Dropping to Earth

and other acts of cultural repair

My last post, telling the story of my various careers and callings, prompted many comments. Some were from friends who jumped on to tell me they remembered being there for these different phases of my life, while others commented on cycles in their lives, or their need to step back from old framings. One juicy comment came from

Alice “Dragonwyst” Suttie

who got me thinking when she wrote:

Strange how the cycles of life work. I find comfort in retreating to a far bigger and wider perspective every so often, though I do so mindful that it needs to be balanced with not losing immediacy and presence as well - a tricky juggling act, at times, with a voice in my head that challenges whether it's the right thing to do or not at times.

Yes, I think, I know this voice from my own internal dialogues, especially over these last twenty years of engaging with climate and ecological issues. But more recently, this voice has quietened in me, I realise now, as that tricky juggling act has eased into something else entirely. Something for which I am profoundly grateful.

Ever since Plato, Western culture has loved dualities, especially the ones that split the world into heaven and earth, spirit and matter, body and soul, male and female, human and nature. More often than not one end of the division is held up high, while the other is subjugated. We all know how this goes. While today’s modernity culture might somewhat redefine the categories or challenge their valuings, what remains is the assumption of dualities and their underlying splits. This all too often sets up a tension of opposites, in the words of Carl Jung, where we can get caught up in an endlessly seesawing without resolution.

The dominant cultural worldview that routinely splits cosmos from matter, body from psyche, and humans from their ecological being, easily falls into an unconscious one-sidedness and neglect. One end of the see saw soars high while the other thuds to the ground.

When it comes to holding a spiritual / cosmological perspective, there is a wariness in many of us, fearing that this might lead to an abandonment of the pressing needs of today’s world, fraying as it is under the weight of the dualities imposed upon it. And it is true, a cosmic or spiritual overview can become entangled with a careless and delusional detachment from earthy life, reflecting the dominant culture’s propensity to split. While self-development books or spiritual workshops may promise to get us more “connected to the Universe”, they can lead to what we now call ‘spiritual bypassing’. When this happens not only are challenging emotions sidestepped, the very state of the world can be “left to the Universe” as presence and attention fly out the window.

Writing this, I haver a flashback to my life changing dream of 2008 (as I wrote about here) which dramatically propelled me from cosmos to Earth. For those of you who have no time to go back to this, let me do a quick recap. At the beginning of my dream, I swung high above the Earth on a rope. From my vantage point I could see the globe beneath me and the continents heaving as the oceans rapidly rose as a result of global heating. It is a mind stopping view. And indeed, without further thought, I let go of the rope, and fall into the midst of this planetary chaos, fully aware and accepting that I am plummeting into chaos and danger. When I awoke from this dream, heart thumping and overwhelmed by sorrow, I knew, without a doubt, that from then on my lifework would be to engage with climate and ecological crises.

It’s been a wild and enlivening ride ever since, but not without its struggles. Early on, there were times I felt paralysed by despair, guilt and shame as I viewed the world and human nature through a dark lens where suffering, sinfulness and punishment loomed large. But over time, a series of dreams shifted me from this Old Testament style narrative into a very different way of seeing and feeling, as dreams so often do when we fall into imbalance.

Here is what I wrote about this dream series in Climate Crisis and Consciousness:

All of my dreams, contained some reference to climate change and were set in, or around, water. In each of them, I was approached by an animal who looked for care and connection. In one dream, I gazed into a stormy sea, eagerly anticipating the end of the human race and, with this, the restoration of the health of the oceans. But, then a thirsty, bedraggled and crusty-skinned seal unexpectedly leapt into my arms, jolting me into the present. My mind abandoned its bleak and guilty imaginings in order to work out how to best care for this desperate creature. I realised that human presence, not absence, was needed in response to ecological destructions.

My dreams navigated me through a sea of feelings. Over time, the waves of despair, guilt, judgement, grief and confusion made way for currents of tenderness, connection, delight, wonder and love … Both in dream and waking life, I found my way from hopelessness and horror to commitment and care.

This dream series acted as a rite of passage, moving me to accept my own others’ humanity, along with the beauty, vulnerability and resilience of life. Out of this, direction and presence has grown, grounded in the sacredness of earthy life.

Photo by Mario Amé on Unsplash

Other experiences since then have further helped me to relinquish the seesawing of Western dualisms for the roundabouts of holistic and cyclic awareness. Reading and listening to First Nations elders and teachers has become ever more important. Not because I can adopt their culture, but because it gives me another way of seeing and relating to the Western culture that has shaped me and much of the world I live in. Knowing that there are cultures where the Earth and the heavens are held to be equally sacred, intimately related through kinship and stories, provides a bridge over some of the splits I have been conditioned into, to take up the work of cultural repair.

Cultural repair involves identifying and connecting to whatever has been split off, denigrated, repressed, or denied, or made into “the shadow” (to quote Jung again) by the culture we live within. Modernity culture, rife with disconnections and dissociations, is a prime candidate for re-pairing. There are now many of us weaving stories about the sacredness of life in its entirety: Earth, oceans, winds, rocks and all other forms of beings including us. All kin, all connected.

When I hear Professor Anne Poelina, a Nyikina Warrwa elder, say that “ The Earth would be lonely without us”, I now know why I let go of my rope and dropped to Earth in my dream. So I can fully embrace Earth as my spiritual home, mending splits in whatever way I can, while gratefully receving the healing that comes my way from the human and more than human world .

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

Substack this week is full of heartening and honest discussions which dig deep into how to stay engaged with our world in its beauty and its troubles. These shared reflections, with their commitment to community and their openness to different perspectives, all contribute to the work of cultural repair.

Here are just a few recent posts, challenging dualities in their embrace of wider and wilder possibilities:

Seeing Each Leaf as a Separate Thing

Priscilla Stuckey

brings together spirit and senses in her beautiful reflection upon the teachings of a Yurok elder about how to listen and learn from trees, opening our hearts to the liveliness of the world. “Spirit in this sense is the gift of life itself flowing through us; it is the heart of our beating heart, the breath filling our lungs, the blood coursing through our veins.”

Death is the Wild.

Chloe Hope

writes “There are ways of being which leave us both humbled and enlarged, broken and blessed, simultaneously emptied and made impossibly rich” in her beautiful essay, contemplating how true wealth is created through submission to the wild and the ephemeral nature of life.

How do we make this anger beautiful? asks

Jane Pike

in her exploration of the connections between anger, protection, care and love, and the finding of right action. “Allowing anger to be motivating and uplifting means recognizing how you feel as an act of love. That you can see it as a messenger that calls on you to rise, to meet and to do what you need to, as is appropriate and possible for the situation.”

Big Questions to Start the Year: from

Catriona Knapman

are provocative and profound. This one is particularly brave in its engaging with a split which often paralyses: “How can I accept my own powerlessness as a starting point for understanding my real power, not my reactive power?”

Why Climate Action doesn’t work: Unless we tackle the stories we tell ourselves

chloé salmon

tackles narratives at their source, addressing the “cultural waters we swim in” while highlighting the power we all have once we recognise that “Every action you take either reinforces or challenges the dominant narrative.”