“Stop asking why? and instead search for the right metaphor.  Is your heart rotting, rioting, burning, bursting?  Are you on the cross, in the pits, in prison, in cold hell, hot hell, purgatory, alone in the desert, thrown on a garbage heap?  Are you in a hostile county, in shackles, in a madhouse, on your knees begging to god?  Do you feel shunned, excluded, treated like a leper, a pauper, a criminal?  Are you awaiting execution, unfairly imprisoned, on the bench of the accused facing a hostile jury?  Do you feel your heart is being eaten by Ebola, the flesh eating virus?”

If the heart needs metaphors to know where it is and so to survive when it breaks, then surely, now more than ever then our relationship to Nature, which is also at breaking point, needs images too.  

However, as we have seen relationships are complicated.  We might go into love feeling selfless but our needs are right there, hidden in plain sight in the way we look at the beloved, what we want them to do for us and what we need to learn to do ourselves.

Nature can tune our tongue

When we walk into nature, rather than transplanting our own need to become greater and better, we can tune our perceptions.  Nature can tune our ear, our eye and our tongue.  It can tune our nervous system, and our imagination too.   The need to form images of the outer world in the inner world shifts to a need to turn the feelings sense outward – to get a sense of the feel of how something is.  The question becomes ‘what is the feel of this place? Or what is the feel of that oak, that sloworm, that crow’  rather than how do I translate this feeling into an inner symbol.

We are in the strange position of never having had so much knowledge and yet less direct experience of nature.  Our needs seem to arrive from sanitised factories and supermarkets – we don’t need to sow or reap corn, or thresh wheat, to guard or shear sheep.

The basic premise of the imaginal is that the imaginal is the place where imagination is real, not just a thought, or fancy.    The imaginal belongs to nature, as nature is the ground and origin of all that is real. Nature is the place to seek the imaginal.  Nature makes clear the fundamental treachery with the modern way of seeing life and lays bare this deceit. 

The fundamental way this deceit reveals itself to us is through the unconscious belief that the world is inside us  As we walk into nature the truth becomes clear. We are in something.  We may act as a container for our memories and sensations, but no more so than a cup dipped into a stream. Does the cup contain the stream?

When we walk out into nature, we walk into it’s  largeness.  I walk into that field of bronze grass, caught by a glitter of Sun and a rake of wind. Past the thick matt of brambles that nurse the elders and hawthorns, the red berries, gold polish in the surface of a blue-grey sea.

Nature gets colonised by our thoughts of it when we translate it too strongly into inner figures, or aspects of the self.  If you meet  Coyote-Wolf as  Emily Paskovic describes in Unpsychology 6, you are not meeting a spirit animal or a representation of a part of your psyche, but something far more awe inspiring.   Paskovic describes in her wonderfully lucid essay how the process worked the other way – she began with a sense of the Coyote-Wolf, imagined it, trailed it and was rewarded not with a vision, but with a true encounter with a real Coywolf that was far more powerful than an inner fantasy.  She writes:

“I started to learn animal tracking after a series of incidents that made me feel as though my body wasn’t quite my own. I’m not sure why tracking was what I turned to, but heading home after that first day of tracing the jagged paths of various woodland creatures, I started to cry. The tears rose from a wild surge deep in my body, as though an innate part of my own animal nature was being fed by following scat and prints through the snow.

Learning to read the signs was akin to pulling a curtain aside, stepping beyond
the human world and into a wilder place and finding that it was legible, that I belonged there, too. I was not separate because of my humanness—in the woods, I was another animal, passing by. Through careful observation, I found myself moving more fully embodied through a world where other creatures are as vital characters as the human ones.” (Paskevics, Tracking the Coywolf, Unpsychology 6)

What she describes is not a fantasy Coywolf, this is what Martin Shaw calls the movement from village to forest – the shape shifting of the psyche that allows us to visit the wild yet return safely to the hearth, the inn and to human company.  In this sense we have disrespected the image of animals by insisting that we know what they mean and that they are a part of us.