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.