In 2014 the posts for this blog focused on the ways in which I began to view the world from a terrapsychological perspective, with my last post describing a 1993 conference entitled "What Makes a City: Myth and Maps" which my wife and I organized to begin community-wide discussions of this perspective. In 1994, our work gained national attention and also led to an idea for a project that would apply the perspective to issues of riverfront development in the Upper Mississippi River Valley.
The national attention took two forms, both of which involved my wife more than me.
Our October 1993 conference had been covered by the National Catholic Reporter newspaper, which itself had a national audience. But then in the early summer of 1994 we got a phone call from a film crew at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City, informing us that they were preparing a video series on Discovering Everyday Spirituality and wanted to come to Saint Paul for a week to film our work for an episode on the spirituality of place. The series was to be hosted by Thomas Moore, then the best-selling popularizer of ideas articulated earlier by James Hillman about the presence of soul in the world. My wife's contribution to the "Place" episode featured both an emphasis on the soul of our neighborhood (via a meditative walk around the block) and a community conversation about our city's role as the head of navigation on the Mississippi River. Our episode also featured another best-selling author at the time, Kathleen Norris, whose book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography had recently been published.
The Discovering Everyday Spirituality series was released on videocassette and never converted to DVD commercially, but it can still be purchased via Amazon. For those who are interested, see: http://www.amazon.com/Discovering-Everyday-Spirituality-Place-VHS/dp/B00000FEHW/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1421024350&sr=1-1&keywords=Discovering+everyday+spirituality
This video was released in the Fall of 1994, coinciding closely with the September/October issue of the Utne Reader which had as its theme "Cities Don't Suck." The issue focused on the reawakening of urban life that was beginning to be evident throughout the US, after the difficult decades of the 1960s-1980s when it seemed that cities were dying. I had been asked by Eric Utne, the principal founder of the magazine, to help plan the issue. Utne had been involved with our 1993 conference and so he also asked my wife to contribute a piece to the issue, an article that would provide what we would now call a terrapsychological perspective. The result was called "Finding the Soul of the City: 20 Questions That May Change How You Think About Your Neighborhood." This piece is still available online, in a version adapted by the Louisiana Folk Life Project, at this website: http://www.louisianavoices.org/pdfs/Unit4/Lesson3/SpiritofPlaceWorksheet.pdf
Next time I will explore how I drew on both of these works by my wife to move terrapsychology into the realm of creative placemaking, drawing on powerful archetypes to perceive, honor and cultivate the soul of a 400 mile stretch of the Upper Mississippi River Valley.
