Soul & Mytho-Poetic Identity

What do we refer to by soul and mytho-poetic identity in the context of Purpose Guiding? The way depth-psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin writes about it is so evocative and resonant with how I see/experience and work with the term Soul. So I decided to quote from the first chapter in his latest book The Journey of Soul Initiation.

Soul
”Like members of all other species, we’re each born to take a specific place within the Earth community, to fill an individual ecological niche in the greater web of life, to provide a suite of unique ecological functions. That place is what I mean by Soul, and occupying that psycho-ecological niche and providing those functions is what I mean by soul purpose.” 

”The human Soul, when understood as unique eco-niche, is an identity much deeper than our personality, social-vocational role, or political or religious affiliations. Each human soul is first and foremost an element of the Soul of the world, the anima mundi.” 

”We are born with a felt sense about our ecological place or niche in the world. This knowledge exists only within the deeper realm of consciousness that all species share, knowledge that is not linguistic but imaginal.”

”Soul purpose is what we’re born to accomplish in our lifetime – the numinous gift we are here to offer to the Earth community.”

Mytho-Poetic Identity
”When it comes to identifying Soul, we can only point or allude to it using metaphor – in the manner of poetry or myth. We can linguistically understand our Souls only indirectly, only mythopoetically. Not coincidentally, this is precisely how we learn about our Souls in the first place: We discover (or remember) our innate place, our true home, when the world mirrors it to us by way of nature-based metaphors, human archetypes, or other mythic or poetic images or symbols.” 

”We don’t choose these metaphors or figure them out with our strategic minds. Rather, we’re shown them in a moment of numinous vision or mystical revelation. This is to say that when we begin to fathom and appreciate our unique eco-niche, we do so in the form of our mythopoetic identity.” 

”Soul is our unique eco-niche, while mythopoetic identity is how Soul is communicated to and represented by our human consciousness. The embodiment of our Soul – the manifestation of our unique eco-niche – is our mature, Adult life purpose, our singular destiny.”