...Whether confronting, petitioning, courting, speaking more directly or wooing, the theme here when walking one step in front of the other into a quest for new consciousness, healing and wholeness, is that this is a relationship we are entering and engaging—and thus we proceed accordingly. So by all means introduce yourself!  Give thanks, inquire with patience, persistence, grace and humility. Perhaps with impatience?! Make a plea, offer a prayer, lament the distance you feel between yourself and her. Stomp your feet with insistence, raise your arms in surrender to his sky, throw yourself onto her body, honor your thirst for the waters of creation and crawl to her river's edge. Do what you must, say what you will, but honor and heed the reality of your relationship. This is your nature. This is our nature. You carry her nature within you. Just as she carries you, on her back, in her belly, in her bosom, on her shoulders. When we go out in a good way, with some sense of ceremony, with a plea or petition, this is a meeting of bodies, a coming together of body of self and world. Honor the truth of this meeting. Feel the push, pull, and holding of earth's body under your own. Thank this body for her support, address the questions this support raise for you. Speak the truth of your relations.

And of course, listen...to the wind and rain, the belly of the mountain and the soul of the forest, the heart of the trees, the scramble and scurry of squirrel and the stealth of the fox. Listen to your body and the body of the earth. Honor your relation to nature and hers to yours. Woo her. Do something about your relationship.

Acknowledging our relations and doing something about our relations expands the circle within which we live our lives. Expanding the circle, increases consciousness, expands care, enlivens curiosity, deepens connection, invites more love.

*Full blog post here

**More active engagement with our call to Quest at Soulandstream.com

"I believe that if I can sit out there long enough those crows, the trees and the wind can teach me something about how to be a better human being. I don't call that romanticism, I call that Indigenous Realism." --Dr Daniel Wildcat 

Yes, when we quest we sit out there…we also walk, wander, and explore out there. Nothing fancy. Mostly old school ways: a few pleas, some simple petitions of nature for friendship and guidance. Some personifying and praising of her gifts to us and within us. But the point is, we do something, about the calling of your soul. We leave the rest all behind, try to get as bare and raw as we can and walk out with our hearts in our hands, out into the wild nature of the world and yourself and say something about who we are and listen closely to what sky, mountain, cactus and coyote, blossom and brook have to say about it.

“I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” --John Muir

You are…ready to walk into the mirror of nature with more curiosity and conviction than ever. Your night dreams and waking dreams can no longer be ignored. The deep nature of yourself and the world calls you to new meaning and new relations. Edward Abbey, nature pilgrim and rebel-saint reminds us, “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”

Nature questing is not therapy and not religious. However, nature questing does have an eye and an ear for the psyche in psychology that is eco-bent--toward seasons of change, living and dying with more integrity, growth, sustainability, movement and vitality… And stepping one foot in foot in front of the other into a ceremony with nature can engage spirit in ways that are visceral and unexpected.

The call to quest in nature doesn't arise for everyone. But if you sense that the deepest roots of your soul are untended in some way and the hills, valleys, and meadows of nature have been a consistent source of nourishment throughout your life, the art of quest may be worth some exploration for you.

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” 
--John Muir

Still registering men interested in this spirit of inner and outer exploration for the Spring Heart Arrow Quest, May 6-8. Please forward to men who might be called in this way and have them contact me directly if interested. Many thanks and sweet travels! Heartarrowquest.com

"I talk with trees and the forest wildlife, and the stones show me the way…"

~Carl Jung; Red Book; Page 227

Try seeing instead of looking, hearing instead of listening, being touched instead of touching… clouds and wind, grass and river…experience the ground coming up to meet you in addition to your feet touching the ground, the earth…What is nature and earth interested in presenting to you? Visit the world around you on its own terms when going out, let it all come up to meet you, greet you, touch you, speak to you---speak through you! Don’t worry about why or how, just be curious about who and what is here when you stand and move with earth in this way. Just be with what is here. Experience…and engage.

Nature questing is essentially a somatic means of healing, learning, expanding consciousness—and therefor growing. It is doing something with and about your longing, your grief and your joy. Doing something about your soul. The body knows, produces, and holds more knowledge than we are willing to grant it most of the time. When we engage the body of earth and body of self with a desire to access this knowledge, we engage the realm of synchronicity, where the veil is dropped between the worlds that divide us: we feel and see a meaningful connection between self and other, how we feel and how we act, between nature of the world and nature of myself.

 A form of freedom and personal truth is offered in nature when we go out this way that we can carry back to community, to our working class work-a-day ego and persona. Nature questing’s gift is a body of knowledge (and a body in knowledge—of soul) that we can carry back in mind for greater clarity, vision, wellness and creativity in our lives. 

