This is a post about questions. About tracking the questions that haunt us. What sets us on the pathway to asking the questions that matter to us is most often our experiences, often our troubles or the worlds. Such questions sometimes lead to very deep, personal experiences, to creativity and healing.

For a while after a deep experience there can be a strong feeling of inspiration. Then, like a pulse, it passes. We forget, or as Marie Von Franz said “consciousness fades away”

I have been quiet here on substack for a while. I had a flurry of writing in the wake of the initial inspiration for pursuing imaginal ecology a few years ago. Much of that writing was inspired by the Wild Land Dreaming wilderness rite of passage I took in 2020. I’ve reposted some of that recently here, and most of it is on Tobychown.com. Much of that writing seeks a language for those experiences, one that doesn’t explain them away. I found that learning to tell fairy stories, to be an excellent way of grounding the transformative reality of those strange and transformative days and nights in the woods.

In order to tell fairy tales the teller has to imbibe vivid primordial images, one, by one. To tell a fairy tale, you have to walk out into the landscape of it’s images, until you find yourself in its strange reflective surfaces. Fairy tales, it turns out have shallow, vividly reflective surfaces. They present flat characters with no “depth” - they need the teller to lend them depth, to bring them to life, to breath life into them with the substance of their own life experience. The price they ask for is that you to take them to heart. Fairy tales are heartless - they need your heart to have a heart. In order to have a heart, they tell us, for example, of Thomas the Rhymer who in order to recieve the Fairy Queen’s gift and become a true poet, rather than a flamboyant flaneur had to remain silent for 7 years in the faerie realm.

What happens during a process of entering the un-world, the imaginal realm, requies a silence that has a respect for mystery.

“Mystery” after all means “lips sealed”. What’s important evaporates if exposed or shared too soon. Visions need to be nourished and fed, but they also need grounding through being kept alive whilst in contact with daily life. Still, they have their origins in strange green solitudes.

as you burst, thick green sprouts come pouring out an angel’s mouth.

That as it may be, I would like to talk about the mystery, the mystery of research. I undertook some research a few years ago, into using imaginal psychology as a research methodology. It began with a question. Now, one strange thing about research is to do with the odd magical power of language and it’s ability to to ask questions. Questions in research operate a little bit like wishes do in fairy tales. Just as you have to be careful what you wish for, (“I wish everything I touch turn to gold” or “I wish your nose WOULD turn into a sausage”) so too you have to be careful what questions you research. Questions and wishes have an intimate relationship with each other. Anyone who has taken anytime with an oracle - like I Ching or Tarot, or perhaps psychotherapy, where the search for a question (“what brings you here?”) becomes very personal and important. Asking the right questions is neither easy nor straightforward. Substituting just one word sets off a completely different answer.

“Why?” Seems to arises first - (why is that?) asking for reasons, seeking a because, and sometimes subtly shifting the inquiry into a cause and effect framework

“How?” Seems to want to know how things function, “how does it work? - again a question with a functional operation.

Sometimes asking “who?” is often the most revealing question of all - which archetypal character speaks through this situation, which part of the self speaks within this viewpoint, or scenario. Who is it in me that speaks or is silent?

My experience of research was a search for the right question, a little like the quest of the mice to find the right question in the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. It’s all very well knowing the answer to something,

Freud says it’s sex, Marx says it’s power, Dawkins says it’s genes….

but how do you find the right question?

In research you are supposed to have a beautifully framed question first, preferably a practical question that humbly fills a little gap in the wall of the citadel of knowledge that all humans are constructing brick by academic brick.

Forcing and narrowing questions causes problems; they turn the researcher into either a labourer in the construction of knowledge, or worse a technician of the machines of knowledge, reading the print outs and feeding data back in, as if the question being researched had little personal importance.

In practice, the questions we ask, whether of oracles, psychotherapists or within scientific research always have a deeply personal resonance. And they are often very tricky to come up with, as they involve deep immersion in a field of experience.

I knew before I started the research that part of the answer was “the imagination” and it’s healing power, it’s centrality to the human psyche and the human heart, and it’s connection to a deeper and more realistic perception of nature.

But what was the question? And what was the methodology by which I would find an answer?

Well, a little water has passed under the bridge, and so I can say a little more about what I wanted to do - the desire that asks the question. Firstly, I wanted to do research through a methodology already steeped in the reality and knowledge of the imaginal, that of archetypal psychology, in the way the image illuminates the borders of what we know and don’t know, how it interpenetrates people yet also feels very personal.

So, as I began to revisit the research process, I started to re-read the books I have of James Hillman - books that I consumed, mostly around the time I was training, now roughly 19 years ago. Reading them then felt like a transformative event, like being incinerated by the blue fire that is the title of his collected works. I emerged out of that blue fire with a feeling that my instinctive love of the creative imagination and feeling for its reality had been both decisively re-arranged, disturbed and yet also made substantial.

Hillman wrote “myth does not ground, it opens” he defends the ground of the mythic imagination as a kind of groundless ground of the psyche. He then opens that door wider throughout his writing, ultimately placing it in the immanence of a living world. This groundless ground is the ground that he both protects and asks us to fall into. That fall is a fall into the imaginal realm, that the imaginal realm is at the heart of our psyche, and is found through a practice of the heart.

Method-ology
Hillman’s archetypal psychology became a methodology, for the research I took on. Methodology - the study of methods - why use that method? How come that method - or perhaps whose method is that? Different methodologies have different understandings about what knowledge is and what is real. These questions brush onto a great deal more than simply how to go about researching the stories that arise within art therapy and their role and value.

As I searched for a methodology, I found that there are ways of looking at what knowledge is and what is real that seem fundamentally harmful. In particular, the two main rival ways of creating methods to understand knowing and being both contribute in different but interlocking ways to some of the damage that we see towards nature and psyche. One part of this has led to a culture lost in dissociated mentation, which imagines that measurement and statistical analysis alone bypasses the bias of the human. In doing so it tries to cut imagination away from the human, to create clarity, and so disfigures the psyche. On the other hand, there is a methodology that sees the psyche as built only from out of the structure of human power relations, and so as something “constructed” and so artificial and unreal. What the dominant worldview ( and there are always competing worldviews) ends up being has a deep effect on what kind of world we live in, often with unexpected consequences.

Because our methodologies are not simply techniques for constructing or processing knowledge. Rather, how we see, (who it is within us that is allowed to sees?) how we know (who within us and amongst us is allowed to know?) how we understand what’s real (who within us to we grant reality to?) directly affect what we do. They bring utterly different worlds into being. They reveal something about what we already think about the answer we seek.

We are currently seeing a world saturated in a very particular kind of chaos and confusion, one in which a world that seemed solid begins to separate and fracture into reactionary and post modern worlds. Our methodologies become more important than ever. Because our methods are always underpinned by the kind of attention that we pay to what we think is real and what we feel is worth knowing. The kind of attention we bring to the world forms that world. So what kind of world is being brought into being right now?

The reactionary post modern world

As I write, the editorial team of Climate Psychology Alliance’s Explorations have just published “Heavy Weather: Exploring Reactionary States of Mind”. I wrote an article about the rise of right wing populism and reactionary ideas. In archetypal psychology’s terms, we have seen a movement in progressive circles from the Dionysian counter culture of the 60’s and 70’s to the cancel culture of the last 10 years. It’s not inaccurate to describe a turn within the green movement from Dionysos to Artemis and Athena. Artemis, the virgin huntress, who led a cult of the Moon and who famously turned a male voyeur into a stag that was torn apart by his own dogs. Athena, the goddess of war and wisdom, or wisdom in war, born from Zeus’s head without the intercession of an earthy goddess, who fights for justice. Dionysos, of course, was also ripped apart, but in such a way that the ripping apart and the one doing the ripping got to know they were one and the same.

Athena and Artemis face off against a regressive bro culture high on a rediscovered cache of Ares warrior bluster. They demands that the city purify itself and re-dedicate itself to justice through dismantling masculinity and disclosing commercial interests and renouncing all of Hermes’s tech trickery.

There is a longstanding depth psychological grudge in the conflict between Athene and Ares : the Iliad shows the behind the scenes battle for Troy as taking place between these two deities of war, Aries and Athena. It reflects a battle in the soul between the “terrible love of the war” and the terrible love of strategy- aka manipulation.

When gods go to war, human beings start to identify with one set of god/desses uncritically or unconsciously. As Hillman also suggests, wars don’t simply arise from racism, they actively strengthen and spread rascism.

I become at risk of psychological inflation and evoke hostility from other god/desses, archetypal forces if I can’t identify this archetypal force and instead attempt to make it part of my own identity. I am in danger of losing sight of my own shadow in the pure light of the god’s numinous light.

It’s relatively easy to point out someone else’s “shadow”. The only shadow that one can really get to know and draw substance from is one’s own and one’s tribe. Robert Bly called it “swallowing the shadow” - a moment when there is a chance to gain nourishment from accepting that one is what one does not really want to be. Yet the path of ashes is also the path of fire, if you feel you could never shine a light….

Given that green movement is the movement concerned with sustaining and preserving life on this planet, with disrupting climate change and it’s corporate backers, with allowing nature to mature and flourish and learning from it, then the green movement and me if I am a part of it, need to become aware of their own shadow more than ever. The shadow of Ares is well known and easily pointed out; we have been living in the 80 year period that has attempted to de-rail Ares to show how he really works for the bank, to show how he brutalises, leaves young lives broken, cities destroyed and crops burned. The shadows of Dionysos, and the pitfalls of the ecstatic turn we have attempted to become aware of since the ascent of the counterculture, addiction, madness, fragmentation, all dangers of a Dionysos that isn’t grounded and given respect due. Athena and Artemis too have shadows; Athena the wise, strategic and just, born of Zeus’s head we can see in an excess of deconstruction, of the idea that data will always convince, of justice become rigid and uncompromising. Artemis the pure, the virgin huntress, the Moon goddess, who protects childbirth, women and wild animals is also the one who turns voyeurs who spy on her into victims of their own libido. We can glimpse her shadow in cults of moral purity and the savage excesses of cancel culture.

Ken Wilber’s book on Trump and the post truth world draws attention to how the success of Artemis and Athena as ways of knowing and being (their methodologies) has led to a slowly thickening shadow in the green movement. One signal of a strong shadow is the totalising claims that comes from adopting an archetypal perspective evokes. Archetypes want to make universal claims, to say this is always like that. However, Wilber argues that since the 1960’s the leading edge of intellectual thought has, confusingly, made totalising claims about not making totalising claims, so called “grand narratives” For example - “there are no grand narratives only personal truths” is a grand narrative about there being no grand narratives.

Wilber draws attention to the success of the postmodern worldview in progressive thought, and it’s importance in pushing further forward anti oppression laws, equal opportunities and green politics. Although postmodernism appears to view the world as an ironic game, a text to deconstruct, there is also a fierce morality embedded within what Wilber defines as the postmodern perspective, one that can easily slip into dogmatic moral purity. This views all systems and hierarchies as “only” false masks for the continuation of oppression, constructed by a Machiavellian liberal ideology. To deconstruct them is to rob the system of it’s power. However, this does not solve the problem of how to use power well, only undermines the legitimacy of those who hold it, in whatever way.

Some hierarchies are oppressive. Many systems can be misused for Machiavellian purposes. Problems arise when this then is taken to be gospel truth and applied in a blanket way. Complicated by the fact that if we unconditionally accept the truth that there are only personal truths, and ranking ideas according to which is better (ie making a hierarchy of values) is seen as innately oppressive (just plain wrong) then we will find it very difficult to discern the real difference in value between one person’s “truth” and another. We will make an absolute truth out of the notion of personal truth, of lived experience.

And as Robert Anton Wilson said “Nothing is absolutely true. And even that is not absolutely true”

Perhaps discerning “who is telling the truth?” (how to I learn to read someone’s actual character) turns out to be more important than “what is truth?” (how do I learn an abstract rule to apply in all cases)

So, as the success of postmodern thought has flowed from a subversive activity into a quite mainstream one, where people born into it start to use it to think with without having studied it, then we have seen just these consequences arise - a rise in the idea that personal truth is uncontested, the loss of faith in “experts,” a cynicism about knowledge and power. When all truths are assumed to be personal opinions, an aggressive narcissism takes the place of curiosity, one that flattens everything into a kind of sameness.

Hillman, in a late lecture, argued if we find one place to be sacred, then we need to know deeply how that place is different from another. If “the sacred” is everywhere at once, then “the sacred” is nowhere in particular. How can we love the Earth if we can’t distinguish the feeling tone of a holy well as something more than a shopping centre? And if we then have to admit that there are always hierarchies within our judgement, and within our relationship. Jung, in his work on ways of interacting with the world felt that feeling was a way of making a judgement, not avoiding one. So the perhaps he would not be surprised the the project to restore feeling to the world can run the risk of becoming too judgemental.

Most commenting people on the internet are not reading Lacan, Derrida or Foucault. Rather, as ideas become more popular and widespread, less uncharted water and more the water we swim in, something changes. As ideas become both less precise and more sure of themselves they become both more popular and more problematic. Psychology itself is experiencing this in the unexpected problems from the widespread adoption of mental health terminology into everyday life - for example the way the word “trauma” has come to mean simply “you’ve upset me” alongside the understanding that trauma can have a formative effect upon perceptions, identity, and relationships get conflated in language.

So when start to search again for what called us, that is to say when we undertake research, we cannot simply look for what we already know, and we cannot assume our way of searching is only incidental.

There is a sufi story, in which the Mullah Nasruddin in frantically searching for his doorkey in the street as the sun goes down. A man starts to help him, and after some time and a lot of stress says
“Where did you drop them?”
Nasrudin waves towards the darkness and his house and says:
“Somewhere over there…”
The man says:
“then why are you looking here?”
and Nasruddin, gesturing up towards the streetlamp they stand under and says
“Well, you see there is more light out here…”

Transcend and include or stick to the image?

Wilber, with his motto of “transcend and include” seems to contradict Hillman’s own fiery invective to “stick to the image.” Wilber’s emphasis on “integration” and an implicit unfolding order seems an anathema to Hillman, who insists that a psyche be as it actually appears, messy, complex full of multitudes, multiple perspectives. A soul made of a spanless span deeper than we can fathom or capture in concepts refuses to be integrated into a neat diagram. For Hillman “integrate” often means “turn it into a concept.” Hillman and Wilber work towards different methodologies, different ways of knowing and being - one driven towards integration, the other towards imagination.

However, I have found about when working with fairy tales that the imaginal already contains more than it seems. If you “work” with a story, you begin by imaging each part of the story something like a painting, and returning to it again and again out of a kind of fascination and a kind of love of the simple beauty of the images.

A poor washerwoman bakes three cakes for her daughters.

She breaks them and they break unevenly.

She sets them on the simple wooden table in the kitchen and calls her daughter in.

”Which one will you take the smaller one and my blessing, or the larger one and my curse?”

As you begin to imbibe the story, more and more details emerge. I remember listening to Martin Shaw tell the Lindworm, and he said at one point he had been telling the story for 20 years and could finally could see the colour of the horse the older brother was riding (it was white). The image contains more than we can see. Just as “nature” also contains more than we can perceive. Our perceptions can open further and deeper. It seems that really the only way to do this is to love the image.

To love the imagination also means to ask the right questions of it at the right time. Yet it also means to allow knowledge to arise from the right kind of attention. Just as we would not probe or interrogate a lover, but would want to know more about them. Hillman’s methodology, is one that re imagines the heart as intelligent, and as a sensing organ that perceives the imaginal. It makes the imaginal real, and the intelligence of the heart a source of knowledge.

Generally, in academic research, as well as in the search for purpose and meaning in our lives, there is some deep moment that catches us vividly, like a firework that illuminates the night sky and shows for a moment all the detail of the landscape ahead. Then, there is darkness, and we work towards the thing we glimpsed, searching again for a way to make that illumination more substantial and permanent, to know the landscape rather than visit it. Research means just this; to search again for the spark that once illuminated you.

I am reposting this essay Well at the end of the World that was first shared on tobychown.com in 2020. It has borrows quite a bit from Hillman and steals a few gems from Martin Shaw too mostly unapologetically. I think the writing stands up and has some verve. Certainly the things it addresses are still present in 2025.

If you want to dive deeper into Hillman and imaginal psychology,(and why not?) I am doing a seminar on archetypal psychology and arts therapy in May here - Integrating Archetypal Psychology with Dramatherapy: The Transformative Poetics of Symbolic Action, and I’m going to write a few pieces about that too in the run up, so look out for them. But for now, here is the well at the end of the world.

There was a well at the end of the world where only the god Nechtan was permitted.
And in that well lived a salmon. Just an ordinary salmon, beautiful and graceful, but no more so than any of its kind. Around that well grew nine hazel trees, that blossomed and fruited in a single day. And into that well each hazel tree dropped a single nut. Nine crimson brown hazel nuts. But these were no ordinary nuts, for contained within them was all the knowledge in the world; what was, what had been and what was to come. The salmon ate these nuts and found that it knew….everything; the horror, the beauty, the infinite universe stretching away. The salmon couldn’t do much with that knowledge. It was only a salmon. So on it swam….
(From the boyhood of Finn, as told on Tales of the British Isles)

At the beginning of the Feinian cycle that tells the story of the great hero Finn MacCool, we find a well at the end of the world, nine hazel trees, and an ordinary salmon. The salmon eats the hazelnuts and knows, or perhaps gnows like gnostics gnow. However, in a narrative twist reminiscent of both Douglas Adam’s plummeting sperm whale, grappling with consciousness and Adam and Eve eating more than they bargained in the garden of Eden, knowledge comes at something of a price to the perplexed salmon. The ordinary salmon has become the Salmon of Wisdom.

It seems fitting that a great cycle of stories begin, not with the birth of the hero himself, but with that which eventually lends him his knowledge and wisdom. It is not the knowledge of books, nor a teacher, nor even his own experience that will eventually by twist of fate come to Finn. Rather, it is the accidental tasting of the flesh of a salmon. And the salmon was only borrowing that wisdom too. The salmon got it from the hazelnuts, who in turn got it from the hazel trees. These nine trees, let’s not forget they were planted around a sacred well at the end of the world. They were nourished water sacred to the water god Nechtan, at the place where the river sprang into this world.



An eco-mythic food web

The story offers something of an eco-mythological food web. It’s a kind of eco-theogony – a story for the genesis of wisdom from the divine, timeless world of gods, on the margins of the world, from where water flows and the mortal, timebound world of hazelnuts, salmon and men. We have a simple trophic pyramid in mythic form.

In ecology, trophic pyramids explain how energy moves through food webs. Energy flows from the Sun, into the plants that soak it up, into the animals that eat the plants and into the animals that eat the. In each stage of this flow (probably doesn’t feel much like a flow to the predated) there is a great loss of energy. At each stage of the process 90% of the energy is lost. By the time you get from Grass, to Gazelle to a Lion, the energy concentrated in the flesh of the Lion, has passed through several stages.

Lest we get too carried away, by the Lion as King of Creation the manifestation of all that concentrated energy, the Lion will also be preyed upon by bacteria, and fungi – food webs are not actually linear. We know that what appears to be dominance may be a kind of illusion; scratch the surface and the world belongs to to the ants and the beetles, to the fungi, to bacteria, to viruses.

Whether the metaphor here is of an increasing concentration of energy in the bodies of animals it as it passes through the web, or of an increasing diffusion, wisdom flows from the edges of our world. That wisdom is so powerful that even a lick of the thumb of the fish oil eventually gifts Finn his knowledge.

The trophic pyramid is one reason many people suggest that we if we want to continue as a species, we need to cut down on eating industrially produced meat. Eating industrial meat means eating farther along the food chain, with energy lost at each link. Farmed salmon are a good example of just how destructive it is to eat further along the food chain in industrial quantities. They are already quite far along the trophic network, so eating them is highly energy intensive – by the time you eat a slice of smoked salmon the salmon has eaten fish that has been bottom trawled, and this fish has also fed on something that has fed, and at each stage 90% of the Sun’s energy has been lost.

