Soulcraft Musings

Friday, February 20, 2026

Imagining Earth

Part II

This is the second 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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Imagination as Threshold

At dawn in summer, I carry my flute to the top of the slickrock mesa, where the undulating stone summit overlooks valleys, canyons, distant ridges, and peaks. I play the walnut flute as a way of beginning the day, greeting the world, offering melodies to rock, clouds, ponderosa, cottonwood in the draw below, grasses in the fields, meadowlarks, doves, finches, lizards. I play as if there are listeners. The music is simple, untrained. Sometimes I get lost in the rhythm of my breath moving through the flute body, emerging as music, and other times I am keenly aware of the Others, my companions in the dazzling world.

I have been teaching myself this practice of offering small beauty and reciprocity to the world, a practice that is deepened each time I play as if creatures other than human beings might hear me. It is an enormous act of imagination to participate as if even stone “hears” and plays a part of the land’s organs of perception. I began many years ago engaging with the world as if it mattered to the Others as well as to me; I began with whispers, with gentle touches, then with praise, poetry, song — actively imagining that it did matter, somehow, even if there was no apparent response. But such offerings brought me more alive and perhaps opened some hidden organ of perception in me, because the world in which I am embedded seemed to tremble with greater aliveness too, like the sudden greening that follows desert rain.

I want to inhabit a fully animate world — and sometimes I do, although not usually while paying bills or getting the tires rotated. In fact, the animate Earth seldom reaches me when I’m involved in the tasks of maintaining a twenty-first century life. The laptop seldom speaks, the espresso pot is silent. Even the stones, antlers, and feathers gathered on sills and shelves are mute. But perhaps the world itself does not change; perhaps the anima mundi is always near a receptive; perhaps the only lens with which I perceive the world shifts or widens. Engaging with the exuberant wild Earth from a different, deeply imaginative mode of participating consciousness might be something like donning 3-D glasses — a shimmering new dimension is revealed, and it is not just visual. The numinous psychic atmosphere pulses with aliveness, crackles with curiosity.

Can contemporary Western people reopen the gates of perception to an intelligent, meaningful cosmos, the cosmos has experienced by “nature mystics” and many traditional people – perhaps even our own distant ancestors? If we cultivate the imaginative consciousness that allows for experience and perception of the anima mundi, would we be able to continue shutting down Earth’s life support systems? Would people who practiced reciprocity to an animate, intelligent Earth have invented fracking, strip mines, Three Mile Island, or the economies of weapons, massive warfare, and destruction? Maybe. Yet it’s difficult to envision how a culture of reciprocity would have developed the necessary Earth-assailing technology; such things would have would have been, perhaps, as unimaginable as schemes to demolish our own loved ones would be to contemporary people.

References

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

Photo: Beyond The Known [collage]. Doug Van Houten

To read previous musings click here.