iRewild: Devil In The Forest

It all started with a turtle . . . Then unexpectedly, I was looking into a mirror of my own human experience. 

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 Today, I’m going to share with you a life-changing experience about a turtle I recently met, - - This story reminds me of a Nordic legend about an old man, who set out for a hike in a remote forest, which, legend has it, was inhabited by the Prince of Darkness.  

As the man hiked farther into the wilderness, he began to observe fewer and fewer birds. Their low melodies no longer filled the forest’s conversation. The constant sound of singing insects ceased . . . In fact . . .  all the wildlife was missing. As he stared out into the eerie darkness, he realized he was getting closer to the devil. 

As we sense and feel the future, we are that old man in the darkness; we can’t see and specify precisely what it is. 

Yet, the real-time connection to that space is the lifeline that guides us. As we move with curiosity into what we don’t know, do we let the silence pass into legend? Or do we ask, “What wants to emerge?” 

In Western civilization, many view nature as something “out there” — to be tamed, paved, marginalized, or profited from, forgetting that we, too, embody nature and belong to the wider natural world. In isolation, from the world that enfolds us, nature’s absence from our lives leads to an impoverishment of identity. We fall short of experiencing the richness of our world — the birds have gone missing — and we leave behind a natural world in crisis. 

Contemporary psychologist James Hillman recognized that our own psyches suffer as the world suffers, because “the soul of the individual can never advance beyond the soul of the world, because they are inseparable.” 

To create the changes that our world needs, we must sense and see ourselves as part of the greater whole. 

Recently, the universe provided me an opportunity to glimpse into the darkness. — A glimpse into the relevance of what can happen when we numb our sensory capabilities.

As I rode my bicycle into an oak forest, - - the gritty details of my life weighed heavily on my mind. As I pushed onward, the trees grew scarcer. The liquid, flute-like bird songs faded. The forest floor’s wildlife disappeared. I was trapped inside my own thoughts, while the beauty of nature eluded me. I was the old man in the forest — seeing nothing other than my own worries.

In a span of seconds, the low whine of traffic noise drifted through the air. I brought my bike to an abrupt stop as I came face to face with a six-lane highway. It was then that a turtle brought me the answer that I didn’t know I needed. 

A movement, in the fringes of my vision, seized my attention. A gravely bleeding land turtle was painfully struggling to crawl out of traffic. Her top shell was fractured in half, exposing her inner, bony layers. I dropped my bike and picked up the struggling animal. Her bottom plate shifted in my hands. A warm, sticky fluid trickled over my trembling fingers.  I could smell the earthy odors of her body and the hot copper scent of lifeblood. For a brief moment, my arms went numb, as I came to the realization that her lower shell was also split in two.

Black vultures circled and dove toward us, coming closer and closer. Flies and wasps were fighting each other for a taste. I carried her to safety and frantically called wildlife rescues; but it was a holiday, and they weren’t answering their phones. I was ten miles from home and had no way to transport her, so I sat on the ground next to her and, for hours, continued to call for help. As I stayed with the turtle, I remembered Hillman’s words: “the anima mundi, the soul of the world, animates her images and affects our imagination. The soul of the thing coalesces with ours.” 

Onlookers gasped at the sight of the wound and quickly rode off. Curiously, a non-English-speaking woman stood silently next to me—the voice of her heart nurturing a sacred space. Within this voiceless relationship I never walked alone, I was given the awareness to set aside my troubles, so that I could help one of Earth’s creations, while exploring my own tender underbelly. 

Numerous cyclists continued to pass by. Over and over, I asked for help in getting her home, or, at the very least, for someone to sit with her while I raced back to get my car. Their answers struck hard — without empathy — as they replied, “She’s going to die anyway, just throw her into the woods.” I didn’t know how to respond to such naiveté.

Every minute felt like an eternity as precious seconds slowly snatched at the turtle’s life. After countless phone calls, a rescue said that they would send someone, - - but, they were extremely busy and couldn’t give me a time — all they would say was that they would be there . . . sometime today. 

To the sides, cyclists continued to fly past as I stood guard. They gazed with grim expressions and, in an effort to get me to surrender, insisted, “Just throw her into the woods.” 

I want to pause here to illuminate a few key learnings from my experience, and then I’ll come back to the turtle . . .

Reality is often clouded by the lenses in which we have become accustomed to seeing the world around us, but sometimes an opportunity comes along that awakens our perception with moments that guide us to experience the hidden unity and deeper aspects of our universe. 

