Barbara Holifield, San Francisco
Wind and stone passageway, We have come far too late.
We are here, we are here.
(‘Song to the Earth in Buckskin Gulch’, Holifield)
Introduction
I am not a pure consciousness outside of my own action but an embodied and ecological self whose borders do not stop at my skin.
(Fuchs 2020, p. 6)
We are now at a pivotal moment in history when the necessity to unseat the attitude that humans are separate from, rather than embedded in, the cosmos is essential for our survival. Indigenous cultures have long held the latter view (Hinton 2017). However, Western culture’s adoption of the attitudes of dominion over nature and spirit distinct from the body more often situates us as observers of the world rather than as participants in a living-breathing world. Joining others in the ongoing necessity of making a course correction to that tendency, I will focus on how our psyche’s unwieldy and messy emotions are an inherent part of this pulsing matrix of the cosmos and why attention to them matters regarding our environmental crisis. I will also attempt to show, from an affective perspective, that: ‘In a realized function, [such as a person living on Earth] no distinction between inner and outer can be drawn –– just as it would be nonsensical to ask whether the air breathed still is part of the external world or already of the organism’ (Fuchs 2018, p. 128).
This paper represents an attempt to address this reality in a way that takes us into an immediacy of experience as a foundation for discussing its implications for the analytic encounter. I will interweave a poem, evocative images of the land’s expression, and clinical and theoretical reflections to achieve this. The poem is written by the Diné poet Luci Tapahonso.[1] It expresses how, following a tragic loss, the poet’s struggle to re-find her feelings is wholly entwined with relocating herself in relationship to the land –– reconnecting to her felt experience of the land, to her emotions and the meaning that arises from this felt experience –– land not bound by borders but known by her and her people. As you will see, the poet’s process illustrates the way in which access to the felt experience of the sacred is dependent on the embodiment of feelings without dismissing body and feelings as lesser than spirit. This entwining holds the tensional forces exerted by the traumatic loss that nearly severs the very bond between the poet and that which is sacred to her and integral to the working through of her emotional distress. However, rather than severing this integral bond, the poet’s heart breaks open ever more deeply to both her feelings and to that which is sacred, which includes the Earth and a way of relating with self and Earth.
Affective and phenomenologically informed approaches to neuroscience emphasize the primacy of emotion in human animals, the embodied basis of emotion and the significance of emotional appraisal on our decision-making processes relative to higher-order cortical processes (Damasio 1995, Fuchs 2018). This amplifies the importance of engaging our emotions with care and skill, in order to inhibit unhelpful reactive impulses and support reflection so that thoughts and actions reflect desired outcomes. Here, for example, I am articulating that this is necessary if our goal is to orient toward choices that are in the service of sustaining our lives and the planetary life with which we are interdependent. Because bodily resonance is the medium of emotional perception, regardless of whether this lies in the foreground or background of one’s awareness, cultivating interoceptive awareness aids emotional recognition and regulation (Herbert & Pollatos 2012). This is particularly important in the pre-reflective flare of bodily affect in response to a perceived threat which can lead to destructive acts, as you will hear in the following poem.
The environmental crisis, including habitat destruction, the effects of climate change and mass extinctions, portends the possibility that the Earth may no longer be capable of supporting us in the ways that it always has. This is shockingly hard to fathom, tainting our lives with an existential threat that can provoke anxiety or despair and, for some, a trauma response. This affects all of us –– analysts and analysands alike –– some more consciously than others. Our tendency when threatened or traumatized is to either dominate (fight), flee (flight), or freeze (feign death, shut down) and so it is not surprising that in the face of the environmental crisis, some of us may be inclined to either dominate the Earth or disconnect from it at the very moment when the Earth needs us more, not less. If we think of a traumatic response as a state of being overwhelmed by more feeling and internal activation than a person can metabolize, this existential threat calls on us to develop an increased capacity to process powerful affective states. While denial (a potential aspect of both a fight or flight response) of the climate crisis is a critical problem, so is the more subtle problem of turning away from it because of our fear of the unknown, and fear of our feelings of helplessness. Susan Bodnar writes:
The freedom to negotiate our relationships with each other as well as with the earth that homes us is hard to hold onto in a consumption-driven society. Most can survive the assault upon our bodily and psychic borders. Many easily dissociate any connection to nature. And some go along with the devaluation of the natural world even though they still feel the earth’s colors brushing their heart’s canvas. For those people especially, the wasting, the bombing, and the lack of balance in our world grips them in a personality organization that enacts all that chaos. But they may also be our prophets. Those who still hear the weeping earth, the mountain’s call, the desert’s sigh and the ocean’s aria may yet awaken the transitive imagination in us all.
