The Wild Edge of Sorrow, page 7
This is the gate where we most directly experience the soul of the world, the anima mundi. Here the alchemical observation that “the greater part of the soul lies outside the body” becomes evident.38 As Jung noted, we live in psyche; psyche does not live in us. We are enveloped in a field of consciousness; everything possesses soul. This was known to every indigenous culture. What we feel from the surrounding world is not a projection of our own minds outward into the environment. We can travel just about anywhere in the world and we will inevitably come across vestiges of clear-cuts, those bleeding and scarred lands that look so desolate and violated. These places announce themselves as a wound, a rupture where life once moved and breathed. Our hearts sink into a deep grief in these times. Western psychology would most likely suggest that the grief we are feeling is related to our own experience of being diminished as a child, a metaphoric clear-cut, as it were. In that moment, we would be left alone with our feelings of grief, wondering about how to heal this wound.
What if, however, the feelings we have when we pass through these zones of destruction are actually arising from the land itself? What if it is the grief of the forest registering in our bodies and psyches—the sorrow of the redwoods, voles, sorrel, ferns, owls, and deer, all those who lost their homes and lives as a result of this plunder of living beings? What if we are not separate from the world at all? It is our spiritual responsibility to acknowledge these losses. What if this is the anima mundi, the soul of the world, weeping through us? We know and feel in our bones that something primal is amiss. Our extended home is being eroded, as is the experience of our wider self. It is essential that we stop and recognize these losses. It is good manners to respond with sorrow, outrage, and apology at these places touched by so much loss.
We cringe when we see polluted rivers and litter strewn along roadsides. We felt the sorrows of the Gulf of Mexico as it struggled with the outpouring of oil into its waters. Our souls are connected with the soul of the world, and it is through this bond that we acknowledge our interconnected lives.
The cumulative grief of the world is overwhelming. The litany of losses could fill this book. Our ways of living have become corrosive to the earth, to prairie dogs and grizzly bears, to bluefin tuna and monarch butterflies and cultures. Every day, we see the dead lying by the side of the road—deer, raccoons, skunks, opossums, and foxes. Shopping malls homogenize the landscape of our communities, turning them into a bland slurry. We are depleting, with an ever-growing tenacity, the complex, multilayered song of the world and replacing it with a single-pitched monotone, depositing empty calories, sterile seeds, and meaningless objects in every developing country while silencing forever the voices of hundreds of cultures. Every few weeks a language is lost and, along with it, a nuanced imagination of a people who were rooted to a place for perhaps thousands of years. Soon we will be left with only the barest semblance of the exuberant matrix that we once had, as the monoculture of modernity plows into the lives of every culture, replacing their traditions with imitations of our own pale expression of life.
How can we possibly stay open to the endless assaults on the biosphere when the urge to avert our eyes and pretend that we don’t feel this pain takes over? It takes a heart of courage and conviction, one willing to look into the center of the suffering and remain present. To live a life of soul means living with sensitivity to the plight of the planet. I think of Rachel Carson, who launched the modern environmental movement with her work on DDT and other toxins; Lily Yeh rebuilding neighborhoods in the inner city of Philadelphia through programs that bring art and beauty to blighted areas; and Rigoberta Menchú protecting indigenous communities in Guatemala from corporate incursions. I think of Nnimmo Bassey fighting to protect the Niger delta from oil spills. Nearly every year, the people of Nigeria experience oil spills the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. There are thousands of men and women, whose names we will likely never know, who are defending their homelands from the assaults of greed.
I have listened to many young men and women share their stories of grief and outrage over the destruction of the world. One young man came to a ritual after spending months on the road, fighting for ecological and economic justice as part of the Occupy movement. He wept the most heart wrenching tears as he expressed his pain for the suffering world. His heart, however, was willing to stay open and register all that is happening in our communities and culture. At another gathering, a woman in her early thirties sat silently, tears streaming down her face. When she spoke, she shared her extreme pain for the world, how it pierced her heart and has shadowed her life with a persistent sorrow. Her faith in our future had been shaken. The entire room was moved by the depth of her pain and her love for the earth. It is imperative that we grant shelter for these young and courageous people working on the front lines of change.
