With today's blog post, I'm going to be wrapping up my series on Urban Terrapsychology and Creative Placemaking for the foreseeable future. 

In my last post I discussed how the people of the Upper Mississippi Valley became aware that the 1854 Grand Excursion went awry in some ways that were evident at that time, but in other ways that weren't evident until our own time.  The problem recognized in 1854 was Saint Paul's failure to exhibit appropriate hospitality to visitors.  The problems evident by 2004 were that 1854 featured systemic injustice to indigenous peoples and the natural world.  In all three ways the 2004 Grand Excursionists pledged to "get it right this time" - often through the community-based arts and cultural activities that comprise creative placemaking.

An exhaustive account of the panoply of Grand Excursion 2004 activities is available at the following website: grandexcursion.com

From a depth psychology/creative placemaking standpoint, here are some additional dimensions to consider:

1. Hospitality: In the ten-year runup to Grand Excursion 2004, Saint Paul resolved to set aside its "smaller twin" inferiority complex by becoming a more welcoming center of local, national and international hospitality.  The city's themes for the Grand Excursion flotilla was "We've Been Waiting 150 Years for This" and "We Did It Right This Time."  The city especially sought to ensure that excursionist visitors to the Falls of St. Anthony and a re-created "mingling of the waters" ceremony would be meaningful and indicative of a welcoming attitude towards the entire world.  Waters from around the globe were united with Mississippi Water in a ceremony featuring representatives from Saint Paul's sister cities of Nagasaki, Japan and Neuss, Germany.  Other dimensions of the city's new commitment to hospitality extended far beyond Grand Excursion 2004: a renovated city arena in 2000 became the home to the Minnesota Wild NHL hockey team, and the city's renovated convention center in 2008 hosted both the Republican National Convention, and a special visit from Barack Obama at a major rally on the night when he clinched the Democratic nomination.

2. Reconciliation with Nature: When I pitched the idea of Grand Excursion 2004 to civic leaders in 1994, there was a decision to grow support for the idea via an annual community dinner focusing on riverfront regeneration.  The first such dinner, held in 1995, drew 125 participants.  In subsequent years the dinner doubled in attendance each year before reaching capacity at over 1,000 attendees.  The annual dinner has now become an annual Saint Paul and regional institution featuring news, plans, entertainment and displays focusing on riverfront regeneration, mostly involving the restoration of the river's natural environment.  For details see: http://www.riverfrontcorporation.com/news-events-whats-new/21st-annual-great-river-gathering/

3. Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples: Winona, MN, a city on the Mississippi River 100 miles southwest of Saint Paul, is a traditional center of the Dakota community, but is mainly populated by European Americans.  When the city of Winona became interested in Grand Excursion 2004, the Dakota community expressed its concern with celebrating the 1854 event which ushered in a time of tragedy for their people.  But inspired by the "We Did It Right This Time" theme of Grand Excursion 2004, the two communities resolved to use the event as an occasion to address past injustices and move to a new level of respect and cooperation.  This effort yielded an annual Great Dakota Gathering event each summer.  But more importantly, it also resulted in a serious "Covenant of Friendship" between the indigenous and Euro-American communities in the city.  See: http://www.winonadakotaunityalliance.org/goalsmission/covenant-of-friendship/

So many remarkable coincidences occurred in conjunction with Grand Excursion 2004 that on more than one occasion other event organizers asked if I was engaged in some sort of magical ritual to make it happen.  My response then was the true one: No, I just discovered an amazing story about our place in the world, and allowed it to re-tell itself.  In the end I think that's what terrapsychology is all about.

In my last post I related how I discovered the story of the Grand Excursion of 1854 and determined that it was an event that I had intuitively been seeking for years - an event that could be repeated in some sense during its 150th anniversary in 2004 as a way both to celebrate ten years of riverfront revitalization and heal some deep wounds to the psyche of the city of Saint Paul. And indeed, as soon as I made that proposal, it was immediately embraced by city leaders all the way up to the mayor. Ten years prior to 2004 the commitment was made to begin preparing for a redux of the Grand Excursion in that year, and I was put in charge of a small committee to begin planning for the big event.

Of course I was thrilled with this development, but I did have one nagging doubt. Why, I wondered, had the 1854 event been nearly forgotten when it was so important at the time? Did something go wrong back in 1854 that our community had been trying to repress ever since? If so, would that scuttle our 2004 plans or perhaps provide an opportunity for an even more profound transformation than we had originally imagined?

It turns out that a number of things really did go wrong back in 1854. One was recognized right away, and blamed on the people of my city. Others we could see in retrospect a century and a half later. But in all cases, the failings of our ancestors opened the door to a creative re-imagination of the original event. Rather than striving to re-enact the 1854 Grand Excursion, we chose to re-create it, in a way that enabled us to "get it right this time."

So what went wrong back in 1854? To answer that question it is helpful to consider in more detail what was supposed to happen back then. Grand Excursion 1854 was intended to be a kind of secular pilgrimage - a journey through the paradise of the Upper Mississippi Bluff Country to the new city of Saint Paul and on to the Falls of St. Anthony, a sacred site (both to native peoples and now to Euro-Americans) where a special ritual would be performed - a "mingling of the waters" ceremony where water from the Atlantic Ocean would be poured into the Mississippi River as a kind of sacred marriage uniting the East Coast with the Midwest.

That was the plan. But one aspect of the plan went terribly wrong. The boats arrived in Saint Paul a day early and no one was prepared to greet the thousands of excursionists and take them to the Falls of St. Anthony. Desperate to get to the falls, the excursionists began to offer to pay anyone who was willing to transport them there. The free market worked its magic, but only at prices that were clearly exorbitant. As a result, the new city of Saint Paul was roundly castigated by many excursionists, most notably by a traveling journalist from the New York Times who concluded a long diatribe against the city with the pronouncement that it was the greediest place in the Western Continent!

