Wild Tending the Psyche: How to Bring Life to Hearts and Lands

I am but one sensing nerve on the tip of Her finger. One holy piece of Her impulse to live.

I write these words as I complete a five month journey, living skin closer to the land. Along my way I found places to rest on the scent of soil. I was at times sheltered by the discarded debris of trees. I washed in streams. Plants moved me over the landscape, in search of their fruit, their medicine, their fibres. I became their legs. I became their eyes in search of new ground to plant them. We became bonded. At times, I forgot the grocery store and our survival became intertwined. My body extended to encompass them, while their bodies extended to encompass the sun and the earth from which they fed.

Within walls again, I hold tight to the lingering feeling that at at my essence, I am the Land. That I am shaped by Her every time She reaching me through my senses, and my psyche orients to Her. I hold tight to the knowing that my faculties of awareness can be tuned to Her needs and that Her health is my own.

What Shape is Your Psyche?

Dreamed by Land

What shape is your psyche? Call it mind, soul or subconscious; that self from which emerge your thoughts, feeling, perceptions and actions. Is it a labelled hypothalamus and cerebral cortex? Is it a series of concrete roadways transporting information? A computer filing away data? Is it a well-groomed lawn? Or is it a torrent of green over green spilling down a mountainside, every piece flourishing and feeding the next?

Do we see ourselves as mechanical or alive? Separate or entangled?

How we see ourselves matters. It affects how we meet life. Even scientific paradigms have imaginal implications, which in turn affect our actions. When we see ourselves as a diagramed brain, we see ourselves as a dead thing. If we are just a series of wired connections, like a hard drive, our purpose is just to perform the tasks of life with efficiency. When we die we will be like a lonely forgotten item, in a landfill, that no longer turns on.

When instead I see myself as one fruiting mushroom in the greater story of the mycelium, or as the landscape from which I am inextricable, my actions become in service to something greater than me, everything is laced with meaning, and I am unafraid to die, as the livingness of which I am a part will carry on.

We came out of the land. It created our sensory perception, and sculpted our bodies. The plants gave us taste buds to distinguish the starchy from the poisonous. Our prey gave us eyes. The distance between the trees gave us legs. So why not see our psyche shaped like plants, fish, and weather systems? Why not see our psyche shaped like a living breathing ecosystem?

Our psyches, even more malleable than our bodies, get continuously shaped by our interactions with our environment. So what is the cost of no longer being called over the land by our kin, but rather funnelled into pathways of metros and roadways? Perhaps it is that we see our brains as highways; chemicals carrying our thoughts like trucks carrying goods from one place to the next. We see ourselves  as white walled houses, with doors to our independence; our existence confined to our skulls. Could it be that the depression and loneliness so prevalent in the psyches of Western culture today, could have at its root that our psyche is as dead as the outer landscape of concrete and strip malls that shape it?

Shaping the Land, Shaping Ourselves

As much as our environment shapes our psyche, we shape our environment. And then in turn, how we cultivate the land becomes our culture. Culture is, perhaps, rightly both the word for human interaction with the land, and the set of beliefs, behaviours and traditions that inform our ways of being. Every practice we impose on the land, we seem to impose on ourselves. Every way we relate to the land, becomes our way of relating to others and our inner worlds.

Modernity

Is it any wonder that as we dam rivers, many of our tears have been culturally blocked, and we have lost our ability to grieve? As fire suppression becomes a practice, our rage also seems to have become suppressed, so that when the accumulated debris does erupt with flame, it creates devastation, rather than generative boundaries. The control we impose on the landscapes through pesticides, genetic modification, and paving over ancient soils with developments, becomes a control of our natural impulses and expression. Aspects of our school systems seem to create monocultures as much as our fields. With fences and land ownership we also view our thoughts, inspirations and troubles as contained within ourselves, rather than interwoven with the greater fabric of life.

What is the alternative to this way we have been shaping land and psyche? Uprooted from my own ancestral cultural soil, I look to examples of another way; a practice embedded in our bones that some call wild tending.

