The Matter of Place: Does Place Matter?

Details: Last Updated: Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37; Written by Medora Woods

Medora Woods, 1997

My particular contribution to the theme of this conference, Geography and Identity in the Age of Cyberspace, is an invitation to wander around the matter of place: first, the question of what may be important to us about place, does place matter? and second, our relationship to place as it mirrors and grows out of the relationship of our dominant culture to matter. I will begin by making more visible the physical, geographical, geological, and bioregional place in which we, at this very moment, are gathered. Where are we? We are in Evanston, Illinois, a city already somewhat invisible, since many of us think we are in "Chicago." We know we are here because we traveled here, not because anything about this space tells us we are in Evanston. Most of us arrived from the air, moving through familiar skies in the same airplanes which carried us when we were headed for other cities. We rented cars, at standardized counters, or we took airport shuttles and taxis; we assumed the ubiquitous presence and qualities of these services. We gather here in the predictable rows of chairs in an anonymous windowless hotel space. We could be in Pittsburgh, Tucson, or Buffalo, Asheville, Austin, or Minneapolis. How many of us here, in this room, know which way is North? Does it matter?

Some years ago, when the international meeting was in Chicago, I was grateful to take part in an orientation to the city provided by the Chicago candidates. On a couple of stunningly clear warm blue days, we experienced some of what is unique about the city, its architecture, neighborhoods, and public art, experiences which are among my most significant memories of that conference. Today, we are on the northern edge of Chicago. According to a recent census report, Evanston is home, in about 30 thousand houses, to about 75 thousand people, about 70 percent of whom are white, over half with incomes in excess of $40,000, and fewer than 10% with incomes below the poverty line. We are in a bedroom community for Chicago, in a landscape dominated by the horizontal presence of Lake Michigan. The city of Evanston is noted for its good schools, wide Midwestern streets, generous frame houses, and towering elms. My father's childhood house is not far from this hotel. I have seen these streets on early evenings in the summer, filled with a green and golden languid light, close to some kind of essence of themselves in the purity of their Midwestern spirit. This is only my sense of where we are.

Today, I want us to wander and wonder about two other places, one, the ghostly place whose spirit still informs the city which has re-placed it, the land, including its related inhabitants, which disappeared beneath this creation of human urban ingenuity. We do not think of the land here as having disappeared. If we think of it at all, we imagine it as the dirt beneath concrete streets and suburban lawns, the dirt which every day is being shoved around, excavated, filled, mounded, and covered with streets, buildings, and artificial landscape. But, once, another land was here. What difference does the unique geography of this land, the plants, animals, and indigenous people who once inhabited it, make to us? After all, the sun shines, the rains come, sometimes snow sweeps down from the North and raw winds blow off the lake, sometimes warm winds from the South bring sticky heat, and fog from the lake can bring air traffic to its knees.

In her book, Far From Tame: Reflections from the Heart of a Continent (Allmann, 1996), Laurie Allmann, describes an area, an eco-region or bio-region, which includes this land and travels diagonally north and west, passing through Minneapolis (where I live) and its part of the Mississippi River watershed, reaching almost to the borders of North and South Dakota. She calls this area a region of transition lands: land of the big woods, rivers, savannas, and bluffs. She describes its eastern portion, where we are now, as "predominantly gently rolling terrain of glacial moraines deposited along the margins of stalled ice sheets, and till deposited by steadily retreating ice sheets (ground moraine) (p. 17)." She says:

"this region is considered by some to be a transition zone from grasslands to forests, and by others as a vegetational region in its own right. Pockets of prairie are found here, but the trademark community is oak savanna: a combination of a prairie understory with dispersed, open-grown oaks, grading in places to dense oak woods. Forests of sugar maple and basswood became established where terrain offered greater protection from fires. The eastern part of the region is known for a local abundance of a groundwater-fed wetland community referred to as the calcereous fen" (p. 18).

The borders of this region are established on the west by less frequent and lower-intensity fires due to firebreaks provided by more irregular topography and rivers. On the north, it is bounded by temperature differences related to latitude. On the east, it is marked by the physical border of Lake Michigan, whose westerlies crossing the lake provide a more moderate climate to Michigan's Lower Peninsula. The land Allmann describes is the land we would see, feel, and inhabit if Chicago and Evanston had not taken its place I imagine this land is still present in spirit.

