More SOULCRAFT...

Here is some more excellent material from the book SOULCRAFT by Bill Plotkin. Much food for thought...

There are many varieties of addicition, but, sooner or later, we each have to address what is the paramount addiction in the Western world: our psychological dependence on the worldview and lifestyle of Western civilization itself. This is the point brilliantly made by eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning in her book My Name Is Chellis, and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization. The Western worldview says, in essence, that technological progress is the highest value and that we were born to consume, to endlessly use and discard natural resources, other species, technological gadgets, toys, and, often, other people, especially if they are poor or from the Third World. The most highly prized freedom is the right to shop. It's a world of commodities, not entities, and economic expansion is the primary measure of progress. Competition, taking, and hoarding are higher values than cooperation, sharing, and gifting. Profits are valued over people, money over meaning, Firest-World entitilement over global peace and justice, "us" or "them." This addiction is the most dangerous one inf the world, not only because of its impact on most of humanity but because it is rapidly undermining the natural systems that sustain the earth's biosphere.

All other addictions in the West can be seen as components of this larger one. If we are born to continue, then it is a dog-eat-dog world, there is no deeper meaning, no human soul, and creation is just a huge, dumb joke. That's a conclusion you wouldn't want to live with every day; better to distract and deaden yourself with addictions.

By the time we reach our first adulthood, our ways of thinking about ourselves and the world have been molded and constrained by the predominant values of Western culture. This limits us in ways difficult to see at first; we are like fish in the sea, unconscious of the cultural waters within which we have come of age.

All children and adolescents fashion personalities that fit within their native culture. In the West, that means a society largely materialistic, synthetic, technological, anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and egocentric. Fitting in with such a culture is difficult to accomplish without losing contact with our souls and with nature, the web of life. Western lifestyles that revolve around a constant barrage of anemic distractions may be, in part, ways of self-numbing so as to minimize the pain of that loss. Many people have succumbed to daily routines of soul-starving entertainment, superficial fashion, and mind-numbing jobs.

This way of life becomes an addiction. The more we live this way, the more alienated we become from something deeper and more meaningful, and the more we need this way of life to keep us from experiencing that alienation.

How do you address an addiction this pervasive? Begin with the soulcraft practices found in these pages. Relinquishing attachment to the adolescent identity is a primary means of overcoming our dependence on the cultural worldview within which that identity was formed.

Appreciation

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. - William Blake

Thoughts on SOULCRAFT

Had a friend lend me his personal copy of SOULCRAFT by Bill Plotkin. I am loving the book, and find it is one that for me takes slow and deliberate digestion. I think I will share quotes from it here periodically as I slowly consume what is within it...

Malidoma Some, an African shaman of the Dagara people, gives us an extreme example of how therapy and soulcraft goals can diverge. When Dagara boys undergo their initiation ordeals, the people of the village realize that a few boys will never return; they will literally not survive. Why would they Dagara be willing to make such an ultimate sacrifice? For the boys who die, this is certainly not a therapeutic experience. Although the Dagara love their children no less than we do, they understand, as the elders of many cultures emphasize, that without vision - without soul embodied in the culturally creative small risk of death is preferable to the living death of an uninitiated life. Besides, when we compare Dagara society with our own, we find that an ever greater percentage of our teenagers die - through suicide, substance abuse, auto accidents, and gang warfare - in their unsuccessful attempts to initiate themselves.

It is fascinating that in such a risk-avoiding, convenience driven-society as our own we think that people such as the Dagara are backwards or violent because of such initiations. Yet, the evidence is there to show us how our own children are seeking to be initiated through the only vehicles they see fit to use... drugs, alcohol, fast driving, gangs and so on.

In addition, many of the children who survive in our culture and make it into so called adulthood, hardly seemed to have grown into true man or womanhood. Some, no matter what age they might be, are still children who happen to be in adult bodies.

Graduations, promotions, legal drinking age, and other small acknowledgments of the transitions in life are in our society a generally soul-less affair. They address the mundane transitions, but not the deeply individual changes occurring at those times.

From Tracking Apprenticeship Winter Outing

A Langauge Older... revisited

A great quote from Derrick Jensen that has made its way into my present life again.

There is a langauge older by far, and deeper than words. Its the langauge of bodies. Body on body. Wind on snow. Rain on trees. Wave on stone. Its the langauge of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We've forgotten this langauge. We don't even remember that it exists. - D.J.

A beautiful quote from a series of documentaries called THE NATIONAL PARKS: AMERICAS BEST IDEA. The series is so powerful, it moved me to tears on several occasions. And, that's saying a lot since I have only watched 2 out of the 6 parts... :)

As long as I live, I'll hear the birds, and the winds, and the waterfalls sing. I'll interpret the rocks, and learn the language of flood and storm and avalanche. I'll make the acquittance of the wild gardens and glaciers, and get as near to the heart of this world as I could.

And so I did. I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream. Whenever I met a new plant I would sit by it for a minute, or a day. To make its acquittance, hear what it had to tell. I asked the boulders where they had been and wittered they were going. When night found me, there I camped. I took no more heed to save time or to make haste, then did the trees or the stars. This is true freedom. A good, practical sort of immortality.

- John Muir

From AWCP OR Dunes 2009

If...

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

- IF,
by Rudyard Kipling

The little mysteries

Step out onto the Planet
Draw a circle a hundred feet round

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody's ever really seen

How many can you find?

- Lew Welch