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The process of soul-making was central to the work of James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology. It was Hillman who most clearly articulated soul-making as an organic process that cannot be hurried. He wrote of soul-making as a “digestive operation” the turning of events into experiences.
Note how central this theme of an organic pace is for Hillman with regards to soul-making:
“Soul slows the parade of history; digestion tames the appetite; experience coagulates events.”
“I worship psychologically at the altar of the god of historical time and slowness, Saturn, the archetypal swallower,”
And finally “All haste comes from the devil, as an old saying goes, which psychologically means that one’s devil is to be found in one’s indigestion, in one’s having more events than are experienced. What we do experience by putting events through an imaginative process is taken off the streets of time and out of the ignorant sea of my mental turbulence. We beat the devil simply by standing still.”
With regards to both soul and soil, creation is slow and incremental, destruction can be nearly instantaneous. It takes between 100 and 1000 years for an inch of top soil to develop under normal conditions. So-called conventional agricultural techniques burn through top soil at a rate 10 to 40 times greater than it is produced.
And so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has so often been the poets, artists, and ecologically-oriented farmers, from Rilke to Tolkien, from Rudolf Steiner to Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, who have sounded the alarm bells regarding our culture’s obsession with speed, efficiency, and mechanization. They have told us in various ways that speed is not value-neutral, that the acceleration of our pace of life is antithetical to the poesis of both soil and soul. Poesis would have us consume less – far less -- and chew more.
Re-animating the world requires paying attention, and paying attention requires slowing down. This is the exact inverse of the so-called attention economy we are every day subject to, measured in clicks and views, that takes a rototiller to our capacity for the type of attention that is the starting point for soul-making.
But life itself is our tailwind: the poesis of soul propagates itself: it slows us down, and from the space cleared by that slowness we have the opportunity to create more soul, make our own contribution of humus to that incremental yet all important growing of topsoil. See how this soul-making dissolves the rigidity of our walled off ego and seeps out in into the world around us, reawakening the kinships and affinities from an Edenic past. Here is Jung writing from Bollingen, the simple stone retreat where he went to slow down and pay attention:
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons.”
