978-1-60868-178-5
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Tothe visionary artisans of cultural evolutionandto the future children of all species.
Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her.
She is like the needle of the compass pointing to the North,
which is most useful…when you know how to navigate.
— C. G. JUNG
…Sometimes…
…I look out at everything
growing so wild
and faithfully beneath
the sky
and wonder
why we are the one
terrible
part of creation privileged
to refuse our flowering….
— DAVID WHYTE, FROM “THE SUN”
Contents
INTRODUCTION: Re-Visioning Our Selves
CHAPTER 1. The Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche: An Overview
CHAPTER 2. North: The Nurturing Generative Adult
CHAPTER 3. South: The Wild Indigenous One
CHAPTER 4. East: The Innocent/Sage
CHAPTER 5. West: The Muse-Beloved
CHAPTER 6. North: Loyal Soldiers
CHAPTER 7. South: Wounded Children
CHAPTER 8. East: Addicts and Escapists
CHAPTER 9. West: The Shadow and Shadow Selves
APPENDIX: Four Practices for Wholing and Self-Healing
Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,
to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,
the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver
running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants
cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.
This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;
you can never be dispossessed.
— DEREK WALCOTT, “EARTH”
It’s time to take another look at ourselves — to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we’re rooted. We’re called now to rediscover what it means to be human beings in a wildly diverse world of feathered, furred, and scaled fellow creatures; flowers and forests; mountains, rivers, and oceans; wind, rain, and snow; Sun and Moon.
It’s time to take an ecological and holistic look at the human psyche, to make a fresh start with Western psychology.1