To the geographies we inhabit, at this moment, in this place, geological, topographical, bioregional, and urban, I would like to add one more: psychological geography. Considering our psychological geography will take me to the central theme of this paper. In asking you to pay attention to our physical location, I depart radically from what is expected at these moments. I suggest that we are gathered in anonymous space, seated in rows of chairs, because, at this moment, to us, this place does not matter. To us, at this moment, matter does not matter. Urban and bioregional communities do not matter, for we could be anywhere. Heating, lighting, and air conditioning systems of this building isolate us from distractions of temperature and precipitation, of season and time of day. We come to this space only to inhabit another, a place where matter is only tangentially relevant, a place of abstraction without physical context, the realm of ideas. I wrote this paper over several weeks, sitting in front of my computer in Minneapolis, near a large round window, through which I watched the leaves of a beloved elm tree yellow and fall to the ground. I present this paper here, hundreds of miles away. Those leaves, that elm, and the seasonal transition which were present to me as I wrote, are now invisible. Does that matter?

To return to the theme of this conference, Geography and Identity in the Age of Cyberspace, let me state the central idea of this paper. I believe that we, as a culture, are the end result of thousands of years of increasing disconnection from place, of which cyberspace is only the latest manifestation. Computers and cyberspace have given rise to a fantasy that, at last, true community, free from the tyranny of location and physical embodiment, is possible. But, as Stephen Talbott points out in his provocative book, The Future does not Compute (Talbott, 1995), what we have not accomplished with our embodied selves in our specific geographical and social locations, we cannot accomplish with the computer.

I will examine the archetypal underpinnings of this cyber-community fantasy in a few minutes. For the moment, let me just point out that cyberspace is a real/unreal no place/place, consisting of invisible electronic impulses and fleeting images on computer screens. That we can imagine such a phenomena to be a place, particularly a place in which we imagine community could exist, suggests to me that it mimics a psychic place which already exists in us, an inner realm of timeless placeless abstract ideas. Looked at in this way, cyberspace is a mirror held up to a disembodied inner realm of ideas. This inner realm is a psychic location we all take for granted, yet it is a relatively recent development in human history. From this perspective, the Heaven's Gate cult, a tragic consequence of our culture's runaway drive to dis-embody and dis-place ourselves, is only a metaphor for what the rest of the culture is doing. Of course, what I am talking about is, at bottom, the split between matter and spirit.

This split between matter and spirit, reflected in our disconnection from place, from the land, from the earth, is a split with profound, ultimately suicidal, consequences for us, in both inner and outer worlds. In the inner world, to quote Fred Gustafson's simple and heartfelt statement in his recent book, Dancing Between Two Worlds: Jung and the Native American Soul (Gustafson, 1997), "I believe we are lonesome for the earthlonesome because we have become more separated from it than we know or our souls can stand (p.109)." I believe our fear of experiencing the deep soul grief of that separation and loss is one of the factors which keeps most of us locked into paralyzed inaction and denial, while outer world consequences of that separation, mounting ecological and social disasters, become more apparent at every moment.

There is more to the question of how we have come to be so separated from place, from the earth, than can be covered in this paper, or indeed, than any of us can truly know. I will simply sketch for you an overview of my own thinking and fantasies on this subject, aided and abetted by others, some of whom I will reference in this paper. For me, the story begins in the misty beginnings of Western culture, in ancient Babylon, a couple of thousand years before Christ, with the creation myth we call the "Enuma elish", after its first words, translated "when on high." At the very beginning, before time and space, the myth opens.

When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsû, their begetter,
(And) Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body;
No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined
Then it was that the gods were formed within them (Eliade, 1967, p. 98).

We are at the origin of life, the seas, Apsû, the sweet water, and Tiamat, the salty. They are undifferentiated, yet separate, fertile possibilities, father and mother. Mummu is the creative interaction between them. As yet, nothing has been named, for naming belongs at the very origin of the world, where what is one and not yet becomes two, This and That, and then the world is. This "not yet" place has many names, one of which is "chaos," chaos as eternal pregnant possibility, or chaos as disorganized undifferentiated energy. How we view chaos depends on the organizing fantasy which informs our viewing perception, that is, both the fantasy which organizes the perception and the fantasy about the way in which organization happens. The archetypal images of this creation myth form an organizing image for Western patriarchal culture.

