Fresh Publication: The New 3 Rs in an Age of Climate Change:

The Journal of Sustainability Education has published a fresh article regarding regenerative approaches partnered with reclamation and resilience as strategies for climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE) (Hauk, 2017).

The new “Three Rs” in an Age of Climate Change: Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Possible Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education

By Marna Hauk, PhD

Cornwall Labyrinth, Public Domain

 Hauk JSE Feb 2017 General Issue PDF

Abstract: This thought piece proposes the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. As a changing climate becomes the larger campus of our learning, denial and top-down emergency preparedness both prove to be insufficient. We are invited into a deeper approach. Reclamation and resilience fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and patterns and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2009) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing. Reclamation, resilience, and regeneration represent ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformations. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, thriving, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence.

Keywords: environmental and sustainability education, climate change education, reclamation, resilience, regeneration, regenerative education, regenerative creativity

http://www.jsedimensions.org/wordpress/content/the-new-three-rs-in-an-age-of-climate-change-reclamation-resilience-and-regeneration-as-possible-approaches-for-climate-responsive-environmental-and-sustainability-education_2017_02/

What the cross-scale parallelisms and values of resilience—psychological, socioecological, educational, and societal—reveal is that climate change realities are the larger, ongoing campus of our educational design and praxis. Rather than continuing to think of disaster against a background of normative business/weather-as-usual to which we can return, and education as happening in formal schooling, we are being invited into a more dynamic time where “the long emergency” (Kunstler, 2005) involves new levels of stamina, systems thinking, and dynamism in order to avoid mitigation-only, denial-informed attempts to “manage” climate change within normative regimes which arguably were never viable to begin with and which certainly are now being continuously disturbed.

Education must move beyond reactive modes reinforcing existing structures, including injustices (as the experience with Katrina so heavily demonstrated – Bullard & Wright, 2009). And it must move beyond militarized control strategies for emergency preparedness (Kagawa, 2010). Moving towards integrated understandings of socioecological system embedment and real-time responsiveness as well as long-term capacity building are critical.

We are invited to design education and educational systems that (1) reclaim or repair whenever possible intact or existing systems of health, connection, and vibrancy across scales (Bowers, 2009), (2) to increase resilience via networks of adaptive capacity (Folke, Hahn, Olsson, & Norberg, 2005; Goldstein, Hazy, & Lichtenstein, 2010; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, & Pfefferbaum, 2008), and (3) to increase emergent co-evolutionary and socio-ecological system self-generativity, also known in complexity as autopoiesis, or more generally as regenerativity (Hauk, 2014a). Environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is particularly poised to be effective in this domain because of ESE’s role in helping learners metacognize their embedment within co-constituting systems and due to ESE’s capability of connecting learners with sources of ecopsychological strength and resilience (Ingulli & Lindbloom, 2013).

Climate Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (CRESE) for Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration (3 Rs)

This paper suggests the adoption of a new “3 Rs” to inform a climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (CRESE): reclamation, resilience, and regeneration. These three Rs fold in (1) the saving of enduring biocultural lifeways and (2) the dynamic flux-states of panarchic socioecological resilience models. These two partner with (3) regeneration: context-responsive social collaborations; eco-socially-embedded capacity building systems; and the promise of regenerative design. These three approaches allow us to re-envision educational systems and encounters that are proactive rather than only reactive or responsive in metabolizing persistent climatic volatility. These three approaches – reclamation, resilience, and regeneration – echo the three approaches to climate change that Pelling has suggested (2011) – mitigation, adaptation, and transformation. Note, however, unlike Pelling’s model, these approaches are conceived as simultaneously requisite literacies and movements rather than as competing.