(Bodnar 2008, p. 509)
Some see this time of crisis as calling forth an evolutionary development, a shift from valuing individualism to embracing interdependence, lest we face the potential failure of our species (Tucker & Swimme 2016, Tarnas 2001, Macy 2021). Regardless of our attempts to dominate nature, there are elemental forces that can overtake us. Similarly, our inner landscape has wild affective elements, sometimes wonderous and sometimes terrifying, which cannot be controlled by will or ego. An analytic attitude holds regard for this inner wildness. With an attitude of collaboration rather than domination, we work to come into relationship with the turbulent storms, rhythmic cycles, and guiding visions of psychic life. This kind of intent to achieve congruence with a reality already given, be it the reality of the psyche or the reality of the land, I believe may be a significant aspect of the evolutionary tasks of our time if we are to turn around the environmental crisis and reap the ‘therapeutic aspects of a long-term intimacy with the landscape’ (Lopez, 1986, p. 411).
Because we have strayed so far from living in this kind of congruence with the natural world, I believe that Western culture must learn from and collaborate with First Nation peoples whose traditions orient toward aligning with the natural world. An example of this can be seen in struggles to develop effective wildland fire management. ‘In Northern California, the Karuk and Yurok tribes have partnered with the [U.S.] Forest Service to manage land for traditional values and wildfire management. Studies have shown that the two goals work hand in hand’ (Sommer 2020). The loss we are facing from environmental crises is immeasurable, be it coral reefs, polar bears, butterflies, bees or the myriad of lesser-known insects, animals, and plants species. Breathable air and clean water are diminishing which disproportionately impacts low-income persons living in industrial waste zones – more often people of colour and Indigenous people (Uteuova 2022). This goes hand in hand with the devastation of Indigenous lands which are fundamentally entwined with their culture, language, sense of self, and community.
A felt-sense of self, a felt-sense of Earth
There is a parallel in the prevailing attitudes of Western culture towards the Earth and towards our bodies––both constitute the very medium of our existence. Yet, for most, they remain absently lived rather than explicitly known (Behnke 2003). Interoceptive experience of self –– respiration, heartbeat, blood flow, temperature fluctuation, gut response, endocrinal fluctuations –– together constitute a feeling of being alive (Fuchs 2018). This inner experience is in constant flux as we perceive the other and our environment and this, in turn, affects how we perceive the environment. Simply stated, our experience of the environment affects how we feel and how we feel affects how we perceive the environment. This interoceptive loop, in which, from a functional systems theory perspective, the person and environment function as a unitary whole (Fuchs 2020), is one way of describing the ecological self. For Arne Naess, the grandfather of the Deep Ecology Movement (Naess 1987), an ecological self is rooted in a feeling of a sense-of-self related not only to humans but also to the living Earth, and the more-than-human others that co-inhabit our earthen home. This intertwining of self, other, and the environment is the basis of our affective intercorporeal reality (Fuchs & Koch 2014).[2] Neuroscientific research indicates that interoceptive awareness –– conscious awareness of the internal, bodily sensations underlying lived experience –– enhances emotional discernment while facilitating affect regulation (Herbert & Pallatos 2012, Dunn et al. 2010). This kind of somato-emotional resonance based on the intercorporeal intertwining of persons and Earth is alive in those peoples who have not lost sight of their interdependence with the Earth (Lopez 2019, Guareschi 2019, Lloyd 2014, Kahn-John Diné & Koithan 2015).[3] An embodied relational approach to the Earth, grounded in not just empathy but this fundamental sense of attunement with the land –– resonating with it, moving and being moved by it –– mediates the dangerous lack of connection all too frequently apparent in environmental politics, policymaking and design. While thoughtful action in relation to the land is urgently needed, I feel it must not be at the cost of a loss of feeling along with viscerally-felt care.[4]
In the poem that follows (Figure 1) we hear the poet’s reclamation of a deep sensorial-emotional awareness of the seamless loop of self and environment as she works through the emotional pain of profound loss.