I was talking one day with a woman who works with communities around the world on issues of global climate change. She was telling me how much grief she had begun to feel as she travels and witnesses what is happening to people in regions that are already badly affected. She had tears in her eyes as she shared stories of whole cultures that may disappear because of rising sea levels. She was feeling the tears of the world and realized that she needed a place where she could reveal these feelings. She was eager to attend our grief ritual.
Walking through the doors of grief brings us into the room of the great grief of the world. Naomi Shihab Nye says it so beautifully in her poem “Kindness.”
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.39
The cloth is immense. There we all share the communal cup of loss, and in it, we find our deep kinship with one another and the living world. That is the alchemy of grief, the great and abiding ecology of the sacred once again showing us what the indigenous soul has always known: we are of the earth.
Another facet of the third gate is the loss of our connection with nature. We no longer live with a sensuous intimacy with the wind, rivers, rainfall, and birdsong. For many of us, the voices of the wild world have faded, receded in mind and imagination. The philosopher Thomas Berry said that we have become autistic to the world and have ceased to register the songs and moods of the singing planet.40 Human biologist Paul Shepard said, “The grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.”41
The weight carried by this statement astonishes me. We were meant to have a life-long engagement with a “beautiful and strange otherness.” It was meant to be an ongoing presence, not something that we capture on our cameras while on vacation in Yellowstone or something we watch on the Nature Channel. Shepard spoke adamantly and repeatedly about how other creatures shaped us and made us human, how the lessons of coyote and rabbit, mouse and hawk taught us core values and how to live in a sustainable way. Animals were the first things that we depicted in recesses and cave paintings, the first we conjured in myths and tales. Their ways were integral not only to our survival but also to the very shaping of our souls.
Now, in the shortest wisp of a moment, the perennial conversation has been silenced for the vast majority of us. There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jays. The myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, and the cleverness of fox have fallen cold. The others have retreated and have essentially vanished from our attention, our minds, and our imaginations. What happens to our soul life in the absence of the others? Shepard says that what emerges is a grief-laden emptiness. How true. And he was wise to recognize our tendency to attribute the emptiness to a “failure in our personality.”
Often, in my practice, I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is more akin to what Shepard is suggesting? What if it is a hollowness that comes from a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red-tailed hawk, or the melancholy call of the loon? What if this emptiness is the great echo in our soul of what it is we expected and did not receive?
We are born, as psychiatrist R. D. Laing reminds us, “as Stone Age children.”42 Our entire psychic, physical, emotional, and spiritual makeup was shaped in the long evolutionary sweep of our species. Our inheritance includes an intimate and permeable exchange with the wild world. It is what our minds and bodies expect. Ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning calls this original enfoldment in the natural world the primal matrix. We were embedded in this matrix of life and knew the world and ourselves only through this perception. It was an unmediated intimacy with the living world, with no trace of separation between the human and the more-than-human world.
What was once a seamless embrace has now become a breach, a tear in our sense of belonging. Glendinning calls this our original trauma. This trauma carries with it all the recognizable symptoms associated with psychic injury: chronic anxiety, dissociation, distrust, hypervigilance, disconnection, and many others. We are left with a profound loneliness and isolation that we rarely acknowledge. It is as if we have completely normalized our condition. And yet, this feeling of separation profoundly affects the range of our reach, the ways we participate in the landscape and sense our allegiance with the living world. Our soul life flickers dimly, and rather than feeling a kinship with the entire, breathing world, we inhabit and defend a small shell of a world, occupying our daily life with what linguist David Hinton calls the “relentless industry of self.”43
This beautiful and strange otherness was also meant to be seen in one another’s eyes. We, too, are meant to embody a vivid and animated life, to live close to our wild souls, our wild bodies and minds. We were meant to dance and sing, play and laugh unselfconsciously, tell stories, make love, and take delight in this brief but privileged adventure of incarnation. The wild within and the wild without are kin, the one enlivening the other in a beautiful tango.
When we pause and allow our separation from the living earth to rise, we feel the “grief and sense of loss” that Shepard speaks of. When we open ourselves and take in the sorrows of the world, letting them penetrate our insulated hut of the heart, we are both overwhelmed by the grief of the world and, in some strange, alchemical way, reunited with the aching, shimmering body of the planet. We become acutely aware that there is no “out there”; we have one continuous existence, one shared skin. Our suffering is mutually entangled, the one with the other, as is our healing.