It took a critically injured animal to remind me, to open me up to a sense-making exploration of my own interconnectedness with—and inseparability from—nature. In examining the events of that day, I now see a powerful and rich story. Everything that happened—every person I spoke to, every action, interaction, every moment—was impregnated with psychological, sensory, and soulful meaning. Each moment expanded my consciousness and my self-awareness, and added richness and meaning to my life experience. 

Our bodies are organs of knowing, the interface between the outside and inside worlds. The numbness I felt in my arms as I held and looked into the eyes of the broken and bleeding turtle, the silence of the woman next to me, the drumbeat of the cyclist’s uncaring voices, the anxiety of endless unanswered phone calls, the panic as my cell phone battery drained to 3% — these experiences were translated by my senses, thereby constructing my reality.

Overtime, life’s pains and the overwhelming plights vying for our attention drive us to numb our senses. When this happens we lose a vital source of wellness. Returning attention to our sensory world induces a profound awareness of interdependence, and we begin to operate from a new consciousness.

In Greek, the word “Aesthetic” means the taking in, or the breathing in, of our world. Hillman argued that we need to aesthetically reengage with nature through sensory and imaginal practices to bring our world back to life. He observed, “The heart’s way of perceiving is both a sensing and an imagining: to sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”  He believed that “the link to the heart was through the organs of sense, the breathing in of our world.” 

With heartfelt emotions involved — when we embrace emotional knowing — we begin to discover the intelligibility of things. We perceive the actual qualities of life or return value — soul value — to the thing we perceive. 

Hillman described it as “Cardiac Consciousness.” 

With this new knowledge, we move our hearts and nurture our psychological energy. We begin to see from the whole, enabling us to discover what wants to emerge, together with our own roles and journeys. 

Now, let’s get back to the turtle . . .  At long last, both the rescue and a park ranger arrived together. After hours of suffering, the turtle was on her way to the hospital! 

Out of nowhere, my heart felt as if it was ripping. Tears streamed down my face. NOT because of the turtle — but because the pain of the earth tore through my entire being, as the empty, merciless voices of the many echoed, just throw her back into the woods. They were tears for an innocent turtle struggling with housing expansion, her lands taken away without a thought; they were tears of the forest facing the loss of another one of her children; they were tears for a society disconnected from one of its their most important underlying pieces that makes them human. It was a different pain—living, and dead. 

The ranger gave me a hug and quietly asked, “Do you know what type of turtle that is?” I struggled to get words out and just shook my head unknowing. “You saved a rare Gopher Tortoise,” he explained, “an endangered Keystone species. Their dens provide homes for 360 other animals.” When a Gopher Tortoise disappears from an environment the entire, entire ecosystem collapses. Our web of life loses a nucleus of intelligence and creativity, a thread securing numerous others in the world of life. 

Peering through the shadowy limbo that twisted within me, I had a choice: I could wake up tomorrow - - and move on with my life. Or, consciously, I could look into the darkness and ask myself: Why did this happen to me? Why did I stop? What am I called to do as the powerful forces of chaos challenge us for the soul of our natural world? 

In the story of the turtle, as I confronted my sensory numbness, — the dark shadow hiding in the underbelly of my inner world, the turtle reached beyond my reasoning mind, showing me how the wonders of nature and our place, in relation to our environment, are creative and interconnected. 

The creative powers possessed by our natural world are all pervasive and symbolic. In the turtle’s features I could see the invisible aspects of my own being—those bits and pieces of myself that had been pushed away from my consciousness and my self-awareness. The turtle’s struggle was a mirror for the life challenges that I was battling within myself. 

It is possible to learn how to re-sensitize our senses and see the world anew? When we rewild our senses and step back into experiencing life with new knowledge, we awaken to the fullness of human experience, we become our authentic selves, and we shift toward embracing all life and the whole of nature in its beauty. It marks the distinction between just living, versus a ‘love’ of life. We re-engage, we stimulate our minds away from the rigidity of the familiar. We awaken to understanding things happening in the world around us in a new way, with the ability to perceive the poetic, the subtle, and the complex aspects of our inner and outer natures, including our natural world. Returning attention to our sensory world induces a profound awareness of interdependence, and we begin to operate from a new, elevated consciousness. 

To learn more about rewilding our senses and bringing our human souls back into a conscious relationship with nature please download our free ebook and listen to our other podcasts.

The relationship between the turtle and myself can’t be reduced to its contents or parts. If we quantify it, if we scientifically measure the details, we miss its transformative influences, the very spirit of the encounter. What tied us together ran deeper than empiricism. Because the relationship between my psyche (our human soul, mind, & spirit)  and the turtle couldn’t be known directly, this relationship was expressed symbolically. Symbolism is the language of the soul. Looking at the symbolic takes the process of inquiry still deeper. 

