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

What I mean by place is similar to what ecologists mean by niche, which refers to the position or function of an organism within a community of plants and animals. A niche consists of a set of relationships with other creatures and with the land and sky and the waters. It's a particular node in a living web.

THE WHEEL OF LIFE In this book you'll find a model of human development that is both ecocentric and soulcentric — that is, a nature-based model that fully honors the deeply imaginative potentials of the human psyche. I think of this model as a new natural history of the soul, a description of the organic, indigenous process by which a human child g

I believe that most people would agree that we will not create a healthier society by affording women the equal right to be as pathologically egocentric as a large proportion of men have been for millennia, to acquire the equal opportunity to excel in the patho-adolescent, class-dividing world of prestige, position, and wealth, academic and corpora

If it weren't for the existence of the ego, we wouldn't wonder about our true place. We would simply take it. It's our egos that do the wondering. Without egos, we would take our place instinctively, as everything else does, and like everything else, we would not know that we knew our place. And yet, if we didn't wonder about our place, if, that is

What makes you the individual you are is not your autonomy but your interdependent and communal relationship with everything else in nature. But having a specific and unique way of belonging to the world in no way implies that you necessarily know what that place is. Although you were born with the potential to occupy that place, you were not born

The Wheel portrays human development as the process of preparing to discover soul, cultivating a relationship with soul, and embodying soul. This is why I call it the Soulcentric Developmental Wheel.

Arrested personal growth serves industrial “growth.” By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citi

Through psychospiritual adventure, the adolescent comes to know what she was born to do, what gift she possesses to bring to the world, what sacred quality lives in her heart, and how she might arrive at her own unique way of loving and belonging.

Wisdom traditions worldwide say there's no greater blessing than to live the life of your soul, the source of your deepest personal fulfillment and of your greatest service to others. It's what you were born for. It's the locus of authentic personal power — not power over people and things, but rather the power of partnership with others, the power