Earth Regenerative

Winter's Gifts of Earth

2011-12-15T11:02:00.000-08:00

I live in the northern hemisphere. For us, the winter comes now. What does the winter mean? I am from peoples who knew seasons, there are other peoples who live closer to where the earth doesn't seem to tilt so much. But here, where a seasonal cycle's circle becomes an undulation of infinity over the arc of larger orbits, winter is a significant teacher.

What are winters gifts? Winter is the time of earth, when all other growth is spared and color is pared down to rock and branch. Brown and black and grey proliferate into a thousand chromal subtleties. Space opens between things, some things sag and some things tighten. The action is all invisible, with roots as superhighways for the churnbuckets of earth. Worms create new life in this womb of the year. Our futures gestate in the fallows of earth and brain.

We lean into the cold, which reminds us about breathing, re-members in us by cold sensory illumination the constant lung root networks whereby air travels to every cell in the earth of our bodies. Winter turtles us under the carapace of cloud, every sky movement an opportunity for nature divination.

This is a time when silence and subtlety remind us to listen closely, to stay quiet so as not to miss the ten thousand voices of crunch, chirrup, breath. The hands of leaves press onto earth's skin and dissolve into her, leaving traceries of the skeletal structures of love in tannins and resolve. We nourish and tend.

We are not estivators, we upright furless monkeys. We rest deeply, but we stay awake. Earth remembers in us in winter how things are made, the starting point before the forms of birth quicken and expand. We live in the seed and kernel time, taking the dense savings and codes of future growth into our own bodies to replicate possibility.

Winter sheds and leans us, a kind of sensory celebration of the subtle form. We make our own seeds from the orbits of the preceding year's growth and decorate. Is this year more hull or pit, more sunflower or nectarine? Has this been a year to grow exoskeletal protection or a time to strengthen at our core? By following the grooves and patterns of what has passed, in winter we hone and harvest. We design and structure. We incubate and portend.

Still now, listen deep. More rock and gesture of leafless branch. More grinning worm shitting earth. More cold air and spacious. Spare and nurturing. Condensing and revealed. Dissolving and forming. These are winter's gifts of earth.

Creativity

2011-10-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

Ken Robinson, in his February 2006 TED Talk (available here), challenges us to redesigneducation to nurture and support creativity. Here's some snapshots of his great talk. "Does School Kill Creativity?"

Children - Capacity for Innovation

"All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, prettyruthlessly."

"My contention is that creativity now is as important in educationas literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

Creativity Requires the Space to Make Mistakes

“Kids will take a chance. If kids don't know, they will take a go, theyaren't afraid of being wrong.”

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up withanything original."

In our culture now, adults stigmatize mistakes. "We are educatingpeople out of their creative capacities."

"We don't grow into creativity, we get educated out of it."

Imagine Shakespeareas a Child

We don't think of Shakespeare being a child. Ken lived near whereShakespeare's father lived.

“Shakespeare was in someone's English class. Imagine Shakespeare as achild. 'Go to bed now. Put the pencil down and stop speaking like that.'”

Againstthe Arts at the Bottom of the Hierarchy of Subjects, Critique of IndustrialEducation as Reproducing Lopsided and Disembodied Head-Focused Experience

Robinson argues against the current hierarchy of subjects. Reading Math,then Humanities, then the Arts. Within the arts, there's a hierarchy. art andmusic higher status drama, dance

"There's no school system that teaches dance everyday. We all havebodies, did I miss a meeting. As children grow up, we educate themprogressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightlyto one side. If we were to visit education as an alien and ask what is it for,you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout theworld is to produce university professors, they're the people who come out onthe top. We should not hold them up as the high water mark of all humanachievement, they are just another form of life. They live in their heads, upthere and slightly to one side. They are disembodied. They look at their bodyas a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head tomeetings."

"Our education system was ... to meet the needs of industrialism.Most useful subjects are at the top. Don't do music, you won't be a musician.Now profoundly mistaken. Second is, academic ability. academic intelligence.The whole system is a protracted entrance exam to university."

“In the next 30 years, more people will be graduating from educationthan any time in history. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything….Before, ifyou had a degree and if you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't wantone.” Now you need a higher and higher one- whole structure changing.

Intelligence is Diverse, Dynamic, and Distinct

"We need to radically rethink our understanding of intelligence..... It's diverse. Secondly, it's dynamic. Intelligence is wonderfullyinteractive. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value."It comes because of going across disciplines (13:50). "The third thingabout intelligence is that it's distinct."

Dancer,not Deficient

Story about Dancer [now captured in his book, The Element (2009)],GIllian Lynne was sent to a specialist because the school suspected a learningdisorder, when the doctor figured out, she was a dancer. "'Mrs. Lynne,Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer.'" Gillian was able to attend danceschool and eventually choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

A New Human Ecology Based on Building HumanCapacity

"Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolutionthat was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future isto adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start toreconstitute our understanding of human capacity. Our education system hasmined our minds in the same way we've strip mined the Earth, for a particularcommodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink thefundamental principles on which we're educating our children."

Need toRe-aim Education at Creativity to Change Human Planetary Presence for Healing/GenerativePurposes

"Jonas Salk...said, 'if allthe insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years, all life onearth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, all forms oflife on earth would flourish.' And he's right."

Celebrating the Human Imagination

"What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We haveto be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of thescenarios we've heard about. The only way we'll do it is to see our creativecapacities for the richness that they are and understand seeing our childrenfor the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being sothat they can face this future. By the way, we might not see this future, butthey will. And our job is to help them make something of it."

Ecological Creativity and Poetic Perception - Part 1

2011-09-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from Laura Sewall, an ecopsychologist and graduated from Brown studying visual psychology and neuroscience. This is from an essay called "The Skill of Ecological Perception," published in 1995 in Ecopsychology - Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner.

"Skillful perception is a devotional practice....In relation to developing an ecological consciousness, skillful perception necessarily includes emphasizing perceptual practices that help us to extend our narrow experience of self and to experience sensuality, intimacy, and identification with the external world. Skillful perception is the practice of intentionally sensing with our eyes, pores, and hearts wide open. It requires receptivity and the participation of our whole selves, despite the potential pain. It means fully witnessing both the magnificence and destruction of our Earth. It is allowing one's identity and boundaries to be permeable and flexible. I refer to this way of perceiving as ecological perception. Mindfulness and practice brought to the entirety of our sensory experience clearly serve to alter consciousness and behavior. Ecological perception is most essentially the perception of dynamic relationships.... There are five perceptual practices... (1) learning to attend, or to be mindful, within the visual domain; (2) learning to perceive relationships, context, and interfaces; (3) developing perceptual flexibility across spatial and temporal scales; (4) learning to reperceive depth; and (5) the intentional use of the imagination."

Becoming Water Birds: In the Kayak in Granite Dells

2011-07-02T05:49:00.000-07:00

Early this summer I had three opportunities to encounter the Granite Dells in the highlands of Arizona. I had visited several times before, and in the space of the week, enjoyed rock lounging with colleagues, rock tromping down to the water with a different group of friends, and finally kayaking within the water with friends near and far. Walking down in and then kayaking radically changed my perspective, placing me at waterline, from within the Dells, instead of on top of or beside them. In this way, I came to know the Dells entirely newly, from within it rather than from the edge of it or on top of it. "Embed and embody" is one of the four characteristics of Gaian Methods, which provide models for research based on the living system(s) of the Earth (deChambeau et al, 2010). Experiencing relationship with the Dells from within the Dells demonstrated that regenerative creativity is a Gaian method of research.

This important change in perspective relates to designing for regenerative creativity. To design from within, rather than with a deracinating sense of distance from, changes me from raptor to water bird, bringing me within the design as an active and activating catalytic presence, blessed by the movements of the work and blessing through my being and interacting presence. The rampant threats of the consequences of scientific innovation separated from the living processes of the planet can be countered through regenerative creativity, which invites symbiotic, ecological, and bodily connectedness. Complex and regenerative creativity requires ecologies of connection and engagement to be saved from the dangers of Cartesian deracination. We become part of the design. Regenerative creativity stirs us into deep, meaningful, and fruitful Earth collaboration, revivifying our creative intelligence, while protecting us from planetary harm.

New Edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education - And an Article on Earth Regeneration

2011-03-30T10:09:00.000-07:00

The 2011 edition of the Journal of Sustainability Education came out this week. It features many interesting case studies, interviews, and peer-reviewed journal articles, including:

An interview with Stephen Sterling, who wrote possibly the best handbook on Sustainability Education (interview by Terril Shorb).

