A. Análisis Doctrinario

The earth is all that lasts.

The earth is what I speak to when I do not understand my life

Nor why I am not heard.

The earth answers me with the same song That it sang for my fathers when

Their tears covered up the sun.

The earth sings a song of gladness.

The earth sings a song of praise.

The earth rises up and laughs at me Each time that I forget How spring begins with winter

And death begins with birth.

(Wood 1974, p.16)

Introduction

Committed to memory in 1979, this poem by Nancy Wood has become a loyal friend, reminding me about balance and cycles and the interconnectedness of all things. Its wisdom has prompted this chapter, forcing me to re-examine my personal relationship to earth, nature and cosmos, shedding light on how those threads are interwoven with my spirituality, my art making and my art therapy work with clients. The stories I share illustrate some of the ways that I see the

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practice of making art as vital to the health of our species and our planet at the start of the twenty-first century.

Art making and healing: a personal journey

How did I come to write about nature? More, it seems, by instinct than logic.

Logic would have dictated a straightforward essay about using art with sexually abused clients and the spiritual components of that path. That is a journey I know personally. Like those children and adults who have come to my private practice, I spent many years plumbing my soul’s depths to understand and heal deep wounds. Were it not for making art, I might still be hiding childhood pain under an active eating disorder and the low self-esteem and shame which kept me from committing myself to the stable (though not static) relationships with home, family, friends, community and world which enrich my life today.

Expressing my feelings through line, color, texture, shape and form, and having the opportunity to share those non-verbal utterances with a trusted thera-pist-guide, literally saved my life. Beginning in my mid-twenties, art making became the essential truth-teller, the place where I couldn’t hide and where, if I was honest in my intention, I could be made increasingly whole…again and again.

But even before I discovered the healing powers of art, I had discovered nature. And it seems that now at midlife I am increasingly familiar with the child who instinctively sought both entertainment and refuge in the fields and woods around her parents’ house, who trusted above all the mute devotion of a black Labrador retriever and the gentle strength of a horse whose stall she cleaned out daily before school that she might gallop bareback in most any weather and thrill at jumping fences. For all the tensions in our home, I was also blessed with much time out-of-doors…to garden, bale hay, make daisy chains, catch frogs, or flop on the ground and look for shapes in clouds. At an early age nature became for me a source of renewal and perspective, a place to be made whole.

These days, nature is the subject matter pushing for expression through my painting, not just the particular details of the natural world but the mystery and power of its essence. ‘Coming Home’ (Plate 7 in section) is an example. On the canvas four chunky upside down bulbs with trailing ribbon-like stems orbit around an orange ball of light, which is also spinning. The bulbs were no strangers; I had drawn them frequently for several months and was particularly intrigued with how after bloom they continued to grow when removed from their pebble-filled, well-watered bowl. But the decision to reinstate them, at

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least metaphorically, on a large, hitherto abstract canvas came as a surprise. The painting’s setting is ambiguous. Do all those swirling layers of blue and brown signify ocean or outer space? I’m still not sure. What was sure was the pleasure of bringing that image to life. Often while working on it would come the haunting chant: ‘Come back to me, with all your heart. Don’t let fear keep us apart. Long have I waited for your coming home to me and living deeply our new life’ (Hosa, by Greg Norbet, Weston Priory). Hearing those tender words, learned in the churches of my youth, brought tears of appreciation for some nameless sense of communion I experienced almost always in my studio, only rarely in a structured religious service.

Looking back, it seems that ‘Coming Home’ was calling me into a new rela-tionship with a larger world. Since then I have found myself eager to draw the plants and animals around me, and to do so with increased skill. I sought out new teachers. With one woman I visited animals in pet stores, animal shelters, barns and pastures, amazed at her facility for relating dry anatomical illustra-tions to the real goat or lama butting at our sketchpads. With another artist I continue to learn about printmaking, finding a satisfying blend of control and surprise in combining stencils of my own drawings with abstract backgrounds which gain richness and depth as the monotype plate is refined and embellished by being passed repeatedly through the press. I have begun studying more about ecopsychology and deepened my understanding of Native American and shamanic nature-based healing through reading and classes. I spend more time gardening, tending flowers and vegetables at home and leading children in rec-lamation, planting and sketching projects at the Science Garden attached to my daughter’s elementary school.

Beneath these activities lies a question: How can I use my creativity in a way that responds directly and compassionately to the pain of not just my human neighbors but of the mother who sustains us all, the earth? As is evident from almost a century of psychotherapy, helping people ‘get well’ emotionally, even spiritually, does not guarantee a healthier planet (Hillman and Ventura 1992).

On the contrary, we continue to deforest the earth, lose topsoil, and destroy plant and animal species at alarming rates; we pump dangerous levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and add 90 million people to the world each year with the assumption that the ecosystem will continue to tolerate such abuse (Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner 1995). It may not.