That’s without thinking about the huge concentration of pesticides used in salmon farming, and the sickness and lice that farmed salmon bring to their wild cousins. Perhaps worst of all in salmon farming is the deformation of the salmon’s soul, the maiming of it’s instinct to journey from ocean far upstream to the source of rivers. This maiming also afffects and the nutrient cycle from ocean to forest. It is as if salmon were blood cells in a vast arterial network, as Chris Packham explained in his masterwork “Secrets of our Living Planet: the Magic Forest“.

No doubt, the Salmon of Wisdom, having gained all knowledge was aware of this, and no doubt would have registered this in the “horror” section of the infinite wisdom it gained from eating the nine sacred hazelnuts, although no doubt the salmon being now wise, and, of course a salmon, kept it to itself. Wisdom, we might note, involves knowledge of suffering.

However, the story illustrates a different kind of concentration of energy to the conventional trophic pyramid- a concentration of wisdom from beyond the threshold of the known, from sacred waters, to hazel tree, to salmon – eventually to the thumb of Finn MacCool.

At the Well at the End of the World, the Salmon of Wisdom, becomes a conduit between one world and another. Our own world feels as if it’s shifted into a permanent point of crisis. Wildfires, floods, viruses, protests. The tiny coronavirus, with it’s incredible ability to mutate and shapeshift, has found the keys to enter our cells, and has revealed vulnerabilities in our human systems, on every level – biological, psychological, political, cultural.

How to find the Well at the End of the World…

I want to consider this image of the Well at the End of the World. One way to approach it might be to consider what a World is. When I say “world” you might think of that image of the planet Earth, a blue marble with white flecks falling through space. However, the root of the word “world” is two words “wer-eld” that comes from Saxon and means “man- age” or “the age of man”. Looking closer, “wer” meaning “man” relates to “virile” and so links to the sense of being alive and vitality, and that “eld” means something like “an age” in the sense of “ageing” – the way things grow, flourish and age over time.

So if we root out the masculine bias here, we can find that the word “world” has a cosmological meaning at it’s roots. The world as “the age of man” doesn’t mean the “time of men to rule. ” It means world as “the domain of life given to a person whilst alive”. A world is not a planet, it’s a lifespan, a worldview, a process. Here we can find something that tends to get obscured by all the big picture thinking that flashes into our imagination as we try to grapple with language to find truth – that a world includes you, is not separate from you. It’s a pulsing, biological process of growth that marks the passage from your birth to your death. At it’s threshold, the threshold of your world and what’s beyond it we find this image of a well encircled by nine hazel trees.

Iain MacGilchrist has done much with his book “The Master and his Emissary” to show how we “world” the world. We do this through the kind of attention we bring to it. We can try to fix the world into a sequence, to abstract it, to explain it, mend it, destroy it. Conceptual thinking. Or we can experience the world, place our awareness as wide as we can, open up the channels and make sense of the bounty. Poetic thinking. We need both, but of the two, MacGilcrist says, poetic thinking is suffering in a world that has become manic with doing that doesn’t serve our best interests. And only one of these kinds of thinking can encompass our actual experience. All language and experience, really has it’s roots in the poetic, not the conceptual, and it is from poetic not conceptual roots that whatever flower might bear fruit for our lives will come to pass.

So, the Salmon and the Well it swims in may be closer than you think, in that the edge of the world, is the edge of your own psyche. I’m not offering some kind of redemptive offering here, a kind of fairy tale happy ending from another world. I want rather to think a bit deeper about how stories take us to the threshold of our world, how they affect us, and how they can offer us pathways into an imaginal ecology. By this I mean that traditional stories can offer a kind of map towards becoming the highly specific being we each are, within a living planet that is both our home and our true parent.



Our colonised self

A map, of course, is not a guarantee of a successful journey. I don’t want to make false promises here. The challenges that face each of us and all of us are immense. Some of what makes them so challenging is that they challenge not only our sense of how destructive systems operate “out there” in the world, but also the way that they operate “in here” in the apparent sanctuary of our sense of self. It’s becoming increasingly clear that whatever industrial colonising processes have happened to the “natural world” – the industrial landscapes, plantations and mega-farms that replace our the rivers, forests, coral reefs, butterflies, rhinos and fungi – have also happened to our own sense of who we are. Our sense of self has become industrialised.

Our own psyche becomes colonised by the same systems of systems of control that destroy the more than human world. It’s no longer advertisers selling consumer lifestyles to you, now it’s your best friend. It has become a time of atomisation, with the irony that the more aware we have become of our identity, and the more precisely we try to define it through, profiles on facebook, dating apps, updates and posts, the less clear we are able to become about who we actually are. The clean crisp images on instagram with it’s array of tiles are nothing like 4 nights spent out in the woods, watching a bee smash through a spiders web, or the sudden glimpse of a buzzard through the trees. Yet our reflex when confronted by beauty is to capture it in a photograph, rather than feel it as soulful. Capture may seem more permenant, yet only the feeling of it allows us to participate in it. And it is participation in the soul of the world we are most starved of.

Our problems as human beings exist on many levels and dimensions. The task of becoming ourself has to include wider frames of reference than the self. Yet within all our modern neuromancy, under electric rain falling on neon signs, black gutters and fears of android supremacy, under all this, each of us still must go through a process of becoming. Within this process of becoming, lies the potential for a deeper knowledge of self – a knowledge both of oneself and what a self can be in relation to the Greater Beauty. The mythic ecologist Martin Shaw calls it ‘becoming a story carrier”.

How stories grow

I’ve spent my days for the last 14 years listening to people’s stories, helping them to get them into shape, sometimes offering them traditional stories as a kind of mythic backdrop to their personal drama within which a reverberation can occur.

I work as a dramatherapist, and mostly work with families where things have gone wrong for someone in that family – most frequently someone’s father or a mother, rather than drinking for Nechtan’s well, has got lost within the demon drink, or some other substances

One thing I’ve started to notice is that until they are told, people’s stories are not stories, just a sequence of stuff that has happened to them.

Stories don’t appear in simple straightforward patterns or arrive ready to be told. As I listen and respond, and show interest, something starts to form in the space between myself and the other person. It’s the experience of something trying to take a shape, take a pattern, find an image, find expression. It’s not abstract, it’s quite physical, it can register in my gut, or my heart, or my throat or my head.

Occasionally, if it seems appropriate and doesn’t interrupt the flow, I’ve let the teller know how it’s affecting me to hear the story as it unfolds. It’s seems essential to stories that they are not just mental images, but affect the living body, as if the story itself had a kind of body. It seem to be an essential part of a story that it’s composed of images that have feeling tones, as it’s essential that it’s fed by attention.

The process of creating a story continues throughout the process of individual dramatherapy, as more experiences, images, memories and metaphors gather into the story and and become embodied in the space. It seems at times that what lies between two people is a proces of something becoming a story. Its not just a question of someone telling and someone listening. Listening alone often acts as a kind of magnet to draw out images that will become stories. But simply listening isn’t always sufficient. A torrent of words and events and a sympathetic ear doesn’t make a story.



Story and the soul

Somehow to be a real story, a story has to come to life. It’s not just about feeling either; some accounts can be flooded with feeling that drowns the narrative. It may have something to do with authenticity, yet here again, it’s hard to tell, as the well sealed vessel of therapy is not a court room, or a detective agency, even if at times therapist and client may become detective of the psyche, seeking clues as to how come things are the way they are. In some ways it seems to be a search for the soul of the story.

James Hillman said “soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences. ” Part of the kind of intangible process that goes on in the formation of a story between two people involves a deepening through dialogue from things have just happened, to having been registered as having happened to the teller .In the difference between the two, soul thickens like fine spun fibre becoming cloth.

I don’t think that’s confined to therapy, or even something that can only happen between people. I think that it’s also something that happens in our relationships with each other and with our relationship to places. I wanted to say “nature” but nature is a problematic word. If I say “relationship to nature” I’m asking you to relate to everything on the entire planet. We are quite good at imagining nature as one thing, the blue pearl that spirals through space, covered in white cloud. Mother Gaia, the soul of the world. We’ve been primed to imagine nature as one thing by centuries of monotheism, which insisted on a unified spiritual world beyond the threshold of the senses, beyond the gateway of death. The interconnection of all things. Yet the question isn’t whether things connect but how they do, and which connections are the important ones, the ones that make the blue light spark.

Place is the space

Is it better to have an abstract connection to all nature, or to know a place through continual returning to it? There is a very great difference between space and place, as the philosopher Edward Casey has explored. Both are acts of imagination – space might be the kind of grid that extends off in all directions, a kind of blue net that bulges and stretches around physical objects. We know what this looks like now through endless computer simulations. Somehow we come to believe this is really what does underly the apparent chaos and diversity of life. Space, Casey reminds us is a certain kind of fantasy about how matter is organised. Yet place, is not like that at all.

Place is the burnt ochre stubble on the harvested wheatfield, that stubbornly shuffles in the midsummer wind. It is the admiral butterfly that opens it’s wings from the matt of purple flowers on Castle Hill. It’s the small bird that bolts out from knee high brambles, whirring as it dips and flies, as I take the rough trail to the old Hawthorn tree to relieve myself. It’s the strange song of the wild fox from the top of the ridge, a high pitched howl. It’s the darkening gloom as the Sun gives way to shadows, the odd fog that comes into the eye with the dark shapes of bushes, it’s hint that there’s more than meets the eye in the shapes of the night.

When Hillman says that events need to deepen into experiences to create soul, he seems to imply that it’s not just enough for things to happen to you. These happenings need to be shaped, worked out reflected on, told in the right places to the right people. For events to become experiences, they need to be shaped by a creative process, even if that person would swear they are no artist.

So called Traditional stories do this effectively. They offer the bones of narrative sequences in ways we respond to, yet in ways not fixed into specific meanings. When we hear that the Kingdom was threatened at it’s borders, and so the King had to be away from the centre for 10 years, we hear this on many levels. It cstrikes a bell that can remind us of how easy it is to become absent when caught up in the struggles at the edges of our world. At the centre though, what lives there, that thing that can spin an experience into soul? Jung thought they were archetypes there and at the centre, the Self, the King archetype.

Jung was ambiguous about his definitions of archetypes, here linking in instinct, here the mythic, yet one thing he implies is that archetypes are not necessarily characters, so much as entire narratives sequences – myths in other words.

Stories as bread for the dreaming soul

Stories allow the dreaming mind to surface, and to become nourished through the recognition of it’s deepest pattern in the telling. Gaston Bachelard insisted that there are conceptual ways of thinking and poetic ways of thinking, and that we do well to remember they are different modes of thinking. With respect to the conceptual, it has become the dominant thinking mode of our world; all space and no place. We may do well to remember that conceptual art won’t necessarily lead to poetic art. Poetic thinking can be lush, excessive, amplified. Excess of images might serve us just as well or not better. Nature certainly is excessive where we allow it space to breathe; bumblebees mate on a chalk track, orange and black, whilst trees fallen from high slopes form giant teepees against their cousins below. Poetic thinking allows words to become animal again, to express a secret love. Hillman writes:

“All good poems are love poems – not because they tell of love or lovers, but because they reveal the poet’s love of language”

Poetry is a wild red rose, and the promise of what it can bring to a kingdom that has become infertile – the freedom to become exuberant, precise, to ask florid question, to command the depths, and most of all to be affected by and to praise that which holds the greatest beauty.

In some ways we have become so used to being impoverished in our poetic imagination that it can be hard to see. It’s easy to be in a beautiful place without seeing any poetry.

Perhaps we don’t quite see with the soul until we hear the right story, the one that tells us something about our life that we knew without knowing. The one about the untamed child who rides a wild goat around the palace from the kitchen to the throne room. Or the prince who wastes away on his sick bed all day and dances all night in a fairy mound. When we recognise ourself in a story something comes to life. I think that’s one thing that Hillman means about soul being created by events deepening into experiences. It means that what has happened to us comes to life – it becomes a story.

Stories also happen without humans; nature itself tells stories that no human ear hears. My old permaculture teacher the great Patrick Whitefield used to listen very carefully to these inhuman stories, and had almost created the genre single handedly. He listened to long strange stories sung by the landscape about how come the slow growing shade tolerant beech trees, the tallest tree in the forest, who ecologists assumed would become a climax tree could be thwarted by strange combinations of weather, animal activity, the shapes of the land or the activity of the soil. His final book before his death, “How to read the landscape” passed on this sense of how stories happen without humans, how the deeply unpredictable patterns within nature lead to a continual unfolding of unpredictability. Nature, it seems is telling a story to itself continually, over a long period of time.

And we still go into nature to find our story, to find out how to make a story from the shards, wound and fragments of the way life has treated us. The way animals, trees, fungi, weather and insects interact, the sharpness of green in a blade of grass, the shape of a download hillside, the small riot of indigo and mauve in a wild flower meadow, the feel entering a high sheltered plateau on a wooded hillside washed in sunstained green light – all these kinds of experiences continually show us the processes of knitting together the constitutes ecology; the life from death, the death from life.

We stare at the sea when our hearts are broken. We climb hills and mountains to test our will power and to be rewarded with horizon and the Sunset. We go the woods to be alone or to replenish a sense of wonder, or to be immersed in a deeper field of life. All of these places offer opportunities for events can become experiences, can become stories we carry and tell, for a bit of soul to get stitched into our heart.

Gregory Bateson, seeking the places that mind and nature meet said that Nature is stochastic – it fires arrow after arrow until one strikes the target. Stories are like that too. We keep telling until we hit the target. Perhaps when we do, a brown-gold hazel nut falls into the well at the end of our world.

“For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first…”. James Hillman

1)

 I praise you Oak tree for your humility, branches open to the skies

like a cupped palm receiving a gift.

2)

Oak tree, your cover your bark with a mossy green coat seems pinned.

It seems to be pinned with with a badge of friendship.

I tip my hat to you Oak tree, for your capacity to reach out across species.

3)

 Oak tree, I recognise your tenacity and patience,

In the corner of this tree you have borne witness to the seasons of hundred years.

To the sudden death of rabbits,  the talons of hawks, innumerable moons have set into your branches, innumerable sunsets painted your gnarled trunk gold.

You stand steady as the seas rise and the moon wobbles.

4)

Your leaves, shaped like green clubs from a pack of cards,

No other tree rounds it’s leaves with such panache.

5)

My spine leans against your trunk, oh Oak, you bring shelter and support.

6)

Who but the Oak allows the lichen to wallpaper its flesh with rasps of grey green flock  in quite such a way?

7)

A house provides shelter, yet an Oak tree takes a person far deeper into their home.

8)

A king with sceptre and orb gathers his estate in full dignity,

yet cannot surpass the calm majesty of your presence, oh Oak.

9)

Silent as an owl at hunt,  taller than a haystack, you seek not scurrying flesh, but upwards to hunt the Sun, and downward to feed with dark networks of fungal filaments

10)

Your companionship with mycelial threads and neurological shapes tangle you into an earth dark pulse that I only touch on in dream or if a lie near you, oh Oak.

11)

You bear all sorrows with patience and diligence; if Odin were to hang from you for four nights and offer his eye for your poetic gifts, you would bear the request with good humour

12)

You showed that one eyed god

the way up to Asgard and down to Helheim;

You stretch up towards dimly remembered gods,

 And down towards the faded ghosts of our forgotten,

 Yet in our in between world, our Midgard

You fork your branch to allow the little hawthorn it’s space,  graceful as a ballerina’s pivot.

 Wiser than Solomon you stand here, allow your body to become both crossroads and shelter.

As a young man, my initiation into ecological consciousness was based on a feeling that there was something about deeply suspect about the prevailing notion that you can travel and live anywhere, do anything you want with no consequence. To have the potential to be anyone means being no-one. To love nature you have to love a specific place. So I stayed where I was, put down roots, got to know the city and it’s fringes, it’s semi wild surrounds. That lead folklore and the mythic dimensions of Sussex, England and Britain.

As I walked I considered this “Matter of Britain” that collection of fragmentary mythic images folklore and stories that point to hint to a dreaming underworld Britain. As I crossed the bridge into the City of London, I thought of the Battersea shield, ritually given to the river, and the Celtic skulls found in the Thames. We need to know our own soil. Tibetan prayer flags, totem poles and shamanic ceremonies fascinate and suggest, and are worthy of study and reverence.

However, to grasp their jewels as one’s own runs the risk of becoming accused of theft. Worse still, it may lead to avoidance in the encounter with one’s own cultural psychology and inheritance, and distortion and loss of the living core. Controversy over the corporatisation of mindfulness, the cultural appropriation of sweat lodges or disdain for plastic shamans all point the same way - we bring our psyches with us when we travel; whether we travel through nations or their cultural practices. Travel broadens the mind, but facing the shadow deepens the soul. Our plastic comes with us, it’s now in our guts as well as our oceans, and certainly in our ideas.

So, the need for a psychology that places the human psyche within an animate nature, means that each human psyche must know the specifics of the place where it lives to deepen into an imaginal ecology. Somethings not ethno-nationalism, but that includes and transcends the story of a nation, folding it’s current anxieties back into it’s ancient dreams, holding in tension the psychic reality of a place in relation to the intoxication national myth, and both in relation to a Gaian ecology.

Alongside the eachness of a place’s bedrock, its trackways, flora and fauna, there is history of a place, it’s ancestry and it’s mythology. For example my hometown of Brighton, Sussex gleams like a gaudy gem on the South Coast, it’s long history of fishing, it’s recent history of eccentricity, art and hedonism and it’s deeper Saxon, Iron Age and Neolithic inheritances still inform it’s character, and it’s sometimes uneasy relationship with the Sussex Downs it lies within. However, dig into a local folklore and different places begin to coalesce, into mythic fragments, back towards the Matter of Britain.

The Matter of Britain gleams with the promise of a native British indigenous mythopoetic psychology, the ancient gods and goddesses of the Isles of the Blessed, lingering in the Old Places, the hilltop enclosures, barrows,and stoneworks . A native animist psychology lies tangled within the sediment layers of empire, empiricism and christianism of the last 2,000 years Britain. Yet a nativist tradition of ancestral and mythic resonance seems alarmingly evocative of ethno-nationalism, of tribal possessiveness and belonging. Nationalism and it’s dark cousin fascism drink deeply on the same wells of mysticism, romanticism and myth, as imaginal ecology. So, how to distinguish?

Perceptions and mythic imagination

From a depth psychology perspective, we can’t avoid myth because we are always already entangled in it. Our perceptions, structured by mythic imagination, want to return there. Our memories and our dreams, as well as our reflections draw on the mythic and numinous - Corbin defined the imaginal realm, mundus imaginalis, as place both “median and mediatory” between the unseen and the seen worlds. Median and mediatory - in between and connecting - mythic imagination connects and mediates our perceptions with the world. Memories, dreams and reflections have strong tendencies towards the mythic imagination and this must be so because it enables a mid point that allows us to pattern match between this specific moment and other moments like it. The image interpenetrates, allows us to find connections between disparate scenarios. “Metaphor is myth in brief” and our perceptions rely on metaphor implicitly.

Our memory acts not only as a personal store but a resource of images, massively extended beyond personal experience through mimetic absorption of those around us, of culture, language and at a deeper level instinctive archetypal structures within our psyche. When Jung defined and detailed the collective unconscious, he placed the imaginal- from it’s mysterious streams in ancestral, cultural, and biological roots - within it’s domain. In effect he entered the world of Freud’s personal unconscious, the repressed Id of psychoanalysis, and saw a trapdoor with a rusty ring beneath his feet.

Let’s imagine that he pulled up that trapdoor, and found old stone steps that led to an ancient cellar - the mythic imagination. One of the dreams that led to his break with Freud describes finding a deeper, more ancient cellar in a house, with old bones lying in ossuaries. When Jung told Freud the dream, Freud famously thought Jung secretly wanted him dead. Jung felt the dream meant that there was more to the house of dreams than the merely personal. So the incision that made this first great split in the body of depth psychology was right on this question of the mythic and it’s status as either guide or deceiver. It will of course be a sore spot.