An academic article about Pedalogy and Pedagogy - Living Soil and Sustainability Education: "We introduce an ecologically grounded metaphoric language rooted in living soil as an alternative regenerative framework for linking sustainability pedagogy with pedology (the study of soil). Five principles that guide this relationship are presented: valuing biocultural diversity, sensitizing our senses, recognizing place, cultivating interconnection, and embracing practical experience. Nurtured within an environment of curiosity, wonder, and questioning, and set to the rhythm and scale of localized ecologies, soil serves as an embodiment of life right beneath our feet rather than the reach of distant stars. In learning gardens, living soil and pedagogy surface in dynamic ways to create an ecological landscape of sustainability education." (by Professors Dilafruz Williams and Jonathan Brown, Portland State)

An article on complexity and sustainability education featuring four natural patterns: composting soil, spring bud burst, chrysalis metamorphosis, and hurricanes, as models for increasing depth, collaboration, diversity, and creativity in learning. These are tied to regenerative earth education (by Marna Hauk of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies).

Gregory Cajete's Book Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence

2011-02-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

I am inspired to share some quotes from Gregory Cajete's book Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence. Cajete, a brilliant professor and Tewa Indian from Santa Clara Pueblo, articulates the Indigenous ways of knowing underlying Native science traditions in this book. I have been studying the roots of terrapsychology, which offers methods for accessing place as a feeling and expressing being, and the many meanings of earth/Earth/dirt/Gaia, as well as developing a theory of ecological creativity. Cajete's work touches on all these topics. Here are a few gems, I will continue to share more in the coming time!

Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science - Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.

From the chapter, "Telling a Special Story"

"Native science continually relates to and speaks of the world as full of active entities with which people engage. To our sensing bodies, all things are active. Therefore, Native languages are verb based, and the words that describe the world emerge directly from actively perceived experience. In a sense, language 'choreographs' and/or facilitates the continual orientation of Native thought and perception toward active participation, active imagination, and active engagement with all that makes up natural reality....If, as Merleau-Ponty contends, perception at its most elemental expression in the human body is based on participation with our surroundings, then it can be said that 'animism' is a basic human trait common to both Indigenous and modern sensibilities. Indeed, all humans are animists." (p. 27)
"We all use the metaphoric mind to describe, imagine, and create from the animate world with which we constantly participate. Just as the focus on participation in Native science brings forth creative communion with the world through our senses, so too does the application of the metaphoric mind bring forth the description and creative 'storying' of the world by humans. Science in every form, then, is a story of the world." (p. 27)
"Because its processes are tied to creativity, perception, image, physical senses, and intuition, the metaphoric mind reveals itself through abstract symbols, visual/spatial reasoning, sound, kinesthetic expression, and various forms of ecological and integrative thinking. These metaphoric modes of expression are also the foundations for various components of Native science, as well as art, music, and dance. The metaphoric mind underpins the numerous ecological foundations of Native knowledge and has been specifically applied in creating the stories that form the foundation of the complex and elaborate forms of Native oral traditions. Realizing that the greatest source of metaphor comes from nature, these stories are filled with analogies, characters, representations drawn from nature, metaphors that more often than not refer back to the processes of nature from which they are drawn, or to human nature, which they attempt to reflect. Because Native science is thoroughly wrapped in a blanket of metaphor, expressed in story, art, community, dance, song, ritual, music, astronomical knowledge, and technologies such as hunting, fishing, farming, or healing, rationalistic scientists, its 'younger brothers,' have difficulty understanding its essence of creative participation with nature." (pp. 30-31)

From the chapter, "Sense of Place":

"Native people expressed a relationship to the natural world that could only be described as 'ensoulment.' The ensoulment of nature is one of the most ancient foundations of human psychology. This projection of the human sense of the soul with its archetypes has been called the 'participation mystique,' which for Native people represented the deepest level of psychological involvement with their land and which provided a kind of map of the soul. The psychology and spiritual qualities of Indigenous people's behavior reflected in symbolism were thoroughly 'in-formed' by the depth and power of their participation mystique with the Earth as a living soul. It was from this orientation that Indian people developed 'responsibilities' to the land and all living things, similar to those that they had to each other. In the Native mind, spirit and matter were not separate; they were one and the same." (p. 186)
"All human development is predicated on our interaction with the soil, the air, the climate, the plants, and the animals of the places in which we live. The inner archetypes in a place formed the spiritually based ecological mind-set required to establish and maintain a correct and sustainable relationship with place. This orientation, was, in turn, reinforced by a kind of physical 'mimicry,' a 'geopsyche,' or that interaction between inner and outer realities that often takes place when a group of people live in a particular place for a long period of time." (p. 187)

Pedagogy of Place and Poetry in Nature Rewilding Learners

2011-02-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

Reflection – Marna Hauk - Sense of Wonder and Earth in Mind – Pedagogy of Place

"To see what is here, right in front of us: nothing would seem easier or more obvious, yet few things are more difficult. There are unmistakable signs that something may be dying among us: that capacity to see the world, to recognize the 'other' and admit it into our lives. Invisible walls shut us out, or shut us in, and we make them stronger and thicker by the day."

- John Haines, Living off the Country, p. 17

In Living off the Country, John Haines describes a possibly dying capacity amongst humans to experience the world deeply and connect. Haines focuses on the role of the poet to resuscitate a capacity of seeing and a culture of connection. In as much as educators are like poets, he is also describing a revitalizing pedagogy of place. Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, E. O. Wilson, and David Orr all confirm the essential elements of this sensory opening and connection with place.

The capacity to wonder sparked by intimate experiences with place sources both poet and scientist. E. O. Wilson argues in "The Poetic Species" (Biophilia, 1984) that poets, like scientists, are engaged in enterprises of discovery bound by our relationship to other organisms (p. 63), founded in love and childhood fascination, providing a lodestar and sanctuary (p. 65). In other words, love and connection are the bases of poetry and science. And education that awakens this love and connection revitalizes our humanness.

The capacity is within us, it is in-built, this sense of wonder, this capacity to deeply notice. E. O. Wilson and Carson agree about the central role of a sense of discovery. For Carson, informal and direct primary experience and discovery nourish the sense of wonder. Carson (1998) confirms that a sense of meeting the unknown with primary senses, and having someone to share the experience with, are the critical process. "The sharing includes nature in storm as well as calm, by night as well as day, and is based on having fun together rather than on teaching" (p. 17). Shared informal and primary sensory experience and discovery can be exhilarating: "just going through the woods in the spirit of two friends on an expedition of excited discovery" (p. 23)

Educators, like poets, break down the walls that have been built up against primary perception and discovering a sense of wonder. Orr affirms that biophilia and a sense of mystery are connected (2004, p. 138). Haines articulates how by becoming connected with place, places can speak through us—by becoming authentic and connected, the voice of the place can enter our work:

"What counts finally in a work are not novel and interesting things, though these can be important, but the absolutely authentic. I think that there is a spirit of place, a presence asking to be expressed; and sometimes when we are lucky as writers, and quiet in a way few of us want to be anymore, a voice enters our own…I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found." (Haines)

How can we design, provoke, and/or encourage learning experiences that allow "the hidden place" below the surface to emerge in us, in writing and in life? Berry suggests that Haines points us towards a focus on authenticity and connection: "Once a place and its spirit have become not just subjects but standards of the writer's work, then the connections between art and community, art and tradition, art and thought become necessary and clear" (2010, pp. 52-53). Berry argues that cultivating this sense of connectedness also saves us from "the shrinkage of the world to the limits of the isolated, displaced, desiring, and despairing self" (p. 53), bringing us to realize Orr's values, consciousness, questions, and conscience (2004, p. 8). Andrea Olsen in Body and Earth encourages a process of direct engagement and what she calls inclusive attention before writing and reflection, "valuing experience as well as the language used to describe it" (2002, p. 5). Carson describes this as "expressing pleasure in what we see, calling his attention to this or that but only as I would have shared discoveries with an older person" (p. 23) As Orr expresses, "True intelligence is long range and aims towards wholeness" (Orr, p. 11).

These scholar-practitioners provide insights into how to reconnect and increase what I term Earth empathy (see www.earthregenerative.org/earth-empathy/homepage.html), the capacity for humans to connect with the larger presence of the life of the planet in a deeply meaningful way. Fostering and encouraging earth empathy is a critically important fruit of emplaced learning. Complexity science, with its understanding of emergent properties arising greater than the sum of parts helps us understand how fostering a Gaian connectedness, an Earth empathy, can help connect humans with the larger living presences of which we are a part – place and planet.

One way to apply these insights regarding a sense of wonder and education that keeps Earth in mind takes inspiration from the field of poetry therapy and poetic medicine. By creating collegial experiences of direct sensory experience and discovery as well as writerly reflection, I have witnessed awakenings with groups across ages. Whether with kindergarteners in a school courtyard opening up to the happenings of a blossoming jacaranda, with middle-schoolers getting their feet muddy at a cob building site and habitat restoration, or with adults in deep forest, direct experience with spacious nature opens and connects. Poetic processes and writing integrated with these experiences help learners track the path of their own discoveries, offers a wider language for their expanded perceptions, and allows them to become metacognitively capable of continuing connection. We become, at least for a time, re-wilded.

References

Berry, W. (2010). Imagination in place: Essays. Berkeley: Counterpoint.

Carson, R. L., & Kelsh, N. (1998). The sense of wonder. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Haines, J. (1981). Living off the country: Essays on poetry and place. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press.

Kellert, S. R. & Wilson, E. O. (Eds.). (1993). The biophilia hypothesis. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Olsen, A. (2002). Body and Earth: An experiential guide. Lebanon, NH: U Press of New England.

Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, the environment, and the human prospect. Washington DC: Island Press.

Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Earth Empathy Resources

2011-01-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Recently developed this website on Earth Empathy. Each of four aspects of cultivating earth empathy:

focus on providing inspiring quotes, links, podcasts, video clips, and experiential learning exercises.

This Earth Empathy website also offers core resources by topic and includes a space to add resources and connect and collaborate.

Check out http://www.earthregenerative.org/earth-empathy/homepage.html

A Day of Poetry and the Language of the Earth

2010-11-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the books and readings I have been savoring today while exploring ideas of earth regenerative education design:
• Abram, D. (2010). Becoming animal: An earthly cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books.
• Berry, W. (2010). Imagination in place: Essays. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
• Berry, W. (2010). Leavings: Poems. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
• Dillard, A. (1982). Teaching a stone to talk: Expeditions and encounters. New York: Harper & Row.
• Haines, J. M. (1981). Living off the country: Essays on poetry and place. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Here are some of the quotes that sparked me during these readings:

David Abrams in his new book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, in his chapter on "The Speech of Things":

Abrams on Gaia:
"An eternity we thought was elsewhere now calls out to us from every cleft in every stone, from every cloud and clump of dirt. To lend our ears to the dripping glaciers—to come awake to the voices of the silence—is to be turned inside out, discovering to our astonishment that the wholeness and holiness we'd been dreaming our way towards has been holding us all along, that the secret and the sacred One that moves behind all the many traditions is none other than this animate immensity that enfolds us, this spherical eternity, glimpsed at last in its unfathomable wholeness and complexity, in its sensitivity and its sentience." David Abram, 2010, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, pp. 180-181

Abrams on Speech and Embodiment:

167 "My encounter with the sea creatures had initiated me into a layer of language much older, and deeper, than words. It was a dimension of expressive meanings that were directly felt by the body, a realm wherein the body itself speaks—by the tonality and rhythm of its sounds, by its gestures, even by the expressive potency of its poise….an older, animal awareness came to the fore, responding spontaneously to the gestures of these other animals with hardly any interpolation by my 'interior' thinking mind. It was rather as if my body itself was doing the thinking, trading vocal utterances and physical expressions back and forth with these other smooth-skinned and sentient creatures."

167 (bottom) "To the fully embodied animal any movement might be a gesture, and any sound may be a voice, a meaningful utterance of the world. And hence to my own creaturely flesh, as well, everything speaks!"

168 "this animal dimension of my own speaking…the gruff or giddy melody that steadily sounds through my phrases, and the dance enacted by my body as I speak—the open astonishment or slumped surrender, the wary stealth of the lanky ease. Trying to articulate a fresh insight, I feel my way toward the precise phrase with the whole of my flesh, drawn toward certain terms by the way their texture beckons dimly to senses, choosing words by the way they fit the shape of that insight, or by the way they finally taste on my tongue as I intone them one after another. And the power of that spoken phrase to provoke insights in those around me will depend upon the timbre of my talking, the way it jives with the collective mood or merely jangles their ears."

172-3 "It follows that the myriad things are also listening or attending to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel that we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care—this full-bodied alertness—is the ancient, ancestral source of all word magic. It is the practice of attention to the uncanny power that lives in our spoken phrases to touch and sometimes transform the tenor of the world's unfolding."

173 "sense of inhabiting an articulate landscape—of dwelling within a community of expressive presences that are also attentive, and listening, to the meanings that move between them—is common to indigenous, oral peoples on every continent."

175: "Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us—and it they still try, we will not likely hear them. They withdraw from our attentions, and soon refrain from encountering us when we're out wandering, or from visiting us in our dreams. We can no longer avail ourselves of their perspectives or their guidance, and our human affairs suffer as a result. We become ever more forgetful in our relations with the rest of the biosphere, an obliviousness that cuts us off from ourselves, and from our deepest sources of sustenance."

"We now know, however, that the tangible world is itself such an iridescent sphere turning silent among the stars, a round mystery whose life is utterly eternal relative to ours, from out of whose vastness our momentary lives are born, and into whose vastness our lives—like those of our ancestors, our enemies, and our children—all recede, like waves on the surface of the sea." (p. 180)

Wendell Berry on Poetry and Silence:

Section 8, 2008 - Untitled, from Leavings

Poem, do not raise your voice.
Be a whisper that says "There!"

where the stream speaks to itself

of the deep rock of the hill

it has carved its way down to

in flowing over them. "There!"

where the sun enters and the tanager

flares suddenly on the lighted branch,

"There!" where the aerial columbine

brightens on its slender stalk.

Walk, poem. Watch, and make no noise.

Wendell Berry

Leavings, 2010, p. 95

Wendell Berry on Speech and Silence:

Essay: "Speech after Long Silence" (1994) appearing in

Berry, W. (2010). Imagination in place: Essays. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.

"The explainers of language of poetry will be forever embarrassed, I hope, by the experience of readers of poetry: Poems tell more than they say. They convey, as if mutely, the condition of the mind that made them, and this is a large part of their meaning and worth. Mr. Haines' poems, as I heard them that evening, told that they were the work of a mind that had taught itself to be quiet for a long time. His lines were qualified unremittingly by a silence that they came from and were going toward, and that for a moment broke. One felt that the words had come down onto the page one at a time, like slow drops from a dripping eave, making their assured small sounds, the sounds accumulating. The poems seemed to have been made with a patience like that with which rivers freeze or lichens cover stones. Within the condition of long-accepted silence, each line had been acutely listened for, and then acutely listened to." (Berry, 2010, pp. 49-50)

"The attendant silence thus becomes the enabling condition of a kind of language and a kind of knowledge." (p. 51)

Annie Dillard on the Vibrant Silence of Nature:

Dillard, A. (1982). Teaching a stone to talk: Expeditions and encounters. New York: Harper & Row.

"it is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate the grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree. Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunder breaks the air in lightning storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever this is motion there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water—and wherever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind, nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town. At any rate, now it is all we can do, among our best efforts, to try to teach a given human language, English, to chimpanzees…" (p. 88)

"At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, to the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep—just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to this silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to its listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression; instead, it is all there is." Dillard, pp. 89-90

p. 94: "The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God's brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a step in the right direction, to pray to this silence, and even to address the prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing."

This passage from Haines reminded me of Craig Chalquists's work in Terrapsychology (such as in Chalquist, C., & Gomes, M. E. (2007). Terrapsychology: Re-engaging the soul of place. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books. ):

Haines, J. M. (1981). Living off the country: Essays on poetry and place. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

which Berry had quoted in his Imagination in Place essay on "Speech After Long Silence":

"What counts finally in a work are not novel and interesting things, though these can be important, but the absolutely authentic. I think that there is a spirit of place, a presence asking to be expressed; and sometimes when we are lucky as writers, and quiet in a way few of us want to be anymore, a voice enters our own…I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found."

The Possibilities of Reawakening - Wisdom Wellsprings of Biocultural Diversity, Generativity, and Planetary Weave

2010-09-08T11:02:00.000-07:00

Notes from a conversation regarding the "Classics" of Sustainability and the idea of using Bickerton's argument [that language has separated Us from nature as a framework for exploring the "classics"... that we have to fight our own inherent nature and processes to stop harming the Earth]...

