The forces in our lives are constantly colliding—sometimes in ways that work out well and sometimes in ways that don’t. This interview series is an exploration of what it can look like to work with the collisions, rather than against them. By digging into how humans and nature interact–from our relationships with other humans, to those with our non-human neighbors, to our relationship with ourselves to our relationship with the landbase–we can uncover how to best step fully into our role in the story of the world.
Today I have the great pleasure of introducing you to my writing colleague and friend-who-lives-afar, Frank Inzan Owen. We met thanks to the supportive community of authors that Les M. Browning founded along with Homebound Publications, a unique community I’m so grateful to be a part of. Frank (隠山, Hidden Mountain) is a Wayfarer of a Nature-oriented contemplative path shaped by a syncretism of East Asian spiritual influences and practices intimately linked with landscape. He is the author of three books of poetry via our shared publisher, Homebound Publications, and he curates the Substack podcast called The Poet’s Dreamingbody. When not gardening, hillwalking, or art-making, he facilitates a form of spiritual direction and transpersonal innerwork he calls contemplative soulwork.
Heidi: Frank, thanks for being here with us today. To start, I always ask the same question: What are two forces that are colliding in your life right now (or that have in the not too distant past)?
Frank: The theme of collisions is a compelling one. In addition to having survived some actual collisions in my life (something my arthritic hip likes to remind me of every day), equally ever-present in my awareness is the strain produced by the collision between the unchecked high-velocity expansion of modernity and the slower, more ancient rhythm of Great Nature. I know you know what I mean, and I find that this aspect is never far from heart-mind.
Alongside this, another collision that has been front-and-center for me for the last few years has been between what Jungian psychology refers to as the First Half of Life and the Second Half of Life. The idea is this:The First Half of Life has its own developmental tasks. Grow up.Get educated.Get established.Get a job.Transition from childhood to young adulthood to independent autonomy as an adult. In other words, get on with the task of “adulting,” as some speak of it. However, just about the time we think we’ve “gotten all our ducks in a row,” so to speak, a whole other process can get kickstarted by the psyche. A mysterious journey begins which, sometimes much to our dismay, we eventually come to realize is happening involuntarily. It’s rather more akin to something that gets “activated,” like a seed suddenly getting fertilized. In my own experience, it wasn’t something I consciously sought. It is something to which I have had to surrender.
Jungian author James Hollis speaks of this as entering “The Middle Passage” (not to be confused with the route taken by ships during the trans-Atlantic slave trade1). The Middle Passage, in this context, is a potent, rather initiatory psychospiritual shifting from the concerns and conditions of the First Half of Life to a sometimes disorienting, sometimes destabilizing experience of personal transmutation. Where the First Half of Life was largely externally-focused on the outer world (getting things done, working toward accomplishments, etc.), the Middle Passage “turns us inward.” It is both a stripping away and a preparation, a tempering.The collision, in this sense, is the collision between ‘who we have been’ (in the First Half of Life) with a phase of groundlessness, unknowing, sometimes a mirage-like confusion, ultimately leading to ‘who we will be’ (in the Second Half of Life)...,or so I am told. The soul, the psyche, ensures all of this it seems. While there’s always a continuity of some aspects of self, the fact of the matter is it can be quite bewildering. And, while there are “maps,” no map is the actual territory and sometimes there simply aren’t that many footholds and handholds.
Heidi: How are you navigating the conditions this collision is creating? How does the dissonance created impact your choices?
Frank: For starters, I’m being very quiet. Or, to put it a slightly different way, I’m being quiet a lot. I’ve also been pondering the potential deeper meaning of this term “bewildering.” Perhaps “bewildering” (which denotes confusion or disorientation) can be turned on its head and become “be-WILDER-ing.” I’m still breathing into this and exploring how this BE-WILDER-ING might very well be a worthy way of navigating midlife.
I’m also journaling like a mad man, tracking the overall process. Since February 2020, when I resigned from a 15-year run in the ad biz, and March 2020, when the pandemic really swung into high-gear and I turned inward, I’ve filled nearly 50 journals. Prior to all of this, I typically filled a journal once or twice a year. For the last two years journaling is a practice that has felt like a life-vest at times and a form of inner archaeology at other junctures. I’m far enough along in the process that I have a growing sense that some of what I have committed to the page will be of use in other ways in the years to come. At the very least the journals will be markers and touchstones to look back at for perspective.
Additionally, I’m staying very true to the path I received from my late teacher, which has really had a bolstering, “brilliant sanity” effect during an otherwise tumultuous time collectively. What I studied with my teacher has filtered down in recent years from being predominantly an intellectual exercise (on my part) to finally “getting” more and more what she was trying to teach me; a way of being much more rooted in a focus on somatic-experiencing in Nature. It's a path that does include study but the mind-aspect is balanced and augmented by personal, investigative shadow work, daily and nightly meditation practice (Sōtō Zen sitting), hillwalking in Nature, and art-making, both visual and written.