*More of my work with soma, psyche and nature at Soul and Stream

Risk meeting your Soul: risk living your life!
(Clinical and poetic inspiration for all of us)

"It is my clinical experience that most of us do not have abiding permission to fully claim our own lives. Sadly, this means that we are often living in a fragmented, partial way. Our soul---that is, our psyche---knows this of course, grieves, and presents us with those many protests we call symptoms." What Matters Most, James Hollis

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowksi

“My so-called personality is a persona through which soul speaks.”  (Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology)

James Hillman used to remind us that if you don’t think you’re talking to yourself--that there isn’t a constant stream of chatter in your mind and body (dreams of course carrying the largest cast of characters and their chatter, shouts, murmurs, and demands) --you’re kidding yourself. And part of his message regarding this substantially unconscious inner dialogue was to help us get real about all those inner figures and give them some space and time to express themselves in a more conscious way. Going on quest, creating some time and space to honor and uncover the true color and character of these figures is a great way to illuminate shadow figures that are either controlling your life unnecessarily or hiding too much energy and opportunity from your daily activity. Hillman and depth psychology help us to realize that personifying our inner lives can be a great tool for living more consciously and thus more in contact with the too easily dismissed life of soul. Hillman actually called this soul-making.

So in this context, that popular expression, walking the talk, meant to express the idea of living your truth, we can see might have another layer of meaning. Walking the talk here is a sort of airing your truth, giving it room to move, to be heard, and to be seen (and eventually either confronted or engaged with more honesty and awareness). We walk our talk, go on quest with our internal figures, our grumblers and celebrants, our belittling voices and our grandiose dreamers, under the sky, give them some fresh air, perhaps name them, play and explore the depth or shallowness of their character, introduce them to the earth under our feet, and see who and what shows up with these figures we have invited out of the closet and onto the trail. Walking the talk, here on quest in nature, opens and invites the depth and breadth of soul to the natural world.  

In addition to personifying the unseen world of soul, when we walk the talk in this expanded meaning of that phrase, we honor the embodied nature of soul, we physicalize, place one foot in front of the other, as embodied soul characters, capable of both small and large steps, breath, voice, unexpected movements, and most importantly, an easy and natural engagement and relationship with the figures and beings of the natural world. My aggravated and meanest inner figure will have as unique and real a relationship to the sun as will my meek yet curious and childish self. Bringing curiosity, presence, creativity and most importantly faith in the reality of these soul figures, can help you bring consciousness to the range of movements, demands, and desires of these inner figures. Otherwise, without the benefit of this walking the talkers, the talkers will just as surely walk you! One of the oldest rules of a depth perspective states that if we don’t own our complexes, the complexes will own us. And most certainly, the more we leave the inner voices and figures to their own devices, the more unconscious and hidden they are, the more ruled by their hidden movements will be our actions, our thoughts, and our feelings. Walking, airing, introducing these figures of ourselves to the natural world allows us on the one hand to confront and limit their dominance of our lives and on the other hand it allows us to bring out and celebrate those that are otherwise too easily hidden or under appreciated.

Walking the talk in nature allows us to quest for more authenticity regarding the powers at play in our lives. The sooner we acknowledge our faith in these figures and their roles in our lives--that we are more Us than I--the sooner we can move towards wholeness and feel our energies and our efforts less divided. Walking in this context is: airing, honoring the truth of, introducing to the outer world, bringing into relationship, and earthing the complexes and complexity of our lives. 

*Mark's work with walking the talk and airing our complexes and complexity in nature can be found at Soul And Stream

It is often a great relief in the midst of our busy lives to create some ceremony and space for the larger and sometimes unseen questions we otherwise ignore, forget or stuff down into the unconscious. Ahh, at last, here is an hour, a day, a weekend to strip myself of the daily accumulation of demands, directions, distractions and disassociations, to allow the bare elements of meaning and value in my life to take center stage! Oh and look, right outside my door here as I step through the threshold and into this new (and old) naturalness of being at the root of me, there are the bare and natural elements of nature to greet me on this journey. Sky, cloud, sun, star…ground, tree, bird, and flower…are all here to meet me at the threshold! There is some alliance, some coincidence and connection between my new embarkation in this way and the world outside the door. Is it a mirror? Do they, the wind, the rain, the leaves, have something to say to me about my life? Or do I perhaps have something to share with them? Regardless of the question or the answer, when you took that step across the threshold you entered a ritual, you created a ceremony for inner and outer communication.

