Make Meaning That Matters

How do we make meaning? Why do certain items, ideas, belief, etc. become meaningful to us? Many ecopsychologists propose that all meaning emerges through a life process that is always in motion, never-ending, and evolves with each experience. To think about every interaction as an important exchange with the world has the power to dramatically change our actions, and shift what is meaningful to us.

Change feels possible when we can embrace the constant shifts small and large, and breathe into the seemingly formless unknowing, while consciously and unconsciously forming new perceptions, and making new meaning. Fisher describes the word contact as active engagement with the natural world out of which new experiences and perceptions are born. He writes, “contact applies principally to those events in which we come in touch with the world and acquire new meaning- when the ground of our existence is altered”. Abrams describes a wordless dimension, where we instead are invited to engage our senses and feel into multiple spheres of knowing and being. This is no easy task because it involves communicating beyond our current comprehension.  An intertwined web of endless experience and interpretation. The facilitator seems to be the wild itself.  

Making new meaning involves mindfulness, and the ability to challenge current thinking patterns that may, at first, feel uncomfortable, even create dissonance, but will indeed ignite new ways of being, and call upon actions that birth change. We aren’t meant to stay the same, and nothing in the living world is constant.

To finding new meaning that matters,

B

Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life

Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World