“Humans weren’t placed on Earth; we emerged out of the Earth. Every day, we consume part of the Earth in order to stay alive. The great landscapes of the planet are our ancestors; they arose from the Earth just as we did, and their energies evoke deep feelings and potentialities within us at both conscious and unconscious levels. …
“In losing our intimate relationship with the Earth, we modern humans have suffered a particular trauma that has caused our wild souls to split off. We may not always be fully aware of what is happening, so accustomed have we become to our high-speed, high-tech, built-up lives. Yet even if we remain unconscious of the source of our pain, we experience the symptoms of separation in a sense of alienation and a lack of aliveness.
“Modernity, with its mechanistic mind-set, excels at certain things: expediency, efficiency, uniformity. But the wild soul––who you really are––gets its sense of power and imagination from the natural world, and thrives on an altogether different set of values: creativity, authenticity, diversity. Exiled from Earth, like a wounded animal the wild soul goes into hiding. And we are left feeling off balance and incomplete.
“Our psyches then look for any available means to experience a sense of wild freedom. Addiction, to everything from alcohol and shopping to technology and pharmaceutical mood enhancers, is a frequent symptom of the soul’s desire to break free of the deadening aspects of modernity. This default approach––what I term living the “shadow wild”––only takes us further from our source. In the end, we find ourselves trapped, tamed, and unfulfilled.”
—From the Introduction of Reclaiming the Wild Soul: How Earth’s Landscapes Restore Us to Wholeness.
