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Eden Of The Mind
“Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” — James Baldwin
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The idea that finding inner relationship with the animals and the elemental life of nature can help us to open up the deeper levels of awareness that usually remain dormant in everyday life, has become foreign in the West.
I began to realize consciously that my life, like that of so many others, was founded on the sense of separation from the rest of life, that it was full of the fear and loneliness, the loss and dislocation which that separation engenders. And so I swung between different states — between the intense joy of inner expansion and turbulent upwellings of the emotional pain which few people on this Earth will not experience.
The experience was not something that I could put easily into words or communicate to other people. It had nothing to do with conventional religious thinking, which has largely separated the sense of immanent Divine presence from the animals and the Earth. And though I had worked for several years in conservation, whatever I believed I knew about the living Earth was only a shadowy thought before this living radiance, this overwhelming presence — of sacredness.
