In my last blog I wrote about the energy or quality of Eros being asleep or lying unconscious in most of us or just running away at the slightest sign of trouble. In the myth Psyche brings her illuminating lamp into the darkness, into the unconscious, into what cannot be seen. She is full of longing and curiosity. Holding the lamp aloft gazing down at his sleeping face she does not see a monster. Desire for him blossoms in her heart. A drop of hot lamp oil accidentally drips from the container onto his shoulder. Waking he sees the one he loves, the one he has warned not to look upon him because he is a God. He flees back to his mother Aphrodite. The darkness, the womb for the light of something new, is not able to give birth. It is a death instead.

The human soul, the life and breath that weaves in and out of ourselves delights in wondrous life, in all its shapes, colors, forms and textures. Our souls desire connection with the depth and breadth of matter or nature which we share with it. Our souls want to connect to and create with all of life. The spark that leaps between our soul and the spirit in life and in matter uniting both is Eros. The spark that leaps from the soul of matter to the spirit in us is Eros once again. Herein is a pathway to a wholeness of being, a wholeness of life.

In my conversation with David Abram he mentioned that he was interested in having individuals engage their senses in order to find or create that spark in relation to nature and in the outer world in general. I am most interested in how the spark or erotic connection is snuffed out quite easily in people and I believe that it has to do with emotional wounding particularly in love and desiring.

I say this because Eros runs back to his mother Aphrodite the goddess of love. He does not stay in the heat of Psyches desire. It wounds him. So David Abram is on the right track in that a quality of erotic connection needs to be brought into the world, in relation to life and creativity to help change our relationship to nature, to each other and to ourselves.  But why is it so difficult to do and lost so easily?

First we might ask why is it so important that we try to come into relationship to this connecting and creating impulse? Well frankly it animates a love of life and life loving us. Backing up for a moment we find that Psyche or soul, the living breath, the breath of life, has a quality of desire, our soul’s desire. When we are wounded, when our souls, our deepest selves are wounded, our ability to connect to and experience this desire is damaged. Living in a culture where rationality and egoism are the dominant qualities considered important for “normal” functioning, where accumulation of wealth is a religion, and where science and technology are used to rape nature, the soul of an individual cannot help but be wounded. Hence our desire, which I consider to be a human sense, becomes susceptible to outside influences and to our inner confusion. We are inundated every day by different forms of mainly electronic media that tell us that our desires are something other than what we might truly feel in our body and our hearts. When we are told by the media, through our education system and by people around us, that the deep inner truth which comes from our own deep essence or soul is off, wrong, or doesn’t exist, we become susceptible to the false manufacturing or commodification of our desire. For the most part this distortion or perversion of desire does not attract the Eros energy that connects it to the something else that needs connection. It is more the energy of the addict, narcissistic and devouring of self and other. For the most part people in positions of power and control want our desire to be like this. It keeps us in the circular loop of addiction. Deep inside ourselves our souls hunger for connection to real creative life. We are told by the powers that be that in fact they know what our desires are and hence know what our truths are. If we do not know the deep truths that come from our own souls then we are vulnerable to this lie. If we are cut off from the feelings of our hearts we are doubly vulnerable to it. So we consume to assuage our addiction and soon, after brief shallow satisfaction, the bottomless feelings of emptiness, anxiety and boredom start gnawing away once again. We cannot feed our soul this way and it lets us know. Then our culture tells us stories that we are, by these actions and even by our ways of thinking, separate from nature, competitive, always self- interested and in a race for the survival of the fittest in a dog eat dog world. And so the circle of the lie is complete. We are what they say we are we say to ourselves. We accept it. And we feel more pain deep, deep down. So we buy more, entertain and exercise ourselves into an apathy and a cynicism that is in the end a profound silence in the face of the living death we have created for ourselves and ultimately for life on Earth.

Our society and our civilization have created a set of stories, which we have internalized, that cut us off from our true essence deeply wounding us. We try to heal the wound with stuff and then more entertainment and then even more distractions or more expensive toys. In a sense we are devouring our own home, we are fouling the nest that we live in because of a false sense of desire and a great big soul hunger which grows larger with each passing day. And so it becomes quite difficult for us to know and engage with real desire in a way that connects us with something deeper in the world through Eros. Then our wounded sense of ourselves, our inability to deeply love ourselves, to trust our souls desire and our fear of vulnerability around being seen like this, makes Eros flee, back to a place in ourselves where we might regain some sense of support and  love. The problem is that Eros, our creative connection to life, goes back into darkness, into unconsciousness.

So it seems that we moderns are in a bit of a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand we can have a distorted sense of desire and lack of Eros connection to life and on the other we generally have a difficult time loving ourselves in a way that can support an exploration of desire and Eros. For me this is when our hearts must lead even if they don’t want to in order to help us find the path through the forest. Somewhere in each person there is the strength of heart to step onto this path.

