I’ve been a few times to this place near a friend’s property in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, each time seductively lured by its strange, exotic, somehow dangerous feel. You approach through a tall forest of messmate and manna gum before the ground starts to slope steeply downwards. The eucalypts disappear as the ground becomes muddy and a creek whispers somewhere below. Unmistakably, inexorably, you are in the territory of the tree fern.
Below a certain level there seems to be no other plant but the tree fern – this is their domain. They stand dense and watchful, their crowns spreading outwards like great umbrellas, discarded limbs piling up around them. I’ve rarely made it all the way to the creek: the child part of me tells me to stop at some point on the descent. This world is so foreign that it scares as it entices. If you stand around long enough, hungry leeches come crawling. It’s better that the visit is short.
I’m fascinated by our relationship with nature. If we are to have a healthy relationship with non-human nature we have to accord it the respect it deserves, which includes understanding our inner or psychic interaction with it. In the modern Western way of looking at the world, my response to the place of the tree ferns would be seen in the light of psychological projection: I project certain emotions, fears etc. outwards. The environment is a catalyst for drawing emotions out of me, but it has no intrinsic quality, no intrinsic consciousness. If I say that it does, I am guilty of anthropomorphism, which is falsely seeing the human in non-human nature.
This is a simplistic and outdated view. Projection is real, but it is not the full story. Projection occurs because a person lacks sufficient insight into their own inner condition and has not integrated aspects of their emotional life. As Carl Jung pointed out, many people carry “autonomous” complexes which cause them to feel strongly a particular way when triggered in certain conditions; others in the same circumstances may react very differently. Unless we are highly mature, integrated people we will project our inner world to some degree. Yet it is also true that projections can be withdrawn as a person psychically matures. The realities of psychically healthy and non-integrated people are very different; while true objectivity doesn't exist, we gain a much more balanced and nuanced view of the world when we can arrive at emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
I struggle to imagine a fully enlightened person striding down the slope of the tree ferns and not engaging with that place. With a level of balance in ourselves, we begin to recognise that all life has intrinsic value and some kind of consciousness. The life of the plant world is different in many ways to our own, but it deserves respect and respectful enquiry through the lens of relationship not human dominance.
When I am in the land of the tree ferns, a psychic relationship occurs. The life that I am, with all that is in me, meets the life in the environment, with all that it is. My emotional response, if I am honest with myself and not engaging in projection, carries the quality of the relationship. Like any relationship, it needs to be understood but will always have some level of mystery, of the unknown. If I feel wary or uneasy, maybe it is not right for me to be there. Until the relationship deepens or I understand more about the environment and my own responses to it, I may continue to feel the same way. Relationships can change over time, but we need always to pay attention to them, to their quality.
I’m interested in the pre-modern stories of certain places like high mountains. When the first mountaineers attempted to climb the Swiss Alps in the early 19th century, locals warned them about dragons living at the top of the peaks. Likewise, the first Westerners who set out to climb Mount Everest were told not to do so because frightful and vengeful demons were up there.
Naturally, we rational moderns laugh at such stories and deride them as superstition. Yet, many people have died and continue to die in alpine areas. The dragons and demons do exist: psychically, emotionally, mythologically. The gear that contemporary mountaineers carry and the preparations they make are markers of a certain relationship to the environment and that relationship continues on their way to the summit. Many climbers become deeply spiritual for the experience. The life of the climber is affected and influenced by the life of the mountain.
We need to rediscover and revalue our relationships with nature. Most of our contemporary myths are related to human material wellbeing and power: there’s the myth of progress, the myth of the economy, the myth of success, of the self-sustaining individual. Nature, in the stories we tell ourselves and which frame our world, is largely absent. Global climate change is forcing us to see the world and ourselves differently, and the myth of Gaia – the wondrous blue planet on which we live – is starting to emerge. As in the land of the tree ferns, so too in every other place on Earth, the challenge is to broaden our horizons, our understanding, through the pathways of relationship.