Jung found a gleaming storehouse full of treasure, described in the Red Book and sublimated and consciously worked into his psychology. This seems at first like a ringing endorsement for the imagination. However to understand our perceptions and reflections as shot through with mythic images and “pattern matches” we must also grasp that our anxieties and paranoias are watered from the same well. Jung constantly seemed anxious as to the dangers as well as the treasures of the collective unconscious. Let us remember that Anxiety makes a deep use of the imagination to make us think the worst will happen, as does paranoia. Fascism relies on conspiracy theory, which blur and distort the lines between mythic reality and everyday reality to generate a dark numinosity. Conspiracy theories resonate with emotional truths, but the details become less important than the sense of certainty that comes from this emotional resonance - thus conspiracy theories offer something of the numinous qualities of myth with none of the thresholds, containers or rituals that the mythic needs to contain it. The real and the mythic blur, become distorted and emotional-ecstatic experience of myth leads to manipulation - it’s no accident that one of the most popular contemporary podcasts investigating conspiracy theory is called “conspirituality.” This is not only misleading but dangerous, as it leads to widespread denial of the greatest danger we face in plain sight - the climate and ecological crisis. The climate crisis is a pyschological crisis - by which I mean not only that it causes unconscious suffering but that it’s a matter of perception. The Climate Psychology Alliance is dedicated to the field of climate psychology, and is hosting a webinar and special issue dedicated to understanding the reactionary mind and climate denial

Paranoia and the Imagination

Hillman tells us that paranoia is the secret twin of spirituality, and fascism in particular is marked by the skill with which is makes use of paranoia, and denies the anxiety at it’s core. Dunt and Lynskey argue in their “Origin Story” of Fascism “At heart what fascism became was both a substitute religion and a conspiracy theory founded on an apocalyptic myth of a decisive battle between good and evil” (Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey) - this quote allows us to glimpse the secret heart of fascism and how it differs from a mythic ecology of place. The environmental movement may at times finds a dark lover in fascism - we remember how close hatred can be to the passionate involvement of love - as within both we find traces of an apocalyptic vision and of a world of black and white morality - in the former one a golden age or rapture whereby the true believers are blessed or achieve mastery, in it’s misanthropic aspect, the other dreams of the passing of humanity. In doing so it imagines it gives the vegetative gods the world to offer back to the animals, either unspoiled by the pestilence of human activity or home to an elect tribal few.

A mythic ecology, in contrast, offers the opportunity for the human psyche to find it’s purpose within the dreaming of nature, that the quests, sufferings and insights of the human psyche serve the soul of the world when the dreaming human psyche knows and responds to the dreaming world that speaks in myth. It offers the idea of a practice rather than a birthright, that to know the secret kingdom within the kingdom takes time, patience, reverence and practice - and is open to all. This final point means that to know and connect to a place means to allow it into one’s heart, to relate to it rather than demand that a place of birth means automatic privileges.

A caveat on the mythic, as the philosopher JF Martell host of the inestimable weird studies reminds us that myths and fairy tales although cut from the same cloth, tend to be used to make different clothes. Mythic consciousness creates heroes that embody nations and their struggles for or against the Gods. The British Arthur, the Greek Odysseus, The Roman Aeneas. They reflect and amplify national character. Fairy tales, with their graceful peasant’s daughters, deceitful millers and lucky woodcutters operate in a different landscape, less grand more animist - a world of talking horses and glass mountains . The solutions to troubles in fairy tales are rarely heroic, more often to do with generosity, faithfulness and cunning. The imaginal landscape of any country’s ecology will be more like a fairy tale than a myth, because following Martell’s argument, and with Marie Von Franz in mind, the region of myth lies within the world of fairy tales rather than vice versa.

Branwen, daughter of Llyr and the inner kingdom

With this caveat in mind I will share something of one of the jewel in this mythopoetics, within the Mabinogion, an latticework of gods, places and moral challenges, set in an imaginal Britain, ruled by a mythic Raven King. His name is Bran the Blessed, or Bendeidfran. Bran means “Crow”, His sister Branwen, carries a name that means “White Crow.” Branwen is a “daugher of Llyr” and to marry her may mean to know the secret sovereignty of the Kingdom - the cathedral within the fortress. We can deduce this by noticing that when her sovereignty is not respected, but it is given away for political expediency, disaster follows.

Her brother Bran is a giant of a man, enormous enough to wade across the Irish Sea, so big to have never slept under a roof. The second branch, tells the tragic story how Bran gave his sister Branwen to the King of Ireland as a bride, without her consent, and how the politics of revenge, spite and pride and the misuse of magic follow this disrespect for the sovereign Queen of the Isles of the Blessed. A bloody war follows, with few survivors:

Only seven survived the war. This handful of men were haunted by what they had seen and heard. For a few days after, some felt compelled to talk. Perhaps they felt that their words would expel the horror from their heads. Instead they relived it again and again in the moment that they spoke. Others became silent and grey. They locked their memories into leaden caskets and buried them deep inside their soul. But something of the poison leached out, and it made their silences chill and make heavy the atmosphere around them.

No one from the army of the Britons thought it could come to this - after all they were fighting for the Raven King, Bran the Blessed. A man so strong as to be worth an entire battalion in battle. A man so enormous he had waded across the Irish Sea, with holy ravens circling around his head, landing on his shoulder to rest. Now, his huge body lay prone on the floor, his once ruddy face now pale, lifeless, corpse-still. His followers knew what they had to do, he had already instructed them. It took a team of them to brace the body, and then, having commandeered a two handled saw, two men to set themselves to saw through the tree trunk thick neck. It was tough exhausting work, both physically and in the moral effort to overcome the revulsion at the task. Grief at it’s necessity twisted sorrow further.

Finally, it was done, and Bran’s head was severed from his body. They placed in a hastily arranged casket. All that was left now was to go home - home to Prydein, the Islands of the Mighty. Home, though seemed a ghostly memory compared to the blood and death they had seen. They lashed long poles to the casket that held the Raven King’s head; raised, steadied and shouldered it, and set off on their long trudge back to the coast, to cross the Irish Sea. Though no one spoke it, all hoped to find some way back to a world that no longer seemed as real as their nightmares….

At the end of the story, the survivors have the mythic head of Bran, and they take it back with them to the Isles of the Blessed. It turns out that the head still has much to offer the British Isles, the King’s head can offer more protection and wisdom in death than it did in life. In particular, the head of the Raven King sings dreams for 80 years that lull the traumatic sting from the horrors of war, allow a blessed peace, if a temporary one for the survivors. They listen in rapture in an Island off the coast of Wales, and inbetween place neither beloning to land nor sea.

Eventually, the head is buried in White Hill, identified commonly as Tower Hill, the site of the Tower of London. (notice how deeply myth wants to find place) The Blessed Raven King’s head protects the Kingdom, as Ravens still protect the Tower of London today, although the tale ends by saying his role was usurped by Arthur, who disinterred the head, and claimed his place as the dreaming saviour of the Blessed Isles.

Where is the Raven King today? That is to say, where is the mythic dreaming England, and it’s connection to the British Isles. The question seems fraught; at a recent talk to launch his book Is a River Alive?” at Brighton Dome the author Robert MacFarlane bluntly stated his opinion that there could be no worthwhile revival of British indigeneity on a large scale. Whilst his quest for the soul of rivers took him to other places in the world which had deeply animist tradition, he shied away from the idea of British indigeneity. Rather, he felt, we should remember that we are a nation of migrants, from the paleolithic mammoth hunters who tracked game as the ice sheets retreated to the proto- Celts, Saxons and Normans. Although he did not say so explicitly, the idea of British indigeneity becoming co-opted by ethno-nationalists and the far right hung like a wraith above his words.

Yet, the argument for a British indigenous psychology, a proto-celtic mythic cycle or wisdom tradition, that places the modern inhabitant of Britain back in good relation to the spirit of the land and it’s ancestors, could not rely not on blood ancestry or DNA. It cannot be literal, yet by knowing it as mythic we can participate in the mythic reservoirs of the Isles of the Blessed, knowing that this means a particular kind of reality and tradition.

We know that a tradition of mythic continuity in the face of genetic discontinuity exits - the builders of Stonehenge, that most British of stones, capable as they were, probably died out, probably from an enormous pandemic of plague. Less than 10% of the population of Britain 4,000 years ago were made up of the people that had lived there 5,400 years ago - a great replacement of the Stonehenge builders. Yet the bronze age people and the Iron Age Celts built their monuments in harmony and sympathy with the old sites, situating them close by or in relationship to them - we see this at stonehenge, and near me at Cissbury Ring.

We live in a world that has progressively found the dates for our ancestry backwards into time, and has mapped our genome back to Africa, at least 100,000 years ago. The idea that a family could live in the same place and have a resonance with that place for many generations back may be attractive, as it seems to offer legitimacy to occupying a land, yet it is misguided. The deep anxiety of our time, and it’s bleak materialism has given birth to a desire for the numinous, for both spirituality and religion. DNA clearly gives us some physical continuity with someone, the chain of mothers and fathers for a European does eventually lead back to cave art, figurines, and back to Africa. But to place our identity solely in a genetic inheritance is also to live in a flatly reduced materialistic world.

Nationalism and the far right draw their power from a yearning for a mythic past - Mark Lila, in his book “The shipwrecked mind: on political reaction” makes this his central point of this study - that reactionary psychology draws it’s power from the central idea that at some point in history we have taken the wrong step. If we could retrace our footsteps back to that point, we could refind the golden age, make right what was wrong and bring an orderly this earth.

However, Golden ages draw us in, whether we want them to or not. They thread their way in to our need for something to change, with our realisation that the present is shonky, dangerous and full of horrors. We might think that we are not seduced by the glamour of a golden age, yet it’s clearly hidden in plain sight both traditional and progressive political ideologies. For one, it’s hidden somewhere in the past, in making Great Britain Great Again. It doesn’t have to be very specific, it simply has to be in the past. The past is one of the main constituencies of the golden age.

So we have reactionary American bloggers calling for techno-feudalism and monarchy, invoking Victorian John Ruskin and the Victorian arts and crafts movement, telling us how great Elizabethan England or Romanov Russia were for the common man, and railing against the ugly dysfunctional world we live in, laying the blame squarely on a deep state of universities and the civil service, somehow squaring an desire for the artisanal with a call for a Wall street CEO to become the monarch of America Inc. A blend of absolute power concentrated in an individual, with the idea that an individual has the ability to design a country better than a series of institutions, as if it were a simple choice between the two. The idea of a deep state that psychically connects universities, media and civil service has all the elements of a conspiracy theory - that is to say a myth that takes itself literally rather than as a myth. Yet, once again there is resonance in the take, this is what I thought 30 years ago when I first had came of age to vote - that the system was rigged, that all the politicians were a PR savy spin doctors and that the real power lay elsewhere, either in the civil service, or in the ideas that motivated and controlled people. Here it becomes lopsided, scattergun, tricksterish, calling for power to be concentrated in one man whilst using fluid bullshit to do it. It is an argument possessed by cunning, nostalia and resentment - a product of what Hillman called “Hermes intoxication” - too much quicksilver, too little substance.

The depth psychologists view of power is that we are lived by powers that we do not understand and often barely know. That man is not even the captain of her own ship, that the complexes, the archetypes and the primordial ideas run through people throughout history, duking it out in the way that Zeus and Hera do over the city of Troy, meddling in human affairs, seeking influence. It could be that some of the power that that reactionary psychology lies in this idea that an individual can make a difference to the world, that by seeing even a conman in charge is preferable to living in a world of call centres and AI assistants.

The other constituency of the golden age, is of course is the future - the golden age will come when we finally return back to the garden, achieving the destruction of violence and structural oppression. The agonies over whether our deep indigenous past was peaceful and communal or brutal and savage reveal something else that depth psychologist know - that both past and future are containers for the imaginal, and that the proper location of utopia is the collective unconscious. Both regressive and futuristic utopias are dream-screens, places to visit in order to know the symbolic, rather than become seduced by literal returns to the past or concrete steps towards the futuristic nostalgia of a “better world our heart know is possible”.

Knowing this means knowing the mythic as a mythic ecology- that is to say as having deep roots in the particular place, yet also able to travel, as the swifts travel from Africa to the Artic via the Sussex Downs, so some stories travel to different places find new forms, and others root down in a particular place. Thus the Matter of Britain does live on, it’s gods not dead but dreaming, it’s wisdom traditions capable of strengthening and informing, the dead whispering their secrets from their bone houses and mounds may be admitted, so long as we can discern and keep firm within their whisperings, the boundaries between the mythic and the everyday.

Conclusion

Loving a place is the epitome of ecological awareness. Myth and fairy tale brings us closer to the language of nature, with its blurring of the boundaries between place and story. Loving a flag often simply demands obedience, “my country right or wrong” A national mythology has a mystery cycle within it, a matrix of stories that instruct and lead deeper. Stories are deeper than flags, they require an encounter with moral complexity, dilemma and the soul, which is always clearer in moments of vulnerability than apparent strength. Bran marries his sister off to the King of Ireland to achieve peace, but failing to allow her consent, the consequence is blood.

Ethno-nationalism draws from a literalised hotchpotch of narrow national mythology - bulldogs, empires, crusading knights, God Save the King. Their capacity to guide and instruct is limited

We do have literal ancestors, and so does our land - they inform how we look, how we think. However, the places we lives are permeated with a history and a dreaming of their own. Those places and their dreaming can educate and deepen us, weather and temper us with the sweetness and medicine of their stories, just as time outside can. Each has a particular reality, and we can think of a country not as the possession of a particular blood line or tribe, but as the sum of all the inhabitants of that place who have contributed to it’s mythic resonance. Those interested in what a mystery school that draws on the idea of an indigenous animistic tradition of the Islands of the Blessed could look at the Dadeni School, which is dedicated to just such a mythic ecology, the work of mending and re-weaving the fragments of the matter of Britain from archeology, myth, and the practice of dreaming the land.

Just as the meaning of a myth is not singular, but comes from the overlay of all it’s tellings, so too a country and the resonance and dreams of all it’s lives. As we cannot escape myth, we must work with it, see through it and know when we see it and when it is using us. Fascism and the far right are built on a kind of literalism of the mythic, a conspiratorial sense of resentment. These feelings should not be dismissed as they may have emotional truths, but they cannot be accepted as final. England’s dream remains the sum of all it’s dreamers and more. More than that, it’s open to any who seek the Raven King and his Sister the White Raven.

The Raven King’s ravens at the Tower of London, the golden rays of the holy Son in St Paul’s Cathedral that Blake called “Jesus the Imagination” and the mystery cycles of death and rebirth, of Mabon and Modron, of Taliesin’s shamanic tongue and the cauldron of the Grail king are too precious, and too deeply rooted in the soil of the Islands of the Blessed to dismiss as a reactionary fantasy.

I watched myself seep into leaf litter and tiny bones
of small creatures like a pool of pulsing blood,

the night’s darkness passed through me with the sweep of a ragged cloak.

As the tracks of wild animals drew close to my dreaming body
so too ancient memories drew close, scenting and tracking the

fugitive shape of my own life’s story to this point.
It’s many wounds and unanswered questions.

Until, laid down on leafy floor, I looked up at a cracked arterial canopy
longed for a language of reverence

A language of root, bones, and leaves
Of ancestors, memory and a pulse of trust

Was that a prayer?  

 I did not know who to pray to, knowing no god that I could name,
And in naming know, as well as my hand, or my friends, or the sky.

I prayed for someone to pray to. The forest itself pulsed with prayer,
through threads that rans from my heart and lungs to the forest floor

to tangled fabrics of sunflesh and the business of ants,
Through threads that hold me up, threads that once snapped,

Will drop my body to earth like limb-tangled puppet,
No longer and never myself no more.

As I lay on the leaf litter in the dream fractured real,
My story bleeding from me like a wounded ghost

I prayed without knowing how, as if all my perceptions were
a kind of bread that might feed the animal fabric of forest

It wasn’t a petition for intervention from a high power,
it was a desire to become angel-bread

And in that desire, this sense that the prayed to needs the pray-er
As I needed the state of mind that prayer grants,

That we were woven together like the Sun weaves the root,
Woven together like tastebuds to fruit.

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Twilight is a mystery moment

The day's business and demnds sunshine gives way to the night and beckons towards dream.
It's a liminal moment, in which, if you pay attention to your body, the desire to work gives way to the need to reflect.

When I was writing "Into the Dreaming Dark" I searched for ways to keep the mystery alive and living. I can't say exactly what I mean by the mystery, because....well it's a mystery. The word originally meant "lips sealed" - the initiate has made a bargain not to tell, in exchange for a ripening of experience.

One place I found this moment when reverence happens of it’s own accord is twilight.
It’s a good time for solitude, a moment when by going in a little, I paradoxically feel more open. In reflection, treasured or difficult moments bubble up. With them come a sense of the mystery - such as the sense that the inner world and the outer world are mirrors in which we can’t know which reflects which.

These days, the collapse or distrust of grand narratives and institutions, mean that people can have experiences of the mytery with no framework to place it in or make sense of it. No doubt there has been a good deal of liberation come about the loosening of structures - yet with looser structure, more precious liquid may be lost.

However, I know that lots of people do experience mystery within their life. It can be subtle or unmistakeable. Once you do, you have to do something with that experience, or it will either become wasted or even hostile to you. For me, the best thing to do is to gradually transform it into culture so it can help others - write it down, draw it or if it's not ready, let it brew. One other thing we can do is see how it connects us to to nature - the secret connection between our nature and nature itself . Nature itself may be one location we seek that renewal, as nature is the source of all our renewals.

Many people use contact with nature to renew themselves - sometimes it's just a snatched glance at a familiar plant, or a flock of sparrow that bandit themselves around a bush. Or it might be planned; a workshop or time spent deliberately outdoors in a special or old spot in the land.

Whichever it may be, it’s based on a kind of understanding that to break out of the hold of a constricting pattern - be it a pattern of thought or emotion - you need to have access to something that goes beyond yourself.

Twilight is the kairos for stories, poems and songs -kairos, the ancient greek word for time as the “right time”, the lucky moment to do something, the psychologially good time, as opposed to chronos - time's arrow, or chronologial time - the time of clock, as opposed to the moment of the heart.

Human beings can't live by bread alone, but by the food of dreams that arises through this psychologically good moment. It's not a luxury - it's not a luxury that we tell each other stories constantly, go to the cinema, dream everynight. This moonfood we get as junkfood on tablets and tv. The old stories - fairy tales, myths and folk stories - have a bit more nourishment in them. They still have a taste of the weird in them. As JF Martel says fairy tales "show us how to live in a dreamworld" - and remind us that the world is enveloped in a dreamworld. It's a strange thing to say, yet even our neuroscience reminds us that we live in a world of symbols, and that dreams are an essential part of being a human.

The Welsh writers who wrote down the Mabinogion in the 11th Century knew it as "Annwyn" - which is a poem of a word that means many things - "the in-world" - or "the Otherworld" or "the utter deep" - the world like this one only with more lustre.

The writers of the Mabinogion, like us, drew on fragments of and old wisdom and knowledge - transmitted not in concepts but story, dream scenarios and the felt image. They reached back into old myths, and wove them into shape.

Henri Corbin, in his study of the creative imagination of sufi saints like Ibn Arabi would coin the name "alam al mithal" - the imaginal realm - the place where the world is co-created between the human and his angel through creative prayer. He equated this kind of prayer with active imagination - the moment when images come to life in the lens of the inner eye.

Jung knew this place as "the unconscious" - but he also knew that the unconscious was "collective" - that is to say it couldn't be placed definitively "within" or "without" - just like twilight is neither captured by night nor day, our creativity is not quite ours and yet very personal. It comes to us through inspiration.

Yet it has substance - just as in the first branch of the Mabinogi, Arawn, the old King of Annwyn swaps faces and kingdoms with a rash young King, and both profit from becoming the other.

So all of this is a roundabout way of getting around to my own venturings into Annwyn.

