Where the wild things are
Kamalamani, 5 Feburary 2012

The seed for this piece of writing was sown when I started writing about 'ecopsychology': what it is, why it matters and my work as an ecopsychologist. That was a few months ago and the ecopsychology seed has sat in the 'writing' folder of my laptop awaiting watering and tending. Writing about ecopsychology didn't engage me, so I gave up. I wasn't disengaged because ecopsychology doesn't matter - in fact, quite the opposite. It's something about the term 'ecopsychology'. It sounds dry, academic, removed from everydayness and ends in 'ology'.

Everything I know about ecopsychology is that it's not dry but moist, it's about reflection and action, and it is rooted in looking at our everyday view, habits, beliefs, assumptions and expectations with a big sky - and spacious heart - perspective. It isn't simply an area of study - although that's the gateway into it for some people. It's also an area that can be difficult to engage with, calling forth our fearless bits in embodying messy emotions like guilt, grief and bliss.

As I understand it ecopsychology calls us humans to wake up to the fact of our interconnection with other-than-human species and a duty of care to ourselves and the planet. Over the past 20 to 30 years people from a range of different disciplines have sought to raise awareness that we are destroying our home - the earth - and thereby destroying the source of our nourishment and, ultimately, our survival. The school of thought or body of knowledge and practice known as ecopsychology has emerged in response to these calls for awareness and action. Ecopsychologists ask how we can make the transition from facing global crisis to a situation in which we humans recognise our related place with the rest of life, living in a sustainable way, thinking through the legacy we will leave our children.

Ecopsychology asks us to have the courage to look at the effect our life is having on the planet as we speak - as I type. To look and to notice our response. And from the energy of that response decide to do something a bit differently. 'Eco' means home. So ecopsychology asks us to look both at home in the most focused and the most broad way possible. So that's a bit about ecopsychology.

At the moment I'm very struck by the notion of 'wild' as but one theme and dimension of ecopsychology. 'Wild' has interested me for some little while. What I mean by 'wild' is a natural state of being un-cultivated and, to some extent uncivilised. I say uncivilised given some of the more dire consequences of so say 'civilisation' in terms of regulation and control to the point where humans can lose initiative, spontaneity and perhaps even the will to live.

My curiosity about wildness started out in relationship to meditation and Buddhist practice. From day one of learning to meditate I have felt like a mediator who meditated. There I sat - here I sit - mediating between the different facets of my character and engrained habits. Mediating between calm and stormy, wild and tame and the beautiful and ugly parts of this thing I call me. Knowing all the time that it's important that all those bits are there (in fact where else could or should they be?!) and that's it my job to witness, cajole, befriend or whatever in the process of alchemy which is meditation.

Working in Africa I was enchanted by the voice of the wild, and at times literally and metaphorically lost in the wilderness. Exploring wilderness and being at sea in a culture which was so clearly not my own throw me back acutely on my very Englishness and the relative tameness of my habits and expectations. Working as a counsellor and therapist has been a constant reminder to tend to my own wild parts, untamed, shadowy, parts of myself I would sometimes rather not know, as I hold the torch for clients exploring bits of themselves in my plant-filled therapy room - a mini wilderness.

Working with and through the body as a body psychotherapist means that I am party to client's inner hopes and fears. Very often people want peace. They've lost their wildness - their connection with their nature - and want to find it. Culturally most of us have been conditioned to not trust our bodies, to fear what we may find when we relax and tune into our body's wave length rather than habitually staying tuned to Radio Rational. Of course rationality is really important, and so is the wealth of experiences in the body and the riches we uncover when we live and relate in an increasingly embodied way.

How does this 'wild' thing relate to ecopsychology? In facing the global challenges ahead, individually and collectively, we need to know more about ourselves and be more resourced, practically and spiritually. I personally can't see that we're going to fix the world's ills through clever 'green tech' solutions and recycling, although they play an important part. Wild invites us to know our own nature and the uncultivated within us at a time when we have become too cultivated. Many of our lives have become too 'safe' and sanitised and based upon acquisition and status. We have lost contact with the rich mud and meaning of our roots. 

Very often people - not surprisingly - associate ecopsychology and wilderness work as going out into the wilds to find our roots in nature and rooted nature. Well that can certainly be an important part of it, given that nature acts as a mirror and a sort of bridge between our inner and outer natures. Going outdoors is great so long as (in my opinion) we're not continuing the well worn tradition of buying another experience to meet our own needs without considering the effect on the ecosystem of our chosen wilderness. In engaging with ecopsychology we are faced with how we've habitually engaged with our nature - inner and outer.

So, for example, in terms of nature 'out there', as it were, we might be: frightened of nature (town dwellers who fear sleeping in the country because it's too dark and quiet), yearning a constant challenge from nature (the white water rafters), romanticising it (seeing all the loveliness without seeing the teeth and edges) or conquer it (concrete over it). All of these are very understandable responses to nature. Taking these analogies, as humans we can be very frightened of our own silence and darkness, or we might constantly challenge ourselves to the point of exhaustion and burn out, or we choose to see our 'good bits' at the expense of never engaging with the potential of transforming our 'bad bits', or we might want to conceal and bury our experience at all costs.

Engaging with the wild is about noticing our own habits and patterns. This matters because until we've a fairly good grasp of understanding our own nature and what shapes and motivates us, we're unlikely to be able to understand our relationship to others and the world around us. This is important work in the current climate. There are also practical ways in which we can re-engage with the wild. Small but important things. We can notice more about the environment in which we live. The flora and fauna, geology, lay of the land (even if that's city foxes, concrete covered limestone, cityscapes - it's still made of the same elements). We can take more notice of cycles - the changing light in the day, the seasons, the moon's phases, the tides and perhaps recall how our ancestors used these cycles to make sense of their world. We can know more about our related place on earth - who were those ancestors? Notice what relevance they have to you in your life today. Unravelling family stories holding important truths in healing rifts and bringing a different perspective, not to mention spending uncluttered time with those around us now.

Engaging with the world and its species and its amazing complexity, beauty and endangerment (and our endangerment as a human species) means changing our life style habits and nature. We don't know yet - we can't know - whether we've left it too late for sustaining human life on earth in terms of climate change or extreme loss of bio diversity. We still have the capacity to blow ourselves up thousands of times over in terms of nuclear arms. Global terrorism, extreme polarities between poverty and wealth and an unjust, unsustainable global financial system are our backdrop.  Yet we need to start from where we are, honestly, rather than an idea of where we would like to be in the face of very uncomfortable truths. Starting from where we are is knowing more about eco or 'home'. Knowing where we feel at home, whether home is a physical place and/or a lived experience and who we are at home with - if we are to engage with changing our relationship to earth; our home.


Acknowledgement
This piece of writing is dedicated to my great-grandfather, 'Beefy' Palmer, who was a passionate educator, gardener and football fan (born the same year as the founding of 'his' team - Bristol Rovers). The writing started to flow once I walked along his favourite river bank. Thank you Beefy...




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