Bill Plotkin > 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

“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

“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

“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

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. — RAINER MARIA RILKE”
― Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries

“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

“[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