To listen to an audio version of this post, click here.
For the last several months I’ve been battling a mealybug infestation in one of my favorite houseplants. It’s an awful icky plague that leaves white sticky residue and larvae all over everything. I diligently treated the leaves and stalks with insecticidal soap and wiped any new clusters off obsessively with my bare fingers, multiple times a day. At last, the classic white and orange signs of the bugs began to fade away and some new growth emerged, signs of life! I’m winning! But even after the diligent (neurotic) tending, the bottom leaves began to yellow and die again.
I finally pulled the plant from its pot, revealing the festering invaders all over the roots—a worst case scenario. Behold, a not-so-small family of white fuzzy bugs sucking the life out of the heart of my poor evergreen. I had only been tending, albeit obsessively, to what I could see and what was easily accessible. Why did I wait so long to do what was necessary and repot the poor thing? What stopped me from moving from obsessive surface dwelling to tend to the roots? Was it too late?
We spend so much of our time tending to what is overtly visible, to what we can reach, what we can touch, what we can measure. We are methodical, diligent, and disciplined. We have precious and careful focus on the details, the body, the output and results of our work and efforts. We fine tune, groom, edit, update.
But as it happens, so much of what’s visible to us is simply a manifestation of what remains hidden.
Underneath the soil of a plant, life should be teeming, rooting, absorbing, and vigorously alive. Beneath our conscious attitude, our psychic life should be doing just as much. In fact, it is, but most of us aren’t paying attention. This subterranean aliveness asks, begs, and finally demands our tending to it, to the shadows and mysteries of that which moves us, compels us, grips us, and provokes us into vitality. A sense of soulfulness and the quality of our relatedness comes from these depths. Our capacity to listen down, into dreams and fantasy and shame, informs our ability to venture out and connect with the world around us meaningfully.
So, what makes us obsess over the stems and flowers but ignore the roots? It’s helpful to remember that in our Western culture we have the thick residue of a Judeo-Christian bias that equates growth, progress, and spiritual evolution with an upward, striving orientation. We know this most intimately through the capitalistic frame. All that is good (it is thought) rises, ascends, transcends. We push toward the sun and the sky, so hard that we might just POP right off the earth’s surface.
We are conditioned to believe that above is righteous, good, desirable, and below is base, immoral, to be overcome or tamed or controlled. This attitude has permeated modern psycho-spiritual communities heavily. Practices from meditation to yoga to shamanic ritual that have been westernized often assume a greatness “on high” and a beastliness “down below.” This is the Christian dichotomy of good and evil. It is one myth among many, and it’s imperative (as far as I’m concerned, at least) that we learn to disentangle notions of heaven and earth from our sense of morality or worthiness.
Spiritual lows are still spiritual experiences, aren’t they?
So, we need to come to know growth as a downward, earthen journey as well as an upward one. My plant’s decay was in the roots, so they were shallow and weak. Once cleaned and repotted, the healing journey should be one of depth, one that I cannot see. Renewal at this stage in the plant’s lifecycle is below, not above. Just as deeply important renewal periods in our own lives take places in terrain that nobody can see, sometimes not even you, it turns out.
This kind of progress cannot be judged by some external metric.
When we feel destabilized, it’s wise to feel for what seeds—what psychological complexes—are embedded in the dark soil of our unconscious mind, because these seeds are influencing all that happens above the surface in the realm of everyday experience. It is wise to go downward. But we do our damndest to avoid it because we have come to believe through these myths that going down is death, that if we let go of the edge of the pool we will drown. We lifehack and optimize and cleanse and intermittent fast and shortcut our way away from the sticky, oozy, untamable centers of our individuation journey.
James Hillman speaks of the exhaustingly manic effort we humans wage against the lower, depressive cycles of life in order to stay on the surface, to be in the sun, to stay lodged in our outward personas and social roles, to please and appease the predominant paradigm. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman writes:
Through depression we enter the depths and in depths find soul. Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness… The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in the cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering it through till it turns, nor theologizing it—but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul. (Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 99)
In the Christian myth that dominates modern life, regardless of your religious affiliations, we grasp for resurrection quickly to escape what we’ve come to believe are “hells.” To spend time below, in slow growth, in the darkness, is to be pathologically and clinically damned. To be outwardly unproductive is anathema to our cultural obsession with upward trends. We say it’s not healthy to spend so much time churning in the underworlds. Yet, don’t we burn with too much time in the sun?
The unconscious is a dark and wild place from whence our dreams, emotions, reactions, visions, intuitions, and spontaneous strokes of creativity emerge. It is the source of our becoming, it holds clues to our next moves, it bears the divine spark of our most deeply hidden sense of meaning, belonging and purpose. Without a dialogue with the depths, without a willingness to grow DOWNWARD, our house is built of straw.
The morning after repotting my plant, I sat in meditation and the spontaneous vision of my own fresh soil emerged in my mind’s eye, as if I was sitting in a fresh pot of plant food. I felt the rich grounding that comes with tending to the underworld. This tending is not an act of will but one of giving over to the gods, gods and forces that have their own intentionality and meaning. It’s a reversal of what we have been conditioned to believe is the omnipotence of the human drive, the human brain, the egoic forces of human consciousness. We believe we can control the gods, the pain, the emotions, the dreams, and even our own evolution. To be with the unconscious is to accept a realm of purpose beyond our conscious control, but one so rich and vital that its contents are necessary for shaping and informing our everyday lives – that is, if we desire to grow in all directions within this one extremely fleeting life.
