Noticing Where I Am

Today I counted the rings of my emergence. With pen to paper, drawing the rings. Around and around, each circle the representation of a loop in the seasons of my life. Ring by ring I recounted the growth that brought the new skin. The weather that colored the bark. The rise and fall of the waves from cracks and striations. Thirty-eight years of growth and life on this planet and I am only recently living with the awareness of my identity in the context of my environment.

I have been thinking so much about connection with place and the ways that being in relationship with the seasons, with the plants and animals that are my neighbors, calms this fear of abandonment that has taunted me my whole life. How seeing the cycles of the moon, watching the rains swell and quiet, noticing that the Stellar's Jay has left to find its winter home and feeling a deep knowing that I will meet all these again has made me feel more attached and secure than my culture has ever allowed me to. We unfold in the context of the endless unfolding, and life and death are just seasons in the circle. In this, my anxiety and my fear have turned into grounding.

In Ecotherapy; Healing Ourselves, Clinebell (1996) speaks of how the denial of our animal selves, our place in the context of nature is a way of "denying human finitude, contingency, vulnerability, and eventual death. The dominant urban, scientific, death-denying mentality tends to be used to support illusions of control over uncertainties, contingencies, and vulnerabilities of the many experiences that really are beyond human control" (p. 32). But what if, as has felt true for me, the letting go of delusions of control, the reconnection with our primal selves is what ultimately can free us from our suffering, our fear, our anxieties? And what if, in that reconnection to our place in nature, emerging from denial of the inescapable reality that we are nature and not separate from it is the thing that alleviates this, but also makes it implausible to engage in the processes that are creating our very suffering?

I am interested in looking at the ways we are disembodied from our wildness and how the reconnection to place can help heal the wounds we suffer, as well as help stop the further alienation and distancing that create the problems.

I have begun reading both Roszak (2001) and Clinebell (1996) in search of therapeutic applications of this ecopsychology. I am particularly focused in this project of finding ways that we can use this lens of reconnection to inform the way we treat clients in a therapeutic setting. 

References

Clinebell, H. (1996). Ecotherapy; Healing ourselves, healing the earth. Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress Press.

Roszak, T. (2001). The voice of the earth; An exploration of ecopsychology. Grand Rapids, MU: Phanes Press, Inc.