There Is a Field

…There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about. 

–Rumi (2004, p. 36)

I often summon up the words from visual perceptionist and ecopsychologist, Laura Sewall that “…the skill of attention is a devotional practice” (2012, p. 267). This reminder prompts a dropping into the phenomenal world all around me, and out of my thinking mind—and even out of the larger narrative of civilization that constantly has us fixate on our egos, abstract thoughts, material things, and a rather flatline view of reality. By paying attention, the world becomes alive again, reenchanted, offering opportunity to listen to the more-than-human world, and perhaps even hear and understand her messages. The skill of attention also ushers in the possibility of synchronicities, the meaningful coincidences that arise through signs and symbols in our awareness. Psychologist Leslie Gray counsels that “synchronous experience is considered a sign of health and the lack of synchronicity a sign of deterioration” (1995, p. 180). For much of my life I have followed synchronicities, marking their ebbs and flows, and attempting to work with their larger messages. I have noticed that my visits to the Central Coast bioregion of Northern California, particularly San Francisco and Marin County, are typically filled with synchronicities. My residence at Commonweal in October continued this trend, with a host of reoccurring signs and symbols to pay attention to. My time at Commonweal, where I was focused on the theme of mind and spirit, prompted the very real need for humanity to break out of its flatlined view of reality and to participate in the deeper reanimation of the phenomenal world, including us. While not necessarily a revelatory undertaking, on some scales the emphasis on the practice of how humanity breaks out of the habitual and into the alive, sentient, conscious realm became my guide.

One of my dear and former colleagues, the artist Robert Spellman, once causally seeded to me that he found meditation really starts after the ending bell. This reflection often surfaces during my meditation practice, noticing that when the effort of trying is relinquished, the experience begins. Ironically, it was during my last morning and last moments at Commonweal, as I was gathering my things to return home, that I stumbled on a newsletter tucked away on a shelf and read the following reflection by Commonweal founder Michael Lerner.

While the materialist paradigm that denies all this remains ascendant, a rebirth of interest in the ubiquity or even primacy of consciousness in the cosmos is well attested. If consciousness and cosmos are inextricably entwined, what does that mean for our work in healing ourselves and healing the earth? That was my original vision of Commonweal. (Lerner, 2024, p. 15)

My heart sang in resonance and these words both bookended and restarted my practice. My work seeks to bring greater well-being to all sentient beings by reconnecting people within Western cultures to nature-centered and transpersonal paradigms. So much of this work has to do with people within Western civilization (and extending to all living under corporate globalization, which tragically are most of us) opening to the possibility that our collective separation from nature has left us in an isolated, abstract experience that underlies our ecological and human crises. Mind split from nature is perilous as we are split from our larger, original consciousness that is needed for the wellness and flourishment of our living and transpersonal worlds, including people. When the lid is shut on this awareness, as well as our active embodiment of the experience, meaning and thriving are lost. As Michael Lerner asks, “…is consciousness a fundamental element embedded in the nature of the cosmos?” (Lerner, 2024, p. 3). Many within ecopsychology, complexity theory, and spiritual philosophies would resoundingly answer yes. The larger phenomenal world and cosmos are alive and intelligent and our current task, as humans with an untamed capacity for abstract thinking and self-centeredness, is to reunite with this larger mind and spirit; to become conscious, co-creative participants.

Shifting to the beginning of my Commonweal story, its opening signs and symbols seemed to manifest as I drove past the turnoff for Mount Talmalpais State Park and began the descent to the coast and was stopped by two large turkeys crossing the road. While they were likely just going about their day, for me it indicated a welcome and permission to be there, as well as a reminder to pay attention to the meaningful gifts forthcoming. As I continued to wind down along the coast, I was truly mesmerized by the beauty of the land that had recently been replenished with rains, alive with vibrancy. I was not lost on the preciousness of this invitation, to be in this region for extended time, to be able to drop in.

As I officially arrived at the compound and began the process of settling into the apartment that was to be my home for a spell, I noticed a spider in the shower stall and was reminded of home. I suppose it is quite a common experience to find a spider or moth in the bathtub, and I do find it quite humorous of how many I encounter. I take pride in making sure each visitor is safely escorted outside and smile at the thought that now any small being trapped inside the house has instant access to the knowledge that if they find the tub, the human will let them out. As I began the liberating task, one of my Commonweal hosts arrived and assisted, and I employed her most useful welcome card and a mug from the cupboard for the assist. Not even an hour passed and the next time I looked in the bathroom, there was a small salamander roaming about. Perhaps this was their space, yet I was not ready to cohabitate. The salamander’s trust in me was blatantly absent as I made several attempts to escort them outside. Over the next couple of hours, I had to peek in from time to time. Finally they gave in and outside they were released. How odd to have already dedicated so many words on the theme of getting out. Ironically, it did not stop there. 