No wonder that by the late 20th century, Saint Paul residents had conveniently forgotten/repressed this embarrassing event dating from the time of the city's founding. And in retrospect, we could see that the entire 1854 event, even in its original intention, was flawed in other ways. It ushered in a full assault on the native peoples of the region, and the beautiful natural environment in which they lived. We certainly did not want to re-enact this kind of event.

I will be taking a two week break from my blog (warmup vacation); when I resume I'll explore how Saint Paul and the people of the Upper Mississippi Valley re-created the 1854 event to "get it right this time," in ways that genuinely transformed the community.

I began the year 1994 with a sense of anticipation.  To summarize items discussed in my previous blog posts: After three years of learning from mentors to think terrapsychologically, I found myself with -

* An awareness that my city of Saint Paul, MN was strong on neighborhood-focused soul, but weak on having a strong sense of itself as a centered city with a healthy ego. (Thanks to Robert Sardello for that insight.)

* Recognition that Saint Paul's inwardness stemmed in part from its natural history as a place riddled with caves and other underground spaces, some of which were sacred sites to indigenous peoples - and that in recent centuries the cave motif carried forward into Saint Paul's two most monumental buildings, the state capitol and the cathedral - both structures dominated by cavelike domes. (Thanks to my spouse Elizabeth VanderSchaaf for that insight.)

* Perception that the neon sign on Saint Paul's historic commercial skyscraper - a giant "1st" that flashes on and off - could be a clue to the psyche of the city and its wounds that needed healing.  Saint Paul was originally an important river city as the head of navigation on the Mississippi River.  And it was the "first born" of the two Twin Cities, and surpassed Minneapolis in size for the first 30 years of their existence.  So it had long been haunted by the dual loss of the river as a special place, lost by abandoning the river to industrial pollution, and the loss of the city's preeminence to Minneapolis.  (Thanks to Gail Thomas for that insight.)

* A meditative image of the Circle City mandala - an image suggesting the interrelationship of a circular pattern of urban development anchored by Chicago in the southeast and Minneapolis/Saint Paul 400 miles to the northwest.  And a growing awareness of a kind of flow of energy from Chicago to the Twin Cities seeking a water path.

What especially fueled my sense of anticipation in 1994 was the fact that Saint Paul had just elected a new mayor, who had made riverfront development a top priority of his administration.  As a planner working for the city, I had been assigned to help the mayor craft his development agenda.  So I knew that his hope was for the city to embark on a ten-year riverfront revitalization project and then do something to celebrate its accomplishments after ten years.  I wondered if my terrapsychological insights could bear good fruit in this context.  So I began reading about the history of the Mississippi River in the Upper Midwest, hoping to find the missing piece to my terrapsychological puzzle.

Almost immediately I found what I was looking for - in a classic book called Steamboating on the Upper Mississippi published in 1968 by a historian named William J. Peterson.  There I read of an event called "The Grand Excursion of 1854."  This event was evidently the largest and most spectacular tourist and visitor event in pre-Civil War U.S. history.  It celebrated the completion of the last link in the first seamless railroad connection between the East Coast and the Mississippi River, terminating then at Rock Island, Illinois.  To celebrate, several thousand East Coast dignitaries gathered in Chicago, took the train to Rock Island, and then boarded riverboats for an excursion to see the brand new city of Saint Paul and the famous Falls of St Anthony, located where Minneapolis soon would be.

I quickly sensed that this story represented the fulfillment of my terrapsychological dreams.  Our mayor's idea of celebrating ten years of riverfront revitalization would coincide exactly with the 150th anniversary of the Grand Excursion of 1854.  So why not re-create that excursion as the way to celebrate not just our city's riverfront revitalization, but the revitalization of the entire Upper Mississippi River Valley?  I did have a few nagging questions, however.  Why was it that I'd never heard of the story of the 1854 Grand Excursion before?  Why was it completely forgotten by almost everyone else in our city, when it seemed to feature Saint Paul so prominently?  And would other cities along 400 miles of the river find this story to be meaningful to them?

Next week: How the idea for Grand Excursion 2004 took root, and how my nagging questions were answered.

My previous posts have discussed various elements that provided me with terrapsychological insight during the early 1990s.  Today I will outline an experience that was more unusual than those I've previously recounted - a relationship with a kind of meditative mandala that seemed to open my consciousness to archetypal dimensions of the region where I live.  And synchronistically, it was this mandala that led to my most successful and influential project as a city planner, which I will discuss beginning next week.

Individuals can use mandalas as a map of the psyche, and as an aid to achieve better articulation and integration of the elements of one's personality.  If places also have personalities, then it makes sense to imagine that there can be mandalas for neighborhoods, cities, even regions.

In the late 1980s I began to discover a mandala for the entire Upper Midwest, anchored in the cities of Chicago and Minneapolis/Saint Paul, 400 miles northwest of Chicago.  The basic structure of the mandala was discerned by Phil Lewis, a landscape architecture professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (although he did not realize that he was articulating a mandala).  In the early 1950s, Lewis had noticed that the four-state region of Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa was largely defined by a system of interconnected cities, arrayed in the form of a circle.  He provided a name for this mega-region: Circle City.  

Starting from Chicago, the outline of the circle proceeded north through Milwaukee and Green Bay in Wisconsin, before heading in a northwesterly direction through the Wisconsin cities of Wausau and Eau Claire toward Minneapolis/Saint Paul where it headed southward towards Iowa cities such as Waterloo and Cedar Rapids, before heading east toward Chicago again through Davenport, IA and Rock Island, IL.  Lewis was not any sort of religious mystic; he explained Circle City entirely in materialistic terms - as a result of the area in the center of the circle being largely undeveloped due to its steep hills and bluffs, anomalies in the otherwise flat Midwest.  But he advocated for focusing future urban development along the path of the circle, preserving the natural areas in its center. Mandalas are typically circular, so Circle City provided an obvious structure for a mandala that could potentially reveal the personality of this part of the world.

