Soulcraft Quotes

“A healthy ego is skilled in imagination, feeling, intuition, and sensing, in addition to thinking.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“As a Wanderer, you must be true to yourself. You cannot continue to follow the crowd.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“It's not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift — your true self — is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs.”
― Thomas Berry, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“You were born to occupy a particular place within the community that ecophilosopher David Abram calls the more-than-human world. You have a unique ecological role, the way you are meant to serve and nurture the web of life, directly or through your role in society. At the level of soul, you have a specific way of belonging to the biosphere, as unique as any maple, moose,”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“In our healing and growing, we must, inevitably, make peace with our own stories and then tell them to at least one person. The telling is crucial. We must own our true stories. In doing so, we begin again to belong to the world in the way only we can. The door to soul opens […] Story is the very fabric of our lives. Every life begins and ends with a story and, taken as a whole, is a story. Every relationship is a story. Every dream. Every experience. Each soul — whether embodied or not in that person's life — is a story longing to be told. The world itself is a story; indeed, it might be more accurate to say the world is made up of stories than to say it is made up of atoms, earth, trees, and other things. The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein insisted the world divides up into facts, not things; I prefer to say stories, not facts. Storytelling has an enormous power over us. It conveys meaning in a way a mere explanation never could. Telling and listening to stories are essential tools in approaching the soul and embodying what we find there. There are many soulcraft skills and practices that incorporate storytelling.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“There's so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you — secreted for safekeeping in your heart — a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“Each human archetype consists of an identifiable pattern found in every society and, as a potential, within every human being: the Hero, the Wise and Gentle Queen, the Courageous Warrior, the Virtuous Maiden, the Seductress, the Nurturing Mother, the Holy Child, the Young Redeemer, the Rebel, the Tyrant, the Trickster, the Sacred Fool, the Innocent, the Sage, the Crone, the Magician. A given individual will resonate more with some patterns than others, or at a certain stage more with one archetype than another, but in any human community each archetype will be found embodied in someone. The human archetypes represent the patterns and possibilities of being human. Without”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“[T]he animistic discourse of indigenous, oral peoples is an inevitable counterpart of their immediate, synaesthetic engagement with the land that they inhabit. The animistic proclivity to perceive the angular shape of a boulder (while shadows shift across its surface) as a kind of meaningful gesture, or to enter into felt conversations with clouds and owls—all of this could be brushed aside as imaginary distortion or hallucinatory fantasy if such active participation were not the very structure of perception, if the creative interplay of the senses in the things they encounter was not our sole way of linking ourselves to those things and letting the things weave themselves into our experience. Direct, prereflective perception is inherently synaesthetic, participatory, and animistic, disclosing the things and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies.5”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“Your soul is both of you and of the world. The world cannot be full until you become fully yourself. Your soul corresponds to a niche, a distinctive place in nature, like a vibrant space of shimmering potential waiting to be discovered, claimed, … occupied. Your soul is in and of the world, like a whirlpool in a river, a wave in the ocean, or a branch of flame in a fire.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“We long to discover the secrets and mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world, to recover the never-before- seen treasure we were born to bring to our communities. To carry this treasure to others is half of our spiritual longing. The other half is to
experience our oneness with the universe, with all of creation. While embracing and integrating both halves of the spiritual, Soulcraft focuses on the first: our yearning for individual personal meaning and a way to contribute to life, a yearning that pulls us toward the heart of the world — down, that is, into wild nature and into the dark earth of our deepest desires. Alongside our greatest longing lives an equally great terror of finding the very thing we seek. Somehow we know that doing so will irreversibly shake up our lives, our sense of security, change our relationship to everything we hold as familiar and dear. But we also suspect that saying no to our deepest desires will mean self-imprisonment in a life too small. And a far-off voice within insists that the never-before-seen treasure is well worth any sacrifices and difficulty in recovering it.”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“There's so much more to who you are than you know right now. You are, indeed, something mysterious and someone magnificent. You hold within you — secreted for safekeeping in your heart — a great gift for this world. Although you might sometimes feel like a cog in a huge machine, that you don't really matter in the great scheme of things, the truth is that you are fully eligible for a meaningful life, a mystical life, a life of the greatest fulfillment and service...”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche

“Spirit likes wholes; soul likes eaches. But they need each other like sadists need masochists and vice versa.9”
― Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche