34 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
tell you something about stories... They aren’t just entertainment...
They are all we have... You don’t have anything if you don’t have the
stories.” (Silko 1977, p.2). Throughout human history, story, myth
and metaphor have shaped the way humans view the world and
offered guidance about the big questions of life: Who am I? What
is the meaning of life? How are we to live in relationship to each
other, to the world and to whatever we believe is bigger than we are?
We need the stories of empirical science, sensory experience, myth
and imagination to meet personal challenges and the challenges of
the world.
As we began work on this book, we realized we wanted to
tell stories not only from expressive arts and ecotherapy, but also
from different disciplines and cultures that undergird these fields.
A nature-based approach to expressive arts includes stories from
ecotherapy and also from the historical and cultural contexts of
the arts, from contemporary ecological sciences, from ecological
philosophies and from the wisdom of indigenous cultures. We first
thought of these stories as foundational roots of our thinking. We
imagined a tree with roots and a trunk and branches. Then we were
captured by the image of a grove of aspen trees. Aspen trees are
strikingly beautiful as they grace the Rocky Mountain areas of the
western United States and Canada, and they are unique in several
ways. Most notably, groves of aspen trees are actually communities.
What appears above the surface of the ground as separate trees is
actually part of a large lateral branching root system that sends out
interwoven rootlets and shoots that grow into future trees. This living
community of the aspen grove is highly communicative, sharing
water and nutrients and responding to the differing environments it
inhabits. This metaphor is appropriate for a nature-based approach
to expressive arts.
Theories, or in our case stories, provide webs of interwoven
connective tissue to order and relate ideas. Our stories also fit
appropriately into the related philosophical metaphor of rhizomatic
relationships , multiple, intertwining and interpenetrating ideas.