Figure 1: The Canyon (author’s own image)
The canyon was serene
Tonight as the bright moon fills the bed, I am certain I can’t rise
and face the dawn. Dreams of Chinle and the mountains urge me to drive
back to the rez[5]. My family knows why I left, but my husband’s gentle horses
must wonder where he went. Since it happened, there has been no way to weave
this loneliness and the quiet nights into that calm state called beauty.
Hózhó. Maybe it doesn’t exist. These days it makes me sad and jealous
that some Navajos really live by hózhóójí. Yes, I am jealous
of how the old ways actually work for them. They wake, rise,
and pray each morning, knowing that they are blessed. For me, the Beauty
Way is abstract most of the time. At dawn, I rush out and drive
to work, instead of praying outside. They say we should weave
these ancient ways into our daily lives. Do you remember the horses
his mother gave us at our wedding? Those horses
were such exquisite animals. We heard that people were jealous,
but we dismissed it. Back then, I rode horses and used to weave
until sunset each day. Once we went camping in Canyon de Chelly. The moonrise
was so bright, we could see tiny birds in the brush. The four-wheel drive
got stuck in the sand, and two guys helped push it out. That night the beauty
of the old canyon, the moon, and the surprise rescue proved that the beauty
the elders speak of does exist. Late that night, a small herd of wild horses
came to our camp. They circled and sniffed the worn-out four-wheel drive.
It smelled of gas and sweat. The canyon was serene. It is easy to be jealous
of the people who live there. How much more substantial the sunrise
blessings seem there. During those summers, it was easy to weave
the story and many others like it into my rugs. Back then, I used to weave
and pray, weave and sing. The Rhythm of the weaving comb meant that beauty
was taking form. Nights like that and his low laughter made my rugs rise
evenly in warm, delicate designs. Once, I wove the colors of his horses
into a saddle blanket. He teased me and said that his brother was jealous
because I had not made him one. Often memories of his riding songs drive
me to tears. Whatever happened to that saddle blanket? Once, on a drive
to Albuquerque, the long red mesas and smooth cliffs showed me how to weave
them into a rug. I was so happy. Here, I was sometimes frustrated and jealous
of weavers who seemed to live and breathe designs. I learned that beauty
can’t be forced. It comes on its own. It’s like the silky sheen of horses
on cool summer mornings. It’s like the small breezes, the sway and rise
of an Appaloosa’s back. Back then, we drove the sheep home in the pure beauty
of Chinle Valley twilight. Will I ever weave like that again? Our fine horses
and tender love caused jealousy. He’s gone. From his grave, my tears rise.
(Tapahonso 2008, pp. 51-2)
In her poem, Luci Tapahonso tells us a story of the terrible loss of her husband and her process of grieving this loss. As with any work of art, each reader will find their own meaning in the piece. For me, the poem’s meaning and implications are subtle and layered. While the poem reveals the poet’s great inner affective capacity, it also shows a way of relating with the Earth that is at once intimate and non-exploitative. It is this kind of relation to the Earth that I wish to highlight. In the poem, I experience the poet’s relational resonance with the land, not only in the content but also in the rhythmicity of the poem. With an attunement that is at once sensorial and kinesthetic, the poet re-weaves the invisible bond between her inner world and the outer natural world that had been obscured by grief. The implicit sensory motor memory of her link with the Earth is felt through her description of weaving –– both literal and metaphoric. Some readers may hear the loss she grieves as analogous to the loss we currently experience of our Earth world. The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy expresses something akin to this in her phrasing of ‘world as lover, world as self’ capturing the intrinsic paradox of differentiation and unity, Earth as other and Earth as self –– as there would be no human-self existence without Earth (Macy 2003/2021, Merleau-Ponty 1964/1968).