But I also discovered another set of tools in the late 1980s that helped me to perceive the personality of Circle City: tools arising from the discipline of sacred geometry, especially as articulated by the British thinker John Michell.  Among Michell's books, The New View Over Atlantis was particularly fruitful for me.  Not only did it describe traditional principles of harmonious geometrical forms that align with personality, it also provided an account of the reawakening of interest in "earth mysteries" in Michell's native land of England.  Much to my surprise and delight, it turns out that this reawakening was partially triggered by mid-19th century European discoveries of Native American earth mysteries in the Upper Mississippi River Valley - essentially within the area that Phil Lewis identified as Circle City.  Before European settlement, this area was thick with natural and cultural alignments over vast distances, believed both to manifest aspects of the personality of the place, and to channel spiritual energy.

By combining the insights of Lewis and Michell, I therefore had a mandalic form that I frequently used in meditation - and also in my engagement with communities in my job as a city planner.  And increasingly a single simple image began to dominate my meditations: a flow of energy seeking a water path connecting Chicago and Minneapolis/Saint Paul.  

Next time: from meditation to manifestation in the "Grand Excursion" and its associated creative placemaking. 

As the year 1994 began I was prepared to translate the lessons I had learned from depth psychology into my work as a city planner in Saint Paul, Minnesota.  Perhaps the single most important lesson I had learned was to reframe the question that city planners first ask when embarking on a project.  That question had already evolved during the course of my lifetime in a positive way.  (Warning: Huge generalization coming.)  In my youth the question typically had been "What do experts think is the most efficient way to create systems to employ people, house people, move people and dispose of their waste?"  After the mid-1960s the question became "What do people want their community to be?"  

Although the second question was a big improvement over the first, it still fell short of honoring sufficiently the depth psychology insight that the world is suffused with soul.  By asking simply what people want their community to be, there is an implicit assumption that while people may have soul, the spaces they inhabit are merely locations that function more like a stage than a character in a play.  

Inspired by my depth psychology mentors, I asked a different question: "What does the place want to be?" with the "place" in question varying according to the relevant scope of the project.  Sometimes it was "What does the city want to be?"  Sometimes it was "What does the neighborhood want to be?" etc.

In 1994 my primary question for my community and my work was "What does the city want to be?"  My challenge was to find ways of pursuing answers to that question that would be embraced by the entire community rather than seen as the imposition of a set of values shared only by some ruling elite.  In a sense, I was looking for a test case that would demonstrate the value of a depth psychology perspective as applied to city planning.

I began to approach this task by looking for clues in three related ways.  First, I asked what was the founding myth (deeply true story) of the city.  A preliminary answer to that question was easy to find, and already well-known throughout the community.  Saint Paul was born as a prominent river town - as the head of navigation on the Mississippi River.  (10 miles northwest of Saint Paul was a large waterfall that could not be navigated in the days before locks and dams.  Minneapolis was to grow up as a mill town around this, the only major waterfall on the Mississippi River.)  But although Saint Paul owed its existence to the river, it had quickly despoiled the source of its life with high levels of pollution and heavy industrial development that caused the residents of the city to avoid the river rather than embrace it.  But by 1994 massive improvements in wastewater treatment systems had resulted in a remarkable recovery of the river's ecological health, and were fueling a community-wide desire to return to the river as a source of life and health.  So there was an easy answer to the question: "What does the city want to be?"  Answer: "To be a river town again."

Gail Thomas of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture taught me a second way of looking for clues to what my city wanted to be.  In her work in Dallas, Gail challenged people to look for symbolic patterns in the built environment that manifest the city's personality.  In particular, she pointed to the neon sign on the historic skyscraper in town as a symbol that synchronistically incarnates the personality of Dallas in a remarkable way.  Dallas' historic skyscraper was the former headquarters of the Mobil Oil Company, and therefore was surmounted by an image of Pegasus that seemed to hover over the city itself.  For Gail and the Dallas Institute, this symbol provided fertile ground for reflecting on Dallas wanting to be what Pegasus wants to be.  The synchronicity of such a symbol held true in Saint Paul as well - our historic skyscraper was surmounted by a giant neon sign that read "1st."  And indeed, Saint Paul was the first of the Twin Cities, and has always been troubled that it was eventually superseded by Minneapolis, the second-born city in the region.  But the "1st" symbol also alludes powerfully to another dimension of the city's founding myth - Saint Paul was first and foremost a river city.

My third set of clues came from a source that deserves a longer explanation, so will be the subject of my next blog post. Sneak preview: it involves a mandalic image that seemed to arise from the landscape of the Upper Midwest, and frequently entered my imagination during times of meditation.  And indeed, it powerfully revealed a deeper insight into how the city could return to the river once again, and fueled a transformative project that exceeded all of my community's hopes and dreams.

In 2014 the posts for this blog focused on the ways in which I began to view the world from a terrapsychological perspective, with my last post describing a 1993 conference entitled "What Makes a City: Myth and Maps" which my wife and I organized to begin community-wide discussions of this perspective.  In 1994, our work gained national attention and also led to an idea for a project that would apply the perspective to issues of riverfront development in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. 

The national attention took two forms, both of which involved my wife more than me. 

Our October 1993 conference had been covered by the National Catholic Reporter newspaper, which itself had a national audience.  But then in the early summer of 1994 we got a phone call from a film crew at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City, informing us that they were preparing a video series on Discovering Everyday Spirituality and wanted to come to Saint Paul for a week to film our work for an episode on the spirituality of place.  The series was to be hosted by Thomas Moore, then the best-selling popularizer of ideas articulated earlier by James Hillman about the presence of soul in the world.  My wife's contribution to the "Place" episode featured both an emphasis on the soul of our neighborhood (via a meditative walk around the block) and a community conversation about our city's role as the head of navigation on the Mississippi River.  Our episode also featured another best-selling author at the time, Kathleen Norris, whose book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography had recently been published.

