“Nature…supports our personal blossoming (if we have any quiet exposure to her) through her spontaneities, through her beauty, power, and mirroring, through her dazzling variety of species and habitats, and by way of the wind, Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies.” -Bill Plotkin
Seven years ago I up and left my hometown of Toronto with a yearning to be closer to nature. For the last six years, I’ve lived within a ten minute walk to the ocean in the place now known as Victoria, BC. I’m certainly a lot physically closer to “big nature”, a short drive to forested and unpopulated hikes and lakes, rivers and canyons just slightly farther afield. But I’m coming to learn that to be “closer to nature” is more than a matter of proximity.
Soon after moving out west I found myself meeting with an eco/soulcentric therapist who closely followed the work of Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute. She worked with a direction-based map of the psyche and spoke about wholling as opposed to healing. “Eco-soulcentric psychotherapy … includes but goes beyond the client’s relationship to self and society, addresses our relationship to the greater web of life.”(Plotkin’s Nature and the Human Soul)
Ever since, I have been following Bill’s work, and attending immersive retreats that put his theory into practice. Practices include engaging the deep imagination, wandering alone for hours in the woods, trance-dancing, dreamwork, and so on (you can read more about the eclectic collection of practices in Bill’s first book, Soulcraft). Some of these retreats have felt life changing to me, others like some bizarre alternative reality that I wanted to run away from. But I keep coming back.
I keep coming back to experience the intersections of self, soul, spirit, nature and community.
I keep coming back to the knowledge that to nourish my soul I need time in the wild, time in circles with others, invitations to wander and the like.
I keep coming back to the hope that I will foster enough relationship with the land and its inhabitants to hear them speak, on a regular basis.
In a few weeks, I’ll be headed on my fourth retreat in this style. I’m hoping to practice how to be in dialogue with the environment. By now I’m pretty comfortable talking to trees; this time I’m hoping to learn more about listening. To apprentice myself to the tree, the river, the night sky. To become open and porous enough to relate with the natural world as kin.
I’m a believer that if we get quiet enough and look closely enough, the natural world offers us a mirror. Reflections and new perspectives peak through. They come through not in plain English but in symbol, metaphor, felt sense and intuition. In Bill’s words, “[b]onding across the species boundaries helps us overcome the conflicts and disparities between nature and culture and within human culture.” This “cross-species bonding” will be my practice on the upcoming retreat.
I’ll forge these bonds by speaking out loud, by making offerings, building altars, enacting rituals, opening up the senses and being mindful of what follows. Mindfulness is the tool that helps me be present to what these retreats and my own time in nature have to offer. When I can be mindful of the way the sun moves across the sky, the bird sings, the flowers smell, I can be present to what the more-than-human community is communicating. Mindfulness can also remind me that there is no self, which then makes it easier for me to identify with, well, everything else.
Practice can help us shift from egocentricity to eco-centricity, re-membering ourselves as a part of, not apart from, the natural world. In the words of James Hillman, to be in deep relationship with ecology is to have “a psyche the size of the Earth”. This can create a sense of belonging and connection that enables us to, beyond heal, become whole.
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