As a founder of terrapsychology—the study of how the things of the world live in us—The New School’s Visiting Scholar Craig Chalquist is interested in how imagination, story, and creativity let us tune in on the Greater Conversation unfolding continually around and within us. Join Craig’s journey at The New School in three offerings happening in May and June.
Land All Around Us: Imagination as a Tool of Wisdom and Transformation | Introduction and Inquiry.
Thursday, May 29 | 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Dreaming the Soul of the Earth: Re-imagination as a Remedy for Our Times | Craig Chalquist in conversation with Host Susan Grelock Yusem.
Tuesday, June 10 | 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM
Walk, Dream, Write: Writing Workshop | Writing and Walking on Commonweal Land
Tuesday, June 17 | 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
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From Craig:
We need a new worldview. The old ones are worn out.
For example, we usually think of the land as a backdrop to human affairs. But in ancient tales, places and their creatures show up as vital characters in the story. What do hills and fields say? Streams and rivers? Geology? How do all these and other eco-presences show up in our moods, our struggles, even in our dreams? What are our homes and roads trying to tell us?
As a founder of terrapsychology, the study of how the things of the world live in us, I’m interested in how imagination, story, and creativity let us tune in on this Greater Conversation unfolding continually around and within us. These modes of consciousness allow us to perceive places, beings, buildings, and the elements, normally considered mute objects, as speaking presences.
These world-populating presences often appear spontaneously as imaginal figures and characters who address us in fantasy, fiction, symptom, and dream. In Restorying Our Lore, the dissertation for my second PhD, I traced a tradition of “imagiknowing”—using imagination as a tool of wisdom and transformation—from ancient Egypt onward. When we work with dreams, when we explore the symbolism in our symptoms, when we as authors talk with “our” characters, we enter what my own fiction calls the Dreamvale, the realm of living imaginal presences.
My question is: How might imagiknowing, the stories and wisdoms it gives rise to, and tending the living presence of place help assemble a worldview that centers Earth, justice, equity, reenchantment, participation, and imagination?
When employed this way, imagination works as a rainbow bridge joining dimensions of experience we normally hold as separate: self and world, higher and lower, fictional and real, past and future. The lore we create can fuel new guiding stories for how to live with ourselves and one another on our troubled but still beautiful homeworld. Perhaps this kind of “loreology” or “worldview therapy” could even build a mythology for our time.
Commonweal is a natural choice of partner for such explorations. It serves as an Earth-honoring hub for visionaries and diverse voices, all concerned with how to heal our world and ourselves along with it. Commonweal recognizes that making good change depends on building good relationships. The lone hero-genius model of change is outdated and never worked well to begin with. We are the cavalry.
As we practice active imagination, explore the presences around/within us in Bolinas (with its fascinating and richly thematic history), write together creatively, tell stories (including ancient myths), practice listening to locale and planet through the organ of the heart, awaken our senses and memories in the garden, and walk together in conversation with the land, we might also consider what a new kind of creative, visionary, and reflective change agent for our time might be like. Not everyone is called to the activist path, yet all of us can respond deeply to what our time asks of us. What sort of Pronoian wisdom—the wisdom in our skills, practices, healings, and deep probings—wants to be shared?
If you are thinking about joining us, keep an eye on your dreams. If you don’t dream much, ask friends and loved ones about their dreams. As we will see, sometimes other people carry our dreamings for us. Many of our dreams are world dreams in which what moves in the world and in the collective psyche appears in symbolic beckonings.
Two questions to sit with:
How am I called to respond deeply and soulfully to our turbulent time?
Might that response include joining others to weave into being a new worldview? What an amazing and reenchanting community that would be.
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Craig Chalquist, Ph.D. is program director of Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation at National University and a former associate provost and several other administrative and leadership roles. His background includes group counseling, depth psychology, mythology, ecopsychology, terrapsychology, and philosophy and wisdom studies. He presents, publishes, and teaches at the intersection of psyche, story, nature, reenchantment, and imagination. He has published more than twenty books, including the hopeful Lamplighter Trilogy. His motto is: “Converse with everything!” Visit Chalquist.com.
