Soulcraft Musings

Friday, March 13, 2026

Imagining Earth

Part V

This is the fifth and final 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.

Practice of Attending

Human beings and many other mammals don’t flourish in the absence of affection, but is this response limited to warm-blooded, mammary-glanded, peripatetic creatures like us? If we believed otherwise, would we pass through the world so casually, riveted to the tunnel-vision of human desire? Or would our human inventions be coherent with natural systems — our buildings shaped of local materials, our energy sources ever-renewing, our industries compatible with ecological design? What our first love with wild iris or bluebirds or rainforest be loyal and enduring, would we sing back to river and wind?

A practice of honoring the other-than-human world — both embodied and numinous — informs me in my work as a guide to the intertwined mysteries of nature and psyche approaching the world as if it is alive an intelligent sometimes causes a wobble in ordinary experience and perception, not only for me but sometimes for participants.

Once I had a man in a short program who had a long history of activism on behalf of wild places, particularly the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and who considered himself deeply informed about the wild Earth. I invited my group to wander out for a brief solo “conversation” with nature, on the land that held some of the dangers of true wildness —opportunities to get lost, large creatures, including moose and bears — even though the land is no longer truly wild. If you walk far enough in any direction, you will encounter, not far away, a road, a well-worn trail, or a waterway whose direction will be a compass for locating yourself again. But this man returned from his solo time with wide eyes and bewildered expression. He said that although he’d spent a lot of time in “wilderness”, he had never before, not once, been alone — no other human within his range of hearing or vision. He had never noticed so many phenomena not pointed out to him by a guide or companion; he had never heard the full polyphony of creaking trees, muted wind in the grass, unidentified footfalls through the dark timber, distant purl of water, rapid chatter of squirrels and whistles, trills, and shrieks of birds overhead. Noticing these things — noticing enough to recognize that he was a nervous, a beginner, an initiate, still only a visitor, hardly intimate, hardly fluent in a land whose language he barely understood — was perhaps his first true act of intimate reciprocity, his first act of offering his deepest attention to the animate world.

On another day, a woman walked into the forest, offering spoken praise to Moss, to Douglas fir and spruce, to the unknown birds flitting in the branches. She listened and waited, walked slowly on, over the carpet of pine needles, elk droppings, and low-growing plants. She moved softly, noticing the sunlight slanting through the green canopy, noticing the shining webs of spiders hanging between limbs, noticing the particular cracks and furrows in the skin of the old trees. She pressed her nose against a certain tree, caressing the brown bark with her bare hands. She stepped into a small clearing and felt her skin prickle, the intelligent rise of hair on the back of the neck. Breathing slowly, she sensed an immense, sentient presence, since that she was not only witnessing the inarticulate Others, but that she was being witnessed.

Another woman had previously walked in the forest only with the sense of being alien, an intruder, an unwelcome disturbance. She was quite convinced that she and other people have no natural place amidst the wild. Yet her dream suggested a longing and perhaps even grief about her distance from wild nature — her own wild nature, and the Earth’s. During the day, she walked deeper into an image presented in a dream. She took a path towards swampy ground where she covered her hands and face and feet with mud. Whether she intended it or not, the clay secretly did its work, transforming her ordinary edges, blurring the line between the civilized, rational human and primordial self. When — after lingering in the swampy clearing, attentive to the long grass is, the sun, the perimeter of trees, the insects over the water she walked into the forest again, mud cracking on her skin and drifting into the air as fine dust, she experienced herself as Earth emerged from Earth. She recognized herself as Earth walking.

Sometimes we might experience a sudden, unanticipated rearrangement of consciousness regarding ourselves in relationship to a wider community — a moment of epiphany that may or may not become a watershed, a trail marker, a cairn, for the direction the rest of our life turns. We may even long for such moments to be touched by a divine dianoia — a profound experiential knowing that shakes, and forever changes, the foundational beliefs that underlie perceptions.

We might be lucky enough to accidentally stumble into such a revelatory experience without preparation, without practice, without planning period an encounter with unfathomable beauty, terminal illness, or any extreme of human experience might induce a sudden shift in consciousness, a sacred knowing. But perhaps more commonly, states of non-ordinary perception are first entered with practice — meditation, prayer, chant, trance dance — or perhaps with the sacramental entheogen such as peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, or ayahuasca.

The woman who experienced herself as Earth walking, the woman who experienced a sense of being witnessed by the mute Others, the man who recognized himself as a pilgrim, a novice in the wild world — each walked “deliberately”, as Thoreau did, into the meadows, swamped, and forest. Each walked with aroused imagination, as if all the world is alive and participatory. They practiced offering themselves — body and senses, imagination, wonder, attention, and praise. None of them knew in advance that they would be any different upon return period of course, a single event does not necessarily reorient a life, but a practice of imaginative reciprocity to the animate world is a doorway through which we might slip into experiential, somatic, emotional, psychic knowing that the world is not quite what we previously believed, and that we’re not quite who we thought we were.

Revitalizing the soul of the world depends on a conscious, engaged relationship between human beings and earth. If our discernment of anima mundi is dim — as it is for most contemporary people — purposeful acts of radical imagination can stir and awaken our perceptions. James Hillman writes that our “imaginative recognition the childlike act of imagining the world, animates the world and returns its soul.”[2]

Perhaps the world deeply longs for the consciously imagining human to participate in birthing a new era in the human earth relationship. A practice of approaching the world as if everything is alive — saturated with psyche purpose and intelligence — re-enlivens us; in companionship with our increasing human aliveness, the world shimmers and both possibility and pain, no longer insentient, no longer without its own longings, its psychic depths, its soul.

References

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

[2] James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (1992)

Photo: Shadows of Woman and tree, on the Mud [Photo]. katepax

To read previous musings click here.