Earth Spirit Dreaming: Shamanic Ecotherapy Practices - Elizabeth E. Meacham 2020
Nature Art Rituals: Earth-Connecting through Creativity
Earth-Connecting Practices
Creativity is a lovely cousin of Earth-connected consciousness. Both are embedded within the layered matrices of our early learning, and are primary modes of relating, knowing, connecting and expressing. Creativity can “open a side door” to Earth-connected consciousness by supporting a shift from rational ways of knowing. They each have their own related logic and kind of knowing that uses the emotional, symbolic, aesthetic and sensing realms as an avenue for learning. Creative moments are intimately connected with experiences of awe, and often accompany flashes of brilliant vision that offer new ways of seeing the world. Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth, describes “spirit power” as expressing more through symbols than words:
The new cultural coding that we need must emerge from the source of all such codings, from revelatory vision that comes to us in those special psychic moments, or conditions, that we describe as “dream.” We are, of course, using this term not only as regards the psychic processes that take place when we are physically asleep, but also as a way of indicating an intuitive, nonrational process that occurs when we awaken to the numinous powers ever present in the phenomenal world about us, powers that possess us in our high creative moments. Poets and artists continually invoke these spirit powers, which function less through words than through symbolic forms.59
Earth-connected cultures use rituals involving art forms to express, teach and support the awe inherent in feeling the interwoven fabric of the life-world. For many of these cultures, the embeddedness with nature that they celebrate is not a “connection,” which implies separation of the human from nature, but an experienced fact of self and community, also rarely separated. Paintings, music, dances, costumes representing animals and other forms, many of which have become something that we enjoy as observers, can become part of our daily rituals of healing and celebration of our relationship with nature.