Ecological Mirrors for the Work of Soul

Ponderings by ahlay blakely

September 19, 2025

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Note to reader: What follows is not new. It is a weaving of teachings passed to me by teachers and by their teachers (see below), braided with my own embodied downloads from traversing underworld terrain and putting theory into practice. In many ways, this is an edited journal entry, written as I myself learn to integrate these philosophies.

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There are patterns in Nature that echo through the psyche and our collective body. They show us that wholing does not come only through reclaiming what has been cast into shadow: the unconscious parts of the self - but also through welcoming back what has been repressed, exiled, what has remained undeveloped, and what has long been missing.

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Wholing can be understood as the lifelong process of remembering and restoring the integrity of the self in relationship with all of Life. It is not the same as “healing” in a medical or transactional sense. Healing often focuses on fixing what feels broken. Wholing instead recognizes that nothing essential is missing, but much may be forgotten, exiled, or silenced within us. In a soul-ecological lens, wholing is mirrored in the way ecosystems function: the forest thrives because decay, fungi, rivers, roots, and wind are all in reciprocal relationship. Wholing is the psyche’s version of this: integrating wounds, shadow, and gifts so that the inner landscape becomes more resilient, diverse, and symbiotic.

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A trophic cascade is the phrase biologists give to the ripples that spread through an ecosystem when a vital presence returns or disappears. The word trophic comes from the Greek trophē, meaning nourishment, and cascade from the Latin cascare, to fall. Science has pictured this as energy “falling down” through levels, with predators on top and plants at the bottom. But as Indigenous peoples and the more-than-human world have been showing us since time immemorial, the cascade is not a ladder of dominance. It is a flow of nourishment moving through a circle of relations.

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In Yellowstone National Park, wolves were killed off for seventy years. Anthropocentrism and colonialism claimed the land was safer without them. Yet without wolves the elk grew too many and stayed too long in the valleys, chewing young willow and aspen to stubble, trampling riverbanks until they collapsed. The land appeared calm, yet it was becoming barren.

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When wolves were reintroduced in 1995, the transformation was astonishing. Elk moved differently across the land. Willows rose, aspens stretched upward, and cottonwoods rooted along the banks. Beavers returned, damming streams that slowed the waters and created habitat for fish, frogs, and birds. The rivers curved back into their life-giving shapes.

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One of cascade’s teachings is that when what has been repressed returns in the right proportion, it helps weave the web whole. Exile creates starvation in the system. Return, held in balance, allows the hidden rivers of relation to flow again. Yet when any one species swells beyond its place and consumes without restraint, the web begins to unravel. Wolves, otters, and sharks still carry this memory of balance. Our human work is to face our hungers with honesty, temper them with reverence, and remember how to live inside the grammar of wholeness.

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The psyche mirrors this. Each of us has forces within that have been cast out, often because they were too much for our family, our culture, or our own survival strategy. For some it may be anger, for others grief, for others still erotic longing or hunger for truth. Some of these carry predator-like intensity, others are tender or easily dismissed, yet all can become shadow when banished. We say "not me." We imagine safety, yet our inner landscape suffers. Anxiety and compulsion graze us bare. Our forests of imagination thin. Our rivers of vitality erode.

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When shadow is faced, whether tender or terrifying, whether exiled, undeveloped, or projected, a cascade begins. What was once distorted finds its rightful shape. Anger steadies as boundary. Grief flows as compassion. Desire moves as vitality rather than compulsion. Tenderness, once silenced, returns as strength. And even the riskier ones: the hunger for power, the killer archetype, the urge to dominate, when integrated, become clarity, discernment, leadership, reverence for the cost of life. The very presence of these returned ones reshapes the whole inner landscape, and balance ripples through the soul like rivers curving back into their banks.

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James Baldwin once wrote: “One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion.” When we recoil in horror at the murderer, the abuser, the tyrant, it is not because we are them, but more likely because their acts call up archetypes we have learned to push away. The killer, the exploiter, the one who takes without asking, all live in our collective bones. We eat, we take life into our mouths. Plants too are beings who die when we consume them. We clothe ourselves in the exploitative labor of others. We hold in our hands devices mined from the earth at terrible cost. To face it is to turn toward what is uncomfortable, to acknowledge complicity with honesty, and to let that recognition soften into humility and responsibility.

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To integrate shadow is to widen the circle of who we are. The killer archetype, when acknowledged, becomes reverence for life. The hunger for power, when faced directly, reshapes itself as strength in service. What once stalked us through projection returns as an ally that steadies our ground. The cascade moves through the soul: what was feared at the top begins to transform everything beneath, softening grief into compassion, loosening old patterns, and allowing imagination and tenderness to grow again.

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Movements for collective, multispecies liberation can mirror this. When we cling to us vs. them, our own shadow grows stronger. Trauma and intergenerational trauma, left unacknowledged, spills sideways into rivalry and collapse. Just as Yellowstone withered without wolves, collective work falters without shadow integration. Prisons follow the same logic of exile and punishment. They claim to bring safety, yet in truth they starve the whole, traumatizing already wounded people. What is needed is not more punishment but the restoration of what has gone missing.

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There is another pattern alive in the world that shows us this. Ecological invitation teaches that imbalance is not always a sign of an enemy to repress but of an absence to be filled. In the permaculture story, slugs overrun the garden. The colonial instinct is poison. But the deeper question is: what or who is missing? The answer: ducks. Ducks eat slugs, fertilize the soil, and gift eggs. The problem was never slugs. It was a duck deficiency.

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The psyche mirrors this too. When the inner critic is loud, the reflex may be to silence it. But what if we ask, Who is not here right now? Whose voice is missing? 

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Then maybe we invite the nurturing adult who can love us through. The critic does not vanish, but its bite is softened and composted into perspective. What looked like a mistake or failure might become a gesture of longing, a risk for connection, a sign of courage.

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When fear rises, we invite the protector.
When rage flares, we invite the truth-teller.
When despair closes in, we invite the playful one.

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The critic is not the enemy. Like the slug in the garden, it signals what is missing. The work is to invite the presence that restores balance.

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Cascade and invitation: the predator’s return and the ally’s arrival. One returns synergy, the other fills the space of absence. Both reveal that wholing never comes through eradication but through relationship.

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These patterns pulse through nature, through the psyche, and through the body of the collective. They remind us again and again that repression leads to collapse, while integration gives rise to mutual flourishing.

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The wolves are returning. The ducks are being invited in. The rivers of soul and society remember their curves. Our task is to welcome them home.

 

***For readers wishing to deepen their inquiry, many teachers illuminate the pathways of shadow, invitation, and wholeness. Among them are Carl Jung, James Baldwin, Bill Plotkin, Kai Cheng Thom, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Lyla June, and the BBC documentary Secrets of Our Living Planet: The Magical Forest … just for starters.