The Discovering Everyday Spirituality series was released on videocassette and never converted to DVD commercially, but it can still be purchased via Amazon.  For those who are interested, see:  http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Everyday-Spirituality-Place-VHS/dp/B00000FEHW/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1421024350&sr=1-1&keywords=Discovering+everyday+spirituality

This video was released in the Fall of 1994, coinciding closely with the September/October issue of the Utne Reader which had as its theme "Cities Don't Suck."  The issue focused on the reawakening of urban life that was beginning to be evident throughout the US, after the difficult decades of the 1960s-1980s when it seemed that cities were dying.  I had been asked by Eric Utne, the principal founder of the magazine, to help plan the issue.  Utne had been involved with our 1993 conference and so he also asked my wife to contribute a piece to the issue, an article that would provide what we would now call a terrapsychological perspective.  The result was called "Finding the Soul of the City: 20 Questions That May Change How You Think About Your Neighborhood."  This piece is still available online, in a version adapted by the Louisiana Folk Life Project, at this website: http://www.louisianavoices.org/pdfs/Unit4/Lesson3/SpiritofPlaceWorksheet.pdf

Next time I will explore how I drew on both of these works by my wife to move terrapsychology into the realm of creative placemaking, drawing on powerful archetypes to perceive, honor and cultivate the soul of a 400 mile stretch of the Upper Mississippi River Valley.

My last blog post described the 1993 "What Makes a City" conference in Saint Paul that featured Gail Thomas of the Dallas Institute and my spouse, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf, as co-keynote speakers.  Together they provoked reflection in the Twin Cities community about how to discern the myth (deeply true story) of a city, and how to perceive landscape patterns that manifest that myth. 

One objective of this conference was to prepare the way for launching an institute similar to the Dallas Institute in the Twin Cities.  My wife and I created a proposal for such an institute, which we were calling The Placeways Institute.  The name was chosen to honor and draw on the perspective articulated in a remarkable 1988 book by E.V. Walter entitled "Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment."  The author, a sociology professor at Boston University, had concluded near the end of his career that a purely quantitative approach to urban issues was leading to a dead end.  Consequently, he set out to reimagine the way in which he thought about cities and other human environments. 

Early in Walter's book he framed his central issue in a quote that has remained a favorite of mine since the time I first read it nearly 25 years ago.  I share it here as background to my upcoming blog posts: "We are threatened today by two kinds of environmental degradation: one is pollution - a menace that we all acknowledge; the other is loss of meaning.  For the first time in human history, people are systematically building meaningless places.  However, we are living through the end of an era, experiencing the demise of modern architecture, a revulsion from 'futurism,' scepticism about planning, and a reaction against urban renewal programs.  As we contemplate the ruins and dislocations of our cities, another way of understanding the built environment and the natural landscape is struggling to emerge.  Today, everyone yearns for renewal; but from a holistic perspective, what does the renewal of a city mean?  It is not merely physical reconstruction, as many people think - demolishing slums and replacing them with new buildings.  Historically, the renewal of a city was experienced as a mental and emotional transformation, an improvement of the spirit, a rebirth of psychic energies." (Walter, "Placeways," pp. 2-3)

In honor of the upcoming Holidays, I'll be taking a break from my weekly blog post, and resuming it after the first of the year.  At that time I'll explore how our work with the Placeways Institute idea began to address the task of bringing about the improvement of the spirit and the rebirth of psychic energies in out city.

1993 would be my final year of collaboration with the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  But what an eventful and fruitful year it would turn out to be!

The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum, described in my previous post, whetted the appetite in my community for approaching the city archetypally.  So later that year I began exploring opportunities to expand both the audience and the scope of the discussion.  I was able to find allies at a local Catholic women's college (St. Catherine's) and the neighboring community of radical nuns (St. Joseph's of Carondelet).  The idea we settled on was for them to host a conference modeled after annual events sponsored by the Dallas Institute.  The Dallas conferences were called "What Makes a City?" and each year explored a different archetypal topic.  For our conference we chose the topic "What Makes a City?: Myth and Maps".  Myth was to be understood as a deeply true story that provides hints as to the personality of the city; maps, we suggested, could serve as mandalic companions to the myth of the city, revealing a kind of sacred geometry that also expressed that personality.

For the headliner at the conference, we imported the Director of the Dallas Institute, Gail Thomas, who had done some pathbreaking work on the myth of Dallas.  She agreed to be a co-keynote speaker with Elizabeth VanderSchaaf, my wife, who had been exploring the idea of maps as mandalas.  We were also able to put together a panel of respondents consisting of local urban experts, moderated by Eric Utne, co-founder and chair of the renowned "Utne Reader."  Our panel consisted of an urban studies professor at the University of Minnesota, a local housing developer (and Jungian), and the former Dallas planning director.  We held the conference in October of 1993; several hundred enthusiastic attendees participated, including the mayors of both Saint Paul and Minneapolis (who sent us a note encouraging us to hold more such events).  

The conference keynote speeches proved be very fruitful in initiating a chain of events in the Twin Cities with positive repercussions directly into the 21st century.  Gail's talk focused on the story of how Dallas discovered a remarkable synchronicity - namely that the neon sign on the city's historic skyscraper proved to be a fruitful symbol for the city and its personality, and a guide for Dallas' future development.  The symbol was at one level purely commercial - the flying horse that was the brand of the Mobil Oil Company that once occupied the building.  But at a deeper level, it embodied the myth of Pegasus, a symbol of high-flying aspiration that needs to be brought down to earth for the waters of imagination to spring forth.  One of Gail's important accomplishments was bringing this symbol into civic discourse in Dallas, where it began to shape the imagination of the community.  Today one can visit Pegasus Plaza, next to the Magnolia Building which still retains its flying horse neon sign.  Pegasus Plaza literally taps into an underground spring of water, which feed fountains representing the muses.  Gail and the Dallas Institute proposed the plaza and helped raise funds to bring it into being.  It continues to inspire the community both to temper its inclinations toward ego inflation, and to energize it in the aftermath of whatever tragedies may befall it.  