I appreciate Nicole's point about loss of cultural diversity as more than a byproduct but actually an erasure of the cultural knowledge base of how we might alternately organize ourselves and collaborate with earth systems in generative ways. I agree that this is where Bickerton's construct requires extension and expansion. We need to extend the thinking beyond language itself into further emergent complexities such as particular cultures (which includes language but also other things, human and non-human cultural adaptations and evolution) and cross cultural relationships. We need to expand the thinking outside of the box of Western industrial dominator/oppressive (technocratic etc.) culture (whatever name you want to use to refer to it) [which is itself only a subculture, there are many and diverse strands of wisdom inside of "Western civ" so I am not intending to demonize at all but rather get specific about the cultural/social virus which sources the multiplying ravages of separation, disconnection, and harm-causing- truly a virus, adaptive and (I know I'm sounding like I agree with Dawkins here, please, let's talk about that another time!**)]. IMNSHO, Bickerton suffers from some intense cultural mypoia conflating Western industrial civilization and culture with the inherent result of all language use. Classic Western academic mistake. In other words, he skips at least two levels of complexity between language, culture, meta or cross-culture and misses the rich diversity of relationship wisdom embedded in other language/cultures. (Note here I am using the word culture complexly to signify human culture as embedded in and coevolving with the particular other species/biota/landscape/etc. within which it arises - perhaps I should be saying bioculture, would that be more comprehensible?) Culture includes not only language but also patterns of behavior and activity. That's why the work of Falk's Finding Our Tongues (2009) is so much richer, because it approaches the inquiry in a more embedded way rather than through such a reductionistic lens.

It is a penchant of W. civ to find bad things and try to fix them (Cartesian world as machine mentality). Or the habit of the past couple thousaind years in some cultures to think we are inherently messed up [part of the virus I mentioned above] and have to redeem ourselves. This is a bit what Bickerton is doing in his framework that I object to. Continuing to think about things as PROBLEMS TO BE SOLVED or SINS TO BE ATONED or whatever perpetuates the virus in the thinking. [Multiple levels of irony that Bickerton's most recent book is called Adam's Tongue.] And I actually have a sense that the sustainability "classics" are more about fresh and direct experience, about removing ourselves from the social virus in thinking rather than perpetuating it.

What if we adjusted our thinking to harvest wisdom strands, locating processes, language, cultural practices that were generative -- to reweave ourselves? To trust to the fathomless unfolding life processes of this planet, of which we are an immeasurably valuable and embedded part? To nurture and be nurtured by the generative co-evolutionary planetary system, in which our molecules are infinitely renewable resources? To catalyze and re-active our co-presencing with the strength of this planet's story? Language and cultures of blessing, of generativity, cultures of increasing biocultural diversity and complexity, this is what the Earth invites me to and us to. We are not despite ourselves but from the very strength of us, not even toddlers in the span of a mammalian species' trajectory, so incipient in our possibility. The tens of thousands of years of so many diverse, earth-loving cultures, each an experiment. It's so much more richly textured than good/bad, constructive/destructive. We are more than a line or hopscotching back and forth over a line. We are rapidly diversifying songstreams, whalesongs of complexity. It is from this framework, this deep weave that I would like to explore the wellsprings (rather than classics) of insight that have watered so many gardens of exploration.

What are other metaphors of connection, nurture, and support that might inform our inquiry?

Image Credit: From an article citing Elizabeth Barber's research, about the Mummies of Urumchi, ancestors were Old Europeans from millenia ago, these were peaceful, arts-based communitarians who travelled to Tibet via the Silk Road thousands of years ago. An example of advanced weaving work with spirals.

Superorganism - Example of Emergence

2010-07-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Here is a video of the structure of a massive ant colony (the way they learn about it is despicable and an example of the ravages of reductionist science)... This demonstrates how superorganisms design elegantly - patterns from nature abundantly demonstrating wise design.

Eco-Conferences 2010

2010-07-19T19:09:00.000-07:00

Interested in up and coming eco-conferences? Here's a new site with oodles of listings to tempt you to convene and confab!

http://www.conferencealerts.com/environment.htm

Blueberry Blue

2010-06-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

But the Earth, capital E, is so much larger than this, on such a different scale, immortal on the scale of billions of years beyond our own droplet of consciousness momentarily raised from this river of Life. She/It will persevere after the cleansing waters released by her detoxify the current poisons and wash away our buildings, and—sadly —our grandchildren. She-It will persist and thrive beyond our reckoning, though our form of worship and praise has been in places inadequate to the beautiful offerings life has made with us. Companera praisesongs momentarily raised, unfurling, then composting, each species, some untimely quenched by the poisonmaker greed of a culture and time too late coming clear to the incompleteness of our vision and the scale of our folly. Swimme and Thomas Berry think the Earth is working through us now to birth a new species. I love their optimism, not sure I subscribe to that magazine.

[picture of "Milky Way Galaxy Appears Over Ontario"
Credit & Copyright: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn (Weather and Sky Photography) Nasa.gov (Creative Commons - Attribution) http://z.hubpages.com/u/443819_f496.jpg]

But a longer faith breathes me, knowing the freshness of time, of She-It-Earth, four billion years young. So nimble, lithe, creative. Able to hibernate for 100 million years of rebirth. Able to boil oceans to get a bath. So many systren solar systems, galaxies, and universes await. We are a blink, our young species, barely a toddler on the scale of mammalian species. We will learn to walk or we will not, but this push for life is so much larger than us, which is what keeps me grinning, that and waking up to mugwort mustering flowers, to the kale seed pods whisper-shaking in the early morning crowsquawk breeze with the melodies of song sparrow bringing lavender to anemonepale skywash, tinting finally to the palest clary sage tongue blue; "blue" insufficient. Calendula blue. Raspberry blue. Fox blue. Spruce blue. Feverfew blue. Crocosmia blue. Yellow road sign hexagon weed plant blue. Grass blue. Sage blue. Fuschia clematis blue. Heliotrope blue. Pumpkin flower blue. Pumpkin blue, Zucchini blue. Basil blue. Zinnia blue, dahlia blue, iris blue. Marionberry blue, sour apple blue, blueberry blue, All this in the moment symphony blue of sky becoming this particular exquisite gift of day, this long languorous summer blue, a long gift of plant party praise flower fruiting. May we be songs of earth and Earth this day, blueberry songs, skritch skritch bird songs, the sleeping slugs in afternoon heat amount of somnolent; the sleeking blackfeather emphatic of small ravens. May we caress each other as this first breeze of now nurtures our left cheek, peach fuzz like peaches somewhere ripening. May we be worthy of this twirl of Earth, the particular gift of HerIts dance. May we be worthy, and may we praise it all as the complex first morning orange of nasturtiums with yellow backside petals contrast with rose geranium reddening organza colored seed and leaf here where the Goddess watches sunrise.

Journal for Sustainability Education Launches

2010-05-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

Prescott College's premiere edition of the Journal for Sustainability Education launched today. Includes great pieces :

Dennis Martinez on The Value of Indigenous Ways of Knowing to Western Science and Environmental Sustainability
Rick Medrick's Review of Andres Edwards’ Thriving Beyond Sustainability
Jordana DeZeeuw Spencer's An Evolving Definition of Sustainability
Pramod Parajuli's auto-ethnography "At Home in Prescott: Confluence of Streams in my Journey as an Interdisciplinary Sustainability Educator"

and a trove of other gems including examples of sustainability curricula, approaches, and resources.

Can the Earth as Mountain Store the Knowing When the Beings Have Passed? - A Revery on Biocultural Diversity Loss and Language Extinction

2010-05-09T21:20:00.000-07:00

[Excerpted from "Petal Fall 42010 of Pacific Cascadia:
Manuscripts, sound files and visual imagery unearthed in the Pacific Cascadia dig of 43343-United Federation of Planets Official Terra-Ethnography
The Life of Terrans, Volume 317: Turtle Island Rites"]

[Manuscript A-1375] [Visual Plates V-9873L-N]

Can the Earth as mountain store the knowing when the beings have passed? Human, plant, ecosystemic. The intricate coevolving weaving, the heart felt presencing, the ways that Scutellaria, Artemisia, Magnolia and humans have intertwined? Is myth the seed carrier, into the mountains? Are our stories shared a living Svalbard of seed stock stored, the mythseeds of intertwining? How will Earth hold all this to the next great flowering? The lost languages, the ways of walking, barefoot, the songs? And how will Earth thrive in the meantime, these songs that helped the sun rise, these prayers that companioned Moon? If we are part of life, part of what is required, then in this time of dissolving, flattening, this time of erasure and the great mindsicknesses that roll across humankind, in this time, if we are not doing as we have done, then the planthunger and storythirst, the songdrought and poemunravelling, how we miss Earth and Earth misses us. All this wavekeening without solace. Perhaps the flowering magnolia can carry us, perhaps old volcanoes ripe with rhododendron.