There is, of course, a long involved story in this myth. I will skip to the moment when the hero, Marduk, a reincarnation of the original father principle, slays the mother, Tiamat.

The lord spread out his net to enfold her,
The Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face,
When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him,
He drove in the Evil Wind that she close not her lips.
As the fierce winds charged her belly,
Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.
He released the arrow, it tore her belly,
It cut through her insides, splitting the heart (p. 105).

After vanquishing her warriors and consort,

The lord trod on the legs of Tiamat,
With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull.
When the arteries of her blood he had severed,
The North Wind bore (it) to places undisclosed.
On seeing this, his fathers were joyful and jubilant,
They brought gifts of homage, they to him.
Then the Lord paused to view her dead body,
That he might divide the monster and do artful works.
He split her like a shellfish into two parts:
Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky,
Pulled down the bar and posted guards.
He bade them to allow not her waters to escape (p. 106).

Marduk puts the heavens in order, establishes the zodiac, tells the moon how to shine, and performs the other acts necessary for the ordering of the world. Splitting Tiamat like a shellfish, he divides the world into firmly differentiated opposites. Marduk is honored as the Creator. The dead mother, Tiamat, who has become the devouring terrible mother in Marduk's imagination, disappears from history. Only the deeds of her heroic son remain. Matter and spirit are forever split.

This myth images a complicated moment, a moment whose consequences spin off in many directions, reverberating down for four thousand years. The "matter" I evoked from the beginning of this paper is here, for "matter" and "mother" are etemologically intertwined. Tiamat, the dead mother, becomes dead matter, the lifeless dirt being bulldozed, scraped, excavated, filled, and shaped into Evanston and Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis. "Killing the mother," my shorthand for the central archetypal dynamic of this myth, becomes the original necessity for Western patriarchal culture. "Wait a minute," I hear your well-trained Jungian minds protest, "this myth only presents a developmental necessity, the heroic ego must establish itself over and against the terrible mother of the devouring unconscious." So, I will pause a moment to deconstruct this assumption, for it is necessary to see through that assumption to the archetypal image embodied in it. In fact, this very archetypal image is embodied in it.

Creation myths are a fundamental expression of the archetypal and developmental perspective of a people, a culture. They tell us about the way in which the inhabitants of that culture imagine creation occurring at every moment, how unknown and formless potential incarnates into space, time, and form. Psychology recapitulates cosmology, or maybe the other way around. Although there are infinite variations and combinations of these, there seem to be two principal ways to imagine creation: creation by Logos and creation by Eros. Logos creates by differentiation; Eros creates by connection. In patriarchal creation myths, differentiation can become splitting, an extreme and problematic form of differentiation and one, I believe, which is a particular property of the patriarchal mind. The "Enuma elish" contains both forms of creation. Marduk's slaughter of Tiamat is a brutal image of creation by a splitting Logos. Creation occurs when form is violently imposed on devouring chaos. Yet, in the first few lines of the myth the world mother and father, their waters commingling, simply produce the originating deities by means of creative interaction between them. This act is creation by Eros.

When the coniunctio is our organizing image for creation, we imagine creation by Eros. Here cosmology recapitulates biology, or maybe the other way around: instinct meets archetype. One of my favorite images of Erotic creation is that of the Orphic creation myth, as reported by Robert Graves (Graves, 1955).

The Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the Universe in motion (p. 30).

Here "that which precedes form" is not the monstrous devouring mother of the "Enuma elish," but the Erotic connection of black-winged Night and Wind and the maternal image of the silvery egg in the womb of Darkness. Eros, a lunar creature of night and wind, not a heroic slayer of dragons, becomes the catalyzing energy of the universe. A similar image is found in Hesiod's Theogony, in which Chaos simply precedes Gaia and Eros, the three powers being created by successive acts of genesis. Commentator Yves Bonnefoy (Bonnefoy & Doniger, 1991) suggests that in Hesiod's image Chaos and Gaia are differentiated but not opposites. They are intimately connected powers, with Eros their eternal intermediary and catalyzing force. This particular creation image seems to be related to the image of creation which is emerging from new paradigm science, that of the self-organizing universe, in which order simply emerges out of chaos as a function of the way the universe works.