While Gail Thomas challenged Twin Citians to seek the myth of our city, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf's talk suggested what form that might take.  Her topic was entitled "Reading the 'Deep Map' of a City" and highlighted correlations between geographical patterns and the personality of place.  She particularly noted the paradox that the Twin Cities were both born on the Mississippi River but both turned away from the river, as if in shame,  when industrial pollution turned it into an open sewer in the late 19th and early 20th century.  But she also highlighted how the physical form of Saint Paul in particular would make it challenging for that city to return to the river.  The land that is now Saint Paul has always been riddled with an abnormal number of caves - including a large cave with an underground lake that was a traditional sacred site for indigenous peoples.  Caves are places of withdrawal and escape.  Synchronistically, as noted in 1991 by Robert Sardello, Saint Paul residents are unusually inclined to withdraw into their families and neighborhoods, and not cultivate the ego/spirit that a city needs to complement its soul.  Even the great public buildings of Saint Paul are cave-like: the state capitol and the nearly identical cathedral that faces it.  

So by the end of 1993 our community was furnished with insights and questions that it hadn't addressed before: What is the myth of our city?  (And could it be that the historic skyscraper in town contains a clue?)  How can we return to the river in a way that draws on our myth and our "deep map" but moves us toward a stronger civic ego to complement our natural inwardness? Early in 1994 some answers to these questions began to appear - as I will discuss in my next post.

In early 1992 I had the opportunity to bring the insights I learned from the Dallas Institute into the life of Saint Paul, the city where I was working as a planner.  Several images and ideas were inspiring me at that time: the need for cities to advance culture but avoid the traps of imperialistic "civilization," the importance of having places of soul but also a strong civic spirit to bring a broader identify into focus, attentiveness to seven generations back and seven generations forward, respect for both indigenous wisdom and the mainstream Abrahamic spiritual traditions of western culture, and attention to the "powers of the four directions" in our natural environment.

All of these elements converged in a January, 1992 neighborhood forum that I helped to plan.  This forum a regular annual event funded by Saint Paul's city government.  I had joined the planning committee for the 1992 event, and successfully inspired other committee members to support my proposals for a theme and sessions.  In that year the theme would be "Visions, Echoes and Dreams for the Seventh Generation."  Sessions would explore topics such as "Urban Ecology and the Recovery of Saint Paul's 'Sky-Blue Waters'," "Developing a Sense of Place from the Past," and "Neighborhood Design with a Human Face."

As the conference theme suggests, the forum looked both backwards and forwards - to echoes of events going back seven generations to the city's incorporation in 1854, and looking ahead with attention to 150 years in the future.  In city planning circles such a perspective is rare - normally 30 years is considered a long-term planning perspective.  The premise of this forum, though, was that 30 years is really short-term thinking and that the Native American perspective of seven generations is more responsible; even if we can't predict the future that far in advance, we can commit ourselves to an environmental and social ethic that can help ensure the nurturance of life for that longer time span.

For our keynote speaker, we turned to a colleague of Robert Sardello at the Dallas Institute - Mary Ellen Degnan, who at the time was heading up a remarkable project called "Dallas Visions."  For the first - and perhaps the only - time in US history, an organization devoted to archetypal and depth psychology was selected to be the lead agency to create a regional plan for a major metropolitan area.  Mary Ellen's job was to organize that project.  Her extensive background in urban design and Dallas civic projects was a perfect complement to the work of Robert Sardello, with his more academic perspective.  I had met her during my visit to the Dallas Institute in 1991 and got to witness her work in action.  Especially memorable was a gigantic visionary map of the city that was an outgrowth of the project - displayed on the wall of a two-story atrium in a prominent downtown office building!

Mary Ellen's keynote address was entitled "Why Are Visions Important for Cities?"  Such a topic could have easily resulted in nothing but cliches - it's fairly typical for cities to proclaim that they have a vision for the future, and many of them do.  The distinctive insights that Mary Ellen provided, however, were informed by her attentiveness to insights from depth psychology, leading to a much richer presentation and fruitful discussion in breakout sessions on topics including "Neighborhood Festivals," "Youth and Urban Visions," and "A Vision for Saint Paul Public Schools."

Part of what made the Mary Ellen Degnan/Dallas Institute perspective on visions so fruitful was her Jungian/Hillmanian recognition of the presence of the Shadow in the background of all human achievement, cities included.  Perhaps Dallas' recent history made it easier for that city to acknowledge the darker shades of reality - in 1992 and even today many people immediately think of the Kennedy assassination and the horrific chapter of American history that ensued when the city's name is uttered.  It's as if the city bears a karmic stain from that 1963 event, and is compelled to revisit the event continually as it sets its own vision for the future.

The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum introduced the depth psychology perspective to a wide audience, and prepared the way for a 1993 event that would take that perspective to an even deeper level in my city.  My next blog post will consider what occurred in that year. 

For the last two weeks my blog has described how my emerging terrapsychological perspective in 1991 was enriched by mentoring from Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  He provided me with important insights about how cities should be centers of culture, nor civilization, but also how it is necessary for cities to have both strong souls (typically rooted in neighborhoods) and strong spirits (typically centered in downtowns).

I had another important mentor in 1991, who helped lay the foundation for my future work in 1992 and beyond - a Native American Episcopal priest and theology professor named Steve Charleston.  I met him while leading a study group I devised called "Nature and the City," a year-long activity that explored how both indigenous traditions (American and European) and the Christian tradition could shed light on how to live responsibly in both the natural and urban worlds.  I structured the activities of the study group to correlate with ideas expressed by Rudolf Steiner in his little book, The Calendar of the Soul.  As such, we concentrated on moving our collective psyches progressively outward into nature during the first half of the year, and inward toward urban community during the second half of the year.