I'm offering a twilight evening of poems from "Into the Dreaming Dark" of a story told around the company of fire and basic shelter, of the nourishment of story and fire under basic shelter, a walk, and a closing circle on 26th April

You can get the book with the ticket here

if by chance you have found yourself living far from the green valleys of East Sussex, the crooked woodlands of Stanmer and the seaside bacchanals of Brighton, fear not because the book itelf is available online here

be great to see you there

Toby

Author of "into the dreaming dark"

available here

tobychown.com

The Fern

A fern curled up tight in green coils near the heath
unfurls with magnetism of the new Sun’s touch

Perhaps it doesn’t know really know
exactly how it’s supposed to to grow

But it can’t help itself

We on the other hand feel our coiled tightness
to be an unlit candle in the company of dark

We try so hard to unfurl, we miss the medicine
Of the sun’s warmth, and resist it’s pull.

Once, we were given a burning brand of flame,
many ages ago, when the moon was still young,

And we scared away all the animals with it.

Glum and alone, we swallowed fire for company
danced around it until we forget our surroundings.

Now it dances in our brains won’t leave us alone.

It flickers on our screens, tells jokes, laughs no matter what
offers updates on the war and the money

Sneaky glances of our friends, or morons we never met.

Fire won’t let us sleep now, it scorches cities

Cuts taxes
Powers taxis
Raises taxes
Distills alcohol
Pumps out clothes
Plastic Jesuses and art

Animals gather in its shadows,in the lost world
That lies between our days and our dreams.

How is it that we, with a sliver of Sun
In our brains, can’t see anything but our own light?

And use it so often to keep ourselves tight?

Such a concept is at once both disturbing and exciting. It is disturbing and exciting in just the way that looking at a person wearing a mask is; a dissonance between the familiar – another human being; and the unreal – the worn mask invites recognition but is not quite human. It’s expression is fixed, yet its eyes and movements are alive. A new thing exists, human yet not human, that seems to defy categorisation.

Masks: a form of possession or a type of psychological inflation?

Masks, therefore invite a variety of responses from the comic to the tragic, to the fearful. Johnstone’s chapter on masks, although iconic has also been controversial within both improvisation and those that use mask in the theatre. Some theatre makers have distanced themselves from Johnstone’s idea that when a mask is worn, a fully formed character instantly appears, and that this character has a character that is only to a small degree dependent on the actor that wears it. Such ideas are indeed deeply threatening to a culture in which a fixed and monolithic sense of individuality is prized. Johnstone’s writing speaks quite directly to an ancient and deep rooted fear of possession, of being possessed by some external spirit, being or god who takes over the actor, making him or her essentially a channel for some other force. Such ideas seem dangerous because they seem to invite madness and superstition. This shows through in popular culture too – Even in Jim Carreys’ breakthrough film “the Mask” the main question of the narrative was – now he has put the Mask, is he able to take it off? Jungians call this difficulty removing the mask “inflation” – the ego puffed up by the archetypal experience confuses itself for the god. One of Jung’s wisest sayings was “do not identify with the archetype” – in other words do not confuse yourself with the god. The greatest and most recurrent theme in tragic drama is hubris and the lesson of tragedy is hammartas – the discovery of the tragic flaw, the unconscious hubris unknown to the tragic hero but revealed to the audience.

However, it is worth noting that this fear of possession holds an archetypal dimension, in as much as fear has a deep connection with religious experience. Kierkegaard called his great exploration of religious experience in an age of rationality; “Fear and Trembling”. Perhaps the most accurate word for this is “awe” which combines a sense of wonder and terror. From awe we can feel “awesome” as well as “awe-ful”

Some writers have made the point that we lack a cultural framework within which to make sense of masks. Masks may be used in theatre, in comic or tragic form, but they no longer form part of ceremonial life. They do, however live on within our imagination. They return each Halloween, that point in the year in which the Sun pivots over the equinox heads towards its winter death. At such a time, it seems natural that our memories of those we have lost may become sharper, even if this meaning gets blurred by sweet gathering and children dressed as witches and skeletons – both of which incidentally are ways of symbolising death in the popular imagination .

Masks as gateways to archaic depths and deeper meaning

Masks disturb us because they force us to look at them, and have an uncanny force. They reveal the limits of our personalities and the extent to which they may be far less stable than we would like. They also act as portals to the gods, because of course the reason that masks have such an old provenance, the reason that there has been such a revivial of interest in masks and the reason they scare and excite them is because they seem to provide a gateway to the gods. One theme that unites experimental and avant garde theatre in the the last 150 years – the theatre of Stravinsky, Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, Malina, Schechner – is a yearning for numinous experience and an intuition that theatre is a place where this can become real. It is an excavation of the archaic, not limited to theatre, but within which theatre, with its ancient and primal roots as well as it’s tendency towards innovation and creativity, seems to have much to offer.

When Johnstone quotes ethnographic accounts of masks, these accounts situate the mask as the god. The mask is sacred because it is the portal to the god. This tradition is present in European theatre as well; the ancient Greek Theatre from which all our forms of theatre and cinema can be traced back to used masks. The word mask was “persona” – from per sona – per meaning throuhg and sona meaning sound – that which the sound comes through. The sound which comes through the mask is that of the god. Chanting, singing, all ancient ways of accessing a trance state in which the ego may briefly dissolve it’s boundaries into the archetypal.

The great theatre director and teacher Jacques LeCoq, at the centre of the great revival of interest in the European mask forms of Commedia Dell Arte, taught mask as a form of initiation into his method of acting. He gave his students neutral masks, not in order to wear them in performance, but in order to give them the experience of stepping outside of their habitual ways of being and acting. The neutral mask was a way of becoming neutral, of finding a stepping stone between the ego and the character to be explored.

The Neutral Mask as a psychological container and groundstate for awareness

Such considerations are also key to the success of any form of therapy, or programme of self improvement and change. The first thing that therapy does is to begin the process of reflection. Depth psychology calls what is reflected upon “the ego”- the small I of identity. Just as Lecoq’s actors learn to wear the neutral mask, so someone in therapy or undergoing a therapeutic process learns to find a neutral place within which to examine their life. This process of reflection is not without it’s challenges, mostly because reflections rarely arrive without judgements. In fact, one of the easiest things of all in any reflective conversation is to mistake self punishment for rigorous reflexivity. The “Neutral Mask” encourages a person to find a place of being without judgement or blame, within which they may review their thoughts, feelings and action. Other disciplines have this as well, in meditation it may be called “groundedness; ” the Buddist writer and teacher Jack Kornfield calls it “taking the one seat[2].”

In the alchemical terms favoured by many Jungian because of their imaginal structure, the process might be analogous to making the “Alembic” – the egg shaped glass vessel that the process takes place in. Psychotherapists talk of creating a good “working alliance” or of “building a container” and this is an analogous process. As every relationship with another person finds it’s mirror in our relationship with our self, what we find here is a place of neutrality – a zero place within which to be aware of the potency of the narratives and thoughts we are in. It’s not the same as “being yourself” in the same way that an experience of awareness of the moment is not the same as flicking through your phone whilst waiting for a bus – both occur in the moment, but they are different dimensions of that moment

(listen to the song Doctor, Doctor, by DLC, a cautionary tale about masks and the heart)

Beyond empathy – towards the heart as a place of imaginative intentionality

At the same time, a containing relationship, a neutral mask or a egg shaped glass vessel in the soul whilst necessary may not be sufficient to achieve the process of self actualisation, individuation, alchemical transformation or whatever the goal of the process is. The important thing here is that there is a process, that it is active and that it has an aim. One of the greatest shadows of the human potential movement, of the rise in credibility of attachment theory with it’s concommitant movement towards deeper and greater empathy as a therapeutic tool is that empathy alone creates the distinct possibility of stagnation, passivity and a miserable non attainment of the Self. Here lies the place where concealed narcissim, dependency, and concealed shame lie, hidden by a cloak of empathy. When empathy becomes dogmatic or considered sufficient, intention and drive suffer, because empathy is also a partial fusion of the self with the other, and so runs the risk of loss of self and dissolution of boundaries and drive.

How to re-establish intention without repeating the grabbing and selfish mistakes that were the cause of the need for the neutral mask in the first place? Here, we can turn to the work of James Hillman, and his source of inspiration Henri Corbin. Corbin makes use of the sufi idea of Himma[3]. Himma is “Intense Spiritual Resolve. This is the most powerful force contained within man. It is the sincere and dedicated application of all of one’s efforts and strivings towards attaining the desired Object – Allah”.

For Corbin and Hillman, in his essay “the thought of the heart[4]”, Himma is one way of re-imagining the intelligent heart . However, this heart is not only the empathic, christian heart that feels and confesses its sins. The heart of the himma is the seat of both imagination and desire, located in the centre of the body. It is what Marcus Aurelius the Roman emperor-philosopher might call “the citadel” of the self[5]. For Hillman and Corbin, it is crucially a place where imagination combines with desire, like oxygen fuels fire. The heart or himma is what fills the vessel – what fills the neutral mask, heats up the alembic, restores the meditator’ s heart with a renewed sense of purpose and wonder. For Hillman and Corbin, the Himma is a place where imagination takes on a reality of its own, through intense desire. Psychologist Mary Watkins speaks of this Sufi approach to prayer, where the concept of prayer and imagination are almost interchangeable.

I remember in a therapist peer support group discussing the difference between wishing for something and wanting it – the language of motivation. Many in the discussion felt wishing to have a lack of agency. However, in these terms of this essay, wishing is closer to imagination as praying here, as it is the heart fixing on something that it wants. It may seems to have less agency that wanting – yet it refers to a creative power that connects the heart to something beyond it. This is what Hillman finds attractive in the concept of Himma – it connects a person to a different kind of reality, one that he calls the imaginal. In the imaginal, the intermediary between the self and world is formed. Hillman, following Corbin, says that this intermediary is daimonic – it is filled with the soul, which is an intermingling of the human and the worlds beyond it. It is in this area that the world itself opens up, filled with it’s own stories and meaning.

The Himma and Imaginal reality – layers of the real

One of the great challenges of modern times has been to find a way of making sense of realities that are not perceptible. Positivism, materialism, reductionism are all words that point to our common assumption of matter as flat inert and having only the properties that are exerted on them. This is the default position of modern science, a so called empirical reality the thought of which shapes the landscapes of our thoughts and actions. We, as partial human creatures clearly need aims and intentions in order to make our way through life effectively. Intentions, however, are closely linked to meaning; we move towards that which we consider meaningful. T he most meaningful things of all are those that describe the world, the complex networks of sky, earth and water, the things that connect the gardens and streets we walk through to the landscapes, and the people and animals that make up our immediate relationships.

If we accept, with Hillman that the mind imagines before anything else, then we have a sense of how fundamental our sense of what reality is may be to everything that follows. It’s hard to destroy or despoil a world that is living, sentient and filled with life that stretches out beyond the perceptible. Spiritual practices tend to follow a Christian perspective and aim at transcendence; the spiritual sits above the material guiding it. This seems a reflection of the way we see the mind as sitting above the body, guiding it. Within this is a continuation of the Cartesian split that leads that strange sense of isolation from the world and others and that allows matter to be violated, extracted, figured as a resource. Rather, Hillman says, soul lies down, in descent into the Earth, in the matter below our feet, and the underworlds of imagination that link us to nature.

DLC – seeking grace through masks and rock and roll.

In a film I made for an experimental rock band DLC, I wanted to explore this further. My approach to creativity, so far as writing songs and singing has been concerned, has been to do it and see what happens. If I sing or speak without knowing what I am going to say, and listen to myself without stopping myself, words, images and feelings emerge. There is a sweet spot if you sing in a rock and roll band that links the karaoke singer to David Bowie; the world seems to be made out of the inspirations you express. They seem to not describe but create the world. This is not a narcissistic projection of the self onto the world; rather it is the action of the world on the self, the participation of the self with the inspiration of the world. Nor is it the exploration and expression of the mind – what is expressed by the mind is not found within it, just as water cannot be found in either hydrogen or oxygen. The himma gives expression to this sense that the heart is the place where the world acts upon a person and that activation is purposeful and towards a goal of self improvement. This self improvement is intersubjective and interdependent; it is more like Self in the Jungian sense than self improvement in the humanistic ideal of just becoming better at functioning.

Philosophies that seek to go beyond the narrow focus on inanimate matter, and the reification of the human mind, such as critical realism and phenomenology, in writers like David Abram[6] and David Kidner[7], they seek the intuition that matter itself is far more complex than we have given it credit for. Perhaps matter itself teems with narratives, sequences. The ancient Greek philosopher Thales said “everything is full of gods.” With the concept of the himma, the imagination of the world is seen as part of its reality, a felt and embodied reality that goes his generative of a vision and that allows that vision to become autonomous, to take the person onward in a service to the world.

Each 20 minute improvisations was a journey beginning with the donning of a mask wearing into how to move from a relatively everyday state into the kind of state of mind in which I not only did not care how I moved and what I said, but might do so unselfconsciously and in a way that might become both meaningful and soulful.

At a certain point in the improvisation, I began to spontaneously improvise and recite a spoken word poem:

“Don’t be too fast
To quick to discriminate or change
those states of mind you think you can rearrange
Being Breathing Living Deceiving

Don’t be too smart too clever too soon
to rise above the very things in this room
In which you participate
your mineral self and rock stone heart and soul

I urge and summon the craving for it all
I urge I summon the craving for it all

this diverse web, split apart by imagination and heart
The himma”

Like the himma itself, much of the meaning of this seems reserved for mostly myself. I appear to be talking to myself, telling myself to slow down, not transcend the world. Of course I know I am performing, so also seem to be addressing anyone who may listen or hear the video Which part of myself is talking to me and you – a “higher” part? A “lower part”? Such questions seem somewhat beside the point. Analysing an experience or a part of the self as “archetypal” or “egoic” would in itself be part of a further activity to either inflate or alienate the self.

All I know is that I value such states for their creative potential, but also realise that whilst they may generate strong feelings, they are not ends in themselves and also invite greater elaboration and explanation. The film takes on a spiritual tone with it’s invocation of deep feeling, of masks, of Everything coming from Nothing. Perhaps this is nothing more or less than a reminder to keep the heart alive, to keep the heart as a part of matter. This would keep the heart involved in the weeds, concrete, wastelands and parks and people that surround the body encased heart. It would sharpen desire for the himma, that investment in imagination that seeks to find in experience that aperture within which one’s own life may be transformed into something that approximates the meaning of the heart itself – compassionate, fiery, filled with both empathy and desire, and flowing with imaginal waters that connect the alienated ego to deeper, more open and more alive sense of reality.

Perhaps, to engage this himma, we need to be able to both put on and remove the masks we wear- personas – but also be able to put, enter into and engage with more archetypal masks – the tricksters, gods and daimons. The meanings and creative transformation we seek may come not just from the mask itself, but from this process of putting on, entering into and coming out from the deep and ancient trance states that masks represent that are the inheritance of our deep psyche.

Within this process of mask wearing and mask removal, what we are really doing is activating the himma – the intelligent heart that reaches out to touch and be recieved by animate Earth

postscript

I am reposting this essay from the “pathways into the imaginal” series a few years at tobychown.com back having just revisited it following from an experience of mask making and ritual trance at the Dadeni course. The experience re-inforced the sense that masks are ancient sacred technologies that allow us to access the numinous. So much that could be said particularly about masks, animals and trance but I am happy to leave it as it stands. The connection between masks, trance, animals and our deeper instinctual nature is deep.

[1] Johnstone K Impro

[2] Kornfield J A Path With Heart

[3] Cheetham T The World Turned Upside Down

[4] Hillman J The thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World

[5] Aurelius M Meditations

[6] Abram D The Spell of the Sensous

[7] Kidner D Nature and Psyche

Machado says it best:

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.

Machado speaks of our passageway through life, it’s lack of certainty or guarantee. One interpretation of his poem could be: “beat your own path, even in the face of it’s inevitable disappearance.”

I think though that this is a misreading.

Machado is not saying – you have a choice here – you could take the “road less travelled” which will take you somewhere glorious, or take the safer path, and get somewhere more or less ok. The poem is not a risk assessment. Machado says here “Your footprints are the only road.” In case that’s not clear he adds “there is no road, you make the road as you walk”.

What he is getting at is that there is not only that there is no “safe road” through life and there is also no “glorious but dangerous road”. Only the passage through life. For you to make. No guarantee, no certificate, no hope or certainty no training course that will deliver success to you or save the world from you or those you see threaten it. No certainty that climate change will be avoided, that more species won’t go extinct, that your decision to work hard will pay off, that your decision to travel will expand your soul, that therapy will make you better that mediation will allow you to see God. That your faith will be rewarded or your insight lead to recognition, or your networking skills lead to security.

Machado suggets that I betray something vital by thinking the pathless path is something for me to do once I got my act together, or for when the penny drops, or for when I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place.

Machado describes a path that you will never walk again. It’s a path we all walk whether we realise it or not. What is that path made of? Of Life? Memories? Reflections? I would say it’s made from something else, something as close to us as our own hand, but as far away as the Moon sometimes. I’d say that pathless path is made of images. Images that become Stories that appear to end, but draw new beginnings from the tail that’s inside their own mouth.

What are Stories?

If the world tells stories what are stories, really? If we think of the world as constructed, it is going to be hard to understand stories as the building material. Not that the “narrative turn” has led to an under appreciation of stories. The popular call for a “new paradigm” (ie a new story) or to “change the narrative” or to notice “how they switch the narrative”. Governments, doctors, academics, conspiracists, spiritual seekers, political analysts, all apparently “selling a narrative” or uncovering one.

Despite the western world’s post-Enlightenment desire to strike out the ambiguities, deciet and downright trickery of storytelling – by calling it “bias” and attempting “objectivity”, the last few years has seen if anything an aggressive re-emergence of the power of narrative – here evoked to make medical knowledge seem comparative, here to replace the online entrepeneur as the author of their own life. Social media amplifies the illusion that I tell my own story and become who I want to.

The world is not built of stories but grown from them

However, whilst the world may be always telling stories, it isn’t constructed from them. The world is not built or constructed by stories, like lego blocks. You can’t simply tell another story and then make something true. You cannot tell a different story about yourself and that become that self without paying a price. That price is a commitment to the story world you are telling. Stories are not constructed but grown, reflective as they are of organic patterns. The world is telling stories and whilst we can tell a dazzling variety of stories about ourselves and the world the true story will elude our grasp so long as we fail to honour the truth about stories – the stories are telling us.

Stories really illustrate processes, and indeed poetic processes. Stories may be more like subtle mirrors where we cannot be quite sure who is the reflective surface. Stories are grown from archetypal images, poetic animals. Stories as poems in action, threaded into the way the world moves.

Stories emerge from poetic images. As the sequences progress the images flow into narrative. Stories have to be worked into being, from experiences, friendships, conversations, stitched together, told and retold in order to make sense. The story that is closest to us, and the story that can be hardest to know, is the story of our own life. That too needs to be stiched together from memories, experiences, relationships. They have a purpose too – to convince, persuade, deflect, validate, oppress, vindicate, connive, dazzle. To move the heart to feel more, or the ear to hear something, to shift the eye to see differently. To share the gift of experience.

Stories also belong to the Trickster. The first stories of children as they gain the power of speech is the story of Hermes the baby-thief when his brother Apollo comes looking for his stolen property : “it wasn’t me.”

The story of (your) life.

So I start here with this idea of making a path through life through telling your story. I want to introduce my own poems against a backdrop of the joy and trickery of what it means to tell that story at this moment. What we are all living with at the moment is an awful wrenching split in our world. It’s a split that many people feel as a wound within themselves. It’s a split that many people see out there in the world. It’s a split that can be witnessed in the distress in our culture. Many people feel it in the destruction of the living fabric of the world itself, as if the world itself was feeling welts of pain, as plants and animals die. Some feel that the Earth itself is dying. It’s a problem so big that it seems hard to know where to begin. My own attempts to deal with it sometimes leave me speechless, either with anger or sorrow, or because I’m unsure where to start with such a world sized story. Overwhelmed.

Whelm

“Whelms” were small drainage gullies that filled with water to drain excess rainwater from fields to protect the crops. Being “overwhelmed” meant that these earth gutters have become too full and spill water. Being overwhelmed means that our capacity has become restricted, too small for the amount of rain.

