Regenerative Design Education: Living Praxis with a Friendly Universe

By Marna Hauk, Jayanna Killingsworth, Julie Malone, Zoe Nelsen, Tamara Wells, Mandisa Amber Wood

This article was selected as a feature article by Kosmos Journal earlier this year and appears in its entirety here: http://www.kosmosjournal.org/reader-essay/regenerative-design-education-living-praxis-with-a-friendly-universe/

We seek not rest but transformation.
We are dancing through each other as doorways.
We are ripples crossing and fusing, journeying and returning
from the core of the apple, the eye of the mandala,
the cave in the heart of the rose,
the circle without boundaries centered on silence.
–Marge Piercy, from “Circling”

We design enfolded in the rich, transdisciplinary rise and texture of the encircling Earth, which is also our body, which is also the uncoiling possibility spaces of thriving. Regenerative design is a set of living systems design approaches that offers a wide-armed embrace of related ecomimetic and systems design practices including sustainability, permaculture, whole systems, biomimetic, and ecological design. Participants in a graduate course at Prescott College describe some of the key strengths of designing, beyond sustainability, for regeneration. These groundswelling approaches can inspire living buildings and regenerative architecture, and guide ecosocial planning and design at multiple scales for social justice integration and biocultural thriving.

Regenerative Systems Design Lens: Benevolent, Creative, Friendly Universe

The first principle of social permaculture is that the universe is inherently benevolent and creative (Aal & Adair, 2008). In our graduate course we held universal friendliness as a key design principle. We co-authored this collaborative inquiry with the idea of benevolent, creative universe as a design lens for the three practices of regenerative systems design we explore.

Creative Flow in Regenerative Design

Active engagement in creative flow requires an intuitive, reflective, and expansive appreciation for the energetic systems and socially constructed realities design both promotes and challenges. The creative cycle is an intuitive process that requires aesthetical feedback and understanding while letting go, exploring the unknown areas of inner and outer worlds. The ability to replicate, through various forms of art, the intricate and seemingly eccentric ways of nature demands attention to the source.
The exploration of one’s personal creative flow offers opportunities for considering intentional interactions that are rooted in a desire to create and reflect universal kindness, a source of infinite patterns, rhythms, tones, and pulsating energies, all fractalized harmoniously (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Original Artwork by J. Killingsworth (2016)

Relationships also ask for a quality of presence and commitment, advocacy and refinement. We let go into the unknown while maintaining trust in our universal interconnectedness. Futurists such as Soleri and Callebaut can contribute to regenerative design through art, architecture, urban planning, biomimicry, and ecology by creating living systems for sustainable actions.
Regenerative Design Prompt 1: Connect it. Visualize and design to strengthen the hidden or potential flows of connection, kinship, relationship, gratitude, and synergy.

Honoring Feedback

Honoring feedback includes activating and opening to the reverberance of the cosmos in and through design colleagues, inspired by universal friendliness. Feedback is present in all aspects of experience. From the naturally occurring processes around us to the music we choose and the interactions we have with others. The systems within our bodies continually provide subtle feedback to sustain life. When such processes fail, we struggle to survive; when we learn to turn this wisdom inside out, we thrive.
Honoring feedback requires self-knowledge and reflection as well as a willingness to listen with empathetic openness to the learning needs of others. Feedback allows for ecosocial systems corrections, reduction of frictions, and the nourishment of brave and creative collaboration. Reverberance is a quality of feedback that happens concurrently at multiple scales and in amplifying emergence. Designs honoring our feelings saturated in contexts of biocultural depth, meaning, and embedment catalyze the regeneration of Earth within, which we might think of as Earth congruence, Earth empathy, or Earth reverberance.
Regenerative Design Prompt 2: Cycle it. Close three loops to allow your design to speak with itself. Generate positive feedback.

Embodied Practice

Embodied practice opens the flows of feedback through the physical, emotional, and relational experience of interacting with learning, meaning-making, and active participation in the adaptive co-creation of reality with all members of a given community, including the more-than-human world. This practice reconciles the often privileged rational stream of perception and decision-making with many other flows of available information. Each practitioner becomes a network of integrated perceptions, responses, and ideas in and of themselves, within a greater network of individuals participating in cooperative community creativity.
Regenerative Design Prompt 3: Thrive it. Embed yourself within the Earthly matrix, and within the design process and design.

Conclusion

Regenerative design views the generation of these vibrant, bioculturally responsive meshes as vital and congruent in both process and form. The designs and designer-context-Gaian mesh-bodies become a portalway of multispecies collaborative embodiment and co-presence.
Regenerative designs can encourage the interconnection between people and the dynamic forces of nature through regenerative curriculum, art, architecture, agriculture, rituals, and community engagement. Through universal friendliness, regenerative design holds the potential to decentralize inequities in wealth and power and ensure Earthly thriving. 

Winter's Gifts of Earth

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.

Becoming Water Birds: In the Kayak in Granite Dells

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

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).
  

Earth Empathy Resources

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

• spirit of place (senses of place/sense of place),
• body/planet,
• despair work, and
  
• deep time.

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

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."

Blueberry Blue

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.

House Blessing

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!