Already early on in her life Geneen had a relationship and appreciation of the natural beauty, and she also often slept outside, and would be transfixed by the starry night sky and the milky way.
Geneen became a systems engineer in Silicon Valley. But seeing the stress at work, just seemed meaningless to her, and she realised that she couldn't stay, and instead went for a bit of a walk about to wild places.
She then lived in a tipi for a year and worked as a river-guide in Jackson Hole, by The Yellowstone National Park, and she felt like she really came alive there. She realised that we can live with so much less. And she loved the experience of getting close to the cold, the other creatures and the night sky.
We speak about how she observed how every animal and being has its place and its purpose in nature, and that everything fits in perfectly in this web of reciprocity, so she wondered what our human role would be in this eco system? what is unique about the human in the eco-system?
Geneen is fascinated by our human capacity to imagine what doesn’t exist. Other forms of life don’t imagine things that have no relation to anything they haven’t experienced. We furthermore have this capacity to create the things we imagine. This imagination is both our gift and our place of unconsciousness, says Geneen.
She also believes that something is happening to our consciousness at this moment in time. There is a way in which the intelligence of this planet is trying to reach us through our generative human imagination, she says, and it seems to be expressing through poetry and other creative arts. F.ex. like Thomas Berry’s book The dream of the earth or James Hillman’s: A psyche the size of earth.
She also speaks about how earth based people have an understanding that everything is cyclical, but that we now understand that there is also a linear development going on. This idea also comes from Brian Swimme, cosmologist, who says that one of the dynamics is chaos and disruption, but there is also another principle of greater and greater coherence.
Geneen also mentions Teilhard de Chardin in speaking about how the greater the complexity, the greater the consciousness or the more encompassing it can become. And she sees the psychedelic renaissance in plant medicines as a sign of changes to the collective consciousness.
Geneen also speaks about how having access to our imagination, being able to imagine the possibility that everything is alive, and has its own longings and awareness, that this opens a gateway in our consciousness, it enlarges it. And she says that the other than human world responds to our appreciation.
She says that our ancestors knew that we have to give gratitude and offerings to the natural world, and we can recover that mind and enact as if our world is holy and sacred, and this is something for each and everyone of us to do - it changes us, and it changes our community
She mentions Howard Thurman, and how he says: do not ask what the world needs, but what brings you alive, because that is what the world wants - your aliveness
You can find Geneen Marie Haugens offerings here: www.animas.org
And these are links to some of her articles: Council of the Wild Gods - Kosmos Journal
It's All Unceded Land | Geneen Marie Haugen
Homo imaginans: The Imagining Earth – Kosmos Journal
Wild Imagination, by Geneen Marie Haugen | Parabola Essay