Perhaps it is this drinking of the ancestor blood, the thick black cemetery ooze of a time before has spiritinfected us. We drink deeply draughts of extincted kin from a time before, perhaps this elixir of ancient cemeteries is a kind of voudoun, and so extinction calls us to it closely. The dark moon time, scythe to extinction. So we need to seed-in, pull the essential information close against the unkind conditions. A time of assessment and discernment. What will Earth harvest from us for some future time? What if we can only bring one thing, or one pattern of life, what will we carry forward as gifts to Earthlife eons from now, some time as different as dinosaurs?

I have no peace in this. Perhaps mountainEarth, fibrileEarth, nitrogenEarth, hydrogenEarth, waterEarth, cloudEarth, riverEarth, magmaEarth, perhaps Earth can carry us deep within. Can Earth know peace? Carrying the mythseeds of us, the distillation, may it not be futurepoison, or if poison, then may it be homeopathic, provoking a healing response. Wholeness, that is this prayer when the spring petalopen flowers contradict the larger scythetimecycle we seem to embody. May Earth know peace. And may we, as a form of living miracle, embody allseason peace though the signs are grim and the grimreap of culture, of beings, unassailably surrounds us. We are beacons of another possibility. May we be these seeds, the mutations, skyrattlingly beautiful, aberrant, potent, vining out also unassailable, awakening and catalytic, clear water in a time of drought, clear water in a time of oilseep, in a time of dinosaurblood. Clear water tingling some older knowing: Life!

Tragic Close of SUNY Southhampton Eco-Campus

2010-04-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Commemorating the work of my colleague Aimee DeChambeau to create human-scale education at SUNY. The SUNY Southhampton campus will be closed due to budget cuts and reopened as a massive commuter school.

So sad to see all that love and design not be able to immediately be a resource to the next generation - I wonder if there were a way to turnaround the campus instead so it could be a profit center for SUNY (not only tuition --but also/instead, produce and products, innovation center)....

In terms of some models for higher education...

Fractal/complexity/emergence science offers more scalable and fleet footed models than these large organizations with so much middle management freight. It shows how sustainability is not only about the "how" of physical infrastructure but also the "how" of scales and power structures. What is at the heart of a school? Is it a campus? Is it about a rendering of 17th/18th century mansions/palaces/ with large lawn expanses and the caricature-ization of the leisure class (which by the way implies a servant/slave class, see Rosemary Radford Ruether/I'll save the rest of this rant) or is it more like a working class/productive farm/garden/food forest? with mentoring and apprenticeships, embedded in the community. What about education "booths" or "observation pods" (stations) in public parks? What about bunkhouses, backpacks and distributed computing while tending the geese and llamas instead of all this overhead of large buildings where people can sit inside in regal/majestic courts, completely divorced from weather elements, sometimes without sky? What about goatbarn roundtables while pulling beans?

Beyond the Hero's (or Hera's) Journey

2010-03-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

Just can't resist offering a feminist expansion of what is rendered [a la Joe (Campbell)] as "the hero's journey." I am assuming other feminist scholars besides myself have done the work of deconstructing this "archetype" as only a partial rendering of the many, ecological, connecting archetypal patterns and rhythms for discovery and deepening. I forgive Campbell, for he was such an ardent journeyer and was so beautiful in his way-showing, for this limitation which we can now see in that work. The emphasis of a single being, a "hero," whose journey involves deepening isolation and different-than-ness (OK I could really go on and on here about this, I'll stop myself), deracination, challenge etc. is so ...dominator, so Western. Earth-based practitioners have proposed that for our culture, instead of solo quests (which might make sense as rites of passage in cultures of deep embedded connection), we need to engage in the modes and patterns of the men's/women's movements, about circling, creativity, culture-making, and connection.

A really interesting question is: what would an ecological, planetary-emergent model for rites of passage look like rather than the solitary-being narrative of a disconnected cell - what if contexted properly as part of the larger bloodstream of the earth? How would we need to upend our grammar to properly position ourselves in a narrative of the world-in-the-present-moment-perhaps-unfurling-in-this-water-sac-and-also-as-the-orison-of-4-billion-years-in-process-and-motion-and-evolution? How do we reframe our narratives as the planet-in-bodies?

Just to stir the cauldron and widen our gyre...

Breathe In, Breathe Out as and with the Earth

2010-02-24T15:56:00.000-08:00

But also, connection to nature is an internal thing. Do we internalize it and then carry it with us, then emit it in what we also do?

Perhaps there is an internal terrain of sanctuary, balance, biodiversity, the forest, that I can cultivate even when in a skyscraper. I can become, in effect, a wilding, widening gyre even in steel girders or flying elevators. The mountain I walked on Saturday morning can walk with me on Wednesday in the midst of dozens of grey cubicles. Perhaps it's more like inbreath (time outdoors); outbreath (sharing the spirit of outdoors while in built environments); inbreath (walking with a beloved outdoors); outbreath (copresencing the living spirit of Gaia on floor 24 of a large building); inbreath (time in the garden in the light rain, planting early spring greens); outbreath (emanating gladness and wild delight while sitting on the #9 bus). Also perhaps a countertempo of breaths: outbreath (walk up Mount Tabor and sharing love with the ferns); inbreath (taking in and letting Earth's vital catalyzing force instantly transmute the fear and desperation of the large company meeting); outbreath (sharing gladness with the unfurling turbulent sky about to break open); inbreath (taking in and translating someone's harsh or quick words as the sentence "I want to connect. I am feeling deeply disconnected but know that we all share kinship with Earth."); outbreath (praising the crocuses that have their faces wide open to the sudden bursts of sun even walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood)...

Weave and Mend

2010-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

From a note to Malcolm...

Some people like to cut and dissect, others to mend and weave. I am a weaver. And I notice that cutting and dissecting are also movements of the systems of domination and destruction. I avoid the cutting and dissection pits (a la reductionism).

I like your point about the internal ecosystems of humans - the "inner workings... complex, dynamic, and interdependent." I was reading Spiritual Liberation (by M.B. Beckwith - New Age/Ancient Wisdom stuff) about "inner ecology" (p. 67+) earlier this evening. Similar concept. Loving it! It reminds me of this picture I want to try to find again, from a book about Chinese Medicine, which shows an outline of a person but inside it are mountain ranges and rivers; I can't find it exactly but here's something like it from an outpicturing of the NeiJing (Ancient Chinese medical classic):

So as a weaver, I want to immediately start subverting the distinctions between subjective and objective. Perhaps, as our senses and system senses are awakened, I would offer that we can more easily/"objectively" see and sense systems and it becomes almost impossible to see things as separate. This is a kind of meta-objectivity, or an infusion across/underneath/among objective/subjective. Perhaps this kind of wholeness is what ritual nourishes, what you so aptly cite as LaChapelle describing 'the pattern that connects.' Perhaps as we regain our web-weaver-connectionist perception, our sight clarifies and deepens. This allows us to sense into emerging regenerations sourced from the Earth system, already undergirded and upwelling/groundspringing from the very fabric [fabric/mending/connections] of nature. I have a scythe and there are certainly times I find it useful, but I also have a needle and thread, I also have my outstretched hand, and eyes that weave...

Who or what carries the lost wisdom?

2010-02-17T00:40:00.000-08:00

About the Bari people, described in Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (Carlson and Maffi, 2004)

For now, and for the time to come when the wisdom is even more scattered to the winds, what do you think happens to that knowing? Do the trees carry it? Is it only alive while the Bari elders are alive, in the interactions/relations of the trees and the people? Or is it held by the Earth somehow? By the ancestors of the Bari who have passed? Or perhaps in the bodies or epigenetically or in the field of the Bari progeny?

Sometimes I think the air, every molecule that was ever a tree or Bari or the light that passed through a chloroplast, is quivering with this multigenerational knowing. Is this what sustainability education is, to re-member how to access this knowing?

This seems to me to be the greatest loss, the languages that have passed into air and branch, the biocultural, co-evolutionary complexity. The peoples whose millenial ways have passed through tortuous means from the vital living cultures of Earth. Is there some way we can summon the knowing in this time when wisdom, particular, specific, clarion, could help guide us?