Hózhó
The land emerges in the images and cadence of the poet’s language expressing the deep bond between herself and the land. She writes of struggling with a terrible grief––of not just the loss of her husband but also the dark cloud that surrounded his death. She brings to bear the ancient practice of her peoples, hózhó, to find her way through this grief. Hózhó in part, means beauty or walking in beauty or ‘the Beauty Way’. My understanding of its fuller meaning has unfolded over time by reading Tapahonso’s stories and poems (2008) and others (e.g., Kahn-John Diné, & Koithan 2015; Lopez, 1978, 2019). What is commonly overlooked and what I find so profound, is that it is not solely a way of perceiving the external landscape. Hózhó is a practice of cultivating within oneself, a sense of the interconnectedness between beauty, harmony and order perceived in the natural world, including its creative and destructive forces. That dimension of hózhó, makes it essential to resist a reductionist notion of beauty as merely a surround of pleasing aesthetics, or of harmony as a pleasant quality of contentment, or of order as a sterile-state free of dis-order. Instead, it is helpful to hold these three qualities in mind as you might if you were in deep wilderness where creation and destruction are the ongoing process that regulate ecosystems and restore balance. I want to emphasize that hózhó is not merely about the outer landscape. It is a relational practice of cultivating within, the intrinsic mystery held in the cycles of death and rebirth which manifests as the beauty of the natural world. The poem doesn’t tell us the specifics of the Beauty Way. It instead evokes a sense of some of their guiding values and effects. I am grateful for this way in which the poet reveals a wisdom that serves to open one to one’s own path of discovery.
In the early part of the poem, we hear the poet’s inertia. The question hovers as to whether or not she will be able to engage with the grief of her husband’s death in a generative way. She depicts herself as unable to rise, disconnected from what has meaning for her, hózhó. Her inner state is the understandable response to being faced with a loss that feels to be more than she can bear. The poet brings us into her reflective searching as she weaves back and forth between memory, perceptions of the land, and her current affect, longing for that inner state called hózhó. We hear how Tapahonso finds her way through the shock and inertia by re-creating with words the melodic rhythm of the weaving comb; as she moves back and forth between the inner and outer world, alive to her sensorial experience, an embodied affective resonance is found. In this reflective process, she also finds within that which obscures this resonance: jealousy (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Blockage, Buckskin Gulch (author’s own image)
Tapahonso describes her husband’s brother as also being caught in the repetitive cycling of jealousy and, in ways not made explicit, it seems to be the cause of her husband’s death. In the elegant rhythm of the poem, as Tapahonso weaves her love, her loss, her jealousy, and her struggle to understand her husband’s brother’s jealousy, with the land, it is as if she is attuning to the very fabric of the Earth. By working and re-working the threads of her memories and feelings into a weave, reflecting the complex harmony she perceives in the land, her heart breaks open and she finds the humility needed to own how the destructive emotion of jealousy lives in herself as well as in her husband’s brother.
Figure 3: Inner passageway, Buckskin Gulch (author’s own image)
The poem becomes a ritual expression. ‘It is a move beyond the temporal, a visionary passage’ (Hirsch 2003, p. 471). Tapahonso enters the liminal, relational space of ritual that unfolds between herself and the Earth. To step into such a passageway as the poet does in her writing, or as my companions and I did upon entering Buckskin Gulch on our journey there in 2016 (Figure 3), is to step out of ordinary time and to enter into a realm that seems to lie between this world and another, lesser-known realm. The images of this canyon which lies near the Navajo Nation depict the physical expression of the land alongside a symbolic expression of the emotional territory the poet enters. In this liminal ritual space, one steps out of a familiar sense of identity. This can provoke a deep sense of awe but also an unease that comes with entering utterly unknown inner or outer territory (Turner 1987). For the poet, an intimacy is woven between her and the Earth. Holding the living memories of the love between herself and her husband, while also touching the painful grief within, a passageway is opened to a fuller experience of self and to the beauty of the world. Cultivating this kind of mature relating with the natural world – a relationship based neither on merger, participation mystique, nor projection – vivifies a soulful, relational space between persons and the land. It is a way of relating with the Earth that is at once intimate and non-exploitative. ‘By touching the essence of place, another kind of poetic crossing is made’ (Williams 2016, p. ii). In bearing the tension between ego desire and ego surrender, an experience arises that cannot be created by will alone (Chodorow 1991). The poet refers to this inner state as beauty:
… Once, on a drive
to Albuquerque, the long red mesas and smooth cliffs showed me how to weave
them into a rug. I was so happy. Here, I was sometimes frustrated and jealous
of weavers who seemed to live and breathe designs. I learned that beauty
can’t be forced. It comes on its own. It’s like the silky sheen of horses
on cool summer mornings. It’s like the small breezes, the sway and rise
of an Appaloosa’s back.
