Welcome to Green Night of the Soul
The vision and the name
One of the most flattering experiences of Nature Is Not Metal has been people asking me when I will share more of my thoughts. Now that I am done with grad school and settled into my new home in a new state, there is no better time than now.
So… welcome to The Green Night of the Soul. I hope to use this platform to deliver on my promise of sharing more thoughts and feelings about the philosophy of nature, our relationships to animals, the connection between our psyche and the more-than-human world, and other varied topics.
I have two main objectives. The first is to publish what I’m passionate about. Expressing simply feels good. I have already begun to build a little community of people who share thoughts and feelings around similar themes and I hope we can continue growing those connections. I’m really grateful for those of you who have encouraged me to share more. It is immensely rewarding to receive your curiosity and attention.
The second objective is to follow in the footsteps of some of my favorite writers who are a little too outside the lines to make the traditional writing career work for them; writers who are overly educated (too much grad-school or ADD) without professional networks and lucrative instincts, who have turned to resources like Patreon and Substack to help pay our crushing student loans. I’ll figure all this out as I go, but for now, I’ll try and take the first steps to start getting work out there.
Finally.. I’ll offer my dream for this project and how I chose the name.
Green Night of the Soul
Some of you noticed right away that the name comes from two concepts being mashed together. The dark night of the soul and The Green Knight.
The dark night of the soul relates to human development, personal growth, darkness, post-traumatic growth, and stages of development. The dark night of the soul is a blow to your life, a shattering of your identity, the lightning strike that brings your tower down, the knife in your back, the grief that presses hard enough to leave marks on your body. But it’s also the clarity and meaning after the dust settles. The green sprout with a heavy bud emerging from the rubble. It is the discernment and depth that come with the pain. If you’ve been there, you know.
The Green Knight is a story that has had many shapes. In a recent telling, it includes an uninitiated man whose word is not worth much. He is a man, but still a boy. A cleavage or severing is required. A cutting of the chord or head (in a manner that strikes me as a rite of passage into manhood). And this is what comes his way when the character of the Green Knight arrives. The knight is arboreal, dendroital, strong, and enchanting. He has something to offer the protagonist but is indifferent to the outcome. And, perhaps, most important, whatever injury our protagonist will give him, he will give back.
Taken together, the green night of the soul is the dark night that our Earthly community is going through. Like in the Green Knight, the blow that we deal to the wild places of this Earth are given back to our psyche. The plastic we put into our rivers enters into the liquid flows of our bodies. The bad news, the growing shadow, the despair, closing, isolation. The clearcutting, the sacrifice zones, and the senseless sprawl are all a part of where we are at culturally.
But what comes after the dark night? The desert or the oasis? Stagnation or growth. I guess the name is a vision. A hope that I can contribute to an emerging movement towards post-traumatic growth on a cultural level. The green night of the soul is the time that we are in. There is still much night left to endure. But a new path is being forged. A descent, rather than ascension. Placing the divine back in the material biosphere. Ensoilment (as Sophie Strand would say) The post-rational. Re-enchanting the world.
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-Bradley
~~Towards cities that treat pigeons like suburbs treat labradors.