In this website, Playing into Wholeness, I have been attempting to show different ways to walk this path. For example, dreams come to us because we have become so disconnected from the natural side of ourselves, the side of ourselves that used to connect with nature at a deep level. So in essence dreams are the world or nature, even the natural side of us speaking a story of image and metaphor to our rational egos. So if we were to take to heart that nature is part of our true essence, part of our soul, then using our imagination and creating something from our dreams rather than interpreting them solely for our egos benefit would be a way to begin. Eros will be there when we act.

As I have done here.

A picture that I did from a dream is attached below. Does it move you to do something else?

Imagine living life where that life is intimately connected to nature. Remember the feeling that you get when you see a butterfly for the first time since winter, or when you walk amongst trees on a forest path. Feel in your heart that desire of nature to speak to you, to connect with you, to love you.

I spent about 10 days in April hiking around Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco and attended the Wind Rock and Wave workshop led by David Abram, Taira Restar, and Ken Otter. We were a group of about 22 people from all over the world, some older, some younger. The focus of the workshop was to help us as individuals to get past the subject object duality that we in the West tend to see things with. David Abram spoke about how air and breath weave in and out of the world and us. The root word of psyche is to breathe, to breathe life. David was trying to have us experience the world of imagination that we consider to be strictly within ourselves is actually, like air or breath, weaving in and out of the world around us and wishes connection with us.

I’ll tell a short story of my experience in this regard. Our group had separated and each of us had gone in different directions. I had walked up a forest road and was standing on the edge of the road facing into a swampy area below me that surrounded a small stream that meandered into the ocean nearby. Standing there I settled my mind and my body and opened them to what was around me. The wind was blowing and so I first connected to the waves of air moving through the trees on the other side of the swamp. Each tree has its own particular dance with the wind. Then I noticed the old brown reeds in the swamp bending side to side with the wind. They moved more rigidly in a way and also in a playful dance. Bringing my gaze lower I noticed that the lilies closer to the bank where I was standing were bobbing their heads down and up, down up bowing to the playfulness of the reeds. Looking up I noticed a hazelnut leaf spinning on the edge of the leaves around and around and around it went. Up to my right looking over some old trees I noticed the moisture laden wispy clouds roiling around as they came over the ridge further to my right. Then right in front of my face a green caterpillar was bobbing up and down on the thin silken thread saying see I’m here to. As I stood there I was struck by the intensity of feeling that I had for all the gestures of play and relationship that I was receiving from nature. My heart opened to joy and I danced quietly with my body in response. Back in the group I related what I had experienced in an animated way and felt a certain sense of wholeness arise me in being able to share this freely with people. Later down by the windy seashore we all did watercolor paintings of what experience touched us the most. I did a painting of colors that were veiling together and called it orgasmic play in honor of what I had received while I stood on the side of the road earlier.

In this workshop I had a series of similar experiences but in different locations and in different forms. All of them connected me with a deeper sense of relationship with the world and in particular the erotic soulful quality of the world. During the workshop I kept having the image from the story of Psyche and Eros arise in my imaginal space. The image was of Psyche walking in the dark towards a sleeping Eros with a lamp that she had brought at the suggestion of her three sisters so that she might see whether his face was really that of a monster. As she lifts the lamp to see him a drop of oil splashes onto his shoulder and awakens him. On waking he says I had asked you not to look upon me and you have broken that promise, I must leave you now and he flees from her presence. The root of the word to burn is to kindle to create warmth, in my imagination to create desire. My experiences during this workshop were about kindling or having kindled a warmth of desire for the beloved, an erotic loving connection to the depth of relationship with nature.

I expressed this imaginal experience in an email to David Abram and he replied that the image that I was expressing had Eros fleeing the scene. Paraphrasing David, he suggested that it was his desire to have people be able to experience the mystery of nature, the erotic mystery of nature, the Eros of nature, out in the natural world. As air and breath weave in and out of the world and we humans, so does the erotic mystery and desire of the soul for connection weave in and out of the world and ourselves. Life breathing life. I told David in an answering email that I appreciated his grounding of what I was saying and connecting it to the earth of his work and of my experiences in the workshop. I had also suggested in my first email that there was something about Eros running off to his mother Aphrodite after being burned that was niggling away at my imagination. In our culture eroticism is often sexualized and isn’t held in a place of more creative energy. In fact erotic creativity or erotic connection to creativity is hard for us to get to because of the subject object split that we live our lives by. It leaves the erotic energy to be sexualized as the main form of erotic experience that we have in our culture. The niggling question in my imagination about Eros running off to his mother Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love, still remains for me something to hold and mull over.