(Tapahonso 2008, p. 52)
Psyche indwelling soma and people indwelling Earth
While depth psychology offers us a guide to how it is that psyche comes to indwell the soma, indigenous peoples provide a model for how peoples come to indwell the Earth. From a depth psychological perspective, if things go well enough in early development, the caretaker’s consistent resonant responses introduce and re-introduce the psyche to soma. This process links affect recognition with the concomitant bodily experience. There is an inner quickening in this process as psyche indwells the soma: ‘The infant becomes a person, an individual in his own right’ (Winnicott 1960, p. 590). In the language of the Diné peoples, it is in the rhythm of the weaving between human and land from which beauty, or hózhó, takes form and the felt sense of wholeness emerges.
Figure 4: Below and above, Buckskin Gulch (image author’s own)
For Jung, this experience of wholeness was connected to a mysterious sense of being held by something greater than oneself which he called the Self (Jung 1961/1965). This mythical background presence Winnicott (1963b) spoke of as the ‘organizing messianic genius’ (p. 18) and Grotstein (2000) spoke of as the ‘Ineffable Subject’ (p. 141). Once established, either internally or externally derived sources can serve as that resonant other that allows feelings to be experienced in the body. We hear the poet finding that resonant other in the land, brought forth through her art in the rhythm arising from weaving between both the inner and outer world (Figure 4) and another less visible one.
Indigenous peoples offer us a model of how to indwell the Earth. Through their myths, stories, poems, art, rituals, and ceremonies, they introduce and re-introduce the person to the bigger body of the Earth and, by so doing, keep the relational space between the people and the Earth alive, ever-present. These rituals and stories arise in relation to the land. Practised through the generations, they forge a deep bond between peoples and the land.
Ensouling the land: abiding in both the visible world and the less visible
Figure 5: The crack between the worlds (author’s own image)
Trauma can and often does crack us open (Figure 5). The boundaries that most see as fixed between the visible world and the less visible may seem less fixed once such a seam unravels (Bernstein 2005, Wirtz 2014/2021). Tapahonso seems to enter this space. In the final lines of the poem, we hear a linking of what has been severed as she remembers, and we sense, the numinosity experienced between herself and her husband and their time together on the land: ‘back then we drove the sheep home in the sheer beauty of Chinle Valley’, and her grief begins to lift: ‘from his grave my tears rise’ (Tapahonso 2008, p. 52). Ceremony and ritual, transitional phases such as twilight and the predawn, seasonal turns of the winter and summer solstice, spring and fall equinox, life’s transitions of birth and death –– whether literal or symbolic –– may reveal a place that lies between the visible and invisible worlds. Touching the essence of place by stilling the mind accompanied by finely attuned sensorial perception can give access to this numinous dimension of experience. It is ‘a poetic crossing which follows the arc from physical motion to spiritual action, [which] requires the blackening of the quotidian world and the entrance into another type of consciousness, a more heightened reality’ (Hirsch 2004, p. 471).