Steve Charleston was a member of my neighborhood Episcopal church, and taught theology at the nearby Lutheran seminary, so I sought him as an adviser and study group speaker.  His ability to live creatively within both his own indigenous tradition (Choctaw) and mainstream Christianity influenced me profoundly.  In essence, he proposed that every indigenous tradition deserves a level of respect equal to that accorded by the Christian tradition to the Hebrew Bible (aka the "Old Testament").  As such, we need to reinterpret our monotheistic Abrahamic faith in light of the best insights provided by both our pre-Christian ancestors (indigenous European traditions for many of us), and also the indigenous peoples in the land where we dwell (Native American, for all of us who live in the Americas).

He articulated this perspective in a system he referred to as a "theology of the four directions."  As the term suggests, this perspective drew heavily on Native American sensitivity to the rhythms of the natural world as they manifest themselves in the forms and energies of our surrounding landscapes.  Along with this came an emphasis on the Native American notion of the "seventh generation" - i.e., honoring the wisdom of ancestors at least seven generations back (approximately 150 years), and caring for future descendants at least seven generations into the future.

In an earlier post I recalled my first meeting with Robert Sardello at a Dallas Institute conference in Santa Fe.  I had been drawn to this conference by study group activities and my mentorship experience with Steve Charleston in early 1991.  I went to Santa Fe hoping to learn from both the Jungian/Hillmanian perspective of the Dallas Institute, and the Native American perspective of New Mexico's pueblo culture.  As 1991 came to a close, I had a rich set of gifts from both perspectives, gifts that would shape my work profoundly in years to come.

My post of last week described Robert Sardello's advice to Saint Paul City government leaders in 1991: pursue culture, not civilization.  That is, allow cultural creativity to flourish without interference from other spheres of human activity that seek to dominate the cultural realm.  In particular, don't regard culture as a means to the end of economic profit.  Instead, cherish cultural activity as a pillar of what Lewis Hyde calls the Gift Economy which expects no return on investment, but paradoxically yields prosperity so long as such prosperity does not become the goal of the gift.

There was an additional twist to Sardello's advice, however - one expressed to me privately, not in his official communications to the City.  One might expect that his views on culture and civilization might translate into a privileging of neighborhoods above "downtown" or its equivalent.  After all, neighborhoods seem to be where grassroots creativity can flourish, whereas urban downtowns are typically places where power concentrates and seeks hegemony over the rest of the community, as well as over other cities.  But Sardello's startling observation regarding Saint Paul was that our city had a strong soul, but a weak spirit - manifest in its strong neighborhoods and weak downtown.  This he found to be a startling contrast to Dallas - and even to our neighbor Minneapolis.  His advice to me, then, was to work toward a better balance between soul/neighoborhoods and spirit/downtown in my community - perhaps by seeking a path that could infuse downtown itself with the soul/culture energy of the city's neighborhoods.

I wish I could report that over the next few years I had been able to work with Robert Sardello on such a task.  But as is often the case, there was a "two steps forward, one step backward" dimension to my work with the Dallas Institute after 1991.  Robert had hoped to be hired to direct an anthroposophical organization in the Twin Cities that year, but the organization was not able to raise the needed resources to make that possible.  Instead, he moved to North Carolina to establish the School of Spiritual Psychology which continues today.  And the publication of Sardello's Facing the World with Soul had an unfortunate side effect with my risk-averse City government bosses.  When my own boss started reading the book, he panicked at what he thought were extreme New Age ideas that would set us up for ridicule if we continued to associate openly with them.  So as 1991 drew to a close, so did the Sardello chapter in the history of the City of Saint Paul.

But two steps forward had already been taken, and this was only one step back.  I had established a good connection not only with Robert Sardello, but with several of his colleagues at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture - all of whom shared similar ideas about soul in the city, but with a mode of expression that was a bit more mainstream.  Work with these people - particularly Mary Ellen Degnan and Gail Thomas - would yield great benefits to my city in 1992 and 1993.  Next week's post will continue this story.

I was intrigued to read Patricia Damery's October 27 blog post describing a recent San Francisco seminar on Jung and Steiner, and their contributions to an evolution of consciousness.  Synchronistically, that relates closely to the topic of my blog for today, picking up on my post of last Saturday.

When I met Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1991, we had both recently become students of Steiner and valued his thought as a complement to that of Jung.  And for both Sardello and me, the city was a focus of our thinking at the time.  Those were the reasons why Sardello proposed at our first encounter that we study together in the future.

I met Sardello at the "Art and the Sacred" conference, sponsored by the Dallas Institute, which I attended as a vacation retreat at the time of the spring equinox.  But when I returned and described the event to my boss at the Saint Paul Department of Planning and Economic Development, he reminded me that the city's mayor was beginning to articulate a "cultural initiative" and challenged me to investigate the model of the Dallas Institute for its applicability in our city.  That gave me a ready avenue to work with Sardello throughout the year of 1991 - a momentous year for him as he was completing his most recent book, Facing the World with Soul, at that time.

There were three times subsequent to the conference when travel brought us together.  Only a month after the conference, my City employer sent me down to Dallas for several days to learn more about the Dallas Institute and generate a proposal to create something similar in Saint Paul.  During in the summer, a local anthroposophical organization brought Sardello to the Twin Cities to run a seminar based on his forthcoming book.  And at the end of the year my City government commissioned him to provide advice to Saint Paul's cultural initiative.

The context for the assignment to Sardello was a recently-completed report by a nationally prominent urban political analyst, Neal Pierce.  During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Peirce had written a series of reports analyzing various US cities and recommending strategies for their future.  His reports included both Dallas and Saint Paul - and for Saint Paul, his key recommendation was to make culture the cornerstone of the city's future development.  Given the role of the Dallas Institute as a promoter of humanities and culture, our City leaders felt that Sardello could provide useful guidance regarding how we might advance the ideas recommended by Neal Peirce.

