I feel a huge sense of affirmation and YES after discovering the work of Craig Chalquist who wrote the book Terrapsychology: Re-engaging the soul of place. I believe that we are each born with a deep connection to the living planet but most humans become unconscious of this after young childhood and are encouraged to forget the comfort that we felt from our romps through green messy spaces outside the house (if we were so lucky). Ideas surrounding this concept have been put into a structured annotated scholarly text which can insert these ideas into bigger discussions to connect ecology to psychology and to put human awareness of place into context of our own survival.
During a deep ritual last weekend, I awoke suddenly to my longing and connection to Venezuela, where I was born and lived for 10 years. I couldn't believe that I had not fully realized that naturally, I would be connected to the energy of that place. Being BORN in that geographic location, into the energies of the natural and human history, and into the particular plant and animal energies have probably stayed with me to this day. Then I realized, sadly, how much I actually missed it... I ran around barefoot and dirty for hours after school in the tropical dry forest with thorny trees, wandering brahma cows and tamarinds.
Where we inhabit, love, laugh, run, sing and cry is not simply a backdrop curtain to our experiences, it is an active player with life energies, or lack thereof in some more urban settings, and how do all those life energies combine to influence our views, feelings, modes of being and memories? What ancestral energy or ancestral memory remains in a place to create some inner knowing in our lives, or some unexplainable emotion?
Why do we feel so different on a rock island with swimming iguanas, or in a tidepool with 3 colors of starfish, or in a reef with staghorn coral reaching to the sky, or by the ocean full of jellyfish, or on a quaking bog with trees metronoming back and forth, or swallowed by a dripping rain forest on the sliding steep mud next the spines of a tall palm as a pair of trogons perch above on one of the largest leaves in the plant kingdom? Or in our backyard with our vegetable garden and birdbath...?
Chalquist proposes a critical connection between human wholeness and planetary health. I have long agreed that to inspire the volition in people to save water, conserve energy, or reject consumerism, their psychology needs to be connected to a natural place that they can care about. They need to experience their place with the messiness and chaos that comes with the natural order and chaos of all the connected parts that build up and crash down at different times in different time cycles. This is one reason that I have not agreed with the 'sustainable' urban planning practice of infilling. I don't want to construct on every square inch of brambly woodsy space in urban areas to "prevent urban sprawl." Building upwards is a better way to prevent that. Filling in those rough weedy patches of lone trees between two dead end streets further sterilizes the setting in which we live, pushing us further from any sense of the soul and character of the energy of the place that was, before we arrived so recently. Those patches are an awesome respite for the curious child to get lost in the intricate rotting bark of a branch and all the entomology and mycology it is supporting there.
After reading about terrapsychology and ecotherapy, I was stunned and moved at the idea of skillfully taking a person or group into nature and guiding them to connect to that place in the deepest way that is personal to them which could eventually lead to real healing of our damaged earth. (Think of all the indigenous ways that have been created to help establish such connection.) Grasping the fact of our deep connection to nature "deeply shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional and even lethal human-nature relationship."
