Bill Plotkin - Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World

Bill Plotkin enhances our grasp of the stages of life we are born to pass through by weaving into them themes of meaning, soul, and spirituality. This is a rich offering not only to the field of psychology but to a world torn from its roots.

Chellis Glendinning, PhD,
author of My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

Brilliant, accessible, respectful, and compassionate, Nature and the Human Soul weaves a practical path for anyone from any culture to become whole, leading a soul-centered life that will benefit themselves and everyone and everything around them. Science, as currently practiced, can only tell us what is. Nature and the Human Soul shows what could (and should) be. There is an old adage that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The publication of Nature and the Human Soul may well signal that humanity is ready to learn a better way. It should be read by everyone, particularly those who choose to be parents, educate our children, guide our cultures and communities, and envision a better world.

Dan Popov, PhD, cofounder of the Virtues Project
and coauthor of The Family Virtues Guide

C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Father Thomas Berry, Julia Butterfly Hill, Joanna Macy. These are but a few of the bright visionaries who have helped us to understand the territory of the human psyche in its relation to the realm of myth, the profundity of cosmology, and the ancient human love affair with the natural world. In Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin joins their ranks by masterfully weaving luminous streams of insight and guidance, offering us new tools and maps. These potent maps not only hold the promise of personal transformation, but they may very well be a path toward our survival as a species.

Frank MacEowen, author of The Celtic Way of Seeing

Nature and the Human Soul offers a consolidated and invaluable template for internal and external development not only personally, but collectively as well. Bill Plotkin defines the eight stages of human life and describes the cultural and individual tasks for each stage in brilliant, insightful, and masterful ways.

Angeles Arrien, PhD, cultural anthropologist
and author of The Four-Fold Way and The Second Half of Life

As we enter a future where humans and the natural world are more intimate with each other, we will surely be powerfully influenced by this new guide into the mysteries of nature and psyche. In Soulcraft, Bill Plotkin gives us an authentic masterwork. In the substance of what he has written, in the clarity of his presentation, and in the historical urgency of the subject, he has guided us far into the new world that is opening up before us. We will not soon again receive a work of this significance.

from the foreword to Soulcraft by Thomas Berry,
author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work

New World Library
14 Pamaron Way
Novato, California 94949

Copyright 2008 by Bill Plotkin

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Soulcraft is a registered trademark of Bill Plotkin.

Permission acknowledgments beginning on page 495 are an extension of the copyright page.

The material in this book is intended for educational purposes only. No expressed or implied guarantee as to the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given nor liability taken. The publisher advises such activities as fasting or wilderness excursions not be attempted or practiced without appropriate guidance and support.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plotkin, Bill.
Nature and the human soul: cultivating wholeness and community in a fragmented
world / Bill Plotkin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57731-551-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Developmental psychology. 2. Nature Psychological aspects. I. Title.
BF713.P585 2008
155 dc22

2007038812

First printing, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57731-551-3
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is a proud member of the Green Press Initiative.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my beloved parents, Betty and Bernard Plotkin.
And in grateful memory of my inspired and inspiring teachers
Dorothy Wergin, Steven Foster, Dolores LaChapelle, and Peter G. Ossorio.

We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but inscendence, not the brain but the gene.

THOMAS BERRY, THE DREAM OF THE EARTH

it's 3:23 in the morning
and I'm awake
because my great great grandchildren
won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?...

DREW DELLINGER, HIEROGLYPHIC STAIRWAY

In our moment of history, perhaps the most sweeping and radical transformation ever to occur on Earth is under way. This moment is the twenty-first century, a lifetime from a human perspective, yet a mere dust mote of duration within our planet's 4.5 billion years of exuberant evolution.