Ecological Intelligence (22 page)

D
o dream images have the same meaning for everyone? The answer is no. While there may be certain shared cross-cultural interpretations of dream images, strictly speaking, dreams are not interpreted—they are analyzed. A lion or a snake in a dream could represent different things to different people, but that is only a part of the analysis. The most important part of a dream concerns the context, the timing, and the meaning of the dream for the one who dreams it. In other words, why did that person have that particular dream at that particular time, and what did it mean to him or her? The word
analysis
is made up of the prefix
ana
, meaning “up,” “out,” “back,” “throughout,” and the suffix
-lysis
, which means “to loosen.” In the analysis, then, the dream is thoroughly loosened. It is then remembered, which is to say, it is put together again in a way that is both understandable and meaningful to that individual.

Another important aspect of dream analysis is that the analyst be aware of what is happening in his or her own life when a patient brings a dream into a session. In other words, is the patient’s dream intended for me also…is this a dream that I could have had? Absurd? Why should it be? Are we not a social species? And if we acknowledge that we live in a field of influence or that the unconscious dynamics of the human psyche are historical and shared, would it not make sense that the dreams of those closest to us in our lives and in our work could have something to say about all of us? If this sounds plausible, then what about the dreams of field-workers, game rangers, trackers, politicians, and policy makers? If dreams are the language of the unconscious, or a language of survival, should we not at least have some interest in what our collective psyches may be telling us?

T
he difficulty in promoting the language of dreams will be the same as that of promoting poetry as a way of rediscovering our-selves in Nature. The engaged parties, says Seamus Heaney,

are not going to be grateful for a mere image—no matter how inventive or original—of the field of force of which they are a part. They will want poetry [or dreams] to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their point of view; they will require the entire weight of the redress to come down heavily on their side of the scales. Their general desire will be for simplification.

This is understandable, of course, but poetry and dreams are not intended to simplify. Instead, they should be seen as assisting us to unravel the complex reality that surrounds us and out of which our dreams and poems are generated.

Can you imagine a management meeting that commences, not with a prayer but with the remembering of a dream…or both?

“Follow the birds and the beasts,” came the reply.

“They will show you the way.”

Saint Thomas, The Apocryphal Gospels

8

RECONCILIATION

I
N THE INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER TO THIS BOOK, I WROTE OF A NOTION that our sense of self and our sense of place is linked—that our identity is somehow intimately associated with a deep historical sense of kinship with wild places and wild animals and that we are dependent upon them for our psychological health. How we care for them is surely a measure of how we care for each other. Such a notion might help to explain why there was no surprise when two countries with conf licting political ideologies teamed up to free two whales caught up in an ice f low in the Arctic Circle. This happened at the height of the cold war between Russia and the USA in the early 1980s. It does not concern us that the effort cost millions of dollars and the reason for this non-concern, it would seem, is that our response in such situations is archetypal. For many, the situation grips us. We are compelled to participate, even at a distance, and the energy we expend cannot be measured in dollars. We will continue to dig deeply into our resources to help save animals that are endangered or in trouble. And we will do it for the same reasons. We do it for the sake of the animals, but I believe we do it also because we know that at some deep level their fate has something to do with us; that any step toward a reconciliation with the land, with whales, wild dogs, and butterf lies is a step toward our own healing.

ADAM’S EYE

P
erhaps it is no coincidence that the adjectives we use to describe those occasional deep feelings of connection with animals and with the land are often the very ones that best describe the phenomenon of healing—indescribable, unpredictable, unforgettable.