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Earthiness as Godliness

Natural versus supernatural is a distinction I learned well as a child. It went along with other absolutes like body and soul, mind and matter…always with the understanding that supernatural, soul and mind were separate from and superior to body and matter. Roman Catholic educators, including my parents, taught me that God gave humans dominion over nature. And Western psychology, in which I had been trained in the late 1970s and early 1980s, agreed with that patriarchal assumption. Fortunately, my connections with art, yoga, meditation, and the self-in-relation theory of feminist psychology taught me otherwise. Science began to change too. Thanks to systems theory and quantum physics, we now know that we men, women and children participate in a constantly changing, evolving, intricately interconnected web of living relationships: animal, vegetable and mineral linked in a system akin to the mystics’ irradiated network of light. As in Chinese scroll paintings, we are located within nature, needing not one-pointed Renaissance perspective but many vantage points to experience the multilayered truth about our lives.

In 1987 as I was wrestling to reconcile these newer ideas with the Christian teachings of my youth, Matthew Fox, former Catholic, now Episcopal theologian, visited the Congregational Church to which our family belongs.

His book, Original Blessing (Fox 1983), brought me into contact with Christian voices more congruent with my own experience. Fox described the Eastern Christian churches’ focus on ‘theosis,’ the divinization of all creatures and the cosmos rather than just personal salvation. And within the European Christian tradition he highlighted the contributions of mystics like the twelfth-century musician, artist, abbess and prophetess Hildegarde of Bingen, who stated, ‘Holy persons draw to themselves all that is earthly…The earth…is the mother of all, for contained in her are the seeds of all’ (quoted in Fox 1983, p.57); or Meister Eckhart (1260–1329), who preached a radically new version of humility, not the old self-denigration but a humility which honors its root ‘humus’ or ‘earth’

by celebrating earthiness, sensuality and passions (Fox 1983, p.59); or Julian of Norwich (1342–1415) who believed, ‘Our sensuality is grounded in Nature, in Compassion and in Grace. In our sensuality, God’ (Fox 1983, p.58).

In what became for me a soul-saving text, Fox identified a creation-centered tradition that predates by many centuries (it began in the ninth century BC) the

‘fall/redemption’ ideologies of organized Western religions which originated with St Augustine in AD 354–430. The fall/redemption model of spirituality is both dualistic and patriarchal; it begins with sin, original sin, and generally ends

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with redemption. It neglects to ‘teach its believers about creativity, about justice making and social transformation, or about Eros, play, pleasure, and the God of delight. It fails to teach love of the earth or care for the cosmos, and is so frightened of passion that it fails to listen to the impassioned pleas of the anawim, the little ones, of human history. This same fear of passion prevents it from helping lovers to celebrate their experiences as spiritual or mystical. This tradition has not proven friendly to artists or prophets or Native American peoples or women’ (Fox 1983, p.11).

On the other hand, as Fox points out, it is those same artists, poets, mystics, women and native peoples, approaching their faith from an ecstatic stance, who have kept alive the creation-centered tradition down through the ages.

How then to integrate this holistic, earth-inclusive awareness into my work with clients and students? Of what relevance is the fact that each of us is a part of nature? That we are connected to air, water and land, connected to animals and plants? That we breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat the food which they provide? That without those things we would die?

Art making, earthiness, and soul psychology

The questions listed above seem intimately related to a larger issue, namely our definition of health. What is the state toward which we in the helping profes-sions or we as individuals aspire? Unfortunately, psychology, whose literal meaning is ‘the study of the soul,’ sheds little light on the question. Until recently, like Western medicine as a whole, it has generally chosen to focus its keen analytic mind on the management or elimination of disease, leaving the soul work to pastoral counselors and clergy. Specifically, concerning the rela-tionship of people to nature, psychology remains largely silent. The only mention of nature in the American Psychiatric Association’s giant reference book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition (APA 1994), is the ‘seasonal pattern specifier’ describing the tendency toward increased episodes of major depression at certain times of year, usually in the fall and winter. Even transpersonal psychology, which focuses on experiences and ways of being beyond the personal, has tended to write more about family and society than the nonhuman habitat (Roszak et al. 1995).

Other cultures offer more clues. For 40,000 years native people, including our own European ancestors, have believed that health is inextricably linked to living in harmony with one’s habitat: plants, animals, rocks, water and air as well

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as people. Leslie Gray, an Oneida/Seminole clinical psychologist and shamanic counselor, elaborates:

This kind of relating empowers you as well as the ecosystem, so that both remain sustainable by generating aliveness in each other…you tend the natural world and it in turn empowers you and gives you energy and health. (Gray 1995, p.181).

Child psychologist Anita Barrows (1995) proposes a theory of child devel-opment which echoes another core belief of non-Western thinking, namely the twofold maturational task of learning to separate and maintain one’s boundaries and learning to merge or yield. Thus a healthy person moves in and out of intimacy with all living matter. I have come to believe that art making, especially when done with awareness of its inherent earthiness, offers a natural bridge to this more inclusive worldview. What follows are tools for rebalancing.

