quite successful in using our subject object separation to be able to build a civilization and technology outside of ourselves. Yet this separation is now leading us down the path to our own demise because we cannot remember or see or feel our connection to nature and to our natural inner life.

This blog is about helping all of us to remember these connections.

In my previous blog I tried to provide a story and picture of the experience of relating to nature differently. The first thing that happened to me was that I was able to still my mind by getting out of the chatter of my ego and other inner voices. So a first step in reconnection is to be able to still our inner voices/thoughts long enough to be able to open space in ourselves to allow a different story or way of seeing to arise. This can be done through a variety of different forms of meditation. It doesn’t require one to sit for hours. Simply develop the skill to notice when your mind is quiet. Another way in to this state is to feel with the passion of the heart. In this way our heart leads and the ego and sundry voices fall more or less silent. A caveat here. I do find sometimes that the passion of the heart can be so intense it will not allow the quieter reflecting required to connect with the “other”. If one can bring heart-mind to this process all the better. Opening ourselves like this takes practice. So I would suggest that one work on first becoming aware of the ” I” voice inside yourself. Once you can create this awareness without looking at anything in particular practice with something that you can simply observe or contemplate. See if you can let your mind remain fairly quiet. Then go outside and find something in nature that calls to you and try be still inside now that much more is going on around you.

When we attempt to do these activities our egos will want to start separating when we start to look. By this I mean, describing, comparing, categorizing, defining, thinking about “texting”, etc.,. All of this activity separates whatever we are looking at from us. We are no longer in an equal relationship to that something.  Over time as we have become more egocentric, more of nature and our inner world became other. With the ego dominant our hearts no longer can be heard telling us that something is terribly wrong.

After some practice what I experience when I go through this process is that I begin to see differently, a kind of true clarity and I have a feeling of a light, open heart. I guess one could call it seeing and feeling without judgement or preconception. This creates space for something else to arise. I sense that it is the beginning of a reconnection of my repressed natural inner human with nature. In the moments of this remembering and reconnection I feel an expansion of myself that encompasses me and the former object. From this place the energy moves into a heartfelt sense of joy. I sense that something in what I am relating to is also trying to reconnect with me and I feel love blossom. The separation has dissolved into interdependence and the beginning of a felt sense of wholeness. I feel life.

At no time do I feel that going out and being in nature in the “old” way is now passe’ or not good enough. Any connection is helpful to us and to nature. I am attempting to deepen the experience so that we might heal the wound created by our separation. Heal our own souls and the soul of the world, Anima mundi, together.

In the next blog I will talk about intuition and its relationship to reconnection.

I have pasted the last blog from my old blog site here because I would like to start a series of blogs about an intuitive step-wise approach to opening oneself to the experience I describe below.

The other day I was sitting on the front steps of my partner’s house. She was gardening and I was sitting down because of a back injury. It was sunny and hot and I was relaxing where I was. My mind emptied and I sat there taking in what was happening around me. At first I noticed the small reddish brown ants scurrying back and forth among the sidewalk bricks. Then a bird flew overhead. My eyes drifted down to the right and landed on a small patch of bachelors buttons in bloom at the bottom corner of the steps. I noticed their colour first-a cobalt  blue fringe with a white body on each petal and a grape coloured centre. I felt my body soften and my heart began to open in curiosity. As I gazed at the flowers I noticed some small insects hovering around the flowers. Now and then they would dart in and land for a few seconds sipping something from the centre of the flower. Next a few bees came buzzing in moving slowly from one flower to the other gathering pollen. As I continued to watch a few ants climbed carefully up the stems of the plant inspecting the flowers at the top. Then they would walk back down and go up another stem. By this time I was quite fascinated by what was going in this little patch of flowers. And then to add to my amazement a brown beetle and then a greenish beetle with a triangular shaped body climbed into the bottom of the plants.

I became aware that time had virtually stood still as I sat there engrossed with what was happening near me. Listening quietly to myself I sensed a lightness in my body and heart. I felt a quiet kind of joy in my whole being, my back pain had diminished. Here was something on the surface so mundane, so insignificant and yet so deeply moving. This was a profound moment for me. As I sat there contemplating all of this it moved me to consider how I had opened myself to an experience of nature as part of me, as part of my inner experience. I realized that this was a relationship, that I had opened myself to “be” with nature. Or was it the other way round, or both?

Here was a felt resonance between a human being and nature. It was like a waking dream perhaps foretelling in a way how we might invite nature into our own inner family. Imagine for a moment if we could be in relationship like this always. Could we treat what has touched our core, our heart, our soul in this way as we have before? I can’t, not now. To include nature as an important part of our inner family requires us to see in a different way, to open ourselves to experiences that are like dreams yet we are awake.

In my heart I now understand that if we can see and appreciate nature in this way, in the deepest parts of ourselves, the part of ourselves we barely talk to, that we couldn’t do what we do to the world, to nature, to ourselves.