The big question of course is can this reconciliation be facilitated, or will it remain a series of unpredictable one-off events? I believe it can be nurtured, but it is going to require a profound change in our attitude toward the Human-Nature relationship. Earlier, I made a number of suggestions that could help us, namely, to stop speaking of the Earth being in need of healing; to become more evolutionary and psychologically minded and to nurture a language that is healing. However, it is going to require something else. It is going to require that we develop what analyst James Hillman refers to as Adam’s eye—a way of seeing animals and landscape beyond human parallels and the usual laboratory explanations, beyond grasping at the meaning and metaphor of the animal. It is an aesthetic eye, he says, “a perception for which psychology is yet to train its senses.” It is an eye that promotes survival; that excites the emotions; that takes us to the unexplored edges of the human-animal interface and to the realization that
everything
is intelligent. It is a process that begins when we are grateful for the mere presence of the animal. It ends when you know the animal in yourself.

But why Adam? Put yourself into the skin of the first allegorical man on this one: “And out of the ground, the lord God formed every beast and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” How would you have responded had you been asked to name the animals? Where and how would you have begun? Surely you would need to know something about your own animal nature. In this poem, I salute the Adam in us.

Long before the message
of a Word made flesh;
long before his loss of innocence
and the naming of his soul,
a man of clay and a lonely heart
gave names to his animal flesh.
Pulled
by twisting threads,
he found his way to the scales of dawn,
to his open gills,
to the turn of the tide of blood
and the crossing back to air.

Naked
in a long necked night
of remembering,
he sloped his way toward the light,
he raised his arm to a passing whale,
his thoughts took flight,
by then…he’d named
Himself.

If we are serious about rediscovering ourselves in Nature, we all need to take that journey. But we each have to do it in our own way. To know ourselves we have to know our own animal nature first. We have to wrestle the beasts in us, as Adam did. Why? In order that our animal energy can be transformed—that it can be given a human face. We have to learn how to say yes and no to the crocodile, the fox, the lion, and the bear in us. It is a priceless journey.

However, you have to be willing to be disturbed. To enter into the wild places of the Earth is to enter the wild places of the human psyche at the same time—it is both a reaching out and a homecoming. As happens in the wild, you may need a guide—someone who knows the terrain, who can read the territory, who thinks like a shaman, and who knows when it is time to turn back. You may need someone who can help you to bring your wild images back into the everyday world and to embrace them.

I
n almost every traditional culture, animals have been and remain the guiding spirits of the shamans, those rare individuals whose role, more than anything else, has been that of defending the psychic integrity of their communities. They are the men and women who know the language of the animals and of the land and because of this, they know the terrain and the animals in the psyche of their people.“We are part of the Earth and it is a part of us,” wrote Chief Seattle in 1855 in a letter to the president in Washington.

We know the sap which comes through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and they feed our children. So you must give to the river the kindness you would give any brother.

And then there are these insightful lines from a poem by Pablo Neruda, “I’m Aware of the Earth’s Skin.” He is reminding us of the core of our nature:

We are in dire need of modern-day shamans, men and women who are aware of the Earth’s skin, or, as Mercia Eliade, the former head of the journal
History of Religions
at the University of Chicago, wrote in 1964, “we are in dire need of modern day specialists in the sacred.”

ASKING PERMISSION

T
here is another requirement for the reconciliation that we seek. It has to do with honoring the gods—we have to ask permission to do so. To ask permission is not only an act of respect, it is an art. It begins when you acknowledge that every encounter with Nature is a dual experience; that it involves the intelligence of the other; and that the other may be more intelligent than you—that you may be the one who is lost. What do you do when you are lost, when you can’t find your way through your world? “Stand still!” says poet David Wagoner in his magnificent poem “Lost”:

Stand still!

The trees ahead and the bushes beside you…

They are not lost.

Remember, wherever you are

Is also called here

And you must treat it like a powerful stranger;

Must ask permission to know it

And be known.

Listen!

The forest breathes…it whispers

I made this place around you

And if you leave, you may come back again

Saying “Here!”

No two trees are the same to raven

No two branches the same to wren

But…if what a tree or a branch does is lost on you

Then you are truly lost.

Stand still!

The forest knows where you are,

Let it find you.

