Lorecasting the Weather: Unhumanizing Phenomenology for Decoding the Language of Earth

Abstract

If Earth were a sentient nonhuman being trying to speak to us, how would we decode the message? Until recently, phenomenology as a research approach has restricted itself to human experience, the only kind directly available to us. However, as the Big Machine worldview of reality as subject to linear operations of interlocking parts gives way to a more comprehensive, systemic understanding of the cosmos as alive and participatory, forms of knowledge abandoned by modernity rise to the surface once again. One of these is a view of the world as animated, sensitive, and reactive, a preindustrial view held by all our indigenous ancestors and by certain later alchemists, naturalists, and poets uninvested in mining and consuming a world of supposedly dead matter.

This chapter turns phenomenological inquiry toward the natural world by combining what Goethe developed as an “exact sensorial imagination” with depth-psychological methods of dream amplification. This allows us to interpret natural events like storms and earthquakes as meaningful symbols: nonverbal, imagistic words in the vocabulary of animate Earth. Such an interpretive approach has been suggested by those who work in the field of terrapsychology, the deep study of the largely unconscious connections between people and places and things. Terrapsychology continues ecopsychology’s investigation of our psychic relations with the natural world by converting unconscious reenactments of ecological wounds (e.g., polluted bays mixing into polluted moods) into more conscious styles of dialog between dwellers and landscapes.

By using phenomenological tools to listen imaginatively into the natural occurrences unfolding around us, we stand a better chance of discerning the primal forces and currents that shaped human intelligence and continue to interact with it.