Taking our deepest longing and inquiry with the world and this life on quest, walking one foot in front of the other into the outer world with our precious inner landscape-- introducing the outer to the inner landscape--has a magical effect. By carrying the question of the quest in this human body into the body of nature we create and enter a ritual that brings great relief to both the conscious and unconscious aspects of ourselves. At last the two are introduced and in dialogue. Worldly consciousness, here is your unseen sibling, often living in darkness and mystery, source of creation and creativity, your unconscious. And deep, dark unconscious, filled with unseen light, here is your hard working friend and ally, the conscious self and ego, great figure of action and manifestation. Walk together here now on quest and see what new life you may spy that can be lived forward, that will allow some new wholeness and healing to occur in this living, breathing, walking being.

Some dream workers, working directly with the material of the unconscious, believe that their work is not done until some physical activity, enactment, or ritual is undertaken. The stories of Toni Wolffe, an analyst and ally of Carl Jung in Zurich, and her advocacy for “doing something” with unconscious material are entertaining and poignant. If a patient returning to her office after working with dream material the previous week had not actively and physically engaged with the material in some way the door was quite often barred. They say that some patients who had not “done something” physical were sent out the door with the stark demand to “come back when you mean business.” Going outside, questing in some physical way, performing a physical ritual, to address the otherwise unseen movements of our psyche is the best way I know to tell all the unseen players in our story that we mean business.

*From a longer work in progress, "The Art of Quest"

The Heart Arrow Quest is a time and place for men to remember who they are on a deeper level: as a man, as a human, as a seed of this earth, here to flourish in our own unique manner for this lifetime, for our people, and for the many lands entrusted to us.

It is a time for reconciling the balance of my life: do I have enough of my soul, enough spirit, enough of me in my life to carry me forward, to carry me home?

It is a place for standing in our being and allowing all the branches, all the streams, roots, waterways, deer and coyote, light and dark of me to have a voice in my living.

It is a place for walking, one step in front of the other, with this deeper life that now fills my heart and breathe good mountain air, filled with fresh earth and sky, breathe into these steps going forward...finally seeing more clearly, and being seen more fully.

It is a quest for the love of this life that is in our hearts and needs re-membering and honoring--in solitude and in community.

We quest for the zest!

The Heart Arrow Quest is a men's retreat in the the foothills of Boulder Colorado. Our Spring Quest is May 15-17. If interested, please contact Mark or Andrew, we can only accommodate 8 men.

http://www.heartarrowquest.com

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. –John Muir (Scottish-born American naturalist 1838-1914)

The impulse to go out, get out, hit the road, take a vacation, nearly always holds within its volitional energy the urge to re-create or re-vision one’s life. We think of these common, even mundane responses to life’s regularity, schedule and regimen as almost a mechanical release valve, and although it is certainly that, our urge to retreat can also be a deeper message from the unconscious soliciting or signaling a call to ritual and its symbolic cycles of death and rebirth. We may be happy with the vacation, hike or bike ride we promised ourselves for too long to take and finally succeeded at pulling off. But we may also return home with just a twinge of dis-ease and longing still floating around the periphery of our consciousness if we don’t address the deeper call and hope for some new life or new vision.

The deeper call to head out is a plea from psyche to loosen the confines of an overly literalized and hardening of the structure and story of our lives. By shifting the context of our life we give ourselves an opportunity to reflect on the re-visions that might be available to us. The more imagination, intention, and stripping away of those calcified literalisms that we live with day in and day out, the more authentic restoration and new life we can access and bring back to the life we left behind. Ancient rites of passage, the pan-cultural tradition of fasting from food, shelter and companionship—or the vision quest--and Carl Jung’s inner journey of individuation are both traditions that answer this deeper call to symbolically leave what is known and lived for the sake of harvesting something more sustainable, energized, and meaningful, from the unseen and unlived life.

As James Hollis (depth psychological author of great guides to this deeper human journey like The Middle Passage, What Matters Most, and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life) is quick to remind us, we are all summoned to a larger life; in fact life asks more of us than we are usually willing to admit. Standard modes of escapism (vacationing, a binge on drinking, sex or consumerism, to name a few) seen through the lens of rites, quests, and depth psychology appear as small and feeble relief the morning after and surface as repressed and unfulfilled longings waiting for some greater re-creation or re-vision of the one life we have to live: more often than not a burying of our true connection to psyche and its unconscious gifts waiting to be enacted and lived. Those old standards of distraction and escape eventually become stale and hollow when psyche recognizes and awakens in our consciousness how empty the calories it is being fed really are. “…And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life,” says Rilke in his poem “I Love My Being’s Dark Hours.”

It may not be convenient for you or me to go to a desert and fast for four days and nights to wait, cry or pray for a vision that will change our lives. It may in fact not be convenient, comfortable, or pleasant to even think about abandoning our common assumptions and habits in order to approach the Mystery on bended knee for some morsel of a more meaningful or fulfilling life, but it also might not be sustainable to go on living this half-life—a “divided life” in the words of Quaker author Parker Palmer--or one that never really addresses our longing for deep change, wholeness, and fulfillment. Our individual-ness, in fact at its root is “in” plus “dividere,” not divided or whole.