So, if there are different ways of imagining creation, it seems to me that it makes a significant difference which one is unconsciously operating when we consider the relationship of the ego to the unconscious. It is only Marduk's story which leads us to imagine the ego to be in a life-long struggle to avoid being swallowed up by the devouring mother unconscious. If another story, the Orphic story or Hesiod's story, becomes the story with which we imagine the creation of ego consciousness from its unconscious matrix, then ego consciousness develops naturally and inevitably in a relational context, an Erotic context, in an ongoing and fruitful relationship with the Other: that is, with human others, the world, and the unformed potential of its ground of being.

I do not want to be understood as saying that there is no place for differentiation in ordering form, for, clearly, coming apart is as important as coming together; they are in an ongoing, oscillating dynamic. I also do not want to suggest that a fragile underdeveloped ego is not at risk of being overwhelmed by the archetypal energies of the unconscious. However, when we assign a gender to the unconscious and imagine that the heroic ego is perennially fighting for survival in relation to a devouring mother, then we have been captured by the archetypal image of the "Enuma elish."

Infant researcher Daniel Stern (Stern, 1985) suggests another way of seeing ego or self development, a relational perspective. In his view, a core subjective sense of self exists at birth and the infant moves through a series of stages in the development of its sense of self, each stage of which is always related to a corresponding interpersonal stage with the primary caregiver, usually the mother. Here is an image of mother and infant in a dance of relationship, in which each stage of self development in the infant co-creates a new domain of relationship between them, an image of creation by Eros.

While the purpose of this detour has been to deconstruct a particular theoretical assumption, exploring alternative images of creation serves our main theme, of our culture's profound disconnection from place. The archetypal assumption embodied in the fantasy that the heroic ego must establish itself by killing the dark devouring mother is the assumption that permeates Western patriarchal culture. In the remainder of this paper I would like to consider how profoundly that assumption has affected our relationship to the land. I ask you to listen with an ear attuned to the language and images of relationship, Eros, and the language and images of separation, Logos.

I am deeply indebted to David Abram for his work on perception and language found in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). A philosopher and magician, Abram has written an amazing book in which he works both theoretically and experientially to deconstruct our most basic assumptions about how we perceive the world. He asks:

How did Western civilization become so estranged from nonhuman nature, so oblivious to the presence of other animals and the earth, that our current lifestyles and activities contribute daily to the destruction of whole ecosystemswhole forests, river valleys, oceansand to the extinction of countless species? Or, more specifically, how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciprocity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal peoples (p. 137) ?

Abram is not alone in asking this question these days and there are many speculations about what might have been somehow the defining moment or phenomenon. Abram answers his question by considering our use of written language, asserting that the decisive shift was the shift of our energy, once in a reciprocal relationship to the land, to a relationship with the written word. He argues that in oral cultures the land and its human and non-human inhabitants are in a constant condition of relationship and reciprocity. The contour and scale of the local landscape and the various calls and cries which animate the local terrain are attuned by the rhythms, tones, and inflections which play through the speech of the culture, for the members of a subsistence culture must be exquisitely attentive to subtle shifts in the patterns of weather, landscape, and animal movements. The other participant in this relationship is the land and its more-than-human inhabitants, always sentient, aware, and responsive to human awareness. About the land, Abram says:

A particular place in the land is never, for an oral culture, just a passive or inert setting for the human events that occur there. It is an active participant in those occurrences. Indeed, by virtue of its underlying and enveloping presence, the place may even be felt to be the source, the primary power that expresses itself through the various events that unfold there (p.162).

I do not want to pass too quickly over that statement, for here Abram describes an experience utterly foreign to the Western technological mind. We understand events in human history to have been created by the people involved in them, thus we invent the idea of history as a series of human-centered events. In an oral culture, the land creates and stores the knowledge of events, a knowledge which people transmit through story. Thus, the land, not the people, takes a central role in stories. In addition, the function of story is vastly different from the function of story in an historically-oriented culture.

It may be impossible for us to imagine the experience of language in an oral indigenous culture. An Inuit woman interviewed by ethnologist Knud Rasmussen early in the twentieth century describes it:

In the very earliest time
When both people and animals lived on earth,
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
And an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
And sometimes animals
And there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
And what people wanted to happen could happen
All you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was (p. 87).