Wild Tending

Stories say, that there were times when human interactions with the environment created more diversity and abundance; more livingness. In North America, accounts of the richness of wildlife and plants at European contact are staggering. While there is still a popular belief maintained that this was because it was undisturbed wilderness, there is a lot of evidence that suggests it was because the land was actively tended by indigenous peoples. This is well elaborated in scholarly publications Keeping it Living by Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner, and Tending the Wild by M. Kat Anderson, and historical accounts in Changes in the Land by William Cronon. From harvesting spring greens thereby stimulating the growth of more shoots, to the natural pruning that occurs when fruit trees are stick-beaten to reach their fruit, there are many accounts that suggest, that with the right knowledge and awareness, almost any human interaction with land for livelihood can be symbiotic.

There is likely no way to encompass the depth of knowledge, and the nuance of the interactions embedded in indigenous relationships with each particular ecosystems. However, as I look to these wild tending practices, I notice three patterns that are very different than those in my own upbringing; the importance of harvest, the creation of tended disturbances and relationship to place. I will explore these here and how these three land tending practices may tend to psyche and human culture.

1. Harvest

Regal rods of ochre red, goldfinch yellow and green hues beckoned me deeper. Feet flush in the cold water as I harvest willow. My body comes to know her weight and her spicy smell. The willow also invites me to know the beavers that tend her, coppicing her through feeding, much like humans have tended willow to grow strait for baskets. The willow invites me to know the mud that feeds her, and the crisp desert air that breathes her. That landscape will forever be in me and I will forever wish to visit it like an old friend.

For the rest of the day, every time I closed my eyes I would see the glowing stands of willow. I’ve noticed this to be the case whenever I make a good harvest of things, their pattern becomes etched just below my consciousness. Psyche shaped by willow. Two months she dried next to me; a constant companion. Eventually our collaboration became a basket. She shaped me, while my hands shaped her. My basketry teacher claimed she healed her schizophrenia by becoming a basket weaver. I could  feel my own psyche flexing into something more basket like; a spiral growing wider, deeper, and more able to hold. Less like the linearity of modernity. Less like the square of my computer screen.

In the age of preservationism, harvest is a radical act. Preservationism, believes that the best environmental practice is removing human impact. This is so embedded in our way of viewing human interactions that, even at a young age, in love with nature, I felt misanthropy. Never once in my 6 years of academic training as a biologist was it mentioned that humans have the potential to create a flourishing earth, just by being humans. Conservation efforts in parks tend to opt for minimizing human impacts rather than inviting the painting of landscapes by human interaction. Yet there are countless examples, showing that the aware and knowledgable harvest of wild plants is beneficial to most plants. Here are just two of the many accounts shared in Tending the Wild of how the harvesting practices of indigenous peoples, helped plants and people thrive:

“Digging bulbs, rhizomes and tubers tended to increase the size of the tract, aerate the soil, lower weed competition and sever the tiny bulblets and cormlets, allowing them a better opportunity to grow.”

Painting the Land

“California Indians used areas over and over because their shrubs had sweeter fruit, their trees bore larger and less bitter acorns, or their sandy soils grew the straightest and longest rhizomes.”

Being back in harvest relationship with wild plants would certainly alter landscape, but it would also reshape psyche. Harvest builds relationality, and extends psyche. When our bodies know the gift of another life, does not the psyche also know what it is to be resourced from beyond the self and the human? And, what would change in the way we related to each other, if parks and roadsides welcomed human hands? Perhaps we would have more of a culture of harvest. Don’t we all long to be harvested, not mined, but harvested for our unique offerings? Don’t we all long to have our stories heard and to be in service, just by our very nature?

2. Disturbance

I circle back to a cherished landscape that once held me. It burned since I had been there, so I prepare my heart for devastation as I approach. But, as I pull in, I notice the blackened fertile ground is in flower: fresh green shoots sprouting up from the root systems of shrubs. As I watch these new vibrant expressions of the land, I feel a resonance. There is so much new life in me, rising from my losses. From the burning of bridges within my community, my wandering found me a dream larger than me. From the chronic smouldering pain in my body I was led to lean into my anger, and from the hot ground of those flames eventually arose my voice, once smothered by the accumulated debris of ancestral burdens. I am a forest burned over and over, and yet I am only becoming more generative. For that I have to thank all those that prepared me, and tended to me in those flames; allowing them, but preventing them from burning too hot and taking out all the big trees.