The work of living a deeper and more meaningful life, the seeds of the impulse to head out in order to see better what is within, asks of us again and again, in the words of the School of Lost Borders director, Joseph Lazarus: What is life asking of me now and what may I need to let go of to participate in my own unfolding?

Archetypal psychologist Carol Pearson cuts to the chase, “Those times of depression tell you that it’s either time to get out of the story you’re in and move into a new story or that you’re in the right story but there’s some piece of it you are not living out.”

Going out for the hell of it is always fun and a perfectly healthy, normal and human outlet. But when we recognize the impulse as part of a larger archetypal and mythical impulse to change and deepen our lives, we give ourselves the gift of creativity and consciousness to aid our evolution as individuals and species. Going out in order to go in takes some courage and mindfulness, but the payback is in new life energy that may better sustain and enliven not only us but also the people we serve and surround ourselves with. Going out to go in is an opportunity for whole making and soul making: bringing together the wholeness of ourselves and of the world.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. –John Muir (Scottish-born American naturalist 1838-1914)

The impulse to go out, get out, hit the road, take a vacation, nearly always holds within its volitional energy the urge to re-create or re-vision one’s life. We think of these common, even mundane responses to life’s regularity, schedule and regimen as almost a mechanical release valve, and although it is certainly that, our urge to retreat can also be a deeper message from the unconscious soliciting or signaling a call to ritual and its symbolic cycles of death and rebirth. We may be happy with the vacation, hike or bike ride we promised ourselves for too long to take and finally succeeded at pulling off. But we may also return home with just a twinge of dis-ease and longing still floating around the periphery of our consciousness if we don’t address the deeper call and hope for some new life or new vision.

The deeper call to head out is a plea from psyche to loosen the confines of an overly literalized and hardening of the structure and story of our lives. By shifting the context of our life we give ourselves an opportunity to reflect on the re-visions that might be available to us. The more imagination, intention, and stripping away of those calcified literalisms that we live with day in and day out, the more authentic restoration and new life we can access and bring back to the life we left behind. Ancient rites of passage, the pan-cultural tradition of fasting from food, shelter and companionship—or the vision quest--and Carl Jung’s inner journey of individuation are both traditions that answer this deeper call to symbolically leave what is known and lived for the sake of harvesting something more sustainable, energized, and meaningful, from the unseen and unlived life.

As James Hollis (depth psychological author of great guides to this deeper human journey like The Middle Passage, What Matters Most, and Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life) is quick to remind us, we are all summoned to a larger life; in fact life asks more of us than we are usually willing to admit. Standard modes of escapism (vacationing, a binge on drinking, sex or consumerism, to name a few) seen through the lens of rites, quests, and depth psychology appear as small and feeble relief the morning after and surface as repressed and unfulfilled longings waiting for some greater re-creation or re-vision of the one life we have to live: more often than not a burying of our true connection to psyche and its unconscious gifts waiting to be enacted and lived. Those old standards of distraction and escape eventually become stale and hollow when psyche recognizes and awakens in our consciousness how empty the calories it is being fed really are. “…And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life,” says Rilke in his poem “I Love My Being’s Dark Hours.”

It may not be convenient for you or me to go to a desert and fast for four days and nights to wait, cry or pray for a vision that will change our lives. It may in fact not be convenient, comfortable, or pleasant to even think about abandoning our common assumptions and habits in order to approach the Mystery on bended knee for some morsel of a more meaningful or fulfilling life, but it also might not be sustainable to go on living this half-life—a “divided life” in the words of Quaker author Parker Palmer--or one that never really addresses our longing for deep change, wholeness, and fulfillment. Our individual-ness, in fact at its root is “in” plus “dividere,” not divided or whole.

The work of living a deeper and more meaningful life, the seeds of the impulse to head out in order to see better what is within, asks of us again and again, in the words of the School of Lost Borders director, Joseph Lazarus: What is life asking of me now and what may I need to let go of to participate in my own unfolding?

Archetypal psychologist Carol Pearson cuts to the chase, “Those times of depression tell you that it’s either time to get out of the story you’re in and move into a new story or that you’re in the right story but there’s some piece of it you are not living out.”

Going out for the hell of it is always fun and a perfectly healthy, normal and human outlet. But when we recognize the impulse as part of a larger archetypal and mythical impulse to change and deepen our lives, we give ourselves the gift of creativity and consciousness to aid our evolution as individuals and species. Going out in order to go in takes some courage and mindfulness, but the payback is in new life energy that may better sustain and enliven not only us but also the people we serve and surround ourselves with. Going out to go in is an opportunity for whole making and soul making: bringing together the wholeness of ourselves and of the world.