Wagoner’s words remind us that there is a critical distance between all living things, an invisible territory that must never be taken for granted. Be mindful of it for it is real. It is dynamic, contextual, unpre-dictable, and powerful. It is a space that is filled with the ancient chemistry of yes and no—the first language.

T
o enter into the space of another without permission, be it the land, the sea, or that of an animal, is to violate that space. How do you ask permission from the land? You do it in the same way that you ask permission to enter the space of a patient, a friend, a lover, or a stranger. You take care. You listen to the intelligence of the other. You pay attention. You listen—feelingly.

In the African wilderness, as in all the wild places of the world, to listen to the land is to listen to the wind, to its direction, to its touch, to its scents—the promise of rain, the perfume of spring, the pheromones of decay, excrement, and spray. It is to heed the caution that you may be upwind of that which is listening to you. It is to listen to the signatures in the sand and to what the birds, the squirrels, the baboons, and the antelope have to say. The alarm calls of these creatures are for the same predators that unsettle the human animal. The animals tell us when to look up, down, and around. They also tell us when to go away.

When asked by Barry Lopez what he did when he visited a new place, the Inuit hunter answered: “I listen. That’s all. I listen to what the land is saying. I walk around in it and strain my senses in appreciation of it for a long time, before I myself ever speak a word.” This man believed that if entered in such a respectful manner, the land would open to him, said Lopez. This is the art of asking permission.

S
tand still. Listen. Be patient. Try and make sure that the space between you and the other is safe and containing for you both. As practiced in analytical therapy, “begin by giving a free-floating attention to the encounter,” says London-based psychoanalyst Eric Rayner. Keep a close eye on your reactions. Remember you are in a shared field of influence. Engage yourself in what could be called a primal correspondence—the way a parent, on a nonverbal level, is receptive to what her infant is trying to say. Be deeply receptive to what is rising and falling around you—the intentions, the emotions, and the needs of the other. Develop a sixth sense, what Aristotle called a common sense where the primary qualities of intensity, motion, rest, unity, form, and number are represented in abstract form and trans-lated into
any one of our senses
.

Try and see yourself through the eyes of the other. Be utterly present and open to the guiding potential of whatever impressions or images may emerge, mindful that you do not know what is going to happen next and that what you bring to the encounter could be rejected. As poet Ortega y Gasset puts it, “create an attention that does not consist in riveting itself to the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and avoiding inattentiveness.” In other words, be especially careful of trying to understand the behavior of the animal according to your own needs and expectations. As Lopez reminds us, this is an old trap and to fall for it is to end up knowing very little about the animal at all. Even worse, it is to deny the animal. Animals do not have an ego consciousness as humans do. If they did, then prepare yourself for what Rilke wrote in this verse from the “Eighth Duino Elegy:”

Get back to basics. Know something about the behavior of the animal other—its preferences, its territory, and its threat displays. Sometimes the permission you seek may not be granted. If so, respect the refusal. Back off.

Pay careful attention, therefore, to detail—the swish of a tail, the angle of the head, the inclined ear, the positioning of the feet. Appreciate the timing of the encounter. Were you there first or did you stumble into the space of the one that confronts you? With elephants, for example, to be there first invariably ends up with them giving you a wide berth. When the situation is reversed, be prepared to do the same for them. Watch out if you don’t. Try not to surprise them. Note the time of day. Not all animals see well in twilight. Keep the flashlight low. Try to understand the dolphinness, the elephantness, and the heronness of the one who is with you. Ask these questions of yourself: am I too close, too big, too quick? Have I inadvertently crossed the critical line? Ask of the other: “What is your way?” And then, “Can I share it with you?”

Don’t be too hasty to discard or interpret the images and feelings that may arise, for they can present in any number of ways—a pattern, a shape, a sound, a memory, a feeling. Sometimes the encounter brings a deep sense of familiarity and other times a silence that is both humble and fetal; it may be a sense that this is delicate; that it will take time; that there is no hurry. With time, you will begin to find that your interpretations will become a lot more appropriate and meaningful. And when the encounter is over, say thank you.