“Nature
Naturing”
“We are
an intimate and integral part of nature, neither separate from nor
superior to, neither an afterthought nor an add-on; we are nature
naturing.”
Jerry R.
Wright
Last night, I dreamed of
a woman, half of whose body was composed of earthly elements—leaves
and brown dirt, plants and soil. The other half was covered with
human skin and was lovely. She looked a little like Bo Derek in Ten,
except half of her was earth. The word in the dream was something
like, “patua-land” which I can't find the definition for. The
closest is Greek, pronounced “patrida,” which means motherland.
In my dream she had been shot and badly wounded, but was still alive.
I pay attention to dreams. I wonder whether you do. Dreams like this
one come from the deep unconscious—from what Carl Jung called the
“collective unconscious.” It is the “inner equivalent of
creation, an inner cosmos as infinite as the cosmos outside us.”
(Jolande Jacobi; Complex, Archetype, Symbol, p.59)
The collective
unconscious is composed of the experience and wisdom, as well as the
pitfalls and weaknesses, of our ancestors going back for thousands of
years and is housed in our genetic code. In every human being, some
genes are turned on and some are turned off, which makes for the
unique traits or combination of qualities expressed in each of us. In
The Kingdom Within, John Sanford wrote: “The unconscious
is not only the basement of our minds into which we place the
discarded material of our own lives; it is also the ocean out of
which our conscious lives have sprung, and over which the ships of
our souls sail their course through life.”
So, my dream of the
half-earth, half-human woman whose been shot, but is still alive,
doesn't take a whole lot of digging to figure out, does it? We are
part of nature, as Jungian Analyst, Jerry Wright says, we are “nature
naturing.” We are gravely injured, on life support, but we're not
dead yet. For me, it is a plea for help—for attention to our
nature, our earth, our motherland. The major existential crisis of
our time is just as Greta Thunberg says: it is climate change due to
global warming. No matter what half of our population says—no
matter how much money is to be made pumping oil out of the ground—we
are in dire trouble if we don't wake up and do what needs to be done.
All the money in the world will not save us as a species if our
planet burns to the ground or floods the land upon which we depend.
It is time for us to
think differently if we want our children and grandchildren to have
an existence on this planet. It's not a far-off, future thing; it is
here and it is now. Instead of finding all the ways that we are
different and “special,” it would behoove us to start seeing
ourselves as one among many, one part of the natural world among
many. Here is a way to think about that. It's from Jerry Wright:
“While I am not you, neither am I other than you” This is
true of ourselves and a tree, ourselves and an ocean, or ourselves
and every other animal, including other human animals, living on this
earth.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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