I have shared this quote of Shepard’s on many occasions, and there are always tears of recognition; the words are painfully true. We no longer look to the others in the world, and consequently, our souls are diminished. The multicolored world of animals, plants, streams, hills, and sky has faded from our attention. We are suffering from what ecophilosopher Richard Louv calls nature deficit disorder. We have all but forgotten the intimate connection between our breath and the trees, flowering plants, and oceans that offer us their gift of oxygen. We could not exist without this luscious world surrounding our senses with beauty and delight. We would indeed “die of a great loneliness” without the others with whom we share this animate earth. As ecophilosopher David Abram points out, we have become “a single species only talking to itself.”44 We carry a sorrow deep in our bodies for the suffering earth.
Remembering our bond with the earth helps heal our bodies and souls. One young woman with whom I worked would consistently deprive herself of good food, as if she was not worthy of nourishment. One day I took her hand and led her out into the yard next to the building. I cleared away some leaves and grass, revealing the naked earth. I brought her over, knelt down with her, and placed her hands on the ground, and I asked her to tell the earth about her struggle with food. A torrent of tears unleashed her grief about her feelings of worthlessness. Her tears fell to the earth, and she felt the benevolent pulse of the ground beneath her hands. This was a moment of healing, through the grace of the indigenous soul knowing its deep affiliation with this world. Her relationship to her own soul was reestablished, and she is now the loving mother of her own beautiful, well-fed daughter.
This sweet medicine is available to each of us, offered by the earth without reservation or deserving. We don’t have to earn this grace; it is not a reward for doing something right. It is a matter of recognizing and feeling the fullness of this constant connection. Our welcome is not predicated on measuring up to a standard. It is a matter of intimacy, of relationship with this world as it is.
There is a ritual that my community does annually called Renewing the World in which we communally address the earth’s need to be fed and replenished. The ritual lasts three days, and we begin with a funeral to acknowledge all that is leaving the world. We build a pyre, and then together we name and place onto the fire what we have lost. We place there the deaths of family members; the loss of things like mercy, democracy, and justice; the deaths of rivers and old-growth forests, of manatees and wetlands. The first time we did this ritual, I was planning on drumming and holding the space for the others. I made an invocation to the sacred, and when the last word left my mouth, I was pulled to my knees by the weight of my grief for the world. I sobbed and sobbed for each loss named, and I knew in my body that each of these losses had been registered by my soul, even though I never knew it consciously. For four hours, we shared this space together, and then we ended in silence, acknowledging the deep losses in our world.
The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
There is another gate to grief, one difficult to identify, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This threshold into sorrow calls forward the things that we may not even realize we have lost. I have written elsewhere about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.
How do we even know that we miss these experiences? I don’t know how to answer that question. What I do know is that when these things are finally granted to us, a wave of recognition rises that we have lived without this love, this acknowledgment, and the support of this village all our lives. This realization calls forth grief. I have seen this time and again. One participant in a grief ritual said, “Thank you for opening a door for us that we didn’t even know was there.”
At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, “the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter.”45 We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not a reflection of a personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, “what was once man’s confident expectation for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, ‘I am all right,’ there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”
I remember vividly my experience in Malidoma Somé’s village of Dano in Burkina Faso in West Africa.46 I felt pangs of envy when, every night near dusk, people would gather in the common area and share their day. (This is when we have happy hour in our culture. Drinks at half-price! Perhaps this is how we anesthetize our loss.) In Dano, there was food and millet beer, stories, laughter, and tears. It was thick with a feeling of welcome. Children were there as well, weaving in and out of conversations, playing until they lay down and drifted into sleep, filled with the sounds of their families and community, which lapped in their ears like waves on a beach. They were not segregated from the world of the adults. If a child was hungry and was nursing, any mother with milk offered her breast to the child. It took me days to figure out who exactly was the child of whom. Imagine how profoundly that would impact us, if we knew that we were welcome in any home and could find sustenance at any fire. This has a lasting effect on the psyche. The children I met were generally happy, engaged, and curious, and they displayed a certain confidence. They knew they were a welcomed part of the village. It was clear to me that what we long for and what we need is the fulfillment of these primary satisfactions.