Reclamation would be the more valuable concept in which mitigation fits – designing systems to reclaim previous capabilities and constituencies. Reclamation can involve the ark-like preservation via enclaves, sanctuaries, weather-proof libraries, living libraries, seed banks of existing materials, relationships, and systems, including of cultural lifeways via preservation or recording. Reclamation will not be possible in many cases. Reclamation represents a conserving impulse, and can also involve the restoration of the commons and commonist thinking (Kenrick, 2009). It is often helpful to reframe reclamation as distinct from the restoration of industrial approaches such as mining and extraction. Rather, reclamation signifies reclaiming more intact living systems approaches, including as those memorialized by and vibrantly alive within many living indigenous ecological knowledge systems (IEK or TEK, for example in Bowers, 2013; Cajete, 2000, 2008). Some of the emergent reclamations are sourced in innovative technologies informed by deep biomimicry (Benyus, 2002, 2014: Mathews, 2011), Zeri approaches that involve designing for multiple embedded loops emulating ecosystem dynamics (Capra, 2002; ZERI, 2015), as well as reclaiming older lifeways that are demonstrably more sustainable (Lansing, 2007). This ecoliteracy involves restoring networks, neighborhoods, and actual and adopted families of connection and care. Reclaiming carbon “energy descent” cultures of moderation and anti-consumption cultures of contraction are also relevant here (Heinberg, Sachs, & Shiva, 2008; Kagawa & Selby, 2010). The ethic of care drives reclamation. Reclamation of embeddedness within co-evolving multi-scale systems and networks helps create the foundation for the second R of Resilience.

Resilience. Resilience involves increasing adaptive capacity, and networks and scales of adaptive capacity, to increase the flexibility of the living socio-ecological systems within changing contexts. Resilient educational systems are responsive educational systems focused on capacity building and network extension (Krasny, Lundholm, and Plummer, 2010). Resilience is the second R.

Panarchy is a multi-phase cyclic model for resilience that has proliferated in successfully understanding the complex adaptive cycles of exploitation, conservation, release, and reorganization in interlinked social and ecological systems (Berkes, Golding, & Folke, 2003). The foundations of this approach come from ecology, applying nonlinear dynamics in complex systems (Gunderson & Allen, 2010). “Resilience is described here as the property that allows the fundamental functions of an ecosystem to persist in the face of extremes of disturbance” (Allen, Gunderson, & Holling, 2010, p. 4). Holling, Peterson, and Allen (2008) clarified that “panarchies are hierarchically arranged, mutually reinforcing sets of processes that operate at different spatial and temporal scales, with all levels subject to an adaptive cycle of collapse and renewal, and with levels separated by discontinuities in key variables” (p. 3). In education, resilience theories tend to study and get applied in the study of persistent, flexible continuity across a variety of conditions, including the ability to maintain coherence when shocked. Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wyche, and Pfefferbaum (2008) have synthesized twenty sources of models, theories, capacities, strategies, descriptions, and definitions of the application of resilience across several scales, including the individual, psychological, community, city, social, ecological systemic, and physical (p. 129), in order to understand how communities might best prepare for disaster readiness. Their synthesis had compelling implications for education, and suggested that “Community resilience is a process linking a network of adaptive capacities (resources with dynamic attributes) to adaptation after a disturbance or adversity” (p. 121). They went on to emphasize how

Community resilience emerges from four primary sets of adaptive capacities—Economic Development, Social Capital, Information and Communication, and Community Competence—that together provide a strategy for disaster readiness. To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns. (p. 121)

Along with these systemic and community scale applications of imagining resilience in a time of climate flux, resilience has also been applied in environmental and sustainability education in resonant ways. Sterling (2010) described a reconciliation of instrumentalist and intrinsic views of resilience in sustainability education, a way that education can simultaneously cultivate personal and social resilience in learners while teaching content and process about resilience in social-ecological systems (SES). Krasny, Tidball, and Sriskandarajah (2009) looked at social learning, resilience, and civic ecologies, how education for resilience is “learning is situated in real-world practice, and occurs through recursive interactions between individual learners and their social and biophysical environment” (p. 37). They studied how climate responsive environmental and sustainability education can itself be a constituent social catalyst for social-ecological adaptive systems capacity, whether through lake restoration, mosaicked gardens, or urban civic ecology service learning projects. As Krasny, Lindholm, and Plummer (2010) articulated:

Environmental education strategies consistent with managing for change include social learning, multiple-loop learning, reflexivity, allowing for self-organisation and other forms of participation, attention to multiple forms of knowledge and governance, and the incorporation of feedbacks or information from the social and ecological components of a system. (p. 463)

Thus, resilience as the second “R” in climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education builds emotional and psychological resilience while engaging with content and topics of resilience and while leveraging communities of embedded educators and learners in emotionally, socially, and ecologically intelligent collaborations (Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012) that build and reinforce larger networks of adaptive capacity to reduce inequities, engage communities, and enhance flexibility.

