M. Scott Steedley, among other things, is an artist and environmentalist using art to explore archetypes and symbols in the collective unconscious.
In addition to his work as an artist, philosopher and permaculturalist, Steedley is an Early Childhood and Elementary educator. His goal is to help children become caring and responsible adults, unafraid to speak their minds and pursue their dreams in order to create a more unified and peaceful world for everyone.
His book "Rain Down Rise Up" contains the statement "HUMAN NATURE IS MORE POTENT THAN THE LAW," suggesting he believes in the power of human nature to shape society and culture more than laws that govern them.
Overall, Steedley's work focuses on exploring human experiences, symbols and archetypes shaping our lives. He uses art, nature and philosophy to encourage self-expression, creativity, and personal growth.
Scott wrote RecoverI after a 70 mph head-on collision with a Charleston, SC police cruiser. Happening in a very popular intersection, some of his high school mates were in the car with him and others were first on the scene which quickly grew into a public spectacle. “Jaws of Life” took 45 minutes cutting him from the vehicle. There was no pulse present for 3 minutes after his removal. Scott’s head was implanted two and a half feet into the dashboard causing third degree head injuries, amnesia and facial lacerations. Culmination of a history of events, this accident nearly cost his life and instead reorganized it with a reality check taking nearly a year to recover from. Forcing change, it opened a whole new realm of thought, a fresh way of looking at life and heightened sensibilities.
RecoverI- Prosaics and Mosaics -Welcome To My Mind was a collaboration between Scott and William Woods Higgins. Bill was Scott’s college Philosophy professor, friend and accomplished painter who developed a simple yet profound style which he describes:
(from the forward) “As art, it is a tribal art, a primitive tribal art, a statement about tribal archetypes, a study of symbology in its most concrete characters and figures, within the dimension of Self/self.
As a philosophy, it is speculative metaphysics; basing its hypothesis upon an anthropology of Spirit, the principal/principle that substantiates the pre-reflective, as well as, the reflective orders that substantiate the phenomenology of shapes and their order in one's life world. It is a phenomenological method of description and explanation about the continuum, both physical and psychical, which animates one's life world. The conceptual delineation of Spirit.
As a psychoanalytic method, it is a method of self-portraiture of the individual complexes of the self, that has the potential to form and express the relations of archetypes (shapes/ideas) within the collective unconscious Self.
As a religious experience, it is the linking back to the ancestral spirits so fundamental in the shaping of the Organic Order and the Human Order. Freud would call these shapes of self, "countless egos capable of being inherited by the id, while Jung would call these symbols the "archetypes of the collective unconscious".