Robert Sardello's subsequent report was a fascinating example of translating depth psychology into the realm of city politics and planning.  Without explicitly identifying Hillman, Sardello drew on a fundamental Hillmanian perspective - namely the distinction in the Western world between Greek thinking (living, fluid, culture-affirming, "polytheistic") and Roman thinking (dying, static, civilization-affirming, idolatrously "monotheistic").  He cautioned my city not to try to put culture into the service of business development (a civilization-type perspective) but to allow it to flourish freely as something valuable in and of itself, as a component of a gift economy.  And stepping beyond Hillman into Steiner territory, he also identified Nicholas Roerich as a guide to understand culture as "reverence for light" and challenged us to pursue an educational model with such a focus.

In many ways, my city planning career since 1991 has been an effort to put Sardello's perspective into practice.  Next week I'll pick up how that began to occur in the years 1992-1994. 

My encounter with the ideas of Japanese architect Kiko Mozuna in 1987 (described in my previous blog) elevated my attention to the personality of place, and occurred at the time when I got my first city planning job, in Saint Paul, MN - 250 miles northwest of my graduate school home of Madison, WI.  

Mozuna's concept for educational plazas in Kawasaki included the idea that both the city and the plaza neighborhoods had personalities.  From a city perspective, his proposed plazas would be seven chakras, energizing complementary characteristics of the city's body.  But he also imagined each plaza as embodying one of the seven "gods of good fortune" that are prominent in Japanese popular spirituality.  As such, each plaza would have its own distinctive personality while simultaneously contributing to the personality of the city.

An intriguing concept, I thought, but how to translate such a perspective into an American context?  Surely it was much easier to personify places in Shinto Japan than in a secular US city.  While learning the ropes of my new job, I simultaneously brooded on this question and sought resources that could help me answer it.  I was especially motivated by comments from Saint Paul old-timers who would typically tell me that I couldn't possibly understand their city unless I had lived there my entire life.  And yet, I'd had an experience of gaining some level of understanding of a city in far-off Japan by approaching the place with meditatively-inspired intuition.  Couldn't I do the same in Saint Paul if I had the right tools to help me?

Four years after moving to Saint Paul I made a discovery that provided me with valuable insight into how to think of even secular American places as having genuine personality.  That's when I learned about an organization in Texas called the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, co-founded in 1978 by James Hillman and several other depth psychologists.  Hillman, I learned, had spent his career working to restore the idea that the world and all of its features are ensouled - and that our life in the world should consist of recognizing and honoring soul and personality in all things.  At the Dallas Institute this meant reflection on the soul of the city of Dallas and its neighborhoods, and translating that reflection into creative engagement with the past, present and future of the city.  

I first encountered people from the Dallas Institute at a 1991 conference on "Art and the Sacred" that they conducted in Santa Fe.  By that time Hillman was not actively invoked with the institute, but I met its two co-directors, Gail Thomas and Robert Sardello.  After a brief conversation with Sardello, he proclaimed that he wanted to come to the Twin Cities to study with me.  And that's when things began to get really interesting, as I'll describe in my next blog.

In last week's post I recounted my 1983 decision to develop the skills of an urban social scientist while seeking opportunities to apply the "Van Allen Method" of relying on dreams, intuition and synchronicity as a way to engage more fully the souls of cities.  By 1986 I had some evidence that both strategies were succeeding.

My graduate work in urban planning concentrated on economic and fiscal analysis - the most quantitative of the social science approaches to urban issues.  With my M.S. in this subject I was able to get hired as a policy analyst for the state economic development department in Wisconsin.  But more importantly, in 1986 I also had a rare opportunity to test my belief that spiritual imagination could also lead to creative engagement with urban issues.

This opportunity arose in the form of a competition that one of my former urban planning professors had entered. The competition sought design concepts for a community-oriented college campus in the city of Kawasaki, Japan - an industrial suburb on the southern edge of Tokyo.  My former professor, a habitual procrastinator, had waited until the last minute to develop a proposal and now asked me and another former student to participate in a weekend intensive brainstorming session with him.  His invitation included the promise that no suggested ideas would be off the table, and that if we should happen to win we would split the prize three-way.

Here was my big chance to put myself into a Japanese frame of mind and see what would be the result.  The idea that my intuition yielded was in a way rather simple: think of the city of Kawasaki as a kind of human body with seven chakras that would become the locations for seven outposts of the new college campus, connected by a transportation and communications spine.  Since the terms of the deal with my former professor were that no serious idea would be rejected, this became a key element of our proposal.

To our surprise and delight, our quickly-thrown-together proposal was selected as a finalist in the competition, and we were flown to Japan to present our ideas in person.  Although we did not win the Grand Prize, there was a feature of the final competition that seemed to vindicate my contribution.  One other proposal also imagined Kawasaki as a body with seven chakras, and designed the campus around seven chakra-plazas.  This proposal came from a famous Japanese architect, Kiko Mozuna, widely celebrated as Japan's "cosmic architect" for his long history of designing buildings and communities around Japanese spiritual traditions.  So in some mysterious way I had perhaps tapped into the same ideas that inspired him.

It was intriguing to think that intuition could yield such powerful insights, and my Kawasaki experience inspired me to keep exploring that possibility.  But it would be another five years until I discovered some important tools to help me advance down this path - tools that grew out of the work of James Hillman.  In next week's post I will share that story.

In my first post I revealed that I am a professional city planner and an amateur terrapsychologist.  City planning is a second career for me, however.  And my first career - as a college humanities professor - gave me some of the tools that I could later use to shape my planning work along terrapsychological lines.

I prepared for my first career by earning a Ph.D. in religious studies at the University of Iowa in 1979.  It was there that I learned a valuable life lesson from a most unlikely source - Dr. James Van Allen, Iowa's "rock star" astrophysicist.  Van Allen was world famous in the 1970s for his discovery of a belt of radiation that surrounds the earth, a feature now appropriately named the "Van Allen Belt."  But he was also a bit of a religious mystic, who would annually lecture at a freshman course I coordinated called Religion in Human Culture.

