Joanna Macy and Active Hope

          Recently I heard Joanna Macy at the Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. This was my third time hearing Joanna in Portland, and I also had the good fortune to attend a weekend intensive with her while I was studying down in the Bay Area. Her 2012 talk was an introduction to her new book, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy (Macy and Johnstone, 2012).

Joanna talks about “the great turning.” We were in the great hall of the downtown Unitarian church, and before the lecture we were blessed to hear some really brilliant, integrative live folk music by a young man who’s studied with her. Songs such as “The Uni-Verse/The One Song” and an invocation for a time of global prayer tied to the Olympics, the organizer sharing “Each of us carries an essential thread of this rebirth of the tapestry for this holy Earth.”

Macy, the Clear View, and Redefining Active Hope

Joanna did speak of getting a clear view, seeing what is, even if painful. Macy’s work emphasizes how, in a culture of domination and power-over, even if it’s painful, even in the midst of highly developed brainwash, to choose to see. Then identify the values we’d like to see, and takes steps to move in that direction. She spoke of how our perception is affected by the stories surrounding us, whether it’s the story of business as usual, the great unraveling (in which the industrial growth society is shredding system connections in a way that is unreweave-able), or the great turning. She spoke of how she didn’t want to call the book “hope” – she doesn’t believe in it, has railed against hope for years [to which I was eternally grateful, I agree and was surprised when I saw the title. I’ve been meaning to change the earth empathy site from the beginning from "despair and hope" to "despair and justice," perhaps her words will spark me to make it so]. She described how, even though she did not prefer the language of "hope," her views did not come to fruition; the subtitle is her original desired title. So what she does in one chapter, with the co-author, is redefine active hope so it doesn’t really have to do with hope at all. Instead, it’s about seeing things as they are, being willing to, doing it, having the heart break open from it, and holding the clear intention and taking the action anyway. “The guiding impetus is our intention, not weighing our chances.” Joanna Macy clarifies: “This work does not require our optimism.” That resonated deeply with me. “It’s about stepping into a state of aliveness that makes our life meaningful.”

Dori Midnight, from Joannamacy.net

“Seeing with New Eyes”

She named four stations in the truth mandala that The Work That Reconnects uses: She suggests we ground in gratitude, then bring our awareness to our great sorrow and outrage, and then see with new eyes so that fourthly we can go forth, bringing full presence to the work. The third station was “seeing with new eyes.” Macy suggests a perceptual move of seeing with new eyes, meaning that as we learn/believe/experience (a la the work of deep ecology and the ecological self) “that we are a living part of the living earth, a shift happens.” A wider view of time emerges. The synergy with the natural world also widens and strengthens us. We are closely related to all the other beings through space and time. Other life forms have so much to give and share. We shift toward a different kind of power, from power-over to power-with, from one-way causality to collaborative approaches, power as synergistic, our interactions working with others. Like grace, there is no limit when we work together. 

 Here's Joanna on the possibilities:

The truth of our inter-existence, made real to us by our pain for the world, helps us see with new eyes. It brings fresh understandings of who we are and how we are related to each other and the universe. We begin to comprehend our own power to change
and heal. We strengthen by growing living connections with past and future generations, and our brother and sister species.

Then, ever again, we go forth into the action that calls us. With others whenever and wherever possible, we set a target, lay a plan, step out. We don’t wait for a blueprint or fail-proof scheme; for each step will be our teacher, bringing new perspectives and opportunities. Even when we don’t succeed in a given venture, we can be grateful for the chance we took and the lessons we learned. And the spiral begins again.  - Joanna Macy

Earth Dreaming Research

Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple,"
photo by R. Learoyd

In a multi-scale world of imbricated (woven) co-arising and emergence, the Earth system continues to come alive and communicate in and through us. How can we design research with Earth as an active co-researcher/participant?

One recent initiative hypothesizes that certain kinds of dreams might represent "earth dreams" and constitute expressions of the earth system through humans. This is an extension of the concept of earth empathy, in which the planetary system and wisdom comes alive through human ways of knowing and being. As part of the research work of the Institute, this earth dreaming research is conducting mixed methods research with a cohort of dreamers who are incubating earth dreams. If you have what you believe to be "earth dreams" or encounter them in your readings or life experience, please contact earthdreamingresearch AT gmail DOT com. It might be that your earth dream could be considered as data for this research project in its initial or a future phase. We will post occasional information and ideas pertaining to these topics via this blog.



Image credit: Mariko Mori, "Dream Temple," photo by R. Learoyd From http://www.hubculture.com/groups/47/news/102/

Vandana Shiva Describes Earth Design in the University of the Seed in a Yes! Magazine Video Interview

In the January Yes! Magazine video interview "Vandana Shiva: Teachers for a Living World," Madhu Suri Prakash offers engaging questions and Dr. Vandana Shiva offers examples of how Bija Vidyapeeth (The University of the Seed) focuses on the earth, seeds, and grain as inspirations for sustainability education design.


Dr. Shiva demonstrates that by setting the school within a biodiversity reserve and embedding the learning in living communities, the learning honors the Earth as a sacred community and connects with Gaia as a universal consciousness.  "Teaching composting, all the forgotten foods and disappeared knowledges ... that are living around us" strengthens learning by embedding it in living and dynamic examples, surfacing the amazing traditions and knowledge of the place. 



She explains that the naming of the school was birthed from the name of the movement. In a field farmed continuously in older techniques, a peasant explained that the nine seeds grown there reflected the cosmic/universal balance -- the nine planets (related to each crop) -- and the health-giving, balanced nutrition of the contexted nine plants that grow from them- surfacing from folk traditions the connection between biodiversity, cosmology, and health. She wanted to avoid genetic reductionism of referring to seeds as "genetic resources," which is impossible to convey in indigenous dialects. 


Referring to the content that includes Gandhian principles she finds more relevant than ever in an epoch of accelerated globalization, she says "the seed became the spinning wheel for our times." 


Dr. Shiva has now been invited by the country of Bhutan to extend their orientation around the longer term metric of "Gross National Happiness" instead of GDP (gross national product) to move to exclusive organic agriculture practices. Highly recommended interview...

http://www.nationofchange.org/vandana-shiva-teachers-living-world-1327770383

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.

Creativity

Ken Robinson, in his February 2006 TED Talk (available here), challenges us to redesign education 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, pretty ruthlessly."

"My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as 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, they aren't afraid of being wrong.”

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

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

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

Imagine Shakespeare as a Child

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

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

Against the Arts at the Bottom of the Hierarchy of Subjects, Critique of Industrial Education 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 and music higher status drama, dance

"There's no school system that teaches dance everyday. We all have bodies, did I miss a meeting. As children grow up, we educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to 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 the world is to produce university professors, they're the people who come out on the top. We should not hold them up as the high water mark of all human achievement, they are just another form of life. They live in their heads, up there and slightly to one side. They are disembodied. They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings."

"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 education than any time in history. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything….Before, if you had a degree and if you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.” 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 wonderfully interactive. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value." It comes because of going across disciplines (13:50). "The third thing about 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 learning disorder, when the doctor figured out, she was a dancer. "'Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer.'" Gillian was able to attend dance school and eventually choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

A New Human Ecology Based on Building Human Capacity

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

Need to Re-aim Education at Creativity to Change Human Planetary Presence for Healing/Generative Purposes

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

Celebrating the Human Imagination

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

Ecological Creativity and Poetic Perception - Part 1

From Rankin, 2013, Eyescapes

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

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.