Wild and Sacred Call

Will W. Adams serves as a psychology professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and as an ecopsychologist, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher.

• ForewordDavid R. LoyPreface: Deep Calls to Deep: Hallowing Our Relationship with NatureIntroduction: Transpersonal Ecopsychology by Way of Phenomenology and Contemplative Spirituality1. Seeing Those Peach Blossoms Changed My Life: Keeping Joy, Wonder, and Gratitude Alive in Our Heart2. The Ghost Bird's Haunting Cry: Letting Our Heart Break... Open3. All Real Living Is Meeting: Losing Nature, Losing Our Humanity4. The Dissociative Madness of Modernity's Shadow: Constructing, Deconstructing, and Reconstructing Culture5. The Supposedly Separate Ego: Delusion, Paranoia, and Greed in Conventional (Co)Existence6. No Longer I: Christian Mysticism, Self-Surrender, and Transpersonal Realization7. Nature's Conversational Consciousness: Awareness as an Ecological Field of Relations8. Bashō's Contemplative Therapy for Narcissus: From Ego-Centered Alienation to Eco-Centered Intimacy9. Nature-Healing-Body-Healing-Nature-Healing-Body: From Desensitization to Embodied Attunement10. Living Means Being Addressed: Embracing Earth's Wild, Sacred, Ethical Call11. Love Is Our Nature, Our Calling, Our Path, Our Fruition: It All Comes Down to ThisCoda: Deep Calls to Deep—Deep Listens from Its Depths—Deep Serves DeepAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndexAbout the Author

"Thanks to the author's thought-provoking writing style, this awesome masterpiece will especially interest readers concerned with ecopsychology, deep ecology, spiritual ecology, or environmentalism … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"A Wild and Sacred Call is an invitation to awaken to restorative ways of relating to life and nature." — H-Net Reviews (H-Environment)"Who but the huge-hearted Will Adams could have written this work? There are many fine volumes on the confluence of ecopsychology, spiritual practice, and ecology. Here, however, is a genuinely talismanic text that enacts the healing it so carefully elucidates. This is a quiet masterwork of both scholarship and sensitivity, one that carries the reader into the depths that it gently discloses shimmering around us. A book of simple power that, like a struck prayer bell, keeps reverberating in the hollows of the body, dissolving the shackled habits that block our eyes and ears and heart from really noticing, really attuning to, really feeling what meets us in the relational thick of the present moment." — David Abram, author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology"This book combines a lyrical invitation with an insistent demand. Both involve taking seriously our kinship with the earth and with all our fellow-species, whether we understand this call to become part of a mystical/transpersonal whole, or—in a pluralistic spirit—to respond to the other and the others. In either case, Adams insists, we are called to exit from our own self-centered and possessive egoism, to take up our responsibility for the widow, the orphan and the stranger, as well as for other species and for our shared home." — Donna M. Orange, author of Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics"This work is perhaps the most comprehensive and ambitious text in the fledgling field of ecopsychology, extending its tableau to include transpersonal, literary, and spiritual wisdom sources. Most importantly, it enacts the healing for which it calls." — Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University, author of Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis"Our twenty-first-century Earth community is in deep trouble, heading toward destruction due to the violence perpetrated by humans against one another, and due to the violence wrought against the natural world brought about by human hubris and greed. A Wild and Sacred Call addresses our critical situation, offering a worldview grounded on the fundamental interconnectedness of nature, the human psyche, and spirit. To convey its powerful message, this work deftly combines scholarly erudition with poetic imagery and insight, using stories from the author's own personal life as well as from the store of rich narratives from various cultures." — Ruben L. F. Habito, Guiding Teacher, Maria Kannon Zen Center, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, and author of Be Still and Know: Zen and the Bible"This is an insightful, in-depth inquiry into the psychological and spiritual dimensions of healing in troubled ecological times. As one of its many precious gifts, the book provides a vivid demonstration of how classical and contemporary sources of spiritual wisdom are directly relevant in our day-to-day lives." — James Finley, Center for Action and Contemplation and author of Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God