To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,

Even the loose stones that cover the highway,

I gave a moral life: I saw them feel

Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass

Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all

That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

….William Wordsworth

oh, to just be in the green, the greenest green of your life and to know it to be so….form there all that is invisible will align into view…..the delicious vine seeks the light where green and sun simply be….where is it that heart and mind simply be?

This Wordsworth passage is a statement of mythical thinking and not merely a feeling. ‘I saw them feel’ shows a softer sensibility in intellect itself that can receive and understand the authentic tidings of invisible things. Just this sensibility in intellect, which I am calling mythic sensibility, allows you to notice the quickening soul in which our lives are bedded. Since the acorn can’t even be seen under a microscope, we postulate its invisible reality. A passion to cage the invisible by visible methods continues to motivate the science of psychology, even though that science has given up the century-long search for the soul in various body parts and systems. When the searchers failed to find the soul in the places where they were looking, scientistic psychology gave up also on the idea of soul. For Wordsworth and for mythic sensibility in general, the acorn is not embedded in me, like a pacemaker in my heart, but rather I am embedded in a mythical reality of which the acorn is but my particular and very small portions. What the Romantics called the ‘quickening soul’ is today named psychic reality. It is all over the place, although we insist it is invisible…..James Hillman

we tremble with the big soul

The clouds preceded us

There was a muddy center before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

….Wallace Stevens