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and provides food but, in order to ensure his profits, knowingly degrades the health of the land, water, and people with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.
In contrast, caregiving is its own ample reward and source of joy, not a means to garner acceptance or socioeconomic gain. By simply being herself, a person with a strong Nurturing Adult contributes to her family, her community, and the ecology of which she is a member. Cooperating with and supporting others is an authentic and intrinsic expression of her innate human wholeness.
GENERATIVE LOVE
To the same degree that it is nurturing, the North facet of the Self is also generative — supporting us to sustain and enhance life by careful planning; designing and organizing projects; preparing meals; dreaming up stories and telling them; building houses; creating art; taking out the trash (or, better, supporting cultural changes and creating a sustainable lifestyle so that there is no trash); governing; and giving birth to children, ideas, or organizations. In short, getting the jobs done — the life-enhancing jobs.
But, again and alas, the Generative Adult is not the only doer in the diverse cast of the human psyche. No doubt our subpersonalities have had a major hand in generating most of the wars, toxic substances, depraved acts, dysfunctional relationships, and life-threatening enterprises of our world.
Here, too, the distinction is a matter of both heart and Soul. A woman with a well-developed Generative Adult does not innovate or fabricate in order to impress others or to secure a place of belonging. Rather, she is simply herself — her Self. If she impresses others, it’s because she imagines, designs, and manifests authentically and in a way only she can. She’s unique in her way of loving, contributing, and belonging. But she’s not inflated about it. Nor is she shy or reserved about what she can do and what she loves. She’s both humble and bold.
Although not as common in contemporary Western and Westernized psyches as one would wish, the Generative Adult, by whatever name, is a familiar character found in stories and communities throughout the world, embodied in images such as the good doctor (Jonas Salk, Benjamin Spock), the mature leader (King Arthur, Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln — even the Lion King), the genius inventor (Leonardo da Vinci, Buckminster Fuller, Martha Graham), or the social activist (Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Day, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai).
In the other-than-human world, we observe life-enhancing generativity everywhere we look. We see that our own lives are made possible by nature’s endless giveaways: bacteria, worms, and fungi transforming crumbled rock into fertile soil; herbs and grains providing us with food; ocean-dwelling phytoplankton providing nourishment for other sea creatures and producing oxygen for everyone; mature forests creating wetlands, rain clouds, and habitat for uncountable species; and rock, fossil carbon, and trees providing the materials for our human homes and projects. Everything in nature gives away to others.
GIFTING COMMUNITIES
Those who have cultivated their North facet enjoy nothing so much as offering themselves to the world. They generate opportunities to do so. In the now-rare human communities in which most adults are psychologically mature (which is to say, initiated adults),2 community life is founded on what Lewis Hyde calls a gifting economy,3 in which the most important things are not for sale (things like child care, preparing meals, making music, care of the elderly, leadership decisions). Selling and buying tend to distance or impersonalize relationships. Gifting builds, sustains, and grows relationships and real communities. Like nature more generally, everybody in a healthy community freely gives away to others. And there’s no waste. Every “byproduct” is a resource for somebody or something else.
In Western cultures, people with well-developed Nurturing Generative Adults operate whenever they can as if their community is in fact such a society. Doing so incrementally shifts an adolescent society toward a caring and life-enhancing future.
In this regard, I think of the men and women I’ve had the honor of guiding on their descent to Soul — the three-phase journey of psychospiritual dying (shedding of one’s outgrown social identity), the revelatory vision of a Soul-infused mythopoetic identity, and the embodiment of the new identity in acts of culture-transforming service. Their Nurturing Generative Adult is evident as they go about their world-shifting work. Here are two examples of such individuals, both utilizing the metaphor of song (as well as actual song) as a way to convey the experience of discovering and performing their soulwork.
A Japanese American man, while camped in a wild place, awakened one morning to hear a songbird singing his name: “Awaken to truth and sing its beauty.” Having been raised in an American Shin Buddhist tradition, he understood truth to be the Buddha Dharma, he told me. But he recognized that “the traditional Shin sound of the Buddha’s song was too foreign to be appreciated by the tempo of our times.” With this insight in mind, he embarked upon several years of study of Buddhism and transpersonal psychology and was eventually ordained a Shin priest. He has learned to “transpose an ancient truth into a contemporary melody.” Although shy by nature, he now teaches the Buddha Dharma with boldness, ingenuity, and modern meaning — and, as he says, “as visibly as a singer on a stage.”
A woman on her vision fast was profoundly moved, she told me, by the image of “a deeply rooted tree, a Sitka spruce, a sentient being leaning into the wind to hear the messages of Gaia and to sing and share the beauty, grace, and grief of our world.” Living into this image during the ensuing years, this woman has cultivated her voice as a singer and facilitator, creating songs, practices, and workshops that link activism, creativity, and the sacred. She “supports others to grow deep roots of their own, helping people to claim their unique gifts and serve their communities with courage and grace through the gathering storms of our times.”
As Wendell Berry declares in his inspiring poem “A Vision,” “the songs of [the] people and [the] birds / will be health and wisdom and indwelling / light” — once, that is, we remember as a species how to take our true place in the world, the place ecologist Aldo Leopold called “a plain member of the biotic community.”4
An initiated adult is motivated, not significantly by wealth, fame, or social acceptance, but rather by the opportunity to offer his hidden, transformative treasure to the world, to deliver, by means of his Nurturing Generative Adult, his most creative, Soul-rooted response to his planetary moment.
But a person need not be an initiated adult to cultivate and embody the North facet of her Self. A psychologically healthy person in any stage of life finds herself naturally drawn to serve and nurture others.
THE NURTURING GENERATIVE ADULT IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
The North Self is an invaluable psychological resource at all ages and stages, appearing in its incipient form in early childhood. We see it in an infant’s empathic emotional response and in a toddler’s desire to help. Given a healthy social environment, middle childhood (generally ages four through eleven) gives rise to the North capacity to befriend others, provide care to people and animals, invent games that have rules and structure, and share possessions and knowledge.
A healthy early adolescence promotes additional nurturing and generative behaviors in realms such as courting, environmental stewardship, craftsmanship, and civic responsibility.
Thomas Berry’s experience in a springtime meadow at age eleven is an exemplary instance of an experience on the cusp of childhood and adolescence that can inform a long life of mature, ecocentric caregiving and ingenuity.
ARCHETYPES OF THE NORTH
Each of the four facets of the Self is in relationship with each of the other aspects of our psyches as well as with other people. The former relationships constitute the facet’s intrapersonal dimension, and the latter the interpersonal.
In its relationships to the other elements of our own psyches, the North facet of the Self is what I think of as our inner Nurturing Parent or Adult, as you can see in map 1. This intrapersonal face of the North Self is our primary resource for healing our fragmented or wounded subpersonalities beset by fear, loss, hurt, addiction, obsession, and other tumults.