So whereas reclamation offers a way of “reading” the world and storing patterns and knowledge systems, resilience offers a way of “writing” and wiring our connective and adaptive capacity networks. Regeneration, discussed in the next section, moves beyond the keeping of reclamation and bouncing of resilience and prepares us for something we can “count” on needing: a change-philic strategy avid about transformation as the entangled social and ecological systems within which we are situated undergo massive climate shocks.

Regeneration is the third “R” of climate responsive education and can involve readying for new regimes, regenerating living capacities even if the systems themselves continue to evolve via regenerative evolution. The emphasis in regeneration has more to do with the viability and capacity of living systems even if they must flip out of their current parameters of resilience. Regenerative sustainability education leads to reconnective, multi-scale modeling and embodiment of biomimetic transformative systems (Hauk, 2011, 2014a). Thrivable or regenerative education builds skills for emergence, creativity, zooming, context, multiple perspectives, temporal dimensionality, and compassion (Hauk, 2014a, 2016; Macy & Brown, 2014 on deep time; Russell, 2013, pp. 41-51). Multiple simultaneous perspective metacognition, or polyperspectivality, is what complexity educators have termed level jumping (Davis & Sumara, 2008) and what I have elsewhere detailed as scale-slithering (Hauk, 2014a, 2016), which involves cultivating the capacity to perceive multiscales and their mutual co-generation, thus to perceive the phenomenon and also its context of arising and change, within which the learner is also embedded and with/in which the learner is also transformed and transforming:

The emergent realm of complexity thinking answers that, to make sense of the sorts of transphenomena mentioned above, one must “level-jump”—that is, simultaneously examine the phenomenon in its own right (for its particular coherence and its specific rules of behavior) and pay attention to the conditions of its emergence (e.g., the agents that come together, the contexts of their co-activity, etc.). (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 34)

Holonic, holographic, living classroom, and field-, paradigm- and pattern-sensing capacities come alive in regenerative, emergent teaching and learning (Bache, 2008; Crowell & Reid-Marr, 2013; Hauk, 2014a; Macy & Johnstone, 2012; Taylor, 2011; Wood, 2013). Regenerative, collaborative creativity (Hauk, 2014a) as a form of transdisciplinary, multi-scale, bioculturally embedded, complex collaborative emergence (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016) is a critical dimension of the third “R” of regeneration. These kinds of regenerative creativities constitute and further catalyze geometries of liberation, including the use of complex biomimetic and systems-scale ecofractals to catalyze collaborative creativity, which was shown to nurture anti-domination, ecojustice, and ethic of care orientations in learners while catalyzing collective intelligence and more regenerative designs (Hauk, 2013, 2014a, 2015). These multiscale polyperspectivalities and affiliated creativities can source regenerative designs, creations, and learning/cultures that respond with rather than deny climate change. Regenerative perception and understandings are powerful acts of imaginative transdisciplinary inquiry, capable of navigating the kinds of complex, multiplex, and “wicked” challenges encountered in climate shocking environmental and sustainability education (Brown, Dean, Harris, & Russell, 2010, p. 12).

Williams and Brown emphasized the role of environmental and sustainability education to fundamentally regenerate the root metaphors and mindscapes of learning toward living systems (2012, pp. 42-44). These regenerative approaches are supported by a pedagogy of transformative, transgressive learning, which can generate justice-seeking, lively, conflict-assertive praxis in reflexive social learning and capabilities, critical phenomenology, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), and de-/postcolonization theories (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015). This transformative, transgressive approach distinguishes itself from resilience-based pedagogies and directly “critiques the current tendency in sustainability science and learning to rely on resilience and adaptive capacity building and argues that in order to break with maladaptive resilience of unsustainable systems it is essential to strengthen transgressive learning and disruptive capacity-building” (Lotz-Sisitka, Wals, Kronlid, & McGary, 2015, p. 73). Keating framed these as transformative, post-oppositional pedagogies of invitation (2013).