The primary dissonances I feel are two-fold. The first dissonance is something I know a lot of HSPs live with (see the work of psychologist Dr. Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person). In a nutshell, it’s the realization that one’s inner experience has an insistent life of its own. Quite often the enormity and energy of the process is not something that can be fully articulated to others; and, it goes without saying, this inner process usually runs in a trajectory that has a pace, rhythm, and energy different in tone than the outer world. In addition to Elaine Aron’s book on HSP, Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can’t Stop Talking and Marsha Sinetar’s classic work Ordinary People As Monks and Mystics: Lifestyles for Self-Discovery have been ‘go-to’ reads during this time, along with Robert Rodriguez’ The Book of Hermits.
The second dissonance is between what I am working to cultivate personally and what I observe in terms of the state of the outer world.
Heidi: 50 journals! Wow—I’m feeling inspired to up my journaling game. And “one’s inner experience has an insistent life of its own…” I love that, and I’ll be sitting with it this week as I contemplate here in the north. What has this collision taught you about yourself? The world?
Frank: With regard to collisions and dissonances, in terms of myself, what they have taught me, firstly, is that all growth is a form of stretching beyond limited forms (structures and ideas) and that process of stretching comes with its fair share of irritation, discomfort, and pain. As C.G. Jung put it, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” The image I get is of a snake molting its skin. Some snakes get more than a little bit skittish or “jumpy” when they are shedding their skin. Some get quite anxious and even strike out at the movement of shadows because they temporarily lose their vision while shedding. I think it’s a great metaphor for The Middle Passage (a time when some people report not being able to “see clearly”), but it’s also an image that I think captures something of the collective process we are all in together.
In terms of the world, having studied a lot of cross-cultural history and contemplated the macro-level expressions of “collisions and dissonances” (including in the writings of futurist Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave), I have realized that there really has never been a time when the world wasn’t experiencing some form of upheaval.There have been quantum leaps forward accompanied with various backslides e.g. Emancipation and Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow. There have been times of cultural chaos and losing our senses (what Jung called “mass psychosis”) and there have been phases of rebalancing. Jung’s own notion of this is captured in the word enantiodromia – a term from the Greek which denotes that no matter how far afield or extreme imbalances become, it is a law of the psychic universe (which includes culture) that the pendulum of reality must swing back toward the middle, toward the center, in its search for wholeness.
Some may come to the conclusion that our particular era of imbalances is utterly unique. That may be true when considering the nuclear threat, the potential for more pandemics, and the ferocity of “climate karma” we are seeing. At the deeper level of the collective unconscious, however, I think the process has always been with us. Such conditions and characteristics were present in the time of the Buddha, in ancient China, in ancient Japan (which led such poets as Kamo no Chomei to reflect upon such upheavals in his writing), and modern history is etched with layer upon layer of evidence of such tumult followed by a “righting-of-the-ship.”
I know for certain this is a collective feature of our times because many of my clients have expressed the sentiment of being overwhelmed with the state of the world in the last year. There is a lot of collective feeling of helplessness to affect the macro-level imbalances in the world right now, and a lot of collective grief and concern come with it. However, I also take some solace in the fact that such conditions have sparked some people awake in ways they weren’t before, and it’s clear that such conditions have facilitated a kind of conversation that wasn’t happening a decade ago.
Heidi: We’d love to hear about a collision you explore in your latest project. What are you working on?
At present, I am slowly but surely working on a project, inspired by my late teacher, that explores the “lineage stream” of the old Wayfaring poets. Rather than a cold, sterile history book, or an academic course analyzing poetry, I want to breathe life into a multisensory entryway; a way of practice that is accessible and approachable, without gurus and $1,000 workshops. Books, courses, retreats, travel; I’m not certain at this point what shape it will all take. Ultimately, though, I think of it first and foremost as a kind of trailhead and the path is one that brings certain aspects alive for people so that these orientations can become a practice-companion in these times and, thus, can serve as an antidote to some of the dis-eased characteristics of modern culture. I guess, in a certain sense, you could say that the collision has already happened – what the late Zen master John Daido Loori referred to as “The Great Catastrophe” – and what I’m working with is exploring how some of the ancient ones have left us a trail of breadcrumbs.
Heidi: What a great offering, and a collision of the best sort, I think—I look forward to learning more about it as it unfolds.
What else would you like to share about your current projects?
Frank: Though related in subject but nowhere near the same scope, I have been curating a new podcast and Substack page called The Poet’s Dreamingbody. Thus far, it’s very organic. It’s a very mood-driven animal, sometimes shaped by the questions submitted by readers and listeners, sometimes shaped by the seasons, sometimes shaped by what I call Wayfaring Poet Profiles.
Have a collision you’d like to explore in this space? Send me an email at heidi@heidibarr.com.
The ‘middle passage’ also refers to the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were forceably transported to the Americas in horrific conditions. An estimated 13-20% of enslaved individuals did not survive the journey.