Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin

       Introduction

       Re-Visioning Our Selves

      Let the day grow on you upward

      through your feet,

      the vegetal knuckles,

      to your knees of stone,

      until by evening you are a black tree;

      feel, with evening,

      the swifts thicken your hair,

      the new moon rising out of your forehead,

      and the moonlit veins of silver

      running from your armpits

      like rivulets under white leaves.

      Sleep, as ants

      cross over your eyelids.

      You have never possessed anything

      as deeply as this.

      This is all you have owned

      from the first outcry

      through forever;

      you can never be dispossessed.

      — DEREK WALCOTT, “EARTH”

      It’s time to take another look at ourselves — to re-enliven our sense of what it is to be human, to breathe new life into ancient intuitions of who we are, and to learn again to celebrate, as we once did, our instinctive affinity with the Earth community in which we’re rooted. We’re called now to rediscover what it means to be human beings in a wildly diverse world of feathered, furred, and scaled fellow creatures; flowers and forests; mountains, rivers, and oceans; wind, rain, and snow; Sun and Moon.

      It’s time to take an ecological and holistic look at the human psyche, to make a fresh start with Western psychology.¹ In an era when the revealed interdependency of all things is radically reshaping every field of knowledge, what might we discover about the human psyche — the totality of our psychological capacities, both conscious and unconscious — when we consider that we, too, are expressions of nature’s qualities, patterns, and motifs?

      We’re being summoned by the world itself to make many urgent changes to the human project, but most central is a fundamental re-visioning and reshaping of ourselves, a shift in consciousness. We must reclaim and embody our original wholeness, our indigenous human nature granted to us by nature itself. And the key to reclaiming our original wholeness is not merely to suppress psychological symptoms, recover from addictions and trauma, manage stress, or refurbish dysfunctional relationships but rather to fully flesh out our multifaceted, wild psyches, committing ourselves to the largest story we’re capable of living, serving something bigger than ourselves. We must dare again to dream the impossible and to romance the world, to feel and honor our kinship with all species and habitats, to embrace the troubling wisdom of paradox, and to shape ourselves into visionaries with the artistry to revitalize our enchanted and endangered world.

      BECOMING FULLY HUMAN

      Emerging in the late nineteenth century, Western psychology was seeded in that era’s prevailing practice and philosophy of medicine. Psychology’s focus was on diagnosis and treatment of symptoms, diseases, and “mental illness.” It was, and in many ways still is, an attempt to identify what could and does go wrong with the human psyche when scrutinized outside its cultural and ecological contexts: neuroses, psychoses, personality and attachment disorders, manias, depressions, obsessions, and addictions. With few exceptions — such as Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, James Hillman’s archetypal “re-visioning” of psychology,² and the new field of positive psychology³ — there’s been too little consideration of what is inherently right and inspiring about human beings. There’s been insufficient tending to the process of becoming fully human — an active, deeply imaginative, contributing member of what cultural ecologist David Abram calls the more-than-human world,⁴ a world that includes human society as a subset of a much more extensive Earth community.

      Western