The Transition Movement as well as permaculture and regenerative design indicate both that the solution is in the problem (as in Holmgren, 2002) and that our responses and approaches must model the solutions we imagine (Kagawa, 2010). One of the key characteristics of regenerative systems, often viewed as more “thrivable” than sustainability constructions (Edwards, 2010; Hauk, 2014a; Russell, 2013), is the presence of disruptive, multiple and multi-scale feedback mechanisms in complex networks of emergence. These responsive, regenerative systems are beyond survival, sustainable, or resilient approaches: they are thrivable, meaning “‘anti-fragile’ and get better when disturbed” (Russell, 2010, column 4). Regeneration kicks capacity up out of flexible persistence into dynamism-proaction.

Regenerative climate-responsive environmental and sustainability education (R-CRESE) involves embodying these change-active flows of neighborly social capital, school-community partnerships, citizen science and empowerment, urban food justice and food systems storage and capacity building, commonist knowledge-sharing networks, and water catchment (to name a few) in ways that not only proactively prepare and gird human-ecological networks but while doing so also further disrupt power differentials and (re)generate in amplifying feedback systems capacities that are thereby re-weaving living systems. This is exemplified by community upsurge of those traditionally marginalized, strengthening networks and community while also deepening social and political processes in contexts of scaling up community climate change organizing (Soltesova, Brown, Dayal, & Dodman, 2014, pp. 223-224). Radical regenerative approaches could include dissolution of the public school system in its current form and its regeneration in climate responsive, ecojustice-activist, community-embedded, arts-making, campusless action nodes that would regeneratively and intergenerationally design systems, build solar panels, feed and clothe communities from food forests, energize culture campaigns, provide intergenerational care, and build small-scale carbon-descent interdependence and biocultural thriving (or perhaps something even more radical that I do not have the capacity to imagine). Regeneration continuously generates, innovates, and reweaves, strengthened instead of tilted by shocks and disturbances.

Figure 1. Reclamation, Resilience, and Regeneration as Simultaneous Approaches for Climate-Responsive Environmental and Sustainability Education (own research)

Conclusion

Unlike other models in which components or approaches are competitive, all three Rs are requisite for our multi-system embedded survival and thrivability. As Figure 1 depicts, all three, reclamation, resilience, and regeneration, are ever-more-complex types of capacities and support capacity building aimed together toward life-supportive, dynamic, complex systems transformation. Environmental and sustainability education that fosters skills of reclamation includes preservation, conservation, recording, and the establishment of libraries and sanctuaries of exemplar systems. Environmental and sustainability education for resilience includes network extension and adaptive capacity building. ESE for regeneration nurtures emergent complex systems metacognitions, creativities, and transformative, transgressive social approaches that are connective, disruptive, and innovative and model and embody complex emergence. Regenerative ESE fosters skills to facilitate catalysis of emergent regeneration, self-organization, and transformation into more complex living systems. All of these position embedded learners in pro-active, systems-intensive embodiments of the types of living networks that foster survival, flexibility, and phase-change during our entry into a time of consistent climate turbulence. I would be interested to hear what these three Rs spark in your own educational praxis and action; please share your ideas and comments on the JSE Facebook Page or contact me directly. In order for environmental and sustainability education to scale to increasingly complex systems, the literacies of reclamation, resilience, and regeneration can help build regenerative urban areas as “cities self-organize…where we are our most creative, collaborative, visionary, artistic, and productive” (Hemenway, 2015, p. 240) and where we can support the emergent self-organization of socio-ecological networks of thriving strengthened by the challenges ahead.

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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. 

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!

For the people who work at and especially lead Monsanto

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.)

Earth Creativity and Regenerativity

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.