There is an intimate connection between personifying and loving. In James Hillman’s words: ‘Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is in the invisible, hidden in the heart’.
In science, Descartes’ fundamental division between living human subjects and dead external objects has seen to it that personifying (and the loving that accompanies it) are considered nothing more than mere projection and ‘fantasy’. But today we can now realize that it was Descartes who was projecting, and that his fundamental division of mind from matter was itself a great fantasy – a chimera that we need only dissolve in order to find our true home in the great psyche of the world.
Find a peaceful outdoor place where you enjoy being. Lie down on your back on the ground. Relax and take a few deep breaths. Now feel the weight of your body on the Earth as the force of gravity holds you down.
Experience gravity as the love that the earth feels for the very matter that makes up your body, a love that holds you safe and prevents you from floating off into outer space.
Open your eyes and look out into the vast depths of the universe whilst you sense the great bulk of our mother planet at your back. Feel her clasping you to her huge body as she dangles you upside down over the vast cosmos that stretches out below you.
What does it feel like to be held upside down in this way – to feel the depths of space beyond you and the firm, almost glue-like support of the Earth behind you?
Now sense how the Earth curves away beneath your back in all directions. Feel her great continents, her mountain ranges, her oceans, her domains of ice and snow at the poles and her great cloaks of vegetation stretching out from where you are in the great round immensity of her unbelievably diverse body.
Sense her whirling air and her tumbling clouds spinning around her dappled surface.
Breathe in the living immensity of our animate Earth.
When you are ready, get up, breathe deeply, profoundly aware now of the living quality of our planet home.
From Animate Earth, © 2006 by Stephan Harding , published in the UK by Green Books.
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