This wild beauty isn’t composed of just line and form and color, though that certainly is important at times. It isn’t something exclusive for “people of taste.” It isn’t hard to know when we witness wild beauty - the experience ignites some inner process that transcends and mocks the galleries and critic’s pen, and invites everyone to participate. The sense of belonging that is engendered by such aesthetic experiences can only be mirrored through representations in art or other cultural artifacts. Within the awareness of our belonging, we know that wild beauty is not separate from us, trapped away in objects or things, but is an inner and outer process of witness and creation. The soul responds to wild beauty in a way that unmistakably says, “this is beautiful, and I am one with it.” Serpent’s Egg Grove, a remnant stand of ancient apple trees in a nearby park, roughly laid out in the shape of an egg, is beautiful in this way, and one of my favorite places. Somewhat off the well beaten path of nature trails, it is encircled with columns of weathered trunks and covered with a low canopy of gnarled and twisted branches. It is full of the pungent scents of earth and of apples becoming earth. I found the place last spring by following a snake, and to reach it required picking my way, sometimes painfully, through brambles and thorns. The first time I made it to the center of the grove, I knew I had entered a hidden place, a place of sanctuary and quiet; a place of inner and outer beauty presenting an ecology that could be consciously engaged. As the name I came to call it by might indicate, Serpent’s Egg Grove is, for me, a place of beauty, symbolic form, and soul knowledge. Encountering wild beauty in this way is a numinous embrace which occurs in the dance of our conscious awareness with the personal and collective unconscious. The beauty of the natural world is the source of all aesthetic experience, which in turn is the wellspring of symbolic form. Symbolic form is soul knowledge. Sometimes we humans get glimpses of this knowledge. Sometimes we create this knowledge. We are nature, after all, and participants in the same aesthetic flow as the rest of nature. Our soul’s knowledge mingles with that of nature’s soul into a single knowing born of aesthetic awareness. Seeking out this awareness is an intrinsic part of our being in the world. We long to include wild beauty in our existence, in our experience, and we miss it when we are not able to do so. Through wild beauty, we enter a dialogue of glimpsing and creating symbolic form through deep aesthetic experiences. Our fascination with nature has always been the impetus for this fulfillment of archetypal imperatives for psychospiritual development. We have evolved a spirituality that allows us to engage and transform these aesthetic experiences through a process of mythologizing into symbols pregnant with essential meaning. Through the inherent and autonomous process of this depth aesthetics, vital for our development, nature becomes more than forest, stream, or mountain. It becomes a dense and active symbol containing the soul’s knowledge of what it means to be alive, which is at once a personal and collective experience. The collective experience is not only human - the dance with wild beauty allows our awareness to enter into ecology with nature’s awareness. This great dance is an unveiling of things already known, a nurturing and making conscious of unconscious
images. Intentionally engaging this dance is part of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger termed sorge (care). In some respects, sorge is a form of stewardship, but one that encompasses all of what he called Da-sein (being-as-such, or being-in-theworld). Da-sein is the whole of existence, with nothing left out. It is the physical, mental, and spiritual expansion of being-as-such, existing “for the sake of itself. As long as it is, up until its end, it is related to its potentiality-of-being.”4 Da-sein is thus being and the processes of its unfolding authenticity and potentiality. Sorge is concerned with the nurture of these intentional processes of becoming a true self, the striving for authenticity and realization of potential. The unfolding of da-sein is ever ongoing, and the encountering of the soul’s knowledge through aesthetic experience is inherent to sorge, to nurturing da-sein. Through this, we realize a more immediate relationship to the world, and we suddenly know the unity that our souls always already know. Encountering the collective ecology in this way is a tremendously aesthetic experience. Based on my experience at Serpent’s Egg, a large part of sorge is simply becoming aware, either intentionally or by being confronted with wild beauty. By practicing intentional awareness, all places can be powerfully aesthetic, but it is obvious that some places are inherently more powerful than others and can actually provoke mindfulness through their own beauty. Serpent’s Egg Grove is such a place for me. It is truly liminal, neither here nor there, but unequivocally announcing itself, making itself known through its undoubtedly present beauty that is the birthing place of broader awareness. As I stand in the grove I become aware of the passing blue, grey, clouds, and sun in the sky. Warmth, coolness, breeze, and stillness all are part of the experience. While Serpent’s Egg is, for me, more powerful than many other places in provoking awareness, I can more easily become aware of wild beauty everywhere by intentionally engaging a similar awareness wherever I am. Serpent’s Egg Grove is a mentor in allowing my relationship to wild beauty, wherever it is experienced, to emerge into conscious awareness. Any place of wild beauty can initiate this process, and spending time in Serpent’s Egg Grove reminds me that quieting my mind and simply experiencing my experience of any place allows wild beauty to enter my awareness. As memories and shapes of places inhabit my soul – branches and fruit, birdsong and breezes – they all become a temporal and spatial part of my awareness of wild beauty, empowering my sorge of da-sein on a deeper and broader level. The experience of wild beauty in this way is an event that ignites the psyche with sufficient intensity to mythologize the experience into a symbol. This process is an expression of sorge that is a passionate and participatory experience of wild beauty which encourages the development of the psyche by taking all elements of the experience and synthesizing them into symbolic form. The depth psychologist Anthony Stevens formulates this process as “Archetype + Experience -> Symbol.” 5 The symbol represents not only what we saw or did but also what potential arises in the world because of the aesthetic experience; it informs the expansion of our own da-sein with knowledge to be integrated into our overarching attitude or worldview. The symbol resulting 37