House Blessing

2010-02-13T13:31:00.000-08:00

From the stirring winds of the sunrise, may your home and all who enter be blessed with inspiration. In the heat of the noonday sun, may your home and all who enter be blessed with creative spark and the blessings of fiery transformation. By the soft light of sunset, may your home and all who enter be sweetened in heart and nurtured in compassion. By the clear cool of midnight, may your home and all who enter be deepened and awakened in ancient wisdom. By the clarity of the sky, may your home and all who enter be blessed with guidance and connection. From the fires at the core of Earth through planet to your feet, may your home and all who enter be blessed with energy and strengthened in courage. From within the very center of all-that-is and the center of your hearth, may your home and all who enter be fully vitalized and activated as walking-blessings. May these blessings nourish and regenerate the earth, blessings unimaginable in their out-calling connecting. May this inspiration, strength, love, wisdom, clarity, presence, and healing of your home and life grow and blossom. This and greater yet, already unfurling, so mote be it, ache!

For the people who work at and especially lead Monsanto

2010-02-07T10:49:00.000-08:00

For the people who work at and especially lead Monsanto:
Death dealers, death-makers, destroyers of life,

We pray for you to be released from this mental/social virus that has possessed you. May you be released and may the Earth contain the illness you have wrought. All the cultures, the countless thousands of profusions of the creative life force of Earth, all the winged, rooted, fungal, footed beings that you have destroyed... Some tens of ten thousand million years hence, when Earth has made something new here, something completely different, when time has staunched the pain and ugliness of what you festered forth in the name of righteousness and progress, may you find peace.

We pray for you too. For your children. We pray for your children and grandchildren, as they suffer the cancers, birth defects, and species deaths, starvation and pollution. The unmaking and nanotechnic, genetic aberrations you make. We pray for compassion in your heart with yourself and the systems of destruction when you awaken and realize what you have wrought with your own breath and bone and mental effort. We pray to have the compassion of Walt Whitman when we help triage the wounded and dying. And as we pray, we unmake your unmaking with the very fiber of our being. We pray for strength and clarity. We commit ourselves to this.

The following is from a website of poems

The Wound-Dresser
By Walt Whitman
1819-1892
1

An old man bending I come among new faces,
Years looking backward resuming in answer to children,
Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me,
(Arous'd and angry, I'd thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
But soon my fingers fail'd me, my face droop'd and I resign'd myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;)
Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances,
Of unsurpass'd heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)
Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth,
Of those armies so rapid so wondrous what saw you to tell us?
What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics,
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

2

O maidens and young men I love and that love me,
What you ask of my days those the strangest and sudden your talking recalls,
Soldier alert I arrive after a long march cover'd with sweat and dust,
In the nick of time I come, plunge in the fight, loudly shout in the
rush of successful charge,
Enter the captur'd works--yet lo, like a swift-running river they fade,
Pass and are gone they fade--I dwell not on soldiers' perils or
soldiers' joys,
(Both I remember well--many the hardships, few the joys, yet I was content.)

But in silence, in dreams' projections,
While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,
So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,
With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,
Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof'd hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill'd with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill'd again.

I onward go, I stop,
With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds,
I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable,
One turns to me his appealing eyes--poor boy! I never knew you,
Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that
would save you.

3

On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!)
The crush'd head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)
The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through examine,
Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life
struggles hard,
(Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death!
In mercy come quickly.)

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand,
I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood,
Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv'd neck and side falling head,
His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the
bloody stump,
And has not yet look'd on it.

I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,
But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,
And the yellow-blue countenance see.

I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound,
Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening,
so offensive,
While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

I am faithful, I do not give out,
The fractur'd thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen,
These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast
a fire, a burning flame.)

4

Thus in silence in dreams' projections,
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young,
Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad,
(Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,
Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Gaian Wisdom in the Granite Dells of Arizona

2010-01-25T19:13:00.000-08:00

Two new friends and I caper along the Granite Dells after days of study, discussion, decisions. The Granite Dells are orange-red, round granite rocks in sudden explosions of mounds and hills outside of the town of Prescott. After a foot of sudden snow, the clear sky and half moon beckon us upward on the scree path. Following a stream bed in a cleft of rock, we encounter the strange and unaccountable smell of wet earth, a rarity in this Arizona mountain landscape, desert a mile above ocean. We discover ferns curled and unfurling in shade spots where the many kinds of oak have scratched a tight-limbed life on red rock. I pause to gaze at auburn and white tipped rocks as the other two scamper up diagonal surfaces.

Finally, hearing we will be able to see many peaks, I clamber up and up, cross cutting on the eloquent language of macro-microscopic cell wall-seeming aged lines and curves in the umber granite. Rock the color of Rhodesian ridgebacks, of pumpkin, of salmon flesh. Rock the texture of shark teeth, sunflower seeds, barnacle bone. Rock the taste of ice fall, sound of pterodactyl, flavor of deep time. We scuttle through a creek bed, rock slot where ice and snow cover hard-won native grasses, up impossible verticals in city shoes. In the hindbrain I wonder, how will I ever get back down? At one point, one of my shoes falls off but does not roll down and I am able with a friend's help to retrieve it. I pause and honor the tenacity and welcoming footholds these rocks offer.

Up on the bluff we see in all directions the far-off snow-covered slopes, the nearby lumps and eggs perched on eggs of granite. Across the dropoff we see the feet and toes of yam and brick colored granite carving down to earth. The mountains of granite a people's procession of feet and hands: nature walking westward toward the approaching night. These rocks feel like wisdom libraries, emanating wholeness, the density, super-reality, and slowness of sages. As the living earth, they are slowly moving and travelling, earth summoned from depths through ryolitic birth to visit these millenia with the sun and snow.

May I have this same property of smooth roundness and gritty up-close-ness, good gripping and surely strolling. May we have this same surety of wisdom, numinous and lively. Like these women who have led me up to the granite crest, may we move beyond the limits of the edge of our possible to new terrains of water, fern-unfurling, and to new vistas of rock scamper, creek flow, and life. May we embody the contradictions of cactus in the snow and may our presence be as sweet and holy as the smell of wet earth in the desert, that surprising, refreshing, and life-giving. May it be so.

Gaian Tea Party to Receive and Celebrate Earth Gifts

2009-12-07T23:21:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the hospitality of Vesta's oikos, I imagine a community ritual based on the logic of the gift to express the key qualities of feminist ecological economics. Through ecological service and community networks, or because they are out for a walk, or because they would like to share seeds and plants, neighborhood and community members receive an invitation. They congregate in a city park or greenspace and sit as they are moved to, at one of many tables, each table laden with herbal tea and flower essences poured and shared in wild cups and saucers served with bioregional snacks.

The bell rings every thirty-three minutes, and everyone shares a moment of silence, then a hum for the good and the blessing to be shared out from this place to all places, a love wave of beneficence to bless the bees, pollinators, thank the sun and rain, and praise the beloved plants and gardeners and farmers who have gifted their creative verve to make this magic possible. At each table, folks imbibe the magicked tea along the themes of Care, Community, Compassion, and Connectedness, inspired by the opportunities to initiate conversation from the Position Statement for a Peaceful World – Feminists for a Gift Economy, presented at the World Social Form in Porto Alegre, January 2002 (Vaughan, 2007, p. 375). (See Table 1.) Women and beloveds write poems and share conversation sparked by questions, quotes, and blessings scribed on leaves (See Table 2.)

Table 1. Tea Pots by Theme and Constituents

Theme --Flower Essences & Herbs -- Qualities
(Kaminsky & Katz, Philpotts, Cunningham, Sargent)

Care

Iris, Corn, Nicotiana, Sweet Pea, Trillium, Pink Yarrow, Holly
Fennel, Mint, Verbena, Cinnamon, Lavender, Apricots
Awakened creativity, full embodiment, to feel nurtured and sustained by Earthly forces, to feel there is a place on the Earth for us, overcoming greed – opening to an ability to work for the common good, Loving and nurturing with respect and boundaries. Universal love force.

Community

Essences: Calendula, Golden Yarrow, Quaking Grass
Herbs: Basil, Marigold, Lemon, Passiflora, Licorice, Mallow
Qualities: Able to be warmly receptive as well as dynamically active, listening, healthy boundaries, gentleness, nurturing care, purification of the ego, bending and blending of individual egos for a common purpose.

Compassion

Essences: Sunflower, Impatiens, Lily, Roses
Tea Herbs: Eglantine, Rose, Mugwort, Rosemary, Clover
Qualities: Compassionate presence, positive parent, opening the heart, patience, full embodiment, strengthened and vitalized, relating to the Earth as a living being, opens the soul.