Tasting wild berries

Nature, spirituality and art therapy. At first blush they seem the obvious companions. Originally, if not today, the very tools artists used were made from natural ingredients: clay from the earth, color pigments from the elements, brushes from the bristles of various animals. Yet many who use these in therapy tend to jump over this level of awareness, except perhaps when working with young children or with those who are developmentally delayed or physically impaired. In many cases, in our enthusiasm to help clients focus within and paint the sources of their distress, we neglect to remind them to touch, really touch, the art media at hand…we hope in hand. Introducing what I call a ‘nature basket’

before art making has served as a tool to awaken the senses while stimulating the imagination’s symbol-making capacity as well (Figure 6.1).

Alice

Ninety-two-year-old Alice chose a slender piece of driftwood from a basket of shells, leaves, and pine cones in various states of health or decay. I am visiting Alice in a retirement home where she has just moved after 30 years of living alone in a beautiful stream-side trailer park. We sit close together near the corner windows of her small room. Having squeezed the most wanted of her possessions into this space, Alice feels crowded, caged. Although appreciative of the kindly attentiveness of the staff and friendliness of her dozen housemates, she misses her former independence. The food is

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excellent, but wasn’t it nice when she could lunch on peanut butter and crackers, grocery shop with her part-time housekeeper, manage her own checkbook? Never one for afternoon movies, bridge or bingo, she has been rereading her favorite books on spirituality and art, trying to be patient with the settling-in phase of this newly confining living arrangement.

In the past I might have encouraged Alice to use watercolors or pastels to help her weather this depression. But her arthritic hands tremble just enough to create frustration, so I have been bringing her play dough and other three-dimensional media. These have proved generally unsatisfactory.

Today’s nature basket gets a warmer response. ‘ Hold the wood gently,’ I say.

Observe its every feature, and first with eyes open then with them closed… Touch it to your arm, your cheek. Does it have a particular feel? A scent? A sound? What does it tell you about its past? Often nature can answer the questions of our heart. In your silent contempla-tion, be open to what message this wood may bring you…when you feel you have really made contact with it, open your eyes and use this soft modeling clay to communicate some impression you received.

Alice sinks back in her chair, a faint smile on her lips. An accomplished artist and teacher, she is no stranger to nature. I watch her graceful fingers mold green clay into a facsimile of the wood she chose. Still, I am unprepared for

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Figure 6.1 Alice with Driftwood by Dan Straight

her words, ‘This wood reminds me of the tree at my grave site.’ More alert now, she describes how she selected her particular plot, a small knoll with a single tree and a broad view to the mountains. Evidently the proprietor tried to talk her into a more sociable arrangement with more trees, more neighbors. But Alice prevailed, and asked her grown children to drive her out there so she could show them where she wished to be buried. Telling all this to me, Alice chuckles at their understandable discomfort. The familiar bright eyes and sparkle return as we continue to talk about death and life and what might be ahead for her in this new place. Driftwood in hand, she seems more at peace with the uncertainty of it all. I leave with a silent prayer of gratitude for both Alice’s place in my life and for the help of a humble gray branch in allowing her to express important feelings about her preparations for death.

In the mid-1990s I began bringing more natural objects into my office. Soon boxes, jars and ziplock bags of everything from rose petals to animal bones to snake skins found their way onto shelves already supplied with the more tradi-tional supplies for drawing, painting, clay, and collage. Anderson’s (1995) investigations into the therapeutic possibilities of working with rocks and stones further expanded my range of media. Within my office personal creativity seemed enhanced by these additions, as did opportunities to dialogue with clients about their relationships to the out-of-doors, what ecotherapist Howard Clinebell (1996) calls their nature memories or ‘earth stories.’ Always a plant lover, I became more intentional about my office plant choices: slow and fast-growing plants, bloomers and non-bloomers, etc. Respecting the aliveness of all matter, I made a more conscious effort to communicate that reality to clients through the environment in which therapy occurred. Alice’s story illus-trates one way that nature came to be an integral part of my outreach work with elderly people, helping them attune to their senses in ways not always encouraged by the retirement facilities that house them.

Not only the institutionalized elderly suffer from lack of contact with the earth. For many teenagers, exploring my nature basket, choosing something from it to draw or sculpt, then adding five or six magazine pictures which relate to their current life challenges, have proved to be a useful first session assessment. One 15-year-old girl spent long minutes fingering the whitened skull of a young deer; another was drawn to the translucent beauty of a discarded garter snake skin. At a re-entry program for students who have dropped out of high school, I start each new group with a snake skin. While this serves as a useful focusing device, inviting discussion and art making about what personal qualities and habits students want to shed and which they will expand

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on in their new skins, it also provides an opener for conversations about the natural world and our relationship to it. Reflections about life, death, and the possibilities for change (both personal and environmental) naturally emerge, along with ideas for future creative investigations.

The litanies of sexual dissatisfaction from couples seeking counseling suggest a widespread confusion about our sensuality. Yet how many of us respond to such complaints with the question, ‘How sensuous an animal are you?’ Psychotherapist Philip Chard (1994) would ask just that. He would also

The litanies of sexual dissatisfaction from couples seeking counseling suggest a widespread confusion about our sensuality. Yet how many of us respond to such complaints with the question, ‘How sensuous an animal are you?’ Psychotherapist Philip Chard (1994) would ask just that. He would also