It might be that we are overwhelmed because in an age of industrial individualism, our stories have become too small – gullies shrunk to the size of the self. Countering this, Hillman argues in his essay “The Soul of the World” that the more we refuse the story of the world by only focusing on our own story, the worse it feels – he writes : “the world is inundating me with it’s unalleviated suffering”

Hillman tells us that the world has become replaced by the self, with humans as meaning makers. Whether his be through boldy creating new technologies or identifying all injustice as soley a social (human) construction:

“After one hundred years of the solitude of psychoanalysis, I am more concious of what I project outward than what is projected into me by the unconsciousness of the world”

There are plenty of techniques out there that can help an individual with the experience of being overwhelmed. Some of them are very effective and many worth practicing. Deep Breathing techniques do help re-regulate the nervous system. Correcting self destructivebelief through exposure to a different experiences that don’t fit that belief can be effective.

A list of popular current techniques could include: Running, meditating, plunging the body into cold water, eating like a paleolithic hunter, digital detox, climbing a mountain, praying, psychotherapy, life coaching, fasting, psychedelics, visiting a shamanic retreat in the Amazon, going to Burning Man. All potentially life transforming and worthy pursuits.

Let’s add some more - dabble in astrology, or tarot, or i ching, master yoga, painting, inner work, shadow work, dream work, trauma work.

Or maybe lift weights, take a masters, retrain, eat well, get exactly the right amount of sleep. Attend to self care, socialise, walk in nature, give thanks, practice mindfullness, drink kefir, learn about the polyvagal nerve… And yet….none of these things guarantee a path. Some sticky shadow of world follows us through all of these attempts, some tentacle attaches itself to us in all of our attempts to individuate, heal, progress. tentacle of world, something not me.

Hillman asks us to consider not what I project, but what I recieve. What is the world doing to me, how is it speaking to me, how does it tell me about its problems?

Channel

If we don’t want to merely adapt to be healthy in world that is sick a technique isn’t enough. A technique doesn’t re-world the world. It’s not a technique we need to deal with the overwhelms of our being and submergence of our culture in technical atomisations. What we need is a perspective that allows us to experience the soul of the world in all it’s manifestions, from litter, to building to river, from team meeting to evening walk. And this channel cannot be a straight canal either, a channel that one curves and threads like veins, or rivers, or the branches of trees. Some stories can offer such channels in such shapes.

Our actual rivers have been straightened and damned, and often the old woods cut down upstream in the mountains or high ground. This makes water run off flow straight and fast into watercourses, speeding up water flow increasing the chances of the banks becoming overwhelmed at the narrow points. Roots no longer soak up the rain and pump water into the air as they once did. Rivers are less likely to meander towards the sea, or to lazily soak into wetland in the places they meet the salt water. The banks get overwhelmed, by rains superpowered by climate chaos.

Perhaps then, it’s not surprising that we feel the same way ourselves, that all of the emotions that flow through us seem accelerated and canalised. Our world has accelerated and canalised not just the “outer world” but the “inner” too. Our communications have speeded up, our lives have become networked and manic. We are continually available, everything is focused on efficiency. There are plenty of things present to flood the swollen speeding water over the banks of our being – the destruction of nature and the fate of the living world (which is the whole world, not just the part outside the city walls), the legacy of injustice in our social world bear down large upon us.

That’s before I even factor in the actual experience of my real life – the painful path to finding healthy relationships, the search for a purpose and meaning, the experience of grief, loss, illness in oneself of another. Or simply the sorrow in a child growing older, or a kiss fading. In my song “The Gateless Gate” I put it like this

“there’s a crooked path ahead that only looks straight
beyond the gateless gate”

There are huge world events; war, pandemic, ecologial pain, political rifts and there are small events – our lives happening through and amongst them. Historically, it has been culture that binds our small lives to the greater whole, the passing of the seasons, the passage of the years, the movement of the stars through dark heavens, the lament of the dead at the turning point of the years, the celebration of the Sun’s renewal.

What binds the experience of my life to culture and to nature now? Well, all of these events are still happen – seasons pass, stars wheel, the dead are lamented and pass into memory. But to connect ourselves to the soul of the world we connect first to what we carry in the story of our life, through the paths we make through the treading of stories.

My poems carry little fragments of the story I carry, at times placed within images that supplant them, at times just as small and uncertain as any life. Sometimes the poems are personal, sometimes archetypal. Two kinds of life mingle – the life force that animates and the story of a life as it is lived.

Zoe and Bios

The ancient Greeks has two words for “life” that meant very different things, and referred in fact to different stories, different types of stories. Zoe meant life as the indestructible life force, and Bios meant to be alive, and to tell your life. We have both “biography” which is the description of a life and “biology” which is the study of the process of life. It’s not an accident that biography really means the story of your life.

Zoe on the other hand referred to something far wilder, far more powerful and cosmic in it’s reach. Zoe meant “the indestructible life force” – the blood pumping through a hare’s skull, the fire in the grape vine. Zoe meant something more than just your little life – it meant the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, it meant libations to a world that renews itself as it dies. It meant the Wild Redeemer, Dionysos.

The Wild Redeemer

So the zoe seems to be the place to look, the pulse of the wild in the temple of your skull. I’ve written about the zoe before, and it’s suppression. I’ve spent a few nights out in the woods and in doing so seen how a skin might thin to the suppleness of beech bark, how the ear twists towards a broken twig to locate an animal presence. I’ve felt the way a skull can become antlered, or a sigh become a growl. All of these experiences re-animate something that can easily feel plastered in tarmac, shop windows, perfume and neon screens. The woods themselves continue their merry bachanal all time, full of sound, wonder, lonliness, skill, beauty, birth and death. The leaves shimmer with the breath of wind, the rats gnaw on a forgotten deer bone. A beatle patiently traverses the forest floor. No part is not alive, and we too are soaked in the stuff of it, in the moments we will let ourselves release some of our awful preoccupations and distortions of self.

However, before we get too carried away with the embrace of the Wild Redeemer , or yearn to dance as the bacchants once did around a red cloaked pole with a mask and a wooden phallus attached under a blood red moon ( who doesn’t get such a feeling on a Saturday night), it’s worth remembering that our perceptions of the wild are largely distorted by our experience of domesticity. There may be a yearning for the wild, a yearning to re-connect. That yearning may be more or less conscious. It may take shape in many different forms. Our fantasy of the Wild lack the discipline and order that the Wild Redeemer shows us, what appears to be chaos and hunger is also pattern, greater beauty, emergent living pulsing complexity.

The psychological inflation of the wild

The wild as a psychological force sometimes seems to reveals itself to us mostly through it’s destructive aspects – excess, addiction, wild partying, drinking, use of drugs, spontaneous risk taking, promiscuous love making. Or as a romanticised counterpoint to our domesticated existence – the thought of the wild might be- to become a shaman, to transform into an animal, to speak with the electric tongue of a great poet – to flow like Dylan in ’66. A glimpse of The Wild Redeemer can create both caution and inflation – a too quick identification and a hestitancy about joining the dance.

Both the caution and the inflation shroud a deeper truth. The key we need to encounter the wild psyche lies hidden in our own story; where we already are. And that the price it might ask for us is not only to be a storm cloud of crackling electricity, but also to be the ground that earths that thin potent threads of lightning and sparks us to life once more. The lightning that doesn’t only spark a moment of wild illumination, but releases minerals into the soil. It has a relationship with the ground, and allows nourishment.

Because the wild is of course not simply a coursing flow of animalistic disorder and excess. We confuse the wild with our own experience of the city’s night. Night in a city brings alcohol and tobacco, neon lights, revelry, music, unexpected encounter, danger, pleasure, the promise of sex, or dancing or conversation. A true story is by nature as wild as an animal, and we can tell that because of the way that once we start telling it truly it flies from our mouths like a bird released into the canopy. Yet hidden within it’s twists and turns is the ecstatic embrace of the wild redeemer, who deals in dreams, and wants you to merge with them and the zoe that animates them.

These are all gifts of a Wild Redeemer, and indeed things to be grateful for. Night in the woods is just as electric as the city, yet stiller and gathered up with pressure like water behind a damn, as Stephen Buhner tells us. The final bird stops singing and there is a moment when it is no longer day. The green leaves have become shadowy. Small things move under cover of darkness, owls hunt. On a moonlit night the trunks of trees turn silver. There is of course a discipline to wildness as much as any excess, a need to find an follow particular known tracks, or to stay alert to the unexpected.

When we enter the realm of the Wild Redeemer, the imaginal realm, we carry with us our own story – that’s part of the ground that we leave from and return to. Nowaways when we enter woods our minds beam out neon and blare out pop music – we are so loud and colourful, we scare away most animals even when we are still.

So to really visit the wild on it’s own terms means to be able to be the ground as well as the storm, to be able to find within the zoe new threads of bios to bring back to enliven and ground human life and expand it’s sense of world.


A pathless path home

The pathless path leads us out into the wild, but also back home to tell of what we’ve gained from the journey. It embraces what it sees and brings it into the city, allows the flow to become stronger and more real between wild woods and wild city.

It’s a path into something weird. Carl Jung describes sitting on a rock as a child, for hours, wondering if he was the rock or vice versa. He talks about how as a child he would make fires in a cave above his home that he knew must never go out. There are very old instincts in us as children, and they are still with us as adults. The passage into midlife can reveal some of them, as our sophisticated modern persona starts to crack to show it’s in the shadow of something older.

As part of my clinical work we sometimes take groups of children out into nature and tell them a story, nature begins to participate – a dying butterfly may cling to the dress of a traumatised young girl, and it engenders care and sorrow.

A gang of young boys, new friends, may find a grasshopper and become gripped with the desire to find more, on their knees in the high fields above the river, as the grasshopper leap around them in the high ground in midsummer. This may engender the release of repressed energy, and the joy of the body that leaps.

An old story tells of how helping an old woman carry her pack up a mountain is the only way to defeat a huge rampaging ogre who has gobbled up too much cattle and beer. Only the old woman has the magical knife that would find the ogre’s vulnerable spot. She only responds to kindness. Only the keen eyes and wits of a young fisherman notices the old lady. The young weaver of nets knows enough to know you don’t always tackle brute force head on, but through patience, trickery, a large net and a blade sharpened by experience. Only an old lady’s blade can cut through the hide of an Ogre.

We finish the story, and enact the burial of the bones of the ogre and spontaneously the children throw their shoes into the spot the ogre is buried to represent the bones, and enact the burial of the bones as shoes.

It means something mysterious to that moment, perhaps to be discovered or perhaps not. The great Jungian scholar and storyteller, Marie Von Franz says that shoes in dreams or stories often symbolise a standpoint – they are what we stand on. So it could be that for a moment a standpoint is being buried, and in it’s place there is an urge to be in touch with ground.

Or perhaps it’s just to be taken by the immersion of the stories images to participate in the telling of it high above the town, looking down on a river, by the bronze age burial mound.

In that moment no one knows or cares to know the interpretation; the closeness of the images themselves have touched everyone in the strangeness of the moment.

It feels sometimes as if it is this that Machado’s path is made of, the pathless path like a track across the ocean. Across an ocean of images that we walk through in life, the story of our life we weave behind us as we go. Best to attend to it and be grounded in and by the images that surround us as we walk. Telling a story involves more than just speaking words, after all. It’s a pathless path towards the ground of images; a path towards becoming grounded in and by images.

The Ground of True Speech by Toby Chown
Each day, a flow of images;
Coffee, street, work, dream.
What is it to be grounded in images?

Images have no ground, but you do.
Carrying the story of your life;
sometimes like a banner,unfurled on shining lance
sometimes crushed inside your jacket pocket
like a crumpled old wrapper.

Don’t plan it, this death of yours.
Don’t give it away, like bread to pigeons.
Think of the candle on a birthday cake,
how as you blow it out, you make a wish.

I remember the high walled garden of childhood,
It’s burnt amber maples and sticky pine cones,
smell of mint and terracotta.

Oh how memories become a ghost prison!
A ghost child whose feral shadow splits away,
who grows up far from home, far from memory,

So many ghost children wander street corners
even as they sit at home on their comfortable screens
Feral shadows stalk alleyways.

But now I know a little more
how child and shadow can meet,

I’ll invite them into my home to sit down together,
ask them question that honours them without flattery:

“Can you stand on solid ground
and let those two frauds,
illusion and reality
merge into true speech?”

Ask not what imaginal ecology is, but ask…

What can Imaginal Ecology become for you?

Poetry prevents language going dead – because through familiarity the sparkle and lustre in words can deaden. The words “Imaginal ecology” brings together ecological thought, creative practice and experience in nature. It is a poetic phrase that inspires, rather than a missionary activity that aims to convert or create a new school.

Imaginal ecology inspires us to discover how the deep roots of our creative process.

Imaginal ecology is not a new kind of activity. It draws from arts practice, archetypal psychology and ecopsychotherapy. Imaginal Ecology is not a strictly defined school of thought, practice or registered programme. Even so, it’s useful to approach a definition of it. What, then is imaginal ecology?

A note on definitions

Definitions, by definition tend to pin down practices and exclude the person doing them. Rather than write about what Imaginal Ecology “is” I would rather write what it can become to you. Imaginal ecology can become:

A practice
A perspective
A place

If it sounds a little confusing, that imaginal ecology could be three things at once, let’s have a quick look at what these things relate and what they mean. So :

1.Imaginal ecology can be a practice.
2.Imaginal ecology can be a way of looking at the world
3.Imaginal ecology can be a place, a reality.

These different definitions, when you open them up begin to connect, and relate to each other in fruitful ways.

1) Imaginal Ecology can become a practice.

Imaginal ecology can become the practice of connecting the imaginal realm to it’s ecological roots. At it’s heart lies an understanding that the ecological and the imaginal lies within and around us, no matter what. Our task is to respond and relate to them, rather than generate them. Both the ecological and the imaginal are hard to grasp when thought of as things. Both the imaginal, as the world of imagination, and ecology, as an ecosystem, refer to networks that entangle, interpenetrate and reveal something more than the sum of their parts. To grasp something that at first seems intangiable requires patience, and a practice. However, we all have habits that already send us in this right direction - here are some common practices that you may already be doing that lead towards an imaginal ecology.

The practice of walking

The practice of walking into nature, woods, fields, pathways, hills, brings us to a state of reverie. Walking brings us into our bodies, and inspires movement. It constellates the world around us as fluid, and not static. It allows the unexpected to break into our closed thoughts – the sudden flight of a bird, the stillness of dusklight as it shutters through the trees, the sense of life in the soil in the dormant woods, even in deep winter. All these offer the psyche its native language. Walking allows us to appreciate being still, as when we walk into a place we love, we find when we become still having walked there that the world continues to move around us – or rather that bird moves, that branch falls, that beetle plods on.

The Practice of art making

Gary Synder once wrote that all true art is at it’s heart wild - it’s the last domain of the wild in the psyche, something that cannot be fully tamed, that has a life of it’s own.

The practice of art – the process of writing, singing, painting, theatre making – allow us to experience personally the same kind of potential for multiple connections that we see in developed ecosystems. Creativity can appear to be a talent that only the gifted possess. Yet they would better be considered as practices – things to practice.

Practice lies not so much in the acquisition of skill, but in the practice of continually re-entering into our creative process and following it through. In this way, skills emerge, not so much as the hard fought struggle to form a person into an artist, but rather the skill of allowing ourselves to keeping re-entering that process. This way, the body finds an increasing familiarity with what it’s being asked to do.

Writing allows threads of thought to gather and reveal themselves though the hand. Stepping towards a microphone with a band behind you and starting to sing without knowing what you will say allows thoughts, feeling and images that you did not know you had to emerge from your tongue. Painting a thoughtless mark on a paper, then another, then another, leads to a universe of colour and psyche.

Following it through makes the difference, gives the confidence to keep going, to keep following the flow of the breathe, the brush, the pen. “Con- fidence” from con – “with” and fidere = “to have faith or trust.” Confidence means – with faith. To trust in images.

In the same way each time we edit, we can hone something closer to what we wanted to express in the first place. The practice of making art lies in discovery through the process of making. It does not lie in knowing everything beforehand and then delivering it.

In the same way that the practice of meditation aims to cultivate a state of tranquility when not meditating, the practice of art can lead us to find our creative process anywhere. It can lead us recognise it’s origins in the ecological, which understands dynamic relationships – the “golden threads” as the key to understanding that the great contemporary writer of imaginal ecology Stephen Harrod Buhner describes.

An analogy here with practicing a language – we practice a language when we speak it. The goal of learning a language cannot be to translate it back into our mother tongue, but rather to think with that language in it’s own terms. To be immersed in it. Divination, which shares many properties with art making, as a form of discovery of emergent meaning arising from chance, was once called “the language of birds.” You could think of imaginal ecology practice as practicing the language of birds.

(or the secret language of humans, beneath the chatter of words)

“once it’s heard
the language of birds
stains my ears
taints my tongue
glasslike, still
a language of trills
numbs the grass
trumps the words”

(from “the language of birds” by Toby Chown)

This language involves the practice of taking our attention to the peripheries of our consciousness in a wide relaxed field, not focusing blindly on a spot in front of us.

The Practice of Ritual

The practice of ritual allows symbolic objects to flow from our imaginations into our lives.

My background has been in ritual theatre. What is ritual theatre? (or perhaps rather what might ritual theatre become for you….). Ritual theatre can be a way to rediscover the power of ritual within your creative process. Theatre has ancient origins in ritual, just as story has origins in myth. The theatre tells stories, themselves patterns of comedy, tragedy or heroism that illustrate patterns in the psyche. Ritual may either appeal, or it might seem strange and weird. Yet at it’s simplest ritual simply draws a line and sets apart a world that allows us to explore the story of our lives and our passionate engagement with the world. In this sense, all art is ritual, in that the artists seeks to struggle with something difficult in themselves and return with the knowledge. The simplest defination of ritual is that of a call to adventure, the crossing of a threshold, an ordeal and a return. Psychotherapy has this structure and so does art making.

Ritual theatre pulls out the psychological hotspot from what draws us to the mythic. It sets up a threshold to cross, and an image to enter into. Characters and roles can be inhabited, can dialogue and then become and de-roled from by the simple use of the body and gesture. The key to it lies in ritual’s ability to draw close together the symbolic reality of the imaginal and the reality of the individual life, in a space set aside for this purpose.

That place has psychological depth as well as a physical location. Ecopsychological depth; some of it comes from within you and some from the place your are standing in. That’s why bands spend a lot of time finding the best place to record; why Mark Hollis from TalkTalk spent a year recording their masterpiece “Spirit of Eden” in a studio in a former church and why Neil Young speaks with such reverence of the studios where he recorded songs like “On the beach”. It’s not just acoustics, it’s the place. It’s more than acoustics, in the same way as the psyche is not just you but more than you.

Ritual establishes this place as a place outside the everyday. Recording studios, therapy rooms, theatres, all create secular threshold to be crossed to enter a creative space. That space becomes charged with the imaginal psyche. The common factor: the intention to set up a place outside the everyday and cross over it, do some work and then return.

A note on imaginal ecology and the human

The symbolic dimensions of psyche appreciate a practice in order to become activated. By emphasising a practice, we emphasise a process – a creative process. We don’t need to restrict this practice to a set of rules or dogmas, such as “painting in the woods is imaginal ecology”.

Rather, I want to emphasise how any creative process could become an imaginal ecology – not necessarily when it references nature, but when it honour the roots of the symbolic in the ecological. I think this is an important point, because in our destruction of the living planet, we face unprecedented levels of misanthropy. The dangers to our mental health of separating human consciousness from nature by only revering nature and not human relationship seem very real.

Many creative processes have as a driver an urgent need to understand human relationships – falling in love or the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, dealing with parental complexes or the complexity of becoming a parent. Our life can certainly be a creative process – it holds the overarching story of our existence.

So much of the passion of life lies in our relationships with each other and our need to understand, express, symbolise them. Mythic figures bring the ecological into our lives in surprising ways that suggest an imaginal ecology is already there. Dionysos, the surge of ecstasy that we feel when a song brings us to life, or our sexual desire to another, is also the life force that runs through the vine, or the brain of a hare.