Connectedness

Essences: Angelica, Arnica, Echinacea, Yarrow, Yerba Santa, Dill
Tea Herbs: Bay, Borage, Lemongrass, Yarrow, Thyme, Nutmeg
Qualities: Harmonious sensitivity, ability to receive guidance, releasing armoring as traumas heal to instill etheric wholeness, upliftment, restoring the sanctuary of the heart, capacity to be nourished by quiet beauty and not overwhelmed by machines/ noise/technology,

Other potential Table and Tea themes include Peace, Prosperity, Generosity, and Adaptive Complexity.

Table 2. Affirmation Cards and Questions for Tea-Party Goers- Hand Scripted on Leaves

Care
• What inspires you today? What do you care about?
• Name three ways you treasure the Earth.
• Name three ways the Earth treasures you.
• Join hands and beam love.

Community
• Offer an impromptu verse for how the community of Earth nurtures you today.
• Offer toasts to the center of the Earth and the stars, who share our birthplace.
• Share a memory of community that you carry with you.
• Share a vision of Earth community that unfolds in you.

Compassion
• Name four of the books on the shelves of the Library of Kindness.
• How can you connect across what feels like a chasm (political, cultural, class)? What could you actively do?
• Hold a moment of silence to increase receptivity in the deep heart.
• Share an area where you can increase your self-compassion and what that would look and feel like.

Connectedness
• Offer a toast of gratitude for the algae, mushrooms, molds and fungus.
• What is a creative way you could connect with three of your neighbors, even though it might feel awkward?
• Name a deeply held hope and ask the others at the table to carry it with you.
• How could your yard or patio inspire connection? Your work space?

During this tea party new connections and bonds are sparked, and we leave refreshed and affirmed, opening our hearts and minds to new possibilities, awakening ancient knowing we have always carried. As Berry (1984) suggests, "we pray, not/ for new earth or new heaven, but to be/ quiet in heart, and in eye/ clear. What we need is here" (p. 156).

"We should try to co-municate with the earth…. If Gaia is alive, surely she has a language. She is goddess who speaks to us through synchronicity and nurturing and in other ways as well. How can we speak to her? She is another order of being. We are like cells in the body trying to communicate with the whole body. What gifts can we give?" --Genevieve Vaughan, 1997, For-Giving, pp. 407-408,

Sea Turtles and Climate Change

2009-11-20T17:11:00.001-08:00

A recent New York Times article reports that ocean water rising level and temperature threaten further the fate of the leatherback sea turtle in Costa Rica.

In the style of Joanna Macy, John Seed, and Arne Naess's meditations from Thinking Like a Mountain, where they create a roll call of endangered and extincted species, we can take a moment for the leatherback turtle. We can only hope that this species and the others in the litany of species threatened or gone due to human planetary practices can serve as teachers for us. One part of the article relates the efforts of teenagers in the area to protect the turtle eggs that were still laid, so that they can be buffered from rising tides and baby turtles escorted to the tides after birth.

Stone Age Information Architecture

2009-11-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

Just heard about this, it makes so much sense! I was cruising for great information architecture (IA) diagrams on the web. I came across this site's post about how information architecture cannot die. It included this fabulous Incan knot tying system of encoding memory visually for an oral culture - "This is a quipu, an information system used by the Incas (1100 - 1500 AD)"

"Alex Wright's Stone Age Information Architecture presentation at the [2006] IA Summit went even further back. Alex looked at the information systems of pre-literate cultures and their significance to today's information problems. And guess what? There are many relevant lessons we can learn from stone-age IA, especially about our own latent disposition toward hierarchy." Wright's work has culminated in this juicy book I want to check out: Glut.

From Wright's site: (Check out how modern web interactions parallel more spoken/oral cultural patterns than print culture... perhaps we are in a resurgence of the ancient communications technoogies and modes that served balanced, pre-agrarian biocultural diversity and co-evolution for tens of thousands of years!)

________________<-->--<-->--<-->--<-->--<-->--<-->____________
Quote begins:
Briefly, my talk explored the question of how pre-literate cultures manage their collective intellectual capital. In particular, I focused on the use of folk taxonomies (not to be confused with "folksonomies"), visual symbol systems, and the cultural effects of the transition from oral to literate cultures. Finally, I tried to probe the relevance of these systems to present-day problems in information architecture.

We tend to give Stone Age people short shrift as systems thinkers. In the popular stereotype, "cave men" are cultural simpletons, too preoccupied with the day-to-day business of survival to pursue the loftier avenues of civilization. Modern literate societies tend to write off these cultures as "prehistoric," drawing a sharp dividing line that relegates them to narrow domains of inquiry like archaeology and anthropology. This bias towards literacy runs deep in our culture; and we tend to bound our questions about modern cultural conundrums to the limited horizon of the last 2500-5000 years. In truth, however, pre-literate peoples develop remarkably complex systems for managing information. My working hypothesis is that those systems hold instructive clues about modern problems of information architecture.

Folk taxonomies provide the most compelling example of how pre-literate people create complex, hierarchical systems to keep track of what they know. Every tribal culture ever studied has created a taxonomy of plants and animals; and as far as we know, these systems stretch deep into our species' past. While these systems vary considerably in the details, they all share a surprisingly similar structure. The key hallmarks of folk taxonomies include:

Hierarchical categorization (5-6 levels deep)
Psychological primacy of a "real name" in the middle of the categorization (what Lakoff refers to as basic-level categories)
Binomial naming conventions
"Affiliate" (or meta) classes that run horizontally across categories
High degree of conformity

Why do folk taxonomies matter today? One popular assumption in Web circles these days is that old hierarchical systems are doomed in the face of networked information systems, that the emergence of the Internet signals a new order of knowledge that will render the old top-down systems obsolete. But the high degree of similarity between folk taxonomies suggests that we may have a much deeper disposition towards hierarchy - and a will towards consensus - that stretches deep into our cultural past. In other words, rumors of the death of hierarchy may be greatly exaggerated.

Folk taxonomies also provided a basic semantic scaffolding for human cultures to encode layers of shared knowledge: kinship networks, mythological systems, and cultural norms. From the Zuni tribe of the American Southwest to the Wakelbura of the Australian Outback to the ancient Greeks, synaesthetic systems of knowledge took shape around a basic hierarchical template. As Hobart and Schiffman put it: Genealogy provides the ideal classificatory tool, for it narrates a sequence of actions. It sustains the tradition while subjecting it to a hierarchical ordering that clarifies the nature of various figures. When gods are considered, genealogy becomes a means of understanding the cosmos when mortals are considered, it becomes an encyclopedic framework for historical and geographical as well as social information. As some human cultures crossed the threshold to literacy, these systems formed the basis for modern constructs of knowledge, like contemporary academic disciplines. But the basic hierarchical template persisted - taking shape as ontologies of knowledge and administrative hierarchies. As literate culture flourished, those hierarchical systems escalated in complexity.

The linguist Walter J. Ong coined the term "secondary orality" to describe the similarity of online communications to older oral traditions (although secondary orality differs from "primary" orality in the sense that secondary orality is deeply bound up with writing). On the Web, a great deal of user activity hews closely to oral modes of interaction - e.g., blogs, email and IM - styles of communication that are constantly shifting, lacking the epistemological fixity of traditional print culture. If we look around the Web today, we can see these two cultures of spoken and written words negotiating an uneasy embrace.

Oral cultures also rely heavily on symbol systems to create bonds of trust in distributed social networks. Totemic objects like beads, bones and cave paintings functioned not just as decorative or ritual objects, but as tokens of information, used to negotiate social relationships, serve as markers of trust, and enable people to forge bonds with each other beyond their immediate kinship circle. Totemic objects thus facilitated a "release from proximity" that allowed progressively more complex social structures to emerge. Today, we also rely on totemic symbols for exactly the same reason. Mechanisms like Ebay trust points, Amazon reviewer ratings, Technorati rankings all give us a means to accomplish the same kind of release: to forge bonds of trust with people we don't know, and to engage in new distributed forms of socializing that don't require the proximity of social encounters.

In conclusion, I suggest that the study of Stone Age Information Architecture offers three central lessons:

1. Ontology is underrated

2. Social networks are symbol networks

3. "Orality" is the new literacy
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End of passage. Thanks Alex!

Wilderness and Experience as Medicine for Ecological Overwhelm/Abstract Thinking

2009-11-02T21:41:00.001-08:00

I know that many people turn from knowing more or looking into the "ecological crisis" because it feels overwhelming to them, an abstract wall of doomsday numbers and nothing/little they can do. I hadn't made the connection with the abstract thinking involved... Perhaps our abstract thinking is sourced in our connection with our bodies, and if we are disconnected from our bodies, we are unable to fully succeed in abstract thinking, or we have become so deracinated from embodiment and corporeal strength that we are "developmentally arrested" before embodiment and abstraction?

