“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life–not someone else’s life–water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
What if you think your culture has lost its connection to its soul – to life itself? All around me I see signs that the dominant culture I live in, in North America, has lost contact with the imaginal and the archetypal…we have lost contact with Soul. Our culture is dying inside and it is showing up on the outside. In the US, we have epidemics of drug abuse, homelessness, loneliness and depression. Our homes are full of guns and drugs to defend against our fears and numb our senses. Our children are killing themselves and each other in record numbers. These do not seem like good signs of life.
My community is depth psychology. My training focused on psychology at a community level and was grounded in eco, archetypal and liberation psychologies. I hold all of these inside me and am constantly looking for how to “live into” these beliefs. I understand the metaphorical as “real” and truly believe that interconnection is healing.
But, I also recognize the truth of what is happening all around me. My work is to find ways to cultivate connection to soul within this culture, at this time. And to do this fully engaged with the world, as it is. To me, that means embracing reality and looking right into the eyes of the polycrisis. Knowing the truth of these times, how do we take action – but stay in love with life itself? How do we tend to the soul of the world?