Our nervous systems are threaded through with the fine tunings of millennia, still ruled by the flutterings and pipes of Great God Pan. Rather than simply depicting nature, an imaginal ecology would find the fantasies hidden in our everyday life that have an ecological dimension and give these shape.

Lidido, the felt sense and the imaginal

Libido thrives on the creative act. Even the darkest expression can be life giving. Libido lives in the act of poeisis. It underpins the continual making of marks on a page until a painting becomes formed. Think also of how continual making of sounds allows a song to become, how the continual playing with words allows a story to form, or a poem becomes finished. A surge of life continues to weave thread after thread, drawing unseen connections together, the way water meanders of cuts channels through soft rock, or the way water plants grow on the edges, the way mycelial fungi attaches to roots. An ecosystem can be thought of as a web of unseen connections whose fruition seem to be a continually shifting balance of life and death, held in beauty.

On practice and effort

The experience within practice of the need to continue in the face of the inner critic, underlines that there is some effort, commitment or decision that may have to be made to cross into an imaginal ecology, or to make sense of it. Or it might need less effort, given that strain, tension, trying too hard and stress often act as brakes on the imaginal. Here we find something of the practice of practice. Some writers have written well on a kind of relaxed dreamlike attention that attracts the imaginal, like zen monk Shunryu Suzuki, who wrote of zen mind that “concentration is freedom” or Keith Johnstone who wrote of the spontaneous in improvisation, who wrote

“An artist who is inspired is being obvious. They are not making any decisions or weighing one idea against the other on how to be original. They accept their first thoughts. Striving for originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”

Keith Johnstone: Impro

or the anonymous author of the “meditations on the Tarot” who writes of the magician in the tarot deck as the symbol of “concentration without effort”:

“One may say that the entire being becomes like the surface of calm water, reflecting the immense presence of the starry sky and its indescribable harmony. And the waters are deep, they are so deep! And the silence grows, ever increasing. . what silence! Its growth takes place through regular waves which pass, one after the other, through your being: one wave of silence followed by another wave of more profound silence, then again a wave of still more profound silence. . . Have you ever drunk silence? If in the affirmative, you know what concentration without effort is.”

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot.

Here we have a window into a practice that through effort leads into concentration without effort. That leads us to our second principle:

2) Imaginal ecology can be a way of looking at the world

An imaginal ecology draws on James Hillman’s insights into soul as a “perspective rather than a thing, a view point towards things, rather than a thing itself. ”

Your perspective draws on your experience, the raw dream of your perceptions shaped into a sense of how things are. A perspective might seem insubstantial, yet as we pass through a day, perspectives continually shape our experience.

James Hillman wrote that perspective might not be simply a passive way of seeing something, but that it contains a twist of the soul within it. After all, what happens in a good psychotherapy session, at the end of a ritual or from the experience of nature than a shift in perspective? Remember, that for Jung your personality “is” your soul. Yet your personality, like a Janus face, looks both outward to others (the persona or mask) and inward to your moods, sensations, thoughts and feelings (the anima/animus). It is this “inner personality” that can be a lot harder to grasp and that we tend to confuse with those thoughts feelings and sensations.

Hillman writes that a soul perspective “mediates events and makes differences between ourselves and everything that happens”. The anima relates to the imaginal as a way of seeing that that mediates experience. It reveals ecological roots. The ecological also mediates experience, as the intermediary of relationship.

“The ecological” means the connections between things rather than things themselves. An ecological perspective reveals a network of interconnection, the finely honed sense of the structural similarities between your lungs and a the pattern of trees branches, as well as the linkages between the exchange of oxygen from leaf stomata and carbon dioxide from the branches of the villi .

“Between doer and the deed there is a reflective moment” writes Hillman, and places our soul’s yearning for the images right there in our reflections. In that reflective moment we also find the ecological; the dandelion in the crack of the pavement, the snake shaped branch, the spider’s web, these images that reveal and extend our personality, our soul.

3) Imaginal ecology can be a place.

Corbin refers to “the imaginal” as a “realm”, – “mundis imaginalis.” The suffix “al” turns a noun into an adjective, highlights the sense that whatever that noun may be has been suffused with a particular quality. Here a “realm” has been suffused with “image-ness”. Images, from “imago” – “a reflection, or mirroring.” The imaginal realm becomes a place composed of images.

Grasping the imaginal as a realm may be less straightforward than grasping it as either practice or perspective. The imaginal will not be a realm we can visit like, Tibet,Blackpool or our local woods. Yet an imaginal ecology will always be connected to each place. Think of a place that you know that has a rich ecology. You enter into that place and walk within it for a while. Perhaps you find a place to stop and listen for a while. Things appear to your perceptions that you hadn’t noticed.

The skull of a badger, a beetle goes about it’s business, clambers patiently over a stone. A bird of prey hangs in the air. Lords and ladies raise their phallic flag on the forest floor.

We take into the woods our stories, our thoughts, our feelings and our perceptions. We take our imagination. Something that crosses our path can take on significance, to help illustrate or make sense of our own story. Metaphors, those foundations of our sense of reality, have their origins in the wild.

All metaphors run the risk of becoming turned to stone, calcified by the mind’s desire to fix and systemitise them. The ecology of the woods has it’s own life, it doesn’t exist merely to illustrate the human psyche. The author of “ecology without nature” Timothy Morton has spoken to the way that nature becomes a genre rather than an experience, a pastoral fantasy. At best this fixation of nature becomes whimsical, at it’s worst it becomes a kind of nationalism that wants possession of nature – an England possessed by the English, rather than an open dreaming England that different peoples live within. Once again, we can see the tendency to want to fix down experiences into concepts.

The Imaginal Realm as “The Land of Nowhere“

Corbin investigated the imaginal realm of the sufi’s who called it “na koja abad” – the “Land of nowhere”. He elaborates on this as he distinguishes the “Land of Nowhere” as a place that has no place, but that allows there to be place. Here, we find some correspondence with Jung’s idea of “the collective unconscious” as the place where your psyche finds itself “in something”.

This sense of being in something, rather than it being in you, of experiencing rather than possessing, also relates to nature, to this sense of being part of what Chris Packham calls “the Greater Beauty.” Corbin refers to the imaginal realm as the place that overlays and connects the mundane to the spiritual, both within and between. And we participate with it through imagination, through the place where imagination becomes active in us. This might be as simple as a daydream, a state of mind familiar to us, yet often discounted or thrown away:

“The active Imagination is the preeminent mirror, the epiphanic place of the Images of the archetypal world; that is why the theory of the mundus imaginalis is bound up with a theory of imaginative knowledge and imaginative function—a function truly central and mediatory, because of the median and mediatory position of the mundus imaginalis.”

Henri Corbin, Esoteric Islam and Swedenborg

“The imaginal realm” lies both between and within – both median and mediatory – much as ecology lies within us and between us. The greatest mirrors we can find are those that are the richest ecologically; places where invisible connections between living being, between fungi, tree roots, squirrels, insects and the seasons combine.

If this mirror sounds like a perspective rather than a place, and if the practice of imaginal ecology sounds like the entering into a place that might lead to art, ideas, stories, healing or a deeper sense of our personality, then perhaps we can start to see how it can be that imaginal ecology can become a practice, a perspective and a place, all at the same time.

If this mirror sounds like a perspective rather than a place, and if the practice of imaginal ecology sounds like the entering into a place that lead to art, ideas, stories, healing or a deeper sense of our personality, then perhaps we can start to see how it can be that imaginal ecology can become a practice, a perspective and a place, all at the same time.


I’m preparing to publish a collection of poems called “Into the dreaming dark”

“Into the dreaming dark” is a collection of poems written over the past 5 years that has it’s origins in an exploration of the imaginal and ecological.

It’s impetus came from the week I spent with the West Country School of Myth that I spent doing a “Wild Land Dreaming”.

Perhaps a part of me thought that would be it, that the intense and direct experience of a nature soaked psyche would just keep unfolding itself and all would be well and good.

In some ways that’s true, but I also paid heed to what Joseph Campbell said about the hero’s journey - the return is the hardest part. Campbell saw a structure within myth and fairy tales that applied also to ritual - separation from the everyday world, crossing a threshold, encountering an ordeal, and finally returning back to the everyday world. Steeped in Jung’s depth psychology, Campbell saw a map of the journey into the unconscious and back again.

The Return is hard partly because there is no obvious validation for the struggle that one has gone through. However, it’s also because we as entangled beings are always far more inside out than we think, and far more susceptible to the currents of what’s around us than we would like to think. Our thoughts and feelings are not moored still like a boat, but float in currents more like seaweed on the tides. So much the better; after all a boat anchored to the ocean must only resist the tide, and if the storm grows strong then so does the chance of peril.

However, in terms of having had a deep or visionary experience, the danger to the self is of either clinging on to it and so watching it turn to stone, or abandoning it, and feeling as if one has betrayed oneself.

That’s how come a practice feels so important, because through a practice, one can keep oneself supple and true to the original source, to watch the form change through it’s moods and tidal shifts. Poetry is a practice, all you need is a pen and paper, in fact you can practice without. It’s to do with allowing oneself to enter a particular kind of experience and pull it out. It’s a bit like putting down a long fishing line of many hooks into the deep; as you pull all sorts of strange things come up. I found that taking photos on my phone and then writing a caption for them gave rise to poetry - the initial image an impetus for something more. I began to post them to Instagram as that way they could be shared - another essential ingredient of art is that to be completed it must be shared.

I sometimes like poetry that starts as a description - there’s a discipline to that and it feels good to start where I am. Poetry has a tendency to open outwards from that intial ground and seek a doorway into the imaginal. But there are lots of ways to start. Poetry is often more difficult to read than to write too - it demands something difficult, because the words can twist and turn, just like understanding someone else’s dream is hard, we lose the moorings. Poetry seems to take us into a space that’s both personal and transpersonal - ecological in the deepest sense - not simply a space of nature, but of radical interpenetration.

Sometimes the world seems empty of poems, sometimes it seems to be offering us poems all the time, it’s easy to miss them, just like it’s easy to not catch a fish when you put down a line into the water.

Poems don’t always arrive ready to eat - because they often need further work, or preparation. They do however seem to belong to the ocean, they represent what’s happening in one’s life and show a reflection of your reflection, hardened like a gem. So perhaps it’s not simply that poetry is like fishing - or if it is, what you fish depends on where you have gone to fish - a fishing lake, a spot on the coast, a paddleboard with a mackerel line.

Poetry has a lot of us in it, and for that reason, like all art, it feels very important to not judge it too harshly. Art making brings up our vulnerability like nothing else; art therapists know however that there is value in all art making, because all of it contains a fragment of the whole. Cutting apart one’s poem with the critical mind is like dissecting a frog - a poem is a living sliver of you, so doing this in the wrong way is a form of deep self harm. That doesn’t mean I have to love everything I write, it’s just that it may not be finished, or feel better when some lines are cut, or erased or perhaps it might need to return back to it’s original source.

Most poems seem to have a natural life of their own from first line to last - they seem to know where they want to go - our job as a poet is to follow them, to track them as if they were animals. Ted Hughes wrote about this - it’s better to think of poetry as tracking an animal than building a house. Poems are alive with the psyche’s tangled branches, it’s weird logic - if it’s a house then the house has a skin and unknown rooms that open up, with swallows in the attic, and a rose bush in the parlour.

Here is a poem called the cave that’s a kind of talking to oneself poem - enjoy

The Cave

Strike your fingertips against
The steel strings of a guitar ;

What you hear is not sonic vibrations
In the cave of your cochlea

But some kind of echo
From the recesses of
Your heart.

The heart’s a cave too,
Deep dark and rocky

Filled with shadows
and unknown secrets,
moments of reverberation
fill it’s chambers
With sudden sun

Only when’ll when you strike the strings.

And when
A note sounds
Like a melancholy child

Or a dark bass chord
Of duty and pain

A song gets stuck
in a two chord loop of
Duty and melancholy

I discovered today
One way to
make a stuck
melody sing

Is to play the same notes
with different feeling;

The wind strikes
the same chimes
differently at midnight.

Anyway, the hour is late
I’ve been told
there is a soundless city
Of minarets and fountains
That wait eagerly for news
Of the return of music

So strike the note
and fill the chamber

It’s made for music
Even when the air turns so blue

That old men weep
Under the yellow moon

And lovers
Stare into
broken fountains.

All the cave
Does with each note
Is to let it’s music
Return again
In the split second
If it’s lingering

And sometimes
That’s all that’s needed,
An echo
A reflection
A return
Of what seemed lost

So that what was silenced
May be heard again

Crows return
The same as bluebirds

Echoes in a cave of shadows

You can find more of the image-poems here

What is the use of a castle made of nothingness?

In a single visioned world, things never change. Laws become harsh, greed becomes normal, rivers polluted, fields dry.  A shadow hangs over the land. No one expects the world to ever change.

It takes a great deal of courage to seek the secrets of the castle under such conditions, to move away from the centre towards the edges, to seek the philosopher's secret fire.

So, come and hear this old Persian fairy tale speak out the strange and winding path towards that perilous place.  It'll be at twilight in a beautiful sheltered place on the edges of Stanmer Woods around a fire, just the kind of place you might glimpse such a castle. 

This coming Saturday 27th July at 6pm - sign up in the link below, be great if you can join us

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/imaginal-doorway

Loneliness, Von Franz writes, “invites the powers of the beyond, neither good nor evil.” Rather, she suggests, it brings a person to a critical junction. The person cloaked in loneliness may find in the darkness something beyond who they know themself to be. Yet there is also the threat of succumbing to loneliness, of becoming a lost and wild shade.

In a world in which loneliness has become endemic, it may be well to take some time to understand Von Franz’s perspective on what the mythic imagery of fairy tales tell us about the archetypal experience of loneliness. For we live in a lonely world, in which the mutual need necessary for community to flourish has been surveyed, cracked open, extracted and sold back to us as a service. Even our vulnerabilities become commodities in a world like that, something to be shared in order to increase our online friends. Loneliness is the hallmark experience of mental health problems from psychosis to depression. An image for it might be a labyrinth, a prison cell, or a feeling of being deep under water. It might be combined with a sense of the unreality of the world, the extreme of which is psychosis, or the uncaring nature of it, the extreme of which is clinical depression. Fairy tales, however, view loneliness somewhat differently. In fairy tales, lonliness is not always about the individuals experience of being lonely, but of the consequences of allowing loneliness in an individual to go too far for the collective. Or, as fairy tales would call it “the kingdom.”

Some fairy stories tell of an individual wandering in loneliness in nature, far from the village, how they may gradually turn into a troll, become possessed by insatiably hungry or murderous spirits, or become reckless with their own life.

These stories tell of the connection between loneliness and loss of human identity. In some stories, the consequences of loneliness are written into large compelling images. A case in point - in the first story in “shadow and evil”, a shoemaker, made bitter with implacable loneliness, cuts the eyes out of a sociable tailor, and leaves him sightless beneath a gallows tree covered in crows. The lonely person inflicts their loneliness on another sadistically. We live now in a lonely world, groping around in the dark for ways to see the world anew. If we are to find a new vision, then we will need to understand and face the threat of loneliness to us as individuals and as a society.


Hidden Loneliness

In the experience of modern life, loneliness lies more hidden than in fairy tales. It often lies within apparently positive feelings towards others. If I feel that there is something missing from who I am, then a part of me lies in the shadows. That lost part of myself will appear within my perception of another person. It may be someone famous or someone I know. Loneliness cuts us off from ourselves, and makes it’s opposite quality highly visible in others and charged with energy. In a strange yet vivid way, veneration of others, be they internet gurus or charistmatic friends, amplifies alienation from oneself. This leads to an even deeper experience of disappointment when the adored person cannot live up to the ideal, or one feels oneself to be worthless in comparison.

We hear this in the ritual of celebrity adoration and castigation that feed the media cycle. We recognise the same cycle within our own intimate relationships. On a larger scale, our relationship with nature has led to either unthinking adoration or a blanket dismissal . Rapt adoration and a blanket dismissal share a common goal - to avoid rejection. They are the psychological strategies of adolescence. Not co-incidently, adolescence is the time in our life when loneliness is mostly likely, as the need to form a coherant persona in order to make friends and lovers meets the taunts and indifferences of the world. It is also the time when being alone feels the most life threatening, in which it’s clear that one’s ability to connect to others is key to your survival outside the family.

Loneliness and loss of story

As rejection is a primal terror, there can be a primal terror in the thought of being alone in nature. In the months preceeding a wilderness vigil, in 2019, during my fortieth year, I planned to fast and do a vigil for four days and nights alone in the woods, as part of a wild land dreaming week with the School of Myth. At times in the preceeding months, I worried how I would manage the experience of being alone without food. Yet, when it came, the experiences of being alone was one of relationship - a continual relationship with the intricate web of life and death that an ancient wood is composed of on the one hand. More intimate and immediate than the woods, was the very real relationship with my own story - the memories that rose like flotsam amongst the roots, reflections wrapped in the slow perception of beetles progress amongst grass stalks, family stories rewoven into wild dreams. My own story would not leave me alone. It demanded far more of me than my fear of loneliness allowed.

The thought of being alone, and the experience of the alone in nature diverge deeply. The capacity to tolerate, know and embrace one’s own story contribute a crucial part in the overcoming of loneliness.

One type of loneliness, then, is also the experience of losing touch with the thread of one’s story. Losing touch with the thread means running the risk of being overcome by it. For Von Franz, an experience of unchecked loneliness is a dangerous moment for both individual and community. As the threshold between the concious mind and the unconscious forces loosens, it makes more likely an identification with inhuman forces, in a desperate attempt to meet a basic human need. Attention from others is a basic human need, what Tyrell and Evans call “a human given”. Many strange and bizarre seeming human behaviours have some origin in the need to meet this need, perhaps especially to meet this need in the face of trying to deny it or having low expectations of reciprocation. To understand loneliness we have to understand attention, and the strange twists and turns we make to get it and deny we need it, we have to turn to our most primordial experiences, of childhood.

Loneliness and attachment

Children genuinely need attention survive and to thrive, to the extent that neuroscientists now understand that neglect can be a worse form of child abuse than physical abuse. Physical abuse is a psychologically damaging form of attention. Yet in neglect, there is no attention, and with no attention at all, the organism starts to shrink and die. No co-firing of neuronal networks, the deeply pleasurably sense of mirroring that comes when a baby’s face lights up with joy at being seen, given good eye contact and a smile. If you have ever played “peep-o” with a baby, you know what I mean. The natural ability of babies to mirror back feelings that also make us feel good, transmits itself into a moment of pure pleasure. This moment allows the moment of bonding. The loneliness of neglect turns the lights off within the developing brain, and locks up doors within the psyche that can be very hard to find any keys to, and may never open.

If the world is joyous and fun, open and appreciative, then the child’s nervous system will reflect this. If the world is full of distress, of unconscious adults gouging out on heroin, or passed out drunk, if it’s full of violent disputes, and violence, then the child’s nervous system will adapt to that world too. It may strengthen sensitivity to threat, via the amygdala. The child becomes hypervigilent ready to flee or hide, or to fight in order to survive. Such childhoods cast powerful shadows into adult life, charges up the psyche with an enormous amount of energy. This energy can be released in a destructive or creative way. The best way to transform this energy is for the trapped story to be told. Fairy stories reflect these kinds of transformations at a deep collective level. They bring the mythic backdrop into the foreground of our consciousness. When I recognise myself within them, it’s with the same kind of strange recognition that I have that the oak is far more alive and aware than I allowed myself to know.

White hounds and the watching self: loneliness as a family secret.

Yet a lonely childhood need not be overtly violent. Loneliness within childhood often comes from a family secret that cannot be told. An atmosphere pervades family life, and becomes the water a child swims in and grows into. All seems well, yet appearances decieve.

In the Lithuanian fairy story, “The Sun Princess and Her Deliverer” the story starts in a beautiful castle, with a boy child born to a King and Queen. He appears to have all he needs - as any need appears he has to only clap his hands and servants carrying trays of puff pastries arrive, or musicians with lutes, flutes and drums, or jesters full of jokes. His parents set two white hounds to watch him at all times. Yet anytime he wants to express his loneliness, hands clap; more pastries, more music, more comedy. The white hounds watch him constantly. A crow starts to follow the boy around. Everywhere he goes the crow is there too, watching, looking. In the courtyard, the garden, at the window.