A woman I had seen in analysis for several years had an opportunity to spend time in the Sierra Nevada mountains. One evening she lay in her bed and watched the night sky turn to dawn. Tears streamed down her face as she spoke to me, completely awed by the beauty in those timeless hours. She described how she felt the energy of the stars alive in her body, full of light, and the power of the Earth rise through her, merging into a sensation of stars dancing within and all around. Tears continued to flow as she described the tingling aliveness she felt in her body, resonating with the vast starlit night. The grounded contact of her body, wrapped in warm blankets, resonated with the Earth, ‘Not just my body, a bigger body’, she murmured. She recognized that she had been infused with and guided by numinous energy as personified in archetypal imagery for many years. Through this, she felt that she had participated with life and the forces of the universe. Yet the primal expressions of the natural world touched her in an elemental way that went far beyond –– more potent and immediate. From this tender place emerged a painful reflection on the war in Ukraine. She expressed her desire to live from this vivid state of presence that she was reverberating with and yet also be ready for action. She felt stunned, flummoxed by the cruelty of the war. Quietly staying with this, she spoke of her realization that the cruelty of war would not be possible when connected to the fullness of self and other. With this insight, she found a way to bear those opposing realities. This confirmed the value of her work in the world dedicated to promoting embodiment and connection through dance movement both in the studio and natural world. She felt grateful for our time together, realizing it was needed to help her fully integrate the experience and its meaning.
Expression of experiences of the numinous may arise in silent gesture, prayer, dance, or as we hear from Luci Tapahonso in poem. From this spiritual impulse in the psyche, rituals emerge in the individual or the community, potentially becoming formalized in exacting detail, like the Beauty Way ceremony of the Diné. It is here, in these liminal places, that we are moved by and move with:
a connective tissue of exterior and interior horizons –– it is a flesh offered to flesh that the visible has its aseity, and that it is question and response…The openness through flesh: the two leaves of my body and the leaves of the visible world…the world, the flesh not as fact or sum of facts, but as the locus of an inscription of truth: the false crossed out, not nullified.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964/1968 p. 131)
An intimate encounter
The photographs laced throughout this paper came from a wilderness journey I undertook with two friends, Mary-Jayne Rust and Susan Williams, both also Jungian analysts. Though it was late spring when we entered Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness which abuts the Diné reservation, the sun was blistering hot. A very recent flashflood was made evident by the slick muddy creek bed, making for treacherous hiking. Despite this recent flood, the creek, which we had expected to use for drinking water, was now dry. With climate change, the American West has been experiencing the worst drought in more than 1,200 years, with the last 22 years being particularly severe (Osborne 2022). Even groundwater has severely diminished. Just before we would have been forced to turn back, we did find water trickling from a spring. The spring was at the mouth of an astonishing slot canyon, a narrow passageway sculpted by wind and water called Buckskin Gulch. It is one of those rare places in the world, which to enter is to cross a threshold from the known into an unknown sense of mystery that emanates from the place and reverberates through one’s very bones. The images in the paper were taken on the approach to and within that passageway. They also offer an uncanny symbolic representation of the inner territory explored throughout this piece.[6] This paper has arisen from my recognition and desire to offer reciprocity to that place and the Diné people who have lived in that region for centuries.
Figure 6: Entryway, Buckskin Gulch (painting by Mary-Jane Rust, reproduced here with permission).
In these kinds of moments something is quickened between people and land. This intimacy, this between, is woven when I sing into the unfathomable folds of red rock within Buckskin Gulch and past meets present and future; when my companion Mary-Jayne paints the multicolored wall (Figure 6), and it widens beyond its perceptible materiality without ever leaving it; when our friend Susan pauses, resonating with the silence of stone whose motion is palpable, though utterly still. Personal stories en-soul the land. Here, a story –– not of words but of experience –– is etched between the person and the land creating a bond of recognition and reciprocity. For indigenous peoples, as we hear expressed in the poem, the natural world is the primary locus of an experience of the sacred. Canyon de Chelly is this locus for the Diné, the land is sensed to reveal a sacred order. The practice of hózhó is to cultivate this sacred order within. In intimate encounters like ours in Buckskin Gulch, the resonant land offers itself and if received, a memory is etched into one’s body that later, if called forth is there to respond. Western culture has, for the most part, lost its collective valuing of experiences of the sacred sourced in the natural world and along with this, is the loss of the old rituals and ways of life in which the natural world is acknowledged as guide and teacher. For millennia, rituals like the Beauty Way have arisen as psyche seeks to recreate within the same sense of order perceived in the outer world –– that same depth, that complexity. Luci Tapahonso seamlessly locates nature within herself and herself in nature and elucidates the moment when one feels one’s world interfacing with another, less visible world. In the poem, she recounts:
That night the beauty
of the old canyon, the moon, and the surprise rescue proved that the beauty
the elders speak of really does exist.
