Lapis Magazine

Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin

How do we overcome the disconnection from both the earth and our own souls that industrial society has brought? Bill Plotkin, ecotherapist and wilderness guide, shows us how to reconnect with the sacred powers of life, nature and psyche. By uniting depth psychology, wilderness rites and mystical poetry, he creates a contemporary path of initiation into our own full humanity and into membership again in a soul-infused cosmos. Joanna Meyer reviews his latest book.

Joanna Meyer is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin.

Paperback: 320 pages; New World Library; 368 pages; $15.95

It would be a pity if this book’s audience were restricted to the converted, since Soulcraft, a rich digest of Plotkin’s years of experience as a psychologist and wilderness guide, is a Baedeker to self-discovery. Yet, it’s a subject that invites resistance. Not without reason is the compressed language of poetry favored for conveying the unsayable, the considerable challenge Bill Plotkin sets himself. As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote: It is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there. In his engagement with the ineffable, Plotkin superbly supports his own wise words with quotations from Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, W.H. Auden, and other poets. One might say that Soulcraft is an extended gloss on Rumi’s springtime musing:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the

doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

Plotkin’s aim is to lead us to the doorsill of the two worlds, on an underworld exploration – “not a nature walk, not an Outward Bound journey” – but a journey into “the mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world, to recover the never-before-seen treasure, [what one might equally call the essence, or seed of quiescent potential] we are born to bring to our communities.” As Plotkin capably elucidates, “Our personal destiny is to become that treasure through our actions.” The purpose of our journey is – as expressed in Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name – to discover who we truly are, “to save the only life [we can] save.”

The Soulcraft journey Plotkin details is familiar to many; it is the journey of Odysseus, Aeneas, Psyche, Dante, Job. The list is legion, and the impediments and vicissitudes of such a voyage are, as Plotkin well knows, manifold. Not the least of which is getting started.

“Many people fill their days with a thousand and one distractions in an attempt to muffle the cry of their own souls,” is the core of Plotkin’s argument. Drawing on anthropology, theology, philosophy, depth psychology, and eco psychology (a synthesis of ecology and psychotherapy), he elaborates a series of focused actions to address both the causes and consequences of our Western malaise. Since, as Plotkin believes, “The rarity of finding sacred work is at the root of our Western despair and sorrow,” the first step for many is to recognize that we are cut off from ourselves. Like Dante we are in the middle of a dark wood, the true path lost. Being stuck, paralyzed or, as Plotkin imaginatively puts it, unnecessarily defended by the Loyal Soldier, is not uncommon.

The metaphor of the Loyal Soldier comes from the fate of certain Japanese soldiers, called Japanese Holdouts, or Stragglers for whom World War II did not end with Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945. These soldiers, living in isolated regions, continued to fight for years after the Axis defeat, some unaware, others refusing to believe, that the war was over. To avoid humiliating these loyal fighters, the Japanese honored them. Each one of us, Plotkin contends, has a Loyal Soldier in our employ who has faithfully protected us when it was necessary. But many of these old wars are history and, in order for us to move on, our entrenched servicemen need to be thanked, released, and assigned other duties.

Plotkin describes the first part of our life (youth and adolescence) as being appropriately dedicated to the assimilation of culture in accordance with community and family blueprints. This essential stage, where the Loyal Soldier often wins his first stripes, is dedicated to developing a healthy ego, but too frequently this is accomplished at the cost of misplacing the image with which we have been born.

The often neglected second stage of life (adulthood) requires a solo journey into the heart of our own darkness – a descent towards authenticity, towards soul, to reclaim what Joseph Campbell refers to as the “core” or “basic character of our being.” Plotkin quotes Robert Bly: “Our first twenty years are spent stuffing 90 percent of our wholeness into the ‘long black bag we drag behind us’ and the rest of our life attempting to retrieve those items.’”

However, reclaiming our shadow, those parts of ourselves we have repressed and disowned, is not the only work; we must return with a gift for our community, with the personal quality, or talent that is ours to develop. In order to achieve the Holy Grail, his soul’s quest, Parsifal, the Grail knight of Arthurian legend, needs to ask the ill Grail King two questions: “Lord, what ails thee?” and “Whom does the Grail serve?” With the first question we locate our sacred wound. With the second we discover our soul’s purpose in the world. The soul journey – unlike its opposite yet complementary passage, the spiritual journey – “calls us toward what is most unique in us.”

Plotkin clearly maps the three stages of the underworld journey. The first is severance which requires leaving the safety of home, surrendering control and predictability, and delving into the subconscious (“that which lies below awareness.”) The second stage, initiation, describes the transition from psychological adolescence to true adulthood. Of this long process Plotkin writes, “Most people learn about their soul image one clue at a time. The important thing is to say yes to each clue and thereby wend your way to the next clue until a pattern emerges.”

The recognition and incorporation (the return to our individual community with the gifts discovered on the way) is the final stage, but not the end of the road. The work is on-going. To quote the opening lines of Wislawa Szymborska’s “A Few Words on the Soul:”

We have a soul at times

No one’s got it non-stop,

for keeps.

Later in the poem Szymborska writes:

Joy and sorrow

aren’t two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

We can count on it

when we’re sure of nothing

and curious about everything

The aim of Soulcraft is to help the reader – more importantly the practitioner – to achieve this state of curiosity and paradox. The Soulcraft practices Plotkin outlines – and there are many – are designed to “evoke non-ordinary states of consciousness that reveal aspects of ourselves hidden from everyday awareness,” to walk along the equivocal edge. They include dreamwork, deep imagery, artwork, trance-drumming, trance-dancing, chanting, ceremonial sweat lodges, animal tracking, nature observation, talking across species boundaries, traditional ceremonies and rituals, as well as self-designed ceremonies. While several of these rites descend from ancient spiritual practices, Plotkin is at pains to point out that, “given that soul encounter is about authenticity it if it is about anything, it is best not to imitate another people or era.”

In a secular age there is much misunderstanding of ritual. It is often scorned, or embraced literally and dogmatically. As the playwright David Mamet contends, “The heresy of the Information Age is not even that reason will triumph, but that reason has triumphed.” In these rational times, ritual’s primary purpose, the physical enactment of the durative and transcendental, is misprized. For this reason some may roll their eyes at the many formal procedures Plotkin recommends as a means of stilling the mind, of engaging the body, allowing the something inside us that has no name, that is what we are, to surface. Yet, just as the conscious (rational) mind cannot create art, neither can the conscious mind contact soul.

Soulcraft is encyclopedic in its inclusion of practices, anecdotes, theory and references, and is as useful for the veteran quester as for the novice. Despite the occasional difficulty of expressing the numinous in everyday speech, Plotkin writes discerningly, taking on consequential issues in a fresh way. About the power of Talking Staff circles (ceremonial meetings during which the speaker holds a symbolic object), Plotkin writes, “If this sounds like more than one could hope for from a bunch of people sitting in a circle passing a stick, you probably haven’t yet experienced a council.” In the face of similar skepticism about the practice of Soulcraft, Plotkin would suggest that the doubter has not yet embarked on the dramatic journey into the mysteries of Nature and Psyche. Reading Soulcraft is a good place to start.