It does make sense to me that for many, a personal connection, with discrete processes, lifecycles, hands-on, this round fruit above this particular soil, the way the light comes from the clouds, how the nut casing eases off and roasting then ... becomes our food. Or this particular kind of jigsaw puzzle bark, this avian visitor.... This is spirit and body medicine for the doomsday cloud that hovers over the Western conception of our current occupation (I mean that literally) of Earth. [Humans as an occupying army, shoulder to shoulder, hill to hill, jammed in, tents and tents, our air conditioners and dishwashers are our weapons, the earth is filled with us as an invading army....sorry, rather bleak, I digress...]

Ecological Learning as Pro-Active Relational Healing - for Family Interventions

2009-11-02T08:57:00.000-08:00

My friend Nicole recently spoke about how experiential education would be most effective when it was woven with the experience young learners have with their families, and how this would build a sense of earth connection.

It brought up a question for me, about how the experiential aspect of young people connecting with earth processes through connection with the family, "bringing it home," would/could interact with families who have been disrupted by poverty or addiction. Is there a case to be made here that part of how we could do multivalent intervention in disrupted families (e.g. the teen gang programs that Multnomah County had designed a few years ago) could include this kind of pro-active ecology/cultural earth-based collaborative learning activity/process as part of the design for the intervention? That the very embeddedness we seek to generate in ecological approaches is the same as the one that would weave and mend families whose relationships, resilience, and capacities have been severely impacted by the consequences of cultures of domination and inequity? I'm sure folks are working on this various places, would love to hear what anyone has heard about!

Blessings to the Daughters of Creation

2009-10-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

The wild winds of the East breathe you inspiration and the Muse whisper's of tomorrow's people; the gyring fires of the South invigorate you with vim and vigor; the resplendent waves of the West dolphin-sparkle you with the deep power of compassion; the fortifying rocks of the North nurture and affirm your strength of being. Above sings you lullabies from guides and constellations which also make up your bone marrow and the matrices of your cellular splendour while Below grounds you in this right now breath of whimsy and delight. Sacred Center is a kiss that goes through your whole being, welcoming you here, dear daughter of creation. Welcome!

Organiform Tree of Knowledge Libraries

2009-10-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I reveled in this book: Builders of the Pacific Coast. Today I visualize a library that literalizes the tree of knowledge metaphor - (something I think they incorporated into a Dr. Who I saw once, now that I'm thinking about it) - where different portions of the branches of the building, in organiform unfurling, nest related books. (Here's some snaps of the pics in the book, a great slide show of it here. [Pictured at right: from Builders of the Pacific Coast, photo of the Lloyd House, Lloyd Kahn]

Creativity and Connectedness -With Slices of Lemon and Guided by Beetle and Amaranth Blossom

2009-10-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

I never studied latin, but I will never forget Mrs. Wolff in seventh grade teaching us poetry. We walk into class and she is slicing lemons. She invites us each to get settled in our chairs, and pay close attention. Then she has us each bite into a slice of lemon. A sudden ray of sun, a life-changing moment, an awakening. I will never be the same for that one slice of lemon.

I know this is going to sound so results oriented but I want my teaching to be elemental/alchemical when I'm "in the groove" - catalytic and activating: wings rise; sparks fly; empathy flows; wisdom deepens. So if I were assessing classroom experience, I would want to have a pulse on the direct embodied experience and the fruit of that experience for 'learners'/co-teachers. I wish we had a wow-o-meter that could measure the wow-waves when classes are amazing, synergistic, autopoietic. Then another question for me is what happens with the wow? Can we sustain it? Is some of it subtle and synchronistic (how do we optimize for subtle and synchronistic, guided by beetle and amaranth blossom as much as human mentation or design)-- Is that a longitudinal study? Is that about a way of measuring ecological (relational) richness? The more things it sparks, the better?

As in creativity theory, this might be a new thing related to the quality of elaboration and originality; amongst the main four - according to some-: fluidity, flexibility, elaboration, and originality. Or is it a different factor to assess for; there is definitely a tension between originality sourced in divergence and (innovation) and creativity which connnects. Perhaps there is a form of creativity which has been undervalued in innovation-addicted scientific reaserch on creativity, which perhaps would be a form of originality that would also favor connectedness and relationship instead of difference. It's possible what we need to cultivate now is ecological creativity that connects us to larger cycles and flows of Earth wisdom. Instead of a creativity of divergence and difference, a proliferating profusion of connection, biomimetic, pulsing, alive.

Earth Creativity and Regenerativity

2009-09-29T19:37:00.000-07:00

One thing is that I do not actually think creativity (or intelligence) is a uniquely human activity. In fact I suspect that creativity and engaging in our natural/native/inbuilt capacity for creativity brings us into more alignment with the larger earth-being and other cells/organelles/organs of the earthbodysystementityaliveness. I believe creativity activates earth-wisdom capacity inside of us, and also allows us to become more connected with other earth-beings, both those in human bodies and in other bodies (rock embodiments, peregrine falcon bodies, etc.) if you will [but somehow, while saying this, acknowledging and weighting that we are all part of one thing instead of thinking of ourselves as separate beings--more feats yet to develop with the English language to express this]. Another way I might explore thinking about this, a la John Seed/Joanna Macy in Thinking Like a Mountain and more, in their evolution walk and Council of All Beings (has anyone done these?), is to discover how creativity activates our genetic and epigenetic knowledge of all Earth beings, our deeper wisdom, which we already carry within us, in the very fiber of our beings.

Moving from this place of connection/kin-action, deeply sourced across the entire wisdom of earth's profuse creativity-creation, my consciousness moves from an entirely different place. I am able to hyperdeepenleap into deeptime, creationthought, deepresence, generativeunfoldment, ____(words yet to come)_____.

I would locate the sense of source point or "pinnacle" (hierarchical construct) for knowledge not in some futurity or even current state of prime evolutionary edge (which metacognitively represents a manifest destiny of knowledge if you will), but rather that knowledge and wisdom, sourced at the very epicenter of creation (a la the new cosmologists' great unfurling/big bang or the sense of timelessness in Macy's deep time) is embodied in everything that has matter and energy unfurling. This is very different than the we-know-more-as-we-go sense of progress of the condition of human cultures (for the past 5,000 years) and more greatly resembles earlier 35,000+ years of amicable human-group-nature matrixed living. So there is a deep sense of mystery, depth, sourcing, kinship/activation as part of larger weaves of earthlife, creativity-as-aliveness, regenerativity as a native capacity of all living things that I'd like to explore and energize/catalyze/awaken.

Design Factors for Regenerative Studies

2009-09-23T00:33:00.001-07:00

Earth Regenerative Studies favor the following dense, proliferating, ecosystemic, complex, vibrant, living and life-generating concepts in its design:

regenerativity
autopoiesis and complexity
ecological design and "sustainability"
inspiration, including poetry, story, and the arts
generativity, ancestral and progenic momentum
earth processes: shit, compost, vermiculture
wisdom
darkness, fallowness, mystery
symbiosis, mutualism, co-evolution, collaboration
emergence and emergent properties

Co-evolutionary Inquiry

2009-09-23T00:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Richard Pritzlaff of the Biophilia Foundation says:

"As such, there is need for data and knowledge to help create the movement toward a new paradigm of coevolving sustainable human and Earth systems. It has also become obvious to me that this need and moment have come because of the false pretense of positivism; while perhaps the human world has become longer (in terms of the length of a life) and more comfortable for some, the human world has not become better in terms of depth and satisfaction within the life journey for all but a few. Meanwhile, the toll on the Earth system from creating these material benefits now threatens all of us in the most fundamental ways."

I suggest:
I appreciate the model of co-evolution. One of my favorite historical co-evolution examples is angiosperms/flowering plants and pollinators. I appreciate the beauty and synergy of this form of "extreme mutualism." Perhaps there are forms of ecological inquiry? Where we are not only acting (upon) or changing things (action research), but where we are actively co-evolving, co-learning with the participant-teachers and the autopoietic, vibrant processes we together generate? Where we design to enhance feedback loops instead of trying to remove them? Where we attempt to develop/design research as nature designs itself: stacking and stocking functions within the research...generating new living possibilities? What would that kind of research look like? Our work might particularly lend itself to seeing (and co-generating) the "evolution"/unfurling of complexity and life-generating mutualisms....