Soulcraft Musings

Today, January 20, 2017, we inaugurate Soulcraft Musings, a new offering from Animas Valley Institute (see below). This is the same day America inaugurates a new president, a cultural upheaval currently mobilizing thousands of response teams worldwide. On this day we commence our humble project of Soulcraft Musings in support of the deepening, diversification, and flourishing of all life. At this time in the world, may we all inaugurate actions and projects that collectively give birth to a life-enhancing society.

The journey of descent to soul has largely been forgotten in mainstream culture, but there is nothing more essential in the world today. The experiential encounter with soul is the key element in the initiatory journey that culminates in true adulthood. And true adults — visionary artisans — are the generators of the most creative and effective actions in defense of all life and in the renaissance and evolution of generative human cultures.

The encounter with soul is not a weekend workshop but an unfolding journey over many months or years. Harvesting its fruit and feeding the world with its bounty plays out over the rest of one’s life. Every day holds opportunities for each of us to prepare for the journey to the underworld of soul, or, once we have embarked upon the journey, to take our next steps, or to gather its mystical treasures and hone them into practical shapes, or to fashion never-before-seen delivery systems for carrying these gifts to the Earth community.

We, at Animas Valley Institute, would like to gift you with this weekly email of trail markers (cairns) on the journey to soul. These Soulcraft Musings, although each only a couple minutes of reading, will be, we trust, valuable guidelines and support on your journey. Each includes references for further reading, study, and practice. And each features a resonant image and poem.

The central theme that ties together all the Musings is, of course, soul and the human encounter with soul. But even the original depth meaning of the word soul has been lost to the modern mind. What we at Animas mean when we speak or write about soul is not what you’ll find in contemporary religious, spiritual, philosophical, or psychological traditions or in everyday conversation. We’ll explore these and many other fundamentals and principles in Soulcraft Musings.

If you’re already on our list, you’ll receive an email with a Soulcraft Musing once a week. If you’re not on our list and would like to subscribe, please click here.

And please feel free to share Soulcraft Musings widely with friends, family, and colleagues.

In wildness and wonder,

Bill Plotkin

Founder

Animas Valley Institute

View Previous Musings

Friday, February 27, 2026

Imagining Earth

Part III

This is the third part of multi-part Musing (one per week) from Geneen Marie Haugen’s Imagining Earth as published in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth [1], in honor of the ten-year anniversary of the second edition.

As If Participation Matters

Who would we become if we honored the other-than-human world as if it matters to them and to us? If we do not already recognize that the Others are spiritual-psychic presences as well as physical beings, perhaps it’s still possible to teach ourselves to sense the world from a different set of assumptions, from a different lens, from a different view.

For most contemporary Western adults, intentionally participating with the other-than-human world requires vivid imagination. But an enchanted world is the natural home of human children. Until the spell is broken, the world sparkles and brims with companions and playmates, daemons and demons. Everything is alive and significant, thrilling, sometimes terrifying. Stones, clouds, and butterflies are capable of conversation. For most Western adults, the spell was broken long ago, and an enchanted worldview of anyone past age 6 or so is easily dismissed as naivete, animism, magical thinking, or regarded with suspicion — perhaps mental illness or crackpot mysticism. Yet who does not long, perhaps secretly or with despair, to live in a sentient, meaningful cosmos?

It is one matter to imagine that grass, mountains, Moon, willows, warblers, and weasels are worthy of — and receptive to — our praise and respectful attitudes; it’s another matter entirely to deeply believe this, to apprehend out of our own sensate experience that creatures and the body of Earth itself are aware of and in some way responsive to us — and that perhaps there even participants in human affairs, whether or not we notice. If, as you grew an awareness of the world, you were taught – as children have been taught in many traditional cultures — that the other-than-human world is in conversation with you, asking from you a devoted attention, your experience of the world, your participation, would reflect that foundational understanding. You would be profoundly attuned to the slightest variations in the habits of birds, the arrival of unfamiliar insects, the emergence of rare leaves, the inaudible voice in the forest that says, “wait here”. You wait, and in a moment a spotted fawn, or a sow grizzly, pads into view.

A lifetime of such experience would confirm your unshakable belief in communion with an animate, intelligent world.

Even a few such experiences might momentarily assuage the terrible loneliness of living in a meaningless, insentient universe.

References

[1] Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, Second Edition (2016)

Photo: Responsive Awareness [collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.