(Tapahonso 2008, p. 52)
In these lines, we hear how the weaving of inner and outer is an intrinsic aspect of hózhó. A ‘falling together in time’ when nature and psyche come together.[7] It is just such asymmetrical occurrences which give rise to a new emergent order (Cambray 2012). This experience confirms for the poet what her grief had earlier brought her to doubt: that the beauty the elders speak of does indeed exist.
I frequently journey deep into wilderness. Throughout my younger life, elements of the natural world were touchstones of solace, hope, and security, and at times these experiences were graced with numinosity. In my late teens, when I first began month-long journeys with others into the wilderness areas of the American southwest, it was nothing short of life saving. I, too, was able to do the work of grieving when immersed in that natural surround. This gave rise to ecstatic states and a heightened feeling of, and meaning to, being alive. Working on this inner grief has been a long path for me to walk, winding its way through my personal analysis and re-emerging from time to time into the present. Grieving the current and anticipated loss resulting from environmental degradation, including loss of human life, peoples’ cultures, species, and species habitats, is an excruciating part of what I encounter on this path. Simultaneously, relating to the land has opened me to an intimacy with life. Luci Tapahonso’s poem, though different in content, captures some of the feel of my experience and has beckoned me to look ever more deeply into the dimensions and meanings of that process. I, in turn, attempt to pass to my patients and students some sense of this open-ended interest in the depths and meaning of their experience of self-in-relation to the natural world.
Amid the environmental crisis, at least here in the United States, it seems that more and more people are hungry to experience the Earth’s grandeur, evidenced by a significant increase in the number of people visiting national and state parks. However, I think that many are at a loss as to how to relate to the land itself. Instead, I witness people either stopping to photograph the ‘landscape’ or to take ‘selfies’ (sometimes naively risking their safety, oblivious to the reality of the ‘wilds’). Frequently, I notice that the interest seems more about the photo than the land itself. I see people picnicking and camping with music drowning out the sounds of life and scaring away the animals that may otherwise frequent the area. Some bring along games of all sorts to entertain themselves. Or some come to exercise –– running, biking, hiking, climbing. Though it is lovely to be with others in these ways in the outdoors, it seems that the cultural attitude in which the land is related to in an exploitive way has even seeped into our forms of recreation. While there is very little collective permission for the expression of tender feelings that arise in relating to the land –– neither the feelings that arise in oneself, nor for, or with the land –– I have witnessed how patients or students, when encouraged to reflect on their inner experience of being with the land, often express rich and deep meaning in these encounters. Sometimes these experiences are pivotal. Allowing for an inner settling, an experience of something deeply intrinsic to one’s existence being validated and with that, a felt sense of finding one’s place in the world. I believe for our personal and collective stories to en-soul the land, transforming an objectifying perspective of the land as ‘the environment’ into a relational perspective that incorporates being with and dwelling-in requires a paradigm shift. An attitudinal shift is needed from individual or community ownership, from capitalistic intentions and the need for one’s ‘story’ to be inscribed on the land and thus to dominate and prevail over it, to an attitude of respect for the multiplicities of personal and communal meanings.