What happens when written language intervenes in this relationship? Abram traces the development of written language, beginning with pictorial systems which directly related to objects in the material world. Then, in about 1500 BC, Semitic scribes invented the first alphabet, which had consonants only, the omitted vowels requiring the presence of the reader who would bring the words to life with breath. The phonetic alphabet moved the focus away from the phenomenal world to the sounds of the human voice. Even so, early Greek literature retained a preoccupation with and connection to sensuous nature. It was not until the time of Socrates and Plato that a psychological realm of unchanging ideas, separate from an inner experience of the ever-changing material world, became a possibility. The focus of the Platonic Dialogues was to substitute this realm of abstract disembodied ideas for the older modes of oral discourse which were embodied in lived situations.

I will quote Abram at length here because in his description of the impact the Greek alphabet on what he calls the "literate self," we can hear a description of the definitive separation of matter and spirit.

The letters of the alphabet, like the Platonic Ideas, do not exist in ordinary vision. The letters, and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seem to hover, as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.... The process of learning to read and to write with the alphabet engenders a new, profoundly reflexive, sense of self. The capacity to view and even to dialogue with one's own words after writing them down, or even in the process of writing them down, enables a new sense of autonomy and independence from others, and even from the sensuous surroundings that had earlier been one's constant interlocutor. The fact that one's scripted words can be returned to and pondered at any time that one chooses, regardless of when, or in what situation, they were first recorded, grants a timeless quality to this new reflective self, a sense of the relative independence of one's verbal, speaking self from the breathing body with its shifting needs. The literate self cannot help but feel its own transcendence and timelessness relative to the fleeting world of corporeal experience (p. 112).

In his last work, Man and His Symbols, Jung describes the consequences for our time of that shift away from the sensuous world of nature to the reflective literate self (Jung, 1964).

Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional "unconscious identity" with natural phenomena...Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightning his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing that they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied (p. 95).

These passages shift our focus from "how did this separation happen" to "why did it happen? What human need does this separation serve?" If we have a choice of creation myths to animate our perceptions of way the world comes into being, why has Western technological civilization become so caught up in "killing the mother" as its operant mythology, so caught up that we are literally doing just that to the earth?

For a long time, the story we have told ourselves is that pulling away from embeddedness in a natural matrix and developing a separate reflective self was a necessary step in the process of becoming more fully human. Hearing the echoes of Marduk's triumph in that story, I want to suggest that in the process of that developmental step, something else has happened: we have become, in some significant ways, less fully human. The work of Marija Gimbutas and others suggests that "killing the mother" is not a necessary precondition for creating a culture. As it becomes clear that annihilating indigenous subsistence cultures has been only the first step in annihilating ourselves, it is hard to argue that our technological culture is in some way intrinsically better or more advanced. We have told ourselves stories about what it was like to live in those cultures, believing, along with Hobbes, that indigenous life was "nasty, brutish, and short." Actually, the evidence from the few relatively untouched cultures which we are beginning to examine, with perceptions less constructed by Marduk's triumph, is that people often lived healthy, long lives, devoting far less of their energies to hunting and gathering than we do to work, leaving much more time for community, song, story, myth and relationship. So, why have we told ourselves these other stories?

The story of Marduk and Tiamat takes us back to the earliest times in human development, when nomadic hunting and gathering gave way to settlement and agriculture, to the beginning of history, when the line was first drawn between nature and culture. At that moment, the separation from the earth began, and, I believe, an underlying purpose of that separation was to deny the power of nature and her destructive unpredictability, to deny human helplessness before the inevitability of embodied descent into decay and death. In that sense, Western technological culture has become a massive omnipotent defense against that powerlessness, helplessness, and death. Because women inevitably carry a reminder of that elemental maternal power, they have had to be oppressed. Indigenous peoples have been imagined as "savages," on the wrong side of the nature/culture split. They are still being annihilated, we call it assimilated, because of their connection to the land which patriarchal culture imagines it owns and must develop, exploit, and subdue. Thus, under patriarchal law, indigenous people have scarcely more rights than trees, birds, or rocks.