I must pause to give props to the Black horror genre movie Get Out (2017). While my time at Commonweal was nothing like this film, at night the Commonwealers went to their respective, far away homes and, when there were no retreatants on the land, I was totally alone on sixty acres, which included an abandoned building, ocean cliffs, and thickets of dark forest. And there I was days before Halloween, Samhain, Day of the Dead, at the time when the space between realms gets thin. I was delighted! My attunement to place was heightened and truly, I was never alone—there was the sliver of the moon, the winds, the healing prayers of thousands of people, their lingering ancestors, the practical and grounded knowledge of the decades of telecommunication experts who once inhabited this place, and of course the owls, coyotes, rabbits, birds, and somewhere the spider and salamander. Yet there was a commonality with the film Get Out in the double entendre of one character needing to escape his hostile hosts and land, while the other characters sought to escape their impermanence. Little did the latter folks know that if only they surrendered their abstract consciousness and selfish aims and participated with the larger cosmic web, impermanence could be theirs, and all of ours.

But I digress, the theme of Get Out returned a few days later. I had come accustomed to walking the “Commonweal Loop”—a lovely trail that traced the ocean coast and then turned through vast fields which were inhabited by herds of the famous Niman cattle, perhaps the best-looking cattle I have gazed upon, which says a lot from a Coloradan. Embarrassingly, as a Coloradan I had no knowledge of what to do if I came close to them while walking. One of my gracious hosts offered up that I should just keep going, just pass through. As I passed by the herd in the distance, there was one cattle blocking the gate I needed to pass through. They would not let me out and more importantly they seemed to be overtly demanding that I let them out. I felt so bad that I could not accommodate their request, but they were relentless and would not move. I stood a little ways back and coaxed and pleaded, and finally decided to sing my way out; but they were not having it and started to walk towards me. At that point, I realized I would have to retrace my journey back to the original point, doubling my walk, which was actually lovely. Yet my heart was a bit broken for not responding to what felt like an urgent request from another sentient being. The cattle could not magically appear in the bathtub for predetermined rescue, and even if they could, there was nowhere to safely go.

Going back to our origins is a common theme in ecopsychology, my primary field, which looks at how the separation of humans from nature—particularly humans of Western civilization—has resulted in both the ecological crisis as well as widespread human pathology. An antidote is for us to return to nature, to become earth-based peoples again, to once again cohabitate with the rest of the sentient world. The two talks I gave at Commonweal focused on this theme with both “Reclaiming Wildness” as well as “Bridging Dualities with Nature and Self.” The encompassing term was mending and this expression also extends to its use by scholar and attorney Shariff Abdullah (1999) who sorts humanity into the keepers, the breakers, and the menders. The keepers are the original peoples, the over 350 million indigenous peoples who live in intact relationship with life (more or less). The breakers are us—all those within Western civilization living lifestyles that deteriorate living systems. The menders are also, and hopefully more so, us—those who “choose to live as conscious, integral parts of a vital, sacred planet” (p. 4). This latter category is emergent, and I am constantly curious about this possibility.

The work of Jungian analyst Jerome Bernstein (2005) offers one description with his observance of borderland consciousness. According to Bernstein, it was not until recently that people within Western civilization, with their overdeveloped capacity for abstract thinking, were ready to merge this ability with our more original capacities of living in relationship with the phenomenal and transpersonal worlds. The borderland personality is able to bring our split-off ego-identity back into harmonious relationship with our more earth-based selves, with the addition of the new capacity for self-reflexive consciousness that was birthed by this split. 

While they never met and seem quite unaware of one another, the writer and philosopher Owen Barfield ushers forth a similar view.  I have just recently become aware of Barfield’s work through another series of synchronicities that began a month before coming to Commonweal while I was attending and presenting at a Jungian-themed conference (Forever Jung) at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). At an evening event I met the Barfield scholar Jeffrey Hipolito, only to hear an alum at another CIIS online event mention Barfield the next day. I knew I was fully in a synchronistic web when later that afternoon I randomly ended up on a multiple hour adventure with Hipolito when we decided to share an Uber to an event at the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, only to be dropped off far away from the venue. Our detour culminated in our joining CIIS Professor Emeritus and former President Robert McDermott (who, by the way, is quite fond of Michael Lerner) and his brilliant wife Ellen for dinner and a most memorable late evening talking about Barfield. The Barfield synchronicity culminated while I was at Commonweal when, upon learning of my newfound interest, one of my hosts arranged a dinner party with their local Barfield scholar, resulting in another late night of deep conversation, big laughs, and no poetry.

Barfield is the lesser-known colleague of writers such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and wrote more than either, spanning a range of mediums including both fiction and nonfiction. There is so much more to say about his work and books upon books to be read. In the context of restoring our relationship with all sentient beings and the transpersonal, I was most drawn to his concept of final participation. According to Barfield, prior to our split from nature and the transpersonal, with our separate identities, rational egos, and abstract thinking, people were inherently connected to nature and the numinous, so much so that language, thoughts, and larger psyche simply moved through us. This he calls original participation (Loftin & Leyf 2023. Hipolito 2024). During his lifetime, Barfield was concerned about the ecological and human crises and saw final participation as a stage where people in Western civilization could regain access to original participation and integrate the newer self-reflexive consciousness that developed from our initial separation. Both Bernstein and Barfield saw this split from nature and the transpersonal as purposeful, serving to develop our human self-reflexive consciousness and both viewed the development of our imaginal capacities as the path to this healing stage.

