"An individual's harmon with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world." (James Hillman, quoted in Parenting with Spirit by Jane Bartlett).
I was invibing this idea and imagining that the same is true of our spiritual selves, and not only our psychological selves. We are created from God, from the stuff the earth. What connects us to the earth connects us to our 'own deep self,' and also to the One from Whom all created essence flows and vibrates its creational songs, crying out the Joy! of Being. What's connecting you to you to the earth, to your 'own deep self' and to the One, like you and I, who entered the created order through a natural mother and cried, "I am here!"?
Labels: environment, Spiritual Formation
I think this is difficult. Many of us live in a concrete jungle of sorts and lead busy lives with little time to connect. The older I get the more protective I am of solitude, silence, and even simplicity in my life. It seems like when I am practicing these things, my mind and soul are alert and listening, and I feel the deepest connection to my environment on its many levels and to myself as well. You might find the quote below interesting regarding this. My apologies for posting it in its entirety, I couldn’t find the original link.
In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes Belden Lane describes habitus. Habitus denotes the intimate connection between spirit and place. Belden writes that this connection, “..is hard to grasp for those of us living in a post-Enlightenment technological society. Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable link between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being. Our concern is simply to move quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.
“We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less to perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus. Where we live - in what we are rooted - no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the “free individual” at the expense of a network of related meanings.
“Without a habitus - particularly one that is drawn, at least in part, from the rhythm of the land around us - our habitat ceases to be a living partner in the pursuit of common wholeness. We become alienated from an environment that seems indifferent, even hostile. Habitat turns into scenery, inconsequential background. Habitus is reduced to a nonsacramental, individualistic quest for transcendent experience. We lose any sense of being formed in community, particularly in a tradition that allows us to act unconsciously, with ease and delight, out of a deep sense of what is natural to us and to our “milieu.” We are, in short, a people without “habit,” with no common custom, place, or dress to lend us shared meaning.”