In Van Allen's religion lecture he would explain that the standard account of the scientific method (formulate and test hypotheses based solely on empirical observation) was not at all how he discovered the Van Allen Belt.  On the contrary, much to his surprise he one night had a vivid dream that featured a belt of radiation around the earth.  Suspecting that the dream might be in some sense revelatory, he then began to devise experiments to determine if the dream was true - which of course it turned out to be.  His lesson for us was literally to pay attention to our dreams and other similar sources of inspiration.  But also to seek ways to demonstrate the truthfulness of our dreams in consensual reality.

After earning my Ph.D. and beginning my teaching career I often found myself relying on the Van Allen method to prepare for my courses.  I found that if I put myself into a meditative frame of mind, I could often intuit many of the features of the subject I was to teach.  Then I would research the facts, verify my intuitions, and fill in any knowledge gaps that I had missed.

This method met with a mixed reception by my professorial colleagues.  In general, the humanities faculty thought it was just fine, but the social scientists viewed it with something approaching alarm.  This all came to a head over a senior seminar I created to interpret the city from an interdisciplinary perspective.  Not allowed, said the social scientists - only they could properly interpret the city, and I wasn't properly trained in their methods.  

With that, I made a radical decision: go back to school, get trained in rigorous urban social science methodologies, become a city planner, and seek opportunities in that field to apply the Van Allen method.  So I bade farewell to college teaching at age 33, and headed off to the University of Wisconsin to train for Career #2.

With this post I am launching what I hope will be a regular blog exploring the intersection between the field of terrapsychology, and an approach to urban improvement known as "creative placemaking." 

My perspective is that of a professional city planner (30 years experience) and an amateur terrapsychologist.  Within the field of city planning, creative placemaking is new trend.  The term refers to the involvement of community-based arts and cultural activities to shape the form and socioeconomic structure of neighborhoods, cities, and even regions.  For much of my career I have been a proponent and sometimes initiator of creative placemaking activities in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Area where I work, even before the term was coined earlier in this century.  Similarly, my interest in what is now called "terrapsychology" (a term coined by Craig Chalquist in 2003) extends back to my early years as a city planner, even though I did not have a name for the phenomenon then. 

The marriage of terrapsychology and creative placemaking seems to be a match made in heaven.  The in-depth understanding of place generated by terrapsychology begs to become incarnate in the evolving form of our cities and regions, and the field of creative placemaking yearns for such an in-depth understanding to provide enduring meaning and purpose to its activities.  So this needed union is the topic that I intend to explore in my blogs posts.

My initial posts will focus on my own evolving efforts to think terrapsychologically and act in a way that yields fruitful creative placemaking.  But I will hope to engage in dialogue with others sharing similar interests, the better to articulate what the marriage of these two fields might mean in the future.

To close this post, I do wish to offer one reservation that I have about the term "creative placemaking."  Like the more general term of "placemaking," this term subtly suggests that places are made not born.  In other words, it implies that the placemaker enters an arena of meaningless "no-place" and makes it into a meaningful "place."  This is a dubious presupposition.  In fact, everywhere is a place with a history and a personality.  So my caveat when working with fellow city planners goes something like this: "Place honoring needs to precede placemaking."  Terrapsychology specializes in place honoring, which is why it is so important for creative placemaking to glean from terrapsychological insights.

Last week I journeyed from my home in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Area to Joshua Tree, CA to seek insight into the synchronicities that permeate my personal and professional life. 

By profession I am an urban and regional planner; increasingly I find value in discerning the "spirit of place" as a window into the community where I work.  That has led me into the emerging field of terrapsychology, especially as articulated by Craig Chalquist.

Although the Joshua Tree synchronicity symposium did not address terrapsychological issues directly, I was attracted to it particularly because of the opportunity to learn from Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Tarnas, two brilliant thinkers who in my opinion lay an important foundation for terrapsychology or any other depth psychological work these days.  Their teachings at Joshua Tree more than met my hopes for the event.

I had not previously studied with Rupert Sheldrake, although I had read his "Science Set Free" book and watched several YouTube videos of his talks.  His Joshua Tree material did sound some familiar themes, but I was especially grateful for his attention to the latest developments in consciousness studies and his highlighting of the apparent breakdown of the materialist perspective even among its advocates (example of Sam Harris' book "Waking Up" just now published).  I also valued the opportunity to dialogue with him and came to appreciate better his unique views on both organized and unorganized religion.  His own articulated perspective of Psychedelic Anglicanism Married to a Practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism certainly gives credence to the late Robin Williams' statement regarding Episcopalianism (the US equivalent of Anglicanism) - that "no matter what you believe there is at least one other Episcopalian who believes the same thing."

Joshua Tree was my fourth time hearing Richard Tarnas - he's frequently appeared in the Twin Cities and I make a point of taking part in his events close to home when I can.  I'm finding especially valuable in Tarnas his articulation of the varieties of synchronistic experiences and his point that some are messages from the cosmos via inanimate or barely-animate means (e.g., the golden scarab in the dream of Jung's patient) while others are best seen as extensions of innate capabilities that we all possess in some measure (e.g., telepathic communications).  His emphases on the trickster dimension to most synchronistic experiences and the corollary need to avoid ego inflation were especially welcome to me.

Keeping this post to a manageable length, I'll simply note one pleasant synchronicity that occurred at the symposium.  As previously mentioned I have been attracted to Craig Chalquist's work.  I've not met him in person but have engaged in several conversations with him via email and phone.  Several months ago I asked if he would be at the Joshua Tree symposium and he said probably not - and indeed he was not there.  But serendipitously, Bonnie Bright, a former Chalquist student, had a prominent role in the symposium and was offering a free copy of the Chalquist "Rebearths" book to anyone who would agree to post impressions of the symposium on the Depth Psychology Alliance website.  So that's the genesis of this blogpost.  Thank you Bonnie and Cosmos!

How this all fits into my work as a city and regional planner may be the subject of another post at another time.