Soulcraft Musings

Friday, March 6, 2026

Imagining Earth

Part IV

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

Approaching the Mystery

In mainstream religious traditions, a creator maybe ostensibly worshipped while the creation itself is dishonored; Our Western political system and economy are rife with people who claim, for example, allegiance with Judeo-Christian religions yet do not flinch at profiting from the destruction of Earth’s life support systems. Reverence is reserved for a disembodied god, or for an afterlife, while the physical universe — the creation itself — is largely regarded as inanimate, dead, a warehouse of senseless objects for exploitation and consumption.

Yet some contemporary people, even now, find the presence of gods or the great mystery in the physical universe itself — in the green genius of photosynthesizers, in the owl carrying a shrew into the sky, in the Cosmological epic inscribed in the dark heavens, in the Moon’s love dance with the tides, in the baffling layers of geological history. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass…” writes Mary Oliver in The Summer Day.

Paying attention, kneeling in the grass — these are acts of reciprocity, and who knows but that Earth responds to this loving attention? Perhaps grass knelt upon in reverence, or ecstasy, or even in grief transmits a secret affirming signal to earthworms and microbes, burrowers and fungi. Perhaps a tree whose bark is caressed by kind hands tingles and flashes to its budding tips with the nourishing sap. Perhaps the shaggy pregnant bison who hears a soft voice singing registers the sound with quickening rush of blood to her womb.

If we cannot gauge the effect our attentions have on the other-than-human world, if we cannot measure the value to bison or frogs, owls or grass, perhaps we might notice how we ourselves are opened, at least for a moment. How we, for those attentive minutes or seconds or hours, are not the same isolated human being. A practice of attending an animate world may have a cumulative effect of arranging our own consciousness in a way that we cannot later withdraw from without pain. And experience of sitting in contemplation with prairie grass, for example, may resurge into aliveness later, when we realize we are mindlessly grabbing weedkiller out of the garage in our ordinary campaign on undesirable tenants. A felt-sense of praising the wild stream may become present for us again, later, when we are poised to flush questionable cleaning products down the drain, or when we are heedlessly running water through the tap, our only concern whether it’s purified to our own standards.

In an intriguing thought experiment, Richard Tarnas invites readers of Cosmos and Psyche to imagine that “you are the universe” — an extravagant stretch of almost anyone’s imagination, especially to imagine yourself as “a deep-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence.” You, as the intelligent ensouled universe, are approached by two distinctly different suitors who embody radically divergent ways of knowing — or epistemologies — and who presumably want to know you. The two suitors have contrasting approaches, and you have a choice. Would you reveal yourself most fully to the suitor who regards you as inferior, controllable, and lacking in purpose, or would you reveal your trembling depths to the suitor “who viewed you as at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery” as the suitor? [2]

If the world seems vacant of mystery, without intelligence or feeling, lacking in purpose, absent of psyche, might it be because we step into the world with heavy feet and dulled senses, our imaginations hijacked by corporate advertising, inane “entertainment”, mindless screen addictions and media-manufactured fear? Maybe some people thrive in a meaningless, unfeeling universe, on a dead planet whose only purpose is to provide objects for consumption, but I cannot say that I am acquainted with anyone who truly flourishes in such circumstance.

When the culture does not honor or recognize the world as soul-filled, an individual practice of going forth into our lives as if everything is intelligent and participatory is both essential and risky. We may lose friends, or make new ones, or both.

References

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

[2] Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche:Intimations of a New Worldview (2006)

Photo: Kneeling in Grass Field [Photo]. DriftlessRamblings

To read previous musings click here.