The dark Crow, a crow that turns up with the same regularity as the loneliness, that follows a child around, becomes a conduit for anger rather than the sadness we associate with loneliness. The boy draws the string of his bow taut and directs the sharp barb of an arrow straight at the crow’s heart. It’s a dangerous moment when loneliness turns to anger. In Fairport Convention’s fairy tale “Crazy Man Michael” the hero’s anger too turns towads a Raven who tells the truth. Like a folk tale Oedipus, the truth telling in that story leads to murder and madness and a lifetimes spent in regret seeking redemption. Yet, blessedly, in “The Sun’s Deliverance” the boy-prince has something that Crazy Man Michael lacks - the capacity to listen. The Crow begs for his life and offers to reveal the truth - that reason he is so lonely is because his sisters are locked in an 80 foot tower, topped with diamond spikes.

The Crow reveals that the small gold key to this Tower lies under a flowerpot, by his Mother’s pillow. The story only really starts at this point, a wonderful sequence of primordial images, which illustrate how complex and lifelong this process of liberation from loneliness can be. We all will need a lot of help if we want to to deliver the Sun Princess from Darkness - the story suggests we will need help from many animal instincts, golden threads and daughters of sorrow. Yet, as with many complex things, the crucial moment pivots on something simple - the ability to listen and to act upon what’s been heard.

As the story unfolds, certain way of replacing the Shadow of Loneliness with a deep relationship with Sun Princess emerge - through listening, hard work, following intuition, courage, cunning, love, sorrow and loss, and finding a secret heart. Yet nothing dispels loneliness quite like a story, one that people listen to with their minds in two worlds.

Loneliness as archetype : the fool and his shadow

The images in fairy tales have been taken from ancient dreams and smoothed into coherent narrative shape by being retold by different storytellers over long passages of time. Fairy tales are as natural as dreams, bones or forests. They mediate the relationship between the self and nature, expressing its strange paradoxes, illuminating the dark shadowy borders where psyche meets nature.

It’s a place without rules or rigid frameworks. The dream bones of a fairy tale consist of images - of twins, shoemakers, tailors, gallows, crows, crowns fallen to the bottom of lakes, of Kings, Queens, kingdoms, talking animals. Von Franz argues that they reflect the concerns of people living in a particular place at a particular time. Yet they are spare and open enough to allow people of very different times and places to recognise their own predicaments within their luminous images. These fairy images, Von Franz sets against a backdrop of Jung’s terminology - the Shadow, the anima, the Self. However, she is careful from the start to warn the reader against translating the images into Jungian concepts, preferring to stress that the story itself holds the archetype, not the characters. James Hillman, also warns against the dangers of interpretation as a way of “killing the image,” and build a psychological school around loyalty to the living image.

So, instead, she builds towards her insight about loneliness via telling and unpacking long chains of strange seeming fairy tales. In relation to the shadow, the theme of doubleness emerges. Here are two workmen, a merry tailor and a vindictive shoemaker. Here are two brothers with the same name - one faithful, one unfaithful. Here are two brothers, a greedy goldsmith and a poor but honest wood-gatherer. Within fairy tales and dreams, this doubling of the main character, a fool and their shadow, time and time again leads to an experience of isolation and loneliness. In each story in myriad ways, the unfaithful character betrays the naive and sends them into isolation and loneliness. Loneliness for Von Franz, reveals how human beings lose their way within the shadows and mazes of their own psyche.

We are accustomed to thinking of loneliness in terms of the lonely individual - like Eleanor Rigby who died in the church and was buried along with her name, with no one at her funeral. Yet within Von Franz’s view, the experience of loneliness is not simply the experience of being alone, but rather of being exposed to archetypal forces that become charged up and revealed by periods of isolation. Fairy tales show us not our warm human reaching towards the lonely, be it our self or in others, but rather something like an x ray of the consequences of loneliness from the perspective of a wise yet distant observer deep within ourselves.

Therefore the fairy tales that she relates don’t always relate a positive experience of re-demption from loneliness. The stories she tells can lead to a kind of possession by unconscious forces, and the consequences of this, either for good or ill. The lonely one may become infected by something so outside of the collective norm that they become a threat, a threat that may harm or support the culture. Many of the stories rather show the threat to the collective from an individual’s retreat from the collective life. The challenge is to recognise whether what lies in the shadow is a golden crown lost in the bottom of a lake to be retreived, or a sorcerer who has lost his heart and must be overcome.

Loneliness and the sacred

Von Franz mentions how saints used to seek out time alone in the wilderness, in order to become closer to the sacred. Being alone, as it charges up the unconscious, also reveals it. If done consciously it invites the archetype to the table to break bread. To this end, she describes her own experiences of experimenting with being alone in the Swiss Mountains. She describes the way that she began to become preoccupied by the thought of a burglar breaking in to the little hut where she was alone. She went out to the outside toilet at night and a something made a loud sound near her, sending her running back to the house to find the axe.

She realises, at this point that she went to the mountains to have this experience - the involuntary arising of fantasies and images from her unconscious. So, she has it out with her burglar-image, using the Jungian technique of active imagination. She doesn’t describe the imaginal encounter, but it must have gone well, as she reports enjoying the rest of the trip, and of replacing the axe and no longer locking the door.

What Von Franz identifies is the moment when loneliness leads to a kind of possession and just how normal this kind of possession is. A strong gripping feeling creeps up from within, with such stealth that it appears to simply be a part of oneself.

It’s very easy to identify similar moments in one’s own life when emotions creep up on one, and attach themselves to one’s thoughts in ways that can be hard to shake off.
Loneliness is not really a desire for company, but to a feeling that this company will reject you. That is why loneliness can be so present even at parties and social gatherings, how it can hang off people like an aroma. To this end, the danger to the lonely one are not simply feelings of sorrow, rather of helplessness and resentment. To the sense that one has already been rejected, and must arm oneself against further injury. In one South American story this is shown by a hunter who recklessly joins a party of wild spirits to drink alcohol, and slowly becomes steadily more psychopathic, and more connected to his hunger, recklessness and power to kill. He becomes utterly inhuman, with legs like sharp spears.

However, in our modern world, filled with soveriegn individuals and isolation, the tight knit identity of the tribe has become a fantasy itself, to be sold back to us. Given how fundamentally we need attention and relationship, loneliness is threat to the self. The part of the self that seeks to protect the self once given control is never keen to relax that control. At a political level we have seen “shock doctrine” and the “war on terror” and “the war on drugs” - messages of threat allow authoritarians to assume control. Yet within the experience of loneliness, we are liable to hold onto a spear with a point at both end. The threat that loneliness can be to find oursleves pointing a spear at our own heart.

Loneliness and political violence

This is one reason why psychological transformations within psychotherapy can be so hard and how come a certain amount of attunement, trust and safety must be in place to allow self exploration and healing. Deep experiences of loneliness work against the kind of relational relaxation needed to approach a psychological wound. Subtle defences work against facing the difficult truths - minimisation, ambivalence, avoidance, projection, dissociation. All are symptoms of a need for human contact. The attention of another human being is not simply a luxury but a need we all have, and not just in childhood, but throughout life.

Yet loneliness has reached epidemic proportions - last year according to a survey 24% of the world felt very or fairly lonely. Whilst it’s unlikely that psychologists have managed to talk to a quarter of the world, the idea that there is a greater amount of loneliness today in the human world than in the past seems well supported. We know by the collapse of much of the superstructures of work, leisure and education, and their gradual replacement by specialist groups or online forums or apps, and gated online communties held together by subscriptions. We are witnessing the closure of pubs, the retreat from trade unions, the splintering of extended family networks into nuclear families, and nuclear families into even smaller units. Watch a film like Arcadia, with it’s archive footage of Scots women singing and working together as one, we can see how strongly the desire for communal life works within us, stimulating desire and propaganda.

Yet, worse than these assaults, the compensations that we are offered by an increasingly subtle and psychologically oriented artificial intelligence - are aimed at encouraging us to see within our natural tendency to organsise ourselves into communities an opportunity to sell our skills as entrepeneurs. Instead of churches we have a monthly subscription to an online spiritual community. Our writing becomes paid for £10 a month. Our empathy, even our vulnerability become skills to market and sell. At it’s worst this breakdown of real community into isolation and loneliness leads to savage mistrust and real world violence

Communities of lonely and isolated individuals, often, but not always men, bonded by a deep distrust of the world and a contempt for others yet not able to meet or create real friendships in the everyday world have been at the heart of much of the way the darker corners of the internet has given rise to many of the atrocities in the world. The Christchurch killer, who shot 51 people dead in 2 mosques in 2019 was part of an internet forum where alienation and an implicit sense of loneliness created a dark bond between the young men posting on the message boards. The killer livestreamed his actions, a clear indication of his desire to be seen, recognised and known. In some ways his actions are entirely in step with the time, the sense that to be seen, and given attention, to dispel loneliness, one has to be recorded and broadcast through a large media platform.

“If I can’t show it/if you can’t see me/what’s the point in doing anything?” go the lyrics to St Vincent’s 2014 song Digital Witness. Being seen has become a motivation for murder. A commentator makes the point that for the Christchurch murderer, the point wasn’t to kill muslims, but to make a video of killing muslims. The Christchurch murderer was not lonely in the way Eleanor Rigby was, but more like someone possessed with murderous ideas against people he can no longer see as human. In a world of internet trolls, where the image of a troll has become a figure of fun, he has become possessed by a darker more ancient and murderous kind of troll, thick skinned, inhuman.

When

When I was a teenager,
I could not speak,

It stung to live
such dissonance,

My mute tongue
Useless,

It could not articulate
the pain of the flowering body

The shame of its passion
The chains that bind
the teenage mind,

Subtle chains, uniforms,
blank friendships,

Boring streets,
Repetitions of class

And number,
Gleaming glass and white trainers,

Red eyed stares and clenched fists,
Huge hoarding boards and Friday night violence,

Isolation is the city’s business,
Isolation is a teenage daydream.

I had to learn to sing,
Learn that a voice

Takes form like a tree branch
Solidifies slowly to express its own shape

So if by chance I should sing
The blue jewelled cases of

a wandering insect , Or the wet emerald moss of

A beech tree’s splayed roots
Or the ache in the chest from

A cormorants cry

It’s partly because

I never sang
That mute song

Of the broken suburbs
Crushed beer cans in the gutter,

Empty streets lined with trees,
That sense, that the mute know

Of always looking in from outside,
The sense in a raindrop, a teardrop

A sigh.

by Toby Chown

The loneliness as a glass coffin

Von Franz, in her depiction of loneliness shows us the very real dangers of loneliness to the human community. She shows us some of the reason why wandering alone in nature was considered dangerous in the past - not only wild animals but dangerous parts of the psyche can be activated by threat of loneliness - as well as strong projections from those less able to tolerate the company of the other than human.

And yet this kind of ability to relate to nature - to discern the responses of a jackdaw, to feel the aliveness of a wild clematis, to have a feel for the greater beauty - the connection between the animals, plants and weather, and to feel ones own imagination and life story to be something intricately affected by and interwoven with these elements - this may require a wandering in solitude alone at night, being soaked in moonbeams and hornbeams.

Our ceilings and windows cut us off from the touch of the world - the moodshift as the sun falls into darkness or the moment of joy it gleams again over the horizon to phase out the night. We have been asleep for a hundred years in a glass coffin. As we stumble alive towards this touch, we certainly risk all manner of hubris - of expecting the animals to redeem us, or nature to reveal herself at once, or to subsume all our lonelinesses in the embrace of a mother with bones tangled in her hair. As if a relationship with nature could be a substitute for the painfull difficulties of a relationship with other humans. It’s not.

Alone with nature

Yet far worse is to be isolated with no sense at all of this touch. Bill Plotkin in his “Journey of Soul Initiation” maps out a journey deep into soul, revealed through time alone in nature. Without a withdrawing into the mysteries of the psyche, through the doorway of loneliness, we risk becoming no more than a reflection within each others eyes. A shimmering hall of mirrors that nothing new or and no dirt under it’s fingernails. Perhaps it’s only within the risk of falling deeply into the alone that we risk the chance to know the alone within ourself, and the company of the solitude that surrounds us.

It might be a mystical revelation, or it might be something as simple as what passed between Marie Von Franz and her burglar-image.

Crucially, this solitude links us back to a relationship between the human and human world. The return is often harder than the adventure itself. Especially in a world in which mutual need is continually transformed into personal inadequacy, with the answer sold back to you via a webinar by a charismatic therapist or shaman. Still,

The changes I long for
Cannot be accomplished
Through strategy
Or patience
Or taking action upon the world

But through entering
a water mirror
that excludes the world

excluding the world
means going deeper into it

the deeper I go
the harder the return.

From “Water Mirror” by Toby Chown

When I took that risk to go deeply into solitude in naure, I found myself far from alone, but in the vivid company of my story, and the stories of all the life around me. Such an experience does not instantly create the sense of belonging with a natural world that we have deeply betrayed. But all friendships start with a good story. More than anything, the telling of a story banishes loneliness and releases the Sun Princess for a while. Living a story, may release her for good, and invite more stories to be lived and told.

Recently I made a playlist called “dream songs.” They are a collection of songs with “dream” in the title. Within the 88 songs that made it onto the playlist, each artist has taken strikingly different interpretations of what a “dream” is. Generally, dream in a song means “something desired” like “Don’t dream it’s over”. In “Dream a little Dream of me” dream is a soft focused fantasy. In Jay-Z’s dream it’s a gangster fantasy. For Roy Orbison it’s the ultimate regret - dreams punish him through their illusion, love that happens “only in dreams” is insubstantial.

Not many songs about dreams are like the experience of dreams though ( the Waterboys and Bob Dylan get closest for my money.) It’s as if we need to remember that there is something special about dreams without really facing what they are. Dreaming is central to the imaginal and to nature. Henri Corbin used the phrase “mundus imaginalis” or “the imaginal realm” to locate the visions of the sufi prophets whose work he was investigating. The imaginal can be understood as a place as well as perspective and a practice - and has elements of all three. It’s a dreamlike place.

An imaginal ecology keeps dreaming at it’s heart. A few months ago I organised an event called “Remember the Winter’s Moon: Into the Dreaming Dark”. This was a storywalk, where walk and story combine at twilight in a place of ecological richness - animal, mineral, plant and elemental richness. The dreaming I was after here was of the waking sort, the reverie that following a story down into the darkness towards a specific dreamplace allows us. So what’s the connection between dreaming and nature?

The Dream Masters

The modern master of dreams Carl Gustav Jung was for a while a follower of Freud. He had absorbed Freud’s “Interpretation of dreams,” and it was this that led him to his friendship with Freud. For Freud, dreams reveal psychological material repressed into the unconscious. Dreams, thought Freud are wish fulfilment that we cannot bear to acknowledge consciously, so must disguise with bizarre images. Thus, dreams become for Freud a royal road into the unconscious, and a place to build his theory of the unconscious upon and to discover taboos repressed into surreal symbols. Jung, however, engaged with dreams not in a theoretical, but in a practical and experimental way.

In his “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” Jung describes a dream in which he entered a crypt and saw a long row of men laid out on stone pedestals, like statues. Men from another time. Except, when he looked at the hands of a man laid out dressed in the garb of the 18th century, they moved… He walked down the row, and as he did, the people laid out were from older times, until he reached a body that looked like a wooden carving of a knight decked out in the costume of the 12th century….when he turned his attention to this it too moved. He writes about how the experience of this dream changed his view on what dreams are:

"I had originally held to Freud’s view that vestiges of old experiences exist in the unconscious. But dreams like this and my actual experience of the unconscious taught me that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being” (The Essential Jung: p 75)

Jung felt dreams are not as Freud thought, like a kind of night haunting of the self by the day before. Rather, they are the unconscious come to life. They come to life when we place our attention on them, just as the dead men came to life in the places where Jung turned his attention. This vignette shows Jung’s approach to dreams very well; to assume they are meaningful without knowing quite what they mean, and to allow the fascination with the image to penetrate you until it’s meaning makes sense. You turn your attention to them until they make sense. Not incidentally, if we approach nature in this way, it too becomes meaningful.

Dreams, for Jung, are not attempting to disguise or trick us. Rather they show us where we are. It’s just we often seem to not quite understand the language they use. It’s a language of image, dipped in feeling. Dream images can’t easily be taken from their context, because the tapestry of dream is woven from the feeling of a particular life. Images in dreams are not just pictures. Dreams move us, they are full of emotion, suggestive of feeling, speaking our lives.

Dreams are as natural as a leaf or a fox dropping. An ecology that excludes dreams has lost its soul. Dreaming in a place is perhaps the most straightforward way to establish a connection to a place. This is one reason why the Right to Roam campaign and the freedom to have wild or semi wild places to sleep the night without fear of being disturbed is so important - without this freedom, we cannot have the dreams that reconnect us tothe dreaming earth.

Dreams have always held this level of importance for humans. They offer a golden chain that stretches into the archaic and the divine. Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven with angels moving up and down at Beth-El and created an altar there when he woke. Beth-El means “House of the Elohim” - the Elohim, the 4,000 year or older gods of the Levant, whose fertility cults that stand behind the Old Testament, whose gods created the Garden of Eden and from whose worship the Judaic faith only very slowly and fitfully diverged.

The dream of Jacob’s ladder upon waking leads him to consider the place of the dream sacred, a place of Elohim. Jacob’s dream and his actions on waking are a work of imaginal ecology. Implicit in them is that the place of the dream has something to do with the dream. That’s some distance from our placeless modern worldview where it’s the individual living in a transcendent reality that could be anywhere that is the important factor. Where nowadays we want the dream to tell us about Who had the dream, Jacob’s actions reveal an interest about Where the dream was had. This “Where?” allows a re-sacralisation of place.

Dreaming of Place

In a dream, an artist and skilled ritualist friend of mine with a deep connection to nature, left her notebook at my house. I look inside it and find there are instructions of work she has taken on for National Trust. She has drawn sketches for a manual of rituals to enact that remember where the small gods of charcoal burners were once worshipped. These are for places in the National Trust, aside from the well photographed and visited neolithic cathedrals of Stonehenge or Avebury. The dream invites a remembrance that different places have unremembered histories. They are dream sites that hold dream traces of our half remembered ancestors. Nature is place, nature is dream. Creative images arise from places, like dreams. At the end of this essay is a poem from spending some time in a neolithic tomb called Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesea, during Hugh Lupton and Eric Madden’s Storytelling Retreat.

The re-establishment of our sense of place is one of the greatest needs we have today. Christian theology absorbed platonic idealism to create a Hellenistic ideal of universal brotherhood. The Christian heaven is an (after)world accessible to all if they let Christ into their hearts. Platonic ideas of transcendence through approaching the ideal forms seeped deep into the Christian psyche. As the image of Christ began to fade from European epistemology, it slowly transformed into a secular seeming scientific materialist rationalism. No dreams allowed within it’s rational experiments. Yet this mechanistic materialism retains it’s fascination with transcendence and ideal forms - that there are clear, clean underlying structures to the universe, laws of time and space that extend throughout the universe like an invisible grid.

As my friend Daragh remarked to me, laws of time and space look a lot like Gods to someone looking at them with eye of imagination. The psychological implications of this fascination with universal laws would be to imagine that our senses are deceived. In a world governed by invisible laws of time and space, one place is just like another, at a point of depth. It is as if what is real is an invisible grid, like multi-dimensional squares on a map or a computer game. We mostly carry this mechanistic model with us, and like all such models when we see through it, it appears to be the way things actually are. It takes a lot of energy to keep turning our view from what we see to how we are seeing. Yet if we don’t do this we risk losing a sense of place completely, and in its place having only a theory of space. Edward Casey reminds us that for western philosophers, consciousness has always been of the self, not of a place. Yet as Casey says “there is no self without place” This is very fatal to both us and our living planet – because one place is not like another, the centre of a shopping centre is not like the centre of an ancient woodland - that is to say the centre of white tiled strip-lit Churchill Square shopping centre is not like the centre of the woods on the hill near Chanctonbury ring where a the trees rise like a living Cathedral.