Revelatory experiences, such as those I have recounted and those revealed in the poem, can be understood as our human participation with the dream of the Earth (Berry 2006; Holifield 2013). Like warp threads in weaving, they give shape to the textured fabric of vision and action needed for us to make our way through this perilous time. I believe we are being called on to witness the emergence of these numinous moments of meeting with the more-than-human world, to recognize their importance, so that what they offer may be integrated by the individual, as well as being brought into the ongoing weave of our culture, honouring the land while weaving us back into a relationship with it. In this tumultuous time, I have seen an emergence of spontaneously arising rituals in my consulting room and elsewhere. I recall a patient describing to me how she had held a small bird that had fallen from its nest in the palm of her hand. It was dying. Their eyes met. For the first time in her life, she could accept death instead of feeling it was a shameful thing that wasn’t supposed to happen. Burying the bird deepened the meaning. Before this, she could not tolerate being with pets that had died nor bear her feelings of the loss of persons she had loved. This pivotal experience was like a gateway that allowed her analytic work to move differently. Our work with the psychophysical manifestations of freeze gained traction. She began to be able to bear the feeling of loss of our connection between sessions and to metabolize the frozen terror stemming from injury and loss from her past. No longer trapped in a state of freeze and helplessness, she became active – writing and even calling her representatives in Congress, the Senate, and the U.S. President protesting the catastrophic loss of life and destruction of habitat following a massive oil spill on the gulf coast. This patient had never before acted in this way. This shift out of a state of dissociative shutdown allowed her to face the climate crisis in a way that had not previously been possible.
My mother, having struggled for several years following the death of her eldest daughter, my sister, came to visit me. Sometimes together, sometimes in solitude, we wandered on a beach just north of San Francisco for a period that felt entirely unbound by time. I saw her as she watched the water surge and withdraw, the sand sifting through itself, the sun sinking toward the horizon. I saw her pause in silence. Later, she told me that she had finally come to terms with this loss. No other words were spoken. I felt a silence surrounding her words like the silence a church bell rings into. Touching the essence of emotion can be another kind of poetic crossing. The interoceptive loop of embodied affectivity made conscious reveals the link between our bodies and the body of the Earth.
A rite of passage
Perhaps we can think of climate change itself as an initiatory rite of passage urging us into a new developmental stage for our species –– calling us to remember the depth of nature held within the mysterious matrix of the cosmos (Tarnus 2001). From a Jungian perspective, in the absence of culturally embedded rituals that mark pivotal times in development, the Self devises them. It offers an opportunity to enlarge the narrowed perception of our waking ego-self toward a fuller sense of meaning and purpose (Henderson 2005). As in all rites of passage, the initiate (us) neither recognizes themselves as they are, nor do they know who they are to become. In this state of liminality, transformative processes are at work. In ancient rituals, the elders know the territory the initiate is traversing and know full well that they may or may not survive. At this moment, we are all in the mystery together –– sometimes we are the initiate and sometimes the witness or guide. Perhaps this is necessary in order to bring us all, like Luci Tapahonso, down, close to the Earth, in humility (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Exiting the Passageway (author’s own image).
Holifield, B. (2022) Psyche within the matrix of the natural world: weaving the inner and outer. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 67:5, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. DOI: 10.1111/1468-5922.12874
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article to be published by Wilely Blackwell in The Journal of Analytic Psychology, special edition on the environmental crisis. Expected publication late summer 2022.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/6FUTSPVGEINIDC6WZMRK?target=10.1111/1468-5922.12874
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[1] Luci Tapahonso is the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation (ICTMN Staff 2013). Her writing, unlike that of most Native American writers, is a translation from original work she has created in her tribe’s native tongue. For this reason, her English work is strongly rhythmic and uses syntactical structures unusual in English language poetry (Sonneborn 2007). The Navajo people call themselves Diné which in their language means ‘The People’. The Navajo reservation is in northeastern Arizona. The Navajo Nation extends into Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is one of a few Indigenous nations whose reservation lands overlap its traditional homelands (Navajo Nation Government 2022).
[2] I am a part of a community of scholars who have been inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous volume The Visible and the Invisible (1964/1968), his final attempt to make sense of the theme of embeddedness of self and the world.
[3] These references are a small sample of a wide range of peoples who have not lost sight of their interdependence with the Earth.
[4] See Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, a center that works for socially based environmental justice both locally and internationally for a comprehensive vision and strategy in which this kind of feeling along with the Earth is an intrinsic quality of a sustainable and regenerative way forward in our world. https://oaec.org/our-work/vision-and-strategy/.
[5] “Rez” refers to the reservation, in particular here, the Navajo reservation.
[6] See Francois Jullien’s From Being to Living (2020) who explores a similar dialectic between the inner and outer through Chinese landscape paintings.
[7] This seems remarkably akin to Jung’s discovery of a science of the sacred, which he referred to as synchronicity.