THE OLD MAN IN THE ELEVATOR
nods politely. The button shines for us both but it's clearly
His space I'm invading.
Two floors up and his head down,
the two of us Alone in this captured world.

Not a hair out of place,
his earthly suit without crease
unlike his countenance, wrung dry like a child's spent allowance.

Young boy, first wheels, Young man, first thrills
Passion lost when safety net snagged him like a seined fish.
Whose moist lips have those wrinkled Ones caressed
now drawn tightly, concealing mystery of tongue and teeth, false
Witness borne of competence and culture.

The door slides open, his body twitched like a mountain lion restrained
Old habit, pulling back the pounce
As the caged female, whose meat he could devour with those downcast eyes
is released before him.
- Bela Johnson

Sixteenth century English philosopher Francis Bacon credits three inventions for having changed the course of history: the magnet, the compass and gunpowder. With a little imagination, we can envision the conquering of all of our country's frontiers and even those of the world at large with this lively trio. For along with their emergence came hubris or a form of outrageous arrogance that allowed certain ones to assert dominion over nature in a way virtually without precedent in our time. Jungian James Hillman, who along with W.H. Roscher wrote the spellbinding Pan and the Nightmare, says that "when Pan is dead, nature can be controlled by the will of the new God, man, modeled in the image of Prometheus or Hercules, creating from it and polluting in it without a troubled conscience."

Who is Pan, except for a harmlessly playful mythological nymph-snatching nature sprite? According to Hillman, Pan manifests as a nightmare figure in many of our dreams due to "the fundamental nature of man who, as sexual being, is at one with animal being, with instinct, and thus at one with nature." Note that our entire Christian belief system is based upon a sky God rather than someone we can identify with, here on earth. Our connection to divinity, then, is justifiably removed from our physical surroundings, allowing all manner of distortions in our perception of ourselves as stewards of sacred ground. To continue with Hillman, "It is through the nightmare [that] the reality of the natural God is revealed. As the human loses personal connection with personified Nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil merge."

With earthy images connecting us to our instinctual nature absent from our everyday lives, we lose touch with our intuitive, feeling qualities and ego assumes a predominant role. Judgments enter in, along with fear of those different from ourselves. Anything or anyone that is suspiciously Other is perceived as a threat. Remember ego is invested in identifying us as separate, unique. When taken to a collective level then, earth can and has become a battleground between the righteous versus the evil interlopers. We can more easily demonize the Other while justifying our own self-righteous acts. On a national scale as we are currently witnessing, a dangerous crosscurrent of destruction can threaten to engulf or even eradicate the hallowed ground we all walk upon. There are powerful archetypal forces at play here, and we may examine them to help us understand how our own culture's disregard for natural law has only taken the struggle between our intellect and our humanity (mind vs. body) further underground into the collective unconscious. To bring about healing and promote wholeness, we might begin to allow some of this struggle to resurface within ourselves individually in the form of simple awareness. Bringing some of these shadowy aspects into the light of consciousness and dealing with them appropriately with the help of a qualified professional when needed can facilitate a greater sense of inner peace and harmony. This can result in a more sustainable form of living within ourselves, permeating our family life, our communities and the world at large. Sustainable living starts with a shift in awareness from self and other to self in relation to our world. Separation remains an illusion.

To get back to a sustainable form of living, we must learn how to respect differences between people, cultures, countries, and species. We must unlearn the old mindset which says that "the right over nature [belongs to us] by divine bequest," as ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak states in his biblically-proportioned saga Where the Wasteland Ends. Indeed we might explore how we thought we had to choose between honoring the planet and honoring our Christian God; between loving our Mother and obeying our Father; between listening to the voice of an outside authority vs. trusting the inner voice of conscience. Ask the tough question, as did poet and artist William Blake, why our "love of nature [must] be purchased at the cost of divine love."

Roszak further labels culture as "a buffer zone of the man-made," leading us far astray from wildness, wilderness, desert or forest places which "keep alive the perennial wisdom." In Hans Peter Duerr's Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, he states that "The witch, a being with one foot in the wilderness and the other in civilization [is] not deprived of her power when she [is] driven off the fence." Instead, yet another powerful archetypal force once again profoundly awakens within. Denying our need for wild open spaces in which to explore our primal, untamed nature only causes an uncomfortable darkness or void to emerge from the depths of our souls. We are swept so clean, made so sterile in our concrete, glass and metal lives that our inner landscape is scoured clear of the messy vestiges of decomposition, grief and death. Without death and sacrifice there can be no real life. Until we learn to release what we do not need, we are left with nothing to fertilize the ground nurturing the seeds for our own regeneration. Our creativity dries up. Our life's landscape becomes polluted with gulfs of flat, dimensionless, otherworldly terrain. Like prisoners who begin to feel safer in the monotony of their confinement than in a wide, uncertain world (represented by such characters as Brooks in the film The Shawshank Redemption), we become afraid of space. We fill every moment of our lives with activity. Being alone with ourselves becomes frightening, for we sense something in us about to pounce. It wants out ­ out of the job, out of the confining life we have restricted it to. It longs to remain free in the unchartered territory of our minds, our hearts, our souls. As Duerr reminds us, if we cannot "look our animal nature in the eye," how can we truly know wilderness, in any sense of the word?

Have we collectively moved to a place where containment feels like security, where the chains of convention are preferable to the ranginess of freedom? On one side, we might want a house, a plot of land to cultivate, a corner of the world to call our own. On the other, we observe with increasing concern our wild spaces disappearing, our forests being culled into virtual extinction. How can we find a balance between our twenty-first century human need for security and our ancient, bone-deep animal need for fresh air, pungent forest leaf mold and wild spaces in which to shake out our fur, shake off the stress, and reconnect with the untamed regions of our imagination that we once visited so naturally in our youth? How can we let our bodies celebrate the dance Nature created for us, release the judgments imposed on us by others unwilling to let their spirits soar to the heights and plunge the depths of their very souls? Seek balance, keep perspective. Remember the cycle of life and death continues unabated by our daily dramas, and when the wilderness and wildness disappear, so will we.