Is everything a part of nature’s dream?

Places seem stable - yet dreams remind us that what seems stable may be mercurial - places hold mercurial depths. To remember this lets us hold our ground against the dismissive pseudo philosophy of transcendence invoked to justify violence against nature and others. According to this cynical transcendence, Nature is everything, everything is nature, so anything we do is part of nature. Therefore everything is nature from colonialism to uranium mining to austerity, the hand of the market, and giving tax cuts to billionaires. It’s all part of nature according to this argument. Your fridge is as much a part of nature as Kingley Vale or Ashdown Forest. So why feel bad?

Of course, we are inexorably entwined into an ecological matrix, as Stephen H Buhner reminds us. However, the implications of this are not business as usual. If everything is part of nature then we had better take a deeper look at what we say we revere. It’s also responding to us. This same sentiment spills from the keyboards and mouths of those who don’t want to see human beings as part of nature - nature is all powerful, the climate has always changed, humans contributions cannot possibly be responsible for sending the earth’s weather patterns into a haywire of rain, drought, wild fire and flood. This lip service to a powerful nature is nothing more than the argumentative version of an octopus releasing a jet of ink at it’s prey - managing to at once subtly aggrandise human activity in the face of an omnipotent mother nature, and pay lip service to reverence for nature in order to slip away and carry on as usual.

Dreams show us the way we are entwined in nature. They offer us the texture of the world, where we can feel something that we are not - dreams remind us that our identity is provisional, and we can know the rage of a dark hypnotist at the same time as we know the fear the audience member who resists him. We feel the entire dreamscape, not just who we happen to be in a dream.

Foxes, whales, pigs, pigeons, cuttlefish and spiders all dream. A dream of a fox can change the direction of a life, as it did for Ted Hughes. Plants create dreamy scent scapes. Mature ecosystems create an interlinking mesh of dream, secreting psychedelic compounds through myclelial roots. All of our ancestors sought out wild places and deep caves to dream in, so they might become deeper, wiser, learn more. Stockmarkets, fridges and petrol stations do not dream. At least, if they do, not much.

Instead, the modern world we mostly live in of city, internet, television, adverts offer synthetic dreams on tap. Perhaps these tv shows and memes are as natural as dreams, or derived from nature. However, it’s an endless stream of thin, shallow meme dream, of free uploaded movies interrupted by targeted adverts, of headlines that feed your anger, your disgust, or your lust, there to soothe and satiate your boredom, to offer you company, friends, likes, a community, information. It’s thin, shallow gruel that’s caked in sugar. We have taken our need for dreams and allowed them to be sold back to us as junk food.

We live in a neo-industrial fantasy of dreams we can tap up by tapping a screen. As if Elon Musk had branded an X onto the moon. Imagine if your dreams were interrupted by the voices of your friends, recommending places to eat or travel, selling us T-shirts of our favourite bands, or showing us that Marks and Spencers have the spirit of Christmas. Modern life interrupts our waking dreams, poisoning them with envy, glamour, dissatisfaction. They don’t persuade us to buy things, they create a world that normalises the poisoning of dreams.

The fantasies that draw us deeper into the thin modern world through television and youtube lack a deep nature. The dream of an old oak or mature wood that invades your sleep with ivy if you lay your head down the night there. A dream that pulls you into the darkness to dress you in a coat of moss, that whispers the dark sweet secrets of belonging to a place in your ear.

Yes our modern life is part of nature, and a kind of dreamworld - but it’s a shallow fantasy of eternal spring, where growth is abundant and everything is for sale or must have an obvious function.

As David Kidner writes, your hoover is not going to coil it’s flex into the ironing board to make a habitat for your camping cutlery. Yet a tree does this with consummate ease, ivy binds itself into the limbs of trees, mycelial networks crack into roots. Nature’s desire to knit together a living tapestry, what ecologists call “succession” - the process by which mature ecosystems form- is a form of dreaming. Dreams also show complex networks of connection, their threads linking our past to our present, populating our dream world with forgotten teenage friends, demon headmasters, feathers falling towards oceans. Our dreams need to be fed by the elements so we can feed them back.

Including dreams in our ecology helps us stop fetishising nature as being a particular aesthetic that belongs to a particular group of people - say for example, wool jumpers, folk music and Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings (all of which I love by the way), or tweeds and a wax jacket. To only dress in the clothes of our nature fantasy misses something - excludes our shared omnipresent relationship with a Gaian reality. Aesthetics are keys to our identity, they are what draw us on and into the world, and how we show kinship with a part of it. They allow interplay between the mask we show the world and the deep of our soul, with its need for love and strength. Jungians might put it this way - aesthetics allow the persona to deepen into the soul that we may recognise the sparks of soul in who and what we love. A too fixed sense of aesthetic-identity can be a betrayal of the morphic shifting depths of Nature, the way its scents are replicated in a synthetic perfume or the erotic contours of a football stadium.

Living in a world of thin dreams

When we lose a sense of place, we lose our connection to nature - to our nature and to Nature. We can only find a deeper access to Nature through finding our deeper nature. We find our own deep nature most clearly reflected in dreams. We are creatures hypnotised into thinking we are rational who live in a world of images, feelings and dreams - a dream world that think it’s not dreaming. If we want to distinguish the difference between the dream-world of modernity, with it’s siren calls to our desires - living the dream, the American dream - then we would do well to take time with our actual dreams.

James Hillman, in his “Dream and the Underworld” makes a number of moves to cut away the many subtle tendrils of control that pervade our modern attitude to the dream world. So he tells us to appreciate dreams for what they are rather than what they can for us. Hillman links dreams explicitly to death - to the Underworld. He tells us they are not wish fulfilments in his dreamology, and they do not attempt to balance the narrow minded ego, but show glimpses of the desire of the soul. “Dreaming is the psyche itself doing it’s soulwork” he tells us. He differentiates an attitude towards dreams from knowledge of them. “When we believe we know the invisible we are on a ruinous path”

Like the effects of Jung’s gaze on the hands of the dead, our attitude towards a dream determines the dream. The more we want from dreams to know and learn about ourselves, the more we take on an extractivist attitude towards them and the unconscious. Dreams react accordingly, either flooding us with more images than we can make sense of, or retreating from our grasp. So, there is danger in dreamwork. Of course, there is. Hillman strikes away one by one the grasping desires we have to improve our self through the study of our dreams. What’s left is the strangeness and implications of the dream. Dreams, Hillman tells us don’t show us what to do, they show us where we are. They show us that whilst we move through the world seeking to fulfill our potentials, our dreams stay in the underworld reminding us of the invevitability of our death. They don’t seem to always care about what we think is important. They remind us that we live under Hades’ dreamy gaze our whole lives.

Dreamwork in Sussex

Dreams are subtle and fragile, as if they do not care if they are known and remembered. In the story of Faithful John, the loyal servant overhears 3 ravens foretelling a dark future for John’s master, the young king, unless certain bizaire actions takes place. The Ravens know what will happen, and how to stop it but are not much interested in intervening. Dreams can be like this. They need to be given attention and fed, through being transformed into song, story, painting or poem.

A dream practice

So I would like to take a digression, into a dream of place. I live on the edges of the South Downs in Sussex and here is a dreampoem about that dreamplace, and the dreamdanger of dreamwork, a fusion of dream, poem and experience of a specific place:

Old Ley of the Land by Toby Chown

Into the night
Towards the moon

Through the woods
Up the hill.

Wandering alone in Sussex
Thoughts as thick as daisies

The lords and the ladies
in their silver halls

Stay deep in the dark groves
Behind copper doors

Maybe they could show you

Maybe they have chanced upon
The name you were given

Before you were born.
There’s a spiders web hidden

Inside the mouth of a wren
A chrysalis that’s tucked away

Inside a salmon’s gut,
And inside your name is pulsing

Orange red and bulging
Like a tiny man

Zipped inside a flesh cocoon
Bursting full of name

The wasps, the wasps are hungry
Their larvae they need feeding

The morsels they are seeking
With their mandibles all squeaking

Are pieces of your name

The bars and pubs are open,
On the waterside they’re drinking

But in woods alone at night I’m thinking
Really you’re fair game

The wasps are busy seeking
In the boles amongst the toadstools ,

The wasps are busy hunting
Hungry for your name.

So hide it in the rampions,
Stash it with the oak root

Bury it in the moonrise
Set the wren on guard

Best to let the moon’s arc
Silver through the darkness

Best to let your dreams rip
Deep in your soul

Best to wake at sunrise
Drenched in dew and wild flowers

All you knew just kept you from
this old ley of the land.

Dreams reveal our vulnerabilities in the form of living images. They show we are woven into imaginal scenarios, that there is no place that we could stand outside of this, just as there is no way to stand outside of the ecological matrix of the living earth. Our name is at stake, not the name we go by, the name we were given before we were born. It’s woven into a cocoon with wasps looking to destroy it. It’s hidden inside a wren.

We dream because the earth dreams

One place to look for that name is deep in the woods at twilight, and after dark. At these times, the psyche is lit by the moon, and the awe, terror and wonder of the primordial psyche, its obsessions, vulnerabilities and magics, its kinship with spiders webs, death and with new life bursting through the forest floor, unfurling ferns like green coiled whips, all have a chance to be glimpsed.

Dream theories have a tendency to try to bind dreams into service - for example Tyrell and Griffens compelling theory that dreams discharge the pent up emotional energy from scenarios that we contemplated but did not complete. There is some good reasoning behind this theory, it has a high explanatory power. It explains how come dreaming is so ubiquitous, how come it has to happen whether we remember it or not. It combines science with experience. It also offers a tantalising bridge into the sense that waking consciousness is a kind of elaboration of dream consciousness.

This is the bridge into our capacity to self heal, into a meaningful psychotherapy. It’s often only through entering into a kind of dreamlike altered consciousness that we can have sufficient distance from our wounded everyday mind to be able to process, transform or let go. This alteration may be subtle or profound, it might be the kind of mild intensity of a flow state, or it might be a high moment of epiphany. Either way, it establishes a kind of base line for reality - it’s far more dreamlike than we allow, and more connected to trance.

However, although they offer both a practical and compelling account of the function of dreams, one that makes sense neurologically, it’s an account that binds dreams to a function. The thin silver of dreams seems to hate this, it loves being approached but to hate being pinned down. We are steeped in dreams and they respond to our attentions - the hands of the dead move when given it, a name appears in a wren’s mouth. The doorway opens to a more expanded and participatory field of consciousness.

As Stephen H Buhner writes:

"We dream because the Earth dreams. We sing and know music because the vibrational expression we call music is inherent in this place. We have the capacity to create because the larger system from which we come has at its core the capacity to create. We express new form through dreaming because that is how all form is created in this place”. (Stephen Harrod Buhner : The Lost Language of Plants)

The new arrives through a participatory dream that draws the dream ego into a field far greater than itself. This field is part of the living earth. The dream state often seems highly personal, yet it can also be a kind of gateway to deeper experiences than simply meeting aspects of the self. It’s where transformation takes place, yet, like the Ravens in Faithful John, it doesn’t seem to mind if you ignore it. However, if you turn to look at it, like the hands of the dead in Jung’s dream, it starts to come to life, to show you that your original name is at stake.

Dream on…

Bryn Celli Ddu: Little House of Bones by Toby Chown

Grandfather, Grandmother
We sit within your little house of bones

Our bones one day, like yours will be ground up into corn.
So tell me Grandfather; how do I become an ancestor?

Is it simply a matter of dying?
What is needed from me in this life

To make it across your rivers of salt, tears and blood?
I heard you buried a spiral ear bone

Beneath a spiral stone
So you could continue

To listen to
Bullfinches chirrups

The stream gurgle mountain,
The chatter of ghosts and visitors

The blur of eagle wings.
The ear has no gate;

It even hears
slow cows flow

Like a river of pilgrims
In your childhood.

So who becomes an ancestor?
Those that give roses to old men in blue cloaks when they weep?

Or compose a song strong as rope made from the
Wind that blows through your dark womb?

Those whose ear is an open gate,
Whose heart becomes what they hear

Whose bones,
Filled to the nook

With every cranny of living,
Ground down like corn

Rise like bread
On the other side of

The dark oven door,
In your little bone house.

As he walked deep into the shadows and cool outlines of trees, he was interupted....the ground trembled, then shook.  It shook so hard, he nearly fell over.  A howl that sounded like a hurricane splintered the sapling by his left shoulder.

Cautiously, he drew near to the source of the sound....there on the ground was a enormous Giant.  Tears spilled from the Giant's eyes as he hammered the forest floor with his fists so hard the ground shook.  All the animals had fled and the trees around looked like snapped matches.

The Boy stood in the undergrowth for a short while, watching. Finally he turned and left.

Back in the town, everyone was talking about the earthquake. Some structural damage had occured.  A week later, the Boy went back, and the same thing happened.  Ground shaking, tears flowing. Giant pounding the ground in a rage of fist and fury, like a massive toddler, but a hairy dangerous one with boots and a jerkin on. The boy watched the giant from the undergrowth  and saw something that made him smile.

The third time, a week later, in the same place, the Boy appeared from the undergrowth in full view of the Giant.  He smiled.

"Hey there" he said "Bend down.  I've got a secret to tell you"

He whispered something in the Giant's ear. 

A huge beam grew across the Giant's face as the Boy's words made their way from his ear into his brain and from there into his understanding.

They had a great afternoon together.  After they parted, the boy walked off cheerfully, whistling as he went.  He knew that now there would be no more earthquakes.  He thought some more about the secret he had told the Giant.

"Silly Giant" he said to himself as he came closer to the town.  "How could he not know?  If you want learn how to whistle it's easy.  All you have to do is put your lips together and blow..."

So...welcome to the Imaginal Ecologist, my e-newsletter. 

If you've ever watched a child try to learn to whistle, you'll know that the secret of whistling is really not about technique.  It's more to do with a strange combination of persistance and cheerfulness, the kind that small boys sometimes have when they are allowed to wander around in woods.

Teaching, as those of us who went to school know, can easily be the death of learning. Boys are, by definition not experts. So, in a good place to teach, as they are far better able to teach something they don't quite know or half know or want to know. One of the best known methods for how to learn something is to explain what you know to a child, or teach it to someone else.

So, in a simple cheerful way, it’s good to remember that learning to sing is easy.  You simply have to elongate the vowel sounds as you sing out and make them resonate through your head bones, your ribcage or your gut.

  Song connects people to soul and so to the soul of nature, the Anima Mundi.  Stephen Buhner writes in “Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm” that song and music “opens up sensory gating channels” and so allows more information to pass into oneself than before. In this way song acts as a gateway into a deeper conversation with nature. It activates the felt sense, which allows a deeper rappport with nature. Songs, and the way they form within us, are little pieces of the wild. They grow on us.

This aesthetic dimension to the experience of nature can seem divorced from the political concerns about climate change. It’s not though, it’s central. As Hillman writes in his essay “Orpheus” :

“…the environmental movement must find the Orphic mode of poiesis to enchant the human ears to hear the singing of the world, ears that have become stone deaf, and human actions that have become boringly wooden with ecological rationality”

Orpheus was the master singer, able to enchant the rocks and animals, even move the Dead. He made even the Furies weep, which they never forgave him for. His music reflected life, both the experience of a little human life and the way a song opens us into a cosmology. Actually, all song has a cosmology hidden in it, even now. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in his wonderful memoir Acid For the Children writes: “All music has magic in it ya know, even shitty pop music.” Perhaps it’s that that stops so many of us from singing, in case the magic escapes and we have to live up to it.

Tolkein, a master cosmologist, placed song at the heart of his cosmology myth, the Ainulindale.  In the begining, he wrote, was the One, known as Eru, or Illuvator.  From the void he brought forth song, and sang into beings Powers called the Valar, who would continue the singing, singing the world into being, that would be home to plants, rocks, animals as well as humans.. (Check out Evan Palmers wonderful illustrated version here)

The myth suggests that, like the Boy knows, singing is easy, because everything is a kind of song. Except of course it’s equally easy to end end up feeling not like the Little Boy as he whistles away but sometimes feeling like the Giant, who knows he Just Can't Do It.

Because, even though whistlting is easy, so is being blocked. Maintaining the cheerful attitude of a boy wandering through the woods isn’t always possible.

In the Ainudinale, Tolkein weaves a myth of a world made from song. However, he also gives an account of how come in the midst of this song of beauty there is such suffering, pain, sadism, dominion and what he would call evil. 

For Tolkein, all this actually stems from the attempt to be creative - or rather to be original.  The most mighty of the Powers, Melkor,  wishes to create his own world.  He wanders into the void, looking for the imperishable flame that is the secret of life (ironically it is with him all the time, and not hidden).   His loneliness turns to despair, and to a dark desire to capture and rule all the beauty that he has felt.  His song becomes dark, bitter, ugly, dischordant, poisoned, stormlike, threatening, whining, miserable, treacherous and many things beside.

Yet the mystery of this ugly shadow world ends up deepening the song.   And that's what's hard about singing - it opens up and reveals the heart, and shows us a mirror.  Mirrors are dangerous things. We might want the mirror to only show us in our best light - but we run the risk of becoming rather too thin as our image gets reflected around.  And we are surrounded by more mirrors now than at any time in human history. The moment of opening up can be moments of growth but could also of a kind of soul possession.

Singing, and indeed all creative processes involve opening up.  This opening up also let's something in, which may be how come creative processes work best when they involve a simple sharing as it’s end point. Singers must open up twice, once to let the song in, and the second time to let the response to their singing of it in. The danger lies in what enters in when this opening is made. If the song is being possessed rather than shared than damage can be done to the soul, in the moment the amplification of it’s desires recieves validation. Perhaps that’s how come we are fascinated with the lives of rock stars - they have entered the perilous realm, and we want to see if it swallows them up or they emerge with treasures in great store.

The true vulnerable moment, is not the singing, but when the song ends, and perhaps more so 15 minutes later, when the song has faded, and an emptying out has taken place. It’s this that makes singing hard, not so much the moment of singing but the relinquishing of the song later. If singing belongs in some part to the Child, let's not forget that although the Child loves to sing, but finds it hard to share....and that Giant’s possessed by child-like emotions can do real damage.

Songs are promiscuous - they want to be shared - but what is shared? Flea writes about listening to the band the Germs at the age of 17, and discovering a freedom of simplicity

It became clear that virtuosity and musical sophistication were no longer essential to me and could even be an impediment to musical expression! This realisation did not diminish my love for the most complex music, but made my world a less limited place blowing to smithereens the walls of judgment that surrounded my art. I was a freed man. All that mattered was integrity of motivation, the ability to express your own emotion with whatever vehicle was available to you…

…Bob Marley said it did not even matter what kind of music you played, or even the quality of it. All that mattered was complete comittment in the moment of chanelling it.

In the chaotic hardcore punk simplicity of the Germs, Flea heard the sound of the Giant whistling. Complete comitment in the moment of chanelling it. The moment Flea describes is what Jung called a Primordial Image, “a deeply graven river bed in the psyche, in which the waters of life, instead of flowing as before in a shallow stream, suddenly swell into a mighty river”

Jung wrote of this

The moment when this mythological sitution appears is always characterised by a peculiar emotional intensity. It is as though chords were struck in us whose existence we have never suspected were unlosed (CG Jung: Relation of Psychology to Poetry: 1970: 325)

Maybe that’s what makes singing hard. It’s that it’s easy to fall into a primordial image. It’s only a song. Your heartbreak, your animal desire, your blues, your raw power, only a song. Yet a simple song is an Angel. Angel means messenger - songs bring messages. I discovered when I started singing with DLC one day. That band always sought out messages in the moment of the singing, not repeating them, but looking for the wings and guiding light that comes from just letting it happend. When we seek out that moment of comitment in the moment of chanelling it, it’s quite possible to discover that although Angels may simply be messengers, all angels are terrifying to see…after all what is harder than hearing the truth? No wonder the fact that it’s easy to sing also makes it hard to actually sing sometimes.


(Territory by Toby Chown)

all the best

Toby

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