A book by Michael Ortiz Hill entitled Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage (Hill, 1994) has been helpful in crystallizing my own thoughts on this subject. It is a disturbing exploration of the power of the Messianic fantasies behind the bomb and environmental devastation. As Hill examines the words and fantasies of the bomb makers, their reactions to the awesome power and eerie beauty of the first explosions, he takes us to that moment where light and shadow meet in apocalypse, where aspirations of human culture to transcend and depotentiate matter succeed in a moment of purest chaos, where that which has been most feared, is, at the last moment, understood to have been the goal. Just as Semele was annihilated at the moment she achieved her deepest desire to see Zeus in all his naked power, so is humankind drawn, moth to the flame, to a moment of annihilating transcendence. After all, the site of the first atomic explosion was named Trinity, and, of that moment, Hill says:

The Messianic dream of the Bomb as it was enacted at Trinity partakes of a very particular way of spirituality that far precedes the invention of the Bomb itself. The plurality of nature is stripped away, and the fire that burns in the heart of things is witnessed naked, unmediatedthe mysterium tremendum. In Greek, this is called apokalypsisliterally "revelation" or "a tearing away of the veil, of that which conceals"...Naturematter itselfis rendered as burnt offering toward that which utterly transcends the differentiation of form (p.22-23).

Of course, "that which utterly transcends the differentiation of form" is chaos, that state which has so terrified Western patriarchal culture. The long journey away from it ends in a meeting with it, face to face, for one terrible ecstatic millisecond before the end, a search for omnipotent power ending in utter and awe-full helplessness. I would like to hold this image in all its numinosity and terror for a moment as the hidden shadow of much that seems positive about our culture. The Messianic assumption that human beings are powerful enough to bring about all that we most devoutly desire, the New Age of peace, prosperity and plenty, freedom from hunger, disease, war and death, is only the daylight side of an underlying dark archetypal reality, an archetypal moment of annihilation.

However, I do not want to leave us there. A piece of naturalist lore, which I recently learned, is that the antidote to a natural plant or animal toxin is usually found within the vicinity of the toxin itself. Back in the misty beginnings of Western culture is another myth, the myth of Inanna, an antidote to the myth of Marduk and Tiamat. The myth of Inanna guides us in a descent to the underworld, a descent to the reality of suffering and death, a surrendering of omnipotent fantasies in favor of the deep wisdom available from the joy and the difficulty of embodied life, its limitations and our helplessness, and the possibility of the rich sensuous pleasures of Erotic connection to the phenomenal world. While many of those concerned about our suicidal trajectory believe that we must somehow rid ourselves of technology, this belief is an expression of a fantasy that we can go back, literally re-enter the Paradise from which we are so estranged. Environmental or nuclear devastation could destroy our technological culture so completely that only subsistence cultures would remain. Short of this terrible possibility, technology is not going to disappear. For better or worse, we have left the Garden and cannot return. My personal hope is that the very technology which has brought us the bomb and the massive destruction of ecosystems can be harnessed to serve the web of life rather than destroy it. But, first, we must recover our capacity to listen to the land with our bodies, hearts, and minds. We must learn how to love.

Patriarchal culture has brought out our best and worst selves. Our best self, that self-reflective curious inventive and creative self, which has until now served an omnipotent fantasy of conquering nature, can also serve us in learning how to live within her limitations. For a start, we can get up, walk outside, and look, really look, feel, really feel, re-connect with the reality of the particular place we are in and the more-than-human inhabitants with which we share it. Just as we are terribly lonely for the earth, I believe that the earth is terribly lonely for us. She wants only our open-hearted presence to her beauty and the Sacred which she embodies. There is a wisdom within us which knows this and knows the possibility of living from that open heart, from that "soft animal" of our bodies Mary Oliver describes in her poem, "Wild Geese (Oliver, 1992)." I will close with the words of her poem, for they demonstrate a kind of faith that written words and language which have so disconnected us from the natural world can also re-connect us.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things (p. 110).

Bibliography

Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Pantheon Books.

Allmann, L. (1996). Far from Tame: Reflections from the Heart of a Continent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bonnefoy, Y. & Doniger, W. (1991). Mythologies. A Restructured Translation of

Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionelles et du monde antique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elaide, M. (1967). From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions. London: Fount Paperbacks.

Graves, R. (1955). The Greek Myths. Baltimore. Penguin Books.

Gustafson, F. R. (1997). Dancing Between Two Worlds: Jung and the Native American Soul. New York: Paulist Press.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company.

Oliver, M. (1992). New and Selected Poems. Boston: Beacon Press.

Shlain, L. (1998). The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Viking.

Stern, D. S. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Talbott, S. L. (1995). The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates.

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