The development of our imaginal capacities can take so many forms, all of which would orient our more personal psyches to both the material and transpersonal worlds, bridging mind to both matter and spirit. The practice of synchronicity is one method of doing so. Synchronicity, termed by the infamous depth psychologist Carl Jung, brings together our inner psyche with events that manifest in the outer world, acausally (without a direct link), yet indicating a relationship between the two (Combs & Holland, 1996). An example of this from my story is my search for deeper ideas on how we mend our abstract, ego-fixated consciousness with nature and the transpersonal and, out of the blue, I am happily stranded with a leading Barfield scholar. I might project that my inner psyche invoked this encounter, while a more rational view is that it was a random coincidence. A synchronistic view would see this as a meaningful coincidence.

When wrapped into the pursuit of the imaginal, synchronicities become guides, unfolding a story or archetype that comes from one’s psyche and spills into one’s outward experience (Combs & Holland, 1996). Jung (1973) found that synchronicities occurred outside of the rational mind, and were fueled by feeling, intuition, and receptivity with nature. Synchronicities are unexplainable and unexpected. Combs and Holland (1996) state that “…synchronicity bridges the gap between the conscious and the unconscious, between the world of mind and the world of objective events” (p. xxxix), again linking the individual psyche with the larger world of matter. Jung introduced the concept of the psychoid “where matter and psyche interpenetrate and become one substance or energy” (Tacey, 2009, p. 16). It is a field.

I love the practice of synchronicity because it is an experience, a playful adventure that gets us out in the world amidst playmates that include all phenomena. One does not need to be super intellectual. In fact, if one is too caught up in abstractions, synchronicities do not appear; rather synchronicities require an open heart, burning curiosity, intuition, and devotional attention to nature and the larger world. Synchronicities offer a way to get out of our ego-driven, abstract minds and reenter the sentient, magical realms. 

My time at Commonweal was filled with many more meaningful coincidences. Perhaps the sweetest and most profound ones had to do with my dear mentor Belvie Rooks and her departed and most precious husband Dedan Gills. During the end of his life, Dedan was part of the signature Cancer Help Program at Commonweal and both of them spent time on the land. This was the first time she had been there for quite a while. When she entered the main building, we decided to visit for a bit and sit in the welcome area. As we dropped into the plush couch and even plusher rays of sun beaming in, Belvie instantly spotted a display on the bookshelf which held two poems: one written by her, the other written to her, a love poem from Dedan. Both Belvie and Dedan are so loved at Commonweal. Earlier that day, one of my hosts told me the story of Commonweal founder Michael Lerner visiting Dedan at Zen Hospice shortly before Dedan passed. Dedan had asked Michael, as a man with both privilege and deep knowledge, “How do I get out of here?” We may never really know what he meant—out of hospice, out from physical pain, out from lifetimes of suffering. Perhaps he wanted out of an illusionary reality that denied sentience to all beings and back into an alive, conscious, co-creative reality that was based in the divine.

‍

Jeanine M. Canty, PhD
Jeanine is a professor of transformative studies at CIIS, telecommuting from Boulder, Colorado. Formerly the chair of environmental studies at Naropa University, she continues to guest teach at Naropa and at Pacifica Graduate Institute. A lover of nature, justice, and contemplative practice, her teaching intersects issues of social and ecological justice, ecopsychology, and the process of worldview expansion and change. She is author of Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet and her most recent edited book is an expanded, second edition of Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices (2025).

‍

References

• Abdullah, S. (1999). Creating a world that works for all. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Bernstein, J.S. (2005). Living in the borderland: The evolution of consciousness and the challenge of healing trauma. Routledge.
• Combs, A. & Holland, M. (1996). Synchronicity: Through the eyes of science, myth, and the trickster. New York, NY: Marlowe & Company.  Lost Borders Press.
• Gray, L. & Sloane, P. (1995). Shamanic Counseling and Healing: An Interview with Leslie Gray. In Roszak, T, Gomes, M.E. & Kanner, A.D. (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth healing the mind (pp. 172-182). Sierra Club Books.
• Hipolito, J. (2024). Owen Barfield’s poetic philosophy: Meaning and imagination. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Jung, C. (1973). Synchronicity. Princeton University Press.
• Lerner, M. (2024). From the President Michael Lerner. Commonweal 2024. (pp. 3, 15). https://issuu.com/commonwealbolinas/docs/cw_magazine2024_final_issuu
• Loftin, L., & Leyf, M. (2023). What Barfield thought: An introduction to the work of Owen Barfield. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
• Peele, J. (2017). (Director). Get Out [Film]. Monkey Paw Productions.
• Rumi, Jalal-al Din. (2004). Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. In The essential Rumi: New expanded edition, (Translated by Barks, C.). (p. 36). HarperOne.
• Sewall, L. (2012). Beauty and the brain. In Kahn, P.H. & Hasbach, P.H. (Eds.). Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species. (pp. 263-284). MIT Press.
• Tacey, D. (2009). Mind and Earth: Psychic influence. Jung Journal, 3(2), 15-32.

‍

Header artwork: Raina Gentry