 being caused by impingement on the local spirits living in the land. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from the evolution of language, as it traces the veins of a living consciousness—once shared with the animate terrain. Cultures grew, minds changed and language morphed by scaffolding off of the physical (“the known”) into the abstract (“the unknown”). Perhaps we now know too much, and must tip-toe our way down off of this skyscraper built in paper-scraps, back down onto solid ground.
What if mind..is a property of the Earth itself?
Emerson predicted that the human race would eventually die of civilization. Seeing this prophesy beginning to be realized, how might we go about realizing the known in terms of unknown?
“To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks” French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is calling for a reawakening of the very basic experience of the world through sense perception.
This way of being is alive in us all in the form of a memory, engraved in the DNA from long ago. The process of unknowing might, then, look a lot like remembering. Beneath the scarring of preconceptions built up over lifetimes lies the innocence of permeable perception, which is in touch with the land.
J.R.R. Tolkien has written that “Faërie,” by which I take him to mean all things enchanted, “cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.” One can be enchanted (defined as “filled with delight”) by earthly phenomena only if they are willing to see that every elemental being has its own subjectivity; its own interiority. Human language began as an amplification of the inner world of plants, animals and minerals. If we are careful, we can follow words back to the mind of the world, and our own sanity.
 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Vol 1, p. 66
 Owen Barield, History, Guilt and Habit (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), p.11
 O. Hannaway, The chemists and the word: The didactic origins of chemistry
 Paracelsus contributions to psychotherapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus#Contributions_to_psychotherapy
 About Archetypal Psychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hillman#Archetypal_psychology
 James Hillman. Alchemical Psychology (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2013), Location 94 (Kindle)
 Defnition of “metaphor”: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=metaphor+definition
 Owen Barfield (1979), p. 31
 Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdams, 1967), Location 1050 (Kindle)
 Barfield (1967) 1149
 Barfield (1967) 1118
 Barfield (1967) 427
 Barfield (1967) 2379
 Owen Barfield (1979), p. 16
 Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) p. 63
 Barfield (1967) 433
 David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996), p. 80
 Barfield (1967)
 Abram, p. 58
 Look Around: 1 In 10 Americans Takes Antidepressants, NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2011/10/20/141544135/look-around-1-in-10-americans-take-antidepressants
 David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2010), p.123
 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. viii-ix
 J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories (http://www.rivendellcommunity.org/Formation/Tolkien_On_Fairy_Stories.pdf), p.2
 Definition of “enchanted”: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/enchant?q=enchanted
Maggie Hippman, M.A. began her formal education in psychology, which then extended into an MA in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah. Her work has been primarily with adolescents in Wilderness and Horticulture therapy, which has taken her into the Sierra Nevadas, the deserts of Utah, and the Big Island of Hawaii. Through placed-based therapeutic work (and education that focused on Ecopsychology and Terrapsychology) she developed a sensitivity to th