Historically, turtles are a symbol for Mother Earth—a symbol that represents creation, wholeness, strength, fertility, birth, and transformation. They are often seen in mythology carrying the entire world upon their backs. Her top shell, once a representation of wholeness, was now split in half by an S-shaped fracture, recreating the Yin-Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy, a concept resembling the influential Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung’s principle of opposites and finding unity between two opposing forces. The turtle’s fracture reflected the cataclysmic separation between humanity and nature. It was a physical manifestation of the duality by which we see ourselves as separate from, and as superior to, our natural world. 

Yet, the divide also resided deep within me—a war was raging within my soul. I was looking into a mirror of my own human experience. I was trespassing on the boundaries between the sacred, my soul’s purpose, and the profane, the sickness that I felt from the countless, routine obligations of my everyday life. I lived in a world of never-ending busyness, moving further and further away from my soul’s purpose, that of an ecopsychologist’s work of bringing light upon the interconnectedness of our world. I was in an epic existential battle to regain my life: the sacred, the meaningful, the life-revitalizing experiences. I was aching for ‘being’. 

In the turtle, life and death came together. Nearing death, she was undergoing a deep state of inactivity. Similarly, my senses had become deadened; my heart felt dead, poisoned by meaningless distractions—its once-bright light was fading. I needed to crack open, remove the walls that I had built around my heart to protect it from getting hurt, and allow my heart to, once again, sense and feel deeply. 

We could debate that all of this was projection. Simply stated, projection involves transferring ownership of our unwanted feelings onto someone or something else. We tend to do this without our conscious awareness. We’d rather trick ourselves into denying their existence than to consciously identify them and deal with them. Hillman argues that projection is “An attempt by our psyche to experience things beyond ourselves . . ., an attempt to restore both heart and image, to restore soul to things.” Symbolic engagement is the alternative to projection. Jungian psychologist and scholar Marie-Louise von Franz states, “The symbol helps us over.” This requires us to awaken our hearts and minds to the spontaneous expressions of the unconscious as they appear in both our psyches and in nature. Instead of viewing this incident as a projection of myself, I needed to ask: What was the relationship between the turtle and my psyche? What was the turtle’s language that turned it into soul’s language? How might all of this help me to understand my human, inner world?

It’s through the cracks that light enters. In the chaos, a turtle was a bearer of light whose struggle reawakened my heart and soul, restoring the vital realization of attentive sensing, conscious perception, and cognition. She forged an everlasting relationship in the inward depths of my being. By allowing myself to sink into Earth’s pain and the symbolism within nature, by looking at the world again through soul-seeing eyes, I was able to recognize what was important in my life. 

By engaging with the soul of the world, my human soul crossed a bridge that linked different worlds, the outer world to my inner world, and then both to the world of nature. I was nudged toward a path of restoration and healing, not only of the natural world, but also of my own human nature. It was a new way of life, with a clear view of the surrounding beauty, nobility, and sacred forces embedded in the world in which we live. The magic of the land itself seemed to show me that its inhabitants have an inner dimension, an intelligence, a deep purpose, and that we are all part of an interconnected relationship. 

Nature is a place full of mystery, inhabited by many symbolic images. Humankind must pierce the secrets of nature to reveal the sacred and find meaning in life. When we allow ourselves to recognize the soul of things that dwell in the landscapes around us, the Earth more easily reciprocates, and exposes the realm of its soul to us. It’s there for anyone who wants to cross the imaginal bridge. It’s a place where the turtle attended to my soul and, reciprocally, I returned soul to the world. 

I certainly didn’t go out to do an experiment that day, yet it was on that day that I discovered a new way of knowing.

Our stories are master blueprints on how to, or not to, live life. They allow us to see ourselves, and to examine our internal world. — they help us through the dark forest. The tale of the injured turtle is NOT a story about humans versus nature, as the Prince of Darkness would like us to believe; it is a beautiful story about an ecosystem that includes humans as part of nature.  

When we look inward — but also look outward — we begin to see relationships, as well as depth. If we change the way we see the world, it evolves our personal consciousness, and dissolves boundaries — we experience ourselves as less and less separate from the web of life — restoring well-being NOT only for individuals, but also for our planet. 

Ecopsychologist, David Abram explains that “Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it — of it — immersed in its depths.” 

One last thing; because I stopped that day, the turtle has now been returned to her ecosystem, and has another 50 or so years in which to carry on with her work in the world. I’m reminded that no one person can restore our world’s fragile environment, but we can restore bits and pieces of the environment that are within our reach.