Soulcraft Musings

Friday, February 13, 2026

Imagining Earth

Part I

This is the first 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.

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If we approached rivers, mountains, dragonflies, redwoods, and reptiles as if all are alive, intelligent , suffused with soul, imagination and purpose, what might the world become? Who would we become if we participated intentionally with such an animate Earth? Would the world quicken with life if we taught our children- and ourselves! — to sing and celebrate the stories embedded in the body of the Earth, in the granite bones of mountains and rainy sky tears, in trembling volcanic bellies and green scented hills? What if we apprehended that by nourishing the land and creatures with generous praise and gratitude, with our remembrance or tears, we rejuvenate our own relationship with the wild Earth, and possibly revitalize the anima mundi — or soul of the world?

These were questions I posed to a group of environmental education graduate students during a conversation about Aboriginal Australian songlines — the stories of totemic ancestral journeys imprinted into the land during the Dreamtime, stories that are at once profoundly mythic and, according to at least one researcher, imbued with a deep sense of ecology. Traditional belief suggests that singing or dancing the songlines keeps the land alive. I hoped to fire up the students’ imaginations with the possibility that even contemporary Western people like us might hear the layered geo-poetry and bio-mythos of the land and inhabitants, and honor them with spoken praise, or song, or dance. Or even – and perhaps especially — grief for what the wild Earth has endured at our hands.

“Isn’t that a little contrived?” one student asked. “It doesn’t feel comfortable to talk to trees or the river.”

True enough, I agreed. It’s difficult for Western adults to even imagine that stone or water, forests or creatures have their own ancestral stories — epic journeys and transformations that are not necessarily the stories we tell about them. It’s even more difficult, perhaps, for us to imagine engaging with those stories, participating with their words, gifts, music, or gesture. But what if, I asked, we simply practiced honoring the wild Others as if they could hear us as if they were responsive, and as if Earth depended on this reciprocity for continued flourishing?

“Well,” one of the students allowed, “it would be a different world.”

Toward an Animate World

A sense of the world’s numinous, animating dimension, its psyche or soul — its anima mundi — began to recede from the minds of Western people centuries ago. The modern scientific and industrial enterprise is based upon the Cartesian severance of psyche from matter — how else would we bear vivisection, mountaintop removal, rivers poisoned with effluents? Most never questioned the common view that the world is made up of dead or insentient matter, even though our own senses and experiences might sometimes suggest otherwise. For contemporary people, expressing the possibility (or certainty) that there is sentience, psyche, or soul present in everything can be socially risky though not life threatening, but when radical cosmologist Giordano Bruno affirmed the animate nature of all matter in the sixteenth century, he was burned at the stake for beliefs that challenged the divinely ordained authority of the Medieval Church.[2] With Bruno’s execution, and with the loss of so many other humans and other-than-human beings, the anima mundi — uncelebrated, dishonored — slipped further into the shadows.

James Hillman writes of the need for psychology to return psychic depths to the world, without which we have been trying to heal or treat individual human patients without recognizing sentience — and suffering — in the world in which our individual lives are embedded. [3] It is not clear to me that the world has actually lost its psychic depths, but surely there are few among us who, like Thomas Berry, recognize that the world is saturated in psyche – that “the universe from the beginning has been a psychic-spiritual as well as a physical-material reality.”[4]

We generally regard our bodies as ours, distinct from what is outside our skin, yet our bodies depend on air, water, sunlight — and food, which in turn depends on air, water, sunlight, food. The elements of our bodies were born in a primeval supernova billions of years ago who can be sure where our bodies begin or end?

The familiar view suggests that psyche is entirely subjective residing in the gray matter of the individual brain; yet can we be confident of making the cut that isolates our “own” psyche, mind, or imagination from the larger psyche of the world when we dream of communicating with animals, or of landscapes we have never seen, or when we have a sudden intuition about a distant beloved, or when we have visionary experience, or “remember” lives we have not lived? When we recognize that our animal companions dream, have memory, and sometimes know when we are within miles or hours of arriving home, or when we are aware that the plants may respond to our affections, can we be certain that psychic depths are limited to human beings? And even though, by now, the idea of the interconnected body-mind-soul has permeated the “new age” (and beyond), how often do we enact our lives accordingly, as if there is intimate relationship between our imaginations or mental habits and our bodily experience, including our experiences in the embodied, ensouled world beyond ourselves?

References

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

[2] Christian DeQuincy, Radical Nature: Redeeming the Soul of Matter (2002)

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

[4] Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (2006)

Photo: Blazing a Trail [collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.