With preservationism, our relationship to disturbance has drastically changed. Even though there is a scientific understanding that the highest biodiversity exists in areas of intermediate disturbance, it seems we either plow things down to the point of having no soil, or we do our best to leave things untouched. When we harvest a root we make sure to pat the ground as if sorry for our interaction, when in fact an open ground can better swallow dispersing seeds. We have suppressed fires, when historically cultural burning, using low intensity fires, created huge livingness.

“Deliberate burning increased the abundance and density of edible tubers, greens, fruits, seeds and mushrooms; enhanced feed for wildlife; controlled the insects and diseases that could damage wild foods and basketry material; increased the quantity and quality of material used for basketry and cordage; and encouraged the sprouts used for making household items.” M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild.

We also appear to have lost healthy tending of disturbance in the psyche. Our culture has become more aware of trauma, which one might call too high an intensity of disturbance to be beneficial for health. But, less common is creating disturbance enough for initiatory processes to occur, and having it tended by a cultural container. Initiatory processes are those that help people expand their capacities, and that bring people into relationship with their unique gifts and place in their community and ecosystem. It requires leaving the stable, settled and familiar. Sometimes our foundation does have to be burned to allow something even more alive to be born. In a culture afraid of disturbance, and without the tending of those disturbances, psyches may never mature into true adulthood. True adulthood is defined as “the self coming into service to the greater earth community in most of its ways of being”, by Bill Plotkins in his work on initiation. How much do we desperately need us all to know our gifts and place them into service in these troubled times?

3. Relationship to Place

Seeds: smooth, shiny, curled, stripped, downy, hooked. Everywhere I go, I carry seeds of wild plants, hoping to be reshaped by my interaction with them, and hoping to reshape places with the plants I have come to depend on. I feel like I am carrying the beautiful dreams of the earth. When I eat honey sweet Saskatoon berries, I make sure to share some with the ground. It feels different than the relationship to lettuce grown in a garden. The seeds were not bought. They are not planted in my own little plot. They come strait from the intelligence of the plants and go strait back into the intelligence of the ecosystem. It makes me think that wild is not something untouched, it is something unowned.

As Martin Prechtel puts it, “The land owned the people, the people didn’t own the land.” When people practiced wild tending, it wasn’t that people didn’t alter conditions to favour the growth of certain plants, or have claims to the areas that they tended. It was that they left intact the intelligence of ecosystems, in a way that’s different from modern agriculture or even gardening. Masanobu Fukuoka came to a similar view, in what he calls a natural way of farming, which aims not to impose human control over nature’s intelligence, but can still, he showed, produce higher yields of crops than conventional agricultural methods.

If we trusted the intelligence of nature rather than imposing elaborate agendas, would we trust the nature of our own psyches? If we related to land as if it owned us, would lines of ownership around our psyche loosen? When we felt sadness, would we know that part of it was the river’s grief for no longer receiving the return of the salmon and the eel? When a new melody entered our voice, would we know it as a gift from the place at which we stood? Would we see our inspirations as not belonging to us, but rather belonging to our community through our responsibility? Would we dream again with the earth, and work towards a vision beyond just our own?

On the other side of the spectrum from modern agriculture is the foraging movement, which  doesn’t look to land with the same control, but is often missing the part of “the land owning the people”. People learn what can be harvested, but are missing the piece of offering back tangible reciprocity. They are missing coming back to that plant when it is in seed, and putting new life into the soil for a future to come. They are missing the slowing down required to learn the intricacies of the plant’s preferences, needs and delights, enough to be able to offer them these conditions.

Psyche Planted

How would our psyches respond if given such an attention and care? In actively tending our outer ecosystem, would we learn how best to tend to our inner one? Would we learn to nurture our own cycles of creativity, tending the seeds of our inspirations into fruition and generativity?

It is through tending that one becomes tied to land. Could we find the belonging that many of us search for, by planting our psyche back into place?

Livingness Intertwined

The parallels are endless between how we can tend land and how we can tend psyche. In psyches, we can plant seeds of ideas. We can encourage the growth of the harvest needed by our communities, and we can prune the branches of what is no longer needed, so that our energy can go more to sweetness. But, it’s through embodiment that land and psyche are reshaped. Our bodies actually have to reach for fruit and our hands have to know the textures of seeds as we plant them. Most importantly, we can’t tend one without tending the other; the livingness of land and psyche are intertwined.