Imaginal

Terry Tempest Williams, naturalist and author, realised that she has lost her own sense of poetry, that her rhetoric had become as brittle and hollow as her opponents. She was desperate to retrieve what she had lost. What did she do?

In an interview on New Dimensions, she tells her story: “I went down to those beautiful blue waters, call it a prayer or a plea, and I faced the sea and said: Give me one wild word and I promise I will follow. And the word the sea said back to me, and the word that I heard in my own heart, was mosaic.”

There are two unusual aspects to this story. Firstly, Terry ventures into nature, in this case the seashore, and simply asks for this one wild word. She trusts she will receive the word she needs.

The second unusual aspect is that Terry actually allows the word she received, mosaic, to guide her on a seven-year journey, firstly to Italy to study mosaic, then to a research study on prairie dogs who are treated as a critical part of the desert mosaic, then to Rwanda, where community healing occurs through the building of a memorial building using mosaic.

In our modern world, we wouldn’t normally go outside and seek answers. Perhaps our usual response to a personal crisis would be to use “google” or to see a therapist! Perhaps we need fewer therapists, and more elders? Perhaps the elders are like the old knotted gum trees in the forest, who have weathered the storms of life.

How would we gain wisdom and answers from nature? We would need to let go of our concepts of nature. We would need to shift into a participatory mode of interaction, and treat nature as an intelligent “other”, worthy of respect.

We would need to let nature reveal itself to us in its own way. Perhaps to heal our broken relationship with nature the word mosaic can help guide us. As Terry Tempest Williams says: Mosaic is not simply an art form but a form of integration, a way of not only seeing the world but a way of responding to it.

Perhaps the next time you are facing a life dilemma you could try going to your favourite place in nature, sit quietly, ask a question, and listen.

Perhaps you will sense a response, not necessarily in words, but in a place deep inside.

Give it a go: I think I will.

Despite the depth of financial problems facing the world I find it strange that there has been so little discussion of alternatives to the current dominant economic system. We seem to be locked into a corporate-industrial-military-technological system that denies and backgrounds our dependence on a well functioning earth system, and a supporting social system.

If we consider the possibility of even greater dislocations that may arise from an ecological and/or social system collapse, then there is an even greater need to look for viable alternatives. How did we ever believe that the economy could expand exponentially, even as our social and natural capital eroded, and most people in the world struggled ever harder to make ends meet?

So much discussion is based on the need to “fix” the current system. But is this what we truly want? Surely, it’s time to redesign, and re-imagine the entire system. This is harder that we think - since our minds have become colonised by the logic that produced this system in the first place! As David Kidner states in his brilliant book, Nature and Psyche: “There is a danger that our alternative visions of the future may be a lot less alternative than we think (since) they may be as “rationally” determined as the industrialism that it is intended to replace … there is the danger that environmentalists may be the unwitting carriers of the virus of industrialism to previously uninfected areas.”

So where do we look for real alternatives? Do alternatives exist that are based on earth honouring ways, alternatives that value life over money, alternatives that attack the underlying cause of the current economic (and potential ecological and social) collapse, not just its symptoms? Well, I’ve looked a few ideas that may spark my interest, and share them below.

Have a look at Transition Culture - a movement that provides information on the radical relocalisation of our cities and towns, based on low energy systems and local food growing. The question from Transition Culture is: How can we design (energy) descent pathways which make people feel alive, positive and included in this process of societal transformation?

David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, also argues for a new economy-locally based, community-oriented, and devoted to creating a better life for all, not simply increasing profits. He says that it will require courageous and imaginative changes to how we measure economic success, organise our financial system, even the very way we create money.

There are some beautiful ideas in the idea of the Gift Economy - a system based on meeting people’s needs based on the giving and receiving of gifts. The current economic system is based on the exchange mechanism, where everything is defined in terms of its own aspects of categorisation, competition, quantification and measurement, at the same time hiding the activity of the gift paradigm. This concealment is an important factor in degrading the value of gift giving. For example, modern economies deny and background our dependence on both women and nature, and privilege ways of being that are harmful to the earth and ourselves.

There are so many good ideas, so much new thinking and imagining for building a sustainable future for ourselves, the earth, and other species. You won’t find much of it discussed in mainstream media. It involves thinking at the edge - of exploring ways of being that are new and exciting. Not all will work, but shouldn’t we at least try some?

Lately I have been wondering about sensuality, intimacy, desire and eros, and how these words can apply not only to our relationships to each other, but also to nature, land and place.

Terry Tempest Williams, author and environmental activist, writes of an “erotics of place”. Unfortunately, her phrase has been misunderstood, not surprisingly, in our over-sexualised culture. Terry writes that “erotic longing is the foundation of connection. Eros develops from the realisation that we are incomplete and fragmented - that our mask of wholeness that we present to the world is an illusion.”

Terry believes that there is a key distinction between the erotic and the pornographic. The erotic is based on genuine connection to, sharing with, and acceptance of another’s whole being, in intimate ways. Pornography involves domination, control, and the perception of another as a mechanism for satisfying desires. She calls pornography as “sensation without feeling”. From this perspective our current relationship with nature, land and place can only be described as pornographic, as we (mis)use the body of the earth, pollute it, gouge it and destroy it.

We hunger for deep connection, for communion, with each other and the land that supports us. This hunger arises from heart-felt desire. And desire is the pathway into our passion and the fulsome embrace of our unique journey in connection with our souls, each other, and the earth.

Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist, says this: “For when we see the world as lover, every being can become - if you have a clever, appreciative eye - an expression of that ongoing, erotic impulse”

How do we fall in love, make love, with the world? How do we develop an “appreciative eye”? We need to see the erotic impulse at the very heart of the earth, at our existence. Gravity, for example, is not only a force that keeps us on earth, but iis also the erotic impulse at the heart of the universe, the energetic attraction between heavenly bodies, including us, that keeps everything in right relation.

Maybe you could go to the beach and feel how the land body embraces the pulsing sea. Or sit beside a river and feel into the way the land holds the flow of river with understanding. Watch a flower blossom as it yearns for intimate connection with the sun. We can be like bees and pollinate the world with our love, and our desire for connection and intimacy.

Since our bodies don’t lie, we must allow our bodies to be heard, in all their sensuous richness. In engaging with an erotics of place, we must pierce the heart by bypassing our head, our discursive and analytical mind, and allowing the world to enter us through our senses.

I’ll finish with some more words from Terry Tempest Williams: “We need to feel the the magnetic pull of our bodies toward something stronger, more vital than ourselves. Arousal becomes a dance with longing. We form a secret partnership with possibility.”

“But out here, he discovered, everything was just itself. That was what seemed new. In being just itself, neither more or less, each thing appeared to him in a form he barely recognised …” from the novel Ransom.

Over the Easter weekend I read the new novel Ransom by David Malouf, a well known Australian writer. The book follows the journey by Priam, King of Troy, to reclaim the body of his son, Hector, who was killed and then dishonoured by Achilles. Priam was escorted on his journey by a common man with a cart and his two much loved mules.

I loved the book. While it is a great story, and told in a lyrical but flowing way, one particular aspect of the book really resonated with me. This was the discovery by Priam, for so long removed from reality by his role as King, of the joy in simple things, like the trickling stream around his feet, or his companion’s ordinary but particular descriptions of his daughter-in-law skilfully cooking pikelets.

We often resort to a universal perspective, and describe the world in abstract, conceptual and quantitative terms. We forget the real joy in being with the common but elegant nature of the particular, actual and immediate. Freya Mathews, in her book Reinhabiting Reality says this: Resort to a universal perspective - which is to say, retreat from the particularity of things, betrays desensitisation to subjectivity and a refusal of dialogue. This is because the subjectivity of others is communicated to us via particulars. Communicative cues reside deep with the particularity of things.

If our general mode of perception fails to be with particulars, we may also fail to be with others (people or places) in their particulars: their mystery, their energy, their embodiment, and their very ordinariness. We may see others descriptively, or as falling into a category. We may fail to be with this person, this tree, this river, or this place.

We may even think of particular people and places as homogeneous or interchangeable, and sometimes replaceable (see for example the poorly conceived NSW green offsets scheme).

Our propensity to name (or label) things can also hide particulars. As Susan Murphy, Zen Roshi, asks: “Who is the one you enclose with your name?” Does our name (or label) contain barriers to knowing?

Are we like Priam, King of Troy, so removed from reality and so cocooned from the messiness of life, that we miss the all important cues residing in the particularity of things and fail to allow a real dialogue to take place between us and other people and places? Can we recreate joy by being with the ordinariness of everyday life?

I am sure you’ve wondered how (or whether) the world will ever become sustainable? And I’m sure you’ve wondered what would change the trajectory of today’s civilisation?

There has been so much written and spoken about sustainability, but we seem no closer, and perhaps we are further away than ever. Why are we failing to keep our earth habitable for future generations? What is the real legacy we are leaving?

The path to sustainability is often talked about in global terms - global deals, carbon trading, UN conferences and declarations, policy shifts etc. What is not talked about much is the need for a new consciousness.

Why do we fail to talk about treating each other with love and respect as the foundation of a new society? Why are we scared to talk about our deepest needs? Victor Havel believes that to achieve the fundamental shift in our current direction, we must develop “a new understanding of the true purpose of our existence on this Earth.”

Gus Speth, Dean of Yale School of Environmental Studies, has said this about the changes needed:“many of our deepest thinkers and many of those most familiar with the scale of the challenges we face have concluded that the changes needed to sustain human and natural communities can only be achieved in the context of the rise of a new consciousness.”

There is a real need for a significant cultural change, a change in our worldviews, and a reorientation of what we value. Call this a spiritual awakening, or a new consciousness. If you prefer call it a rethinking of what is really important. (A recent report covers this in great detail - see Towards a New Conscioiusness: Values to Sustain Human and Natural Communities).

If we treated others with respect, generosity, kindness and fairness, would the world become a better place? You bet!

We certainly won’t get there if our fundamental values don’t change, or if we keep believing in endless growth, corporations, unbridled competition, aggression, excessive individualism and materialism. To build a sustainable world, we need a more mature human society based on nature’s templates, as Bill Plotkin reminds us.

If being green was more than just turning off our lights, but also involved switching on our hearts, we would be on the way to transforming our world and ourselves.

Many things happen at the edge. At the edge of our awareness. At the edge of our thinking. The edge is a place where things can be a bit fuzzy. In ecological terms ecotones, the edge of two ecosystems, is often a place of species richness, of variety.

To feel into my edge, to concretely connect to nature, (as opposed to talking about it) I woke early to experience the sunrise on a Sydney beach. The seashore is an elemental meeting place of earth and water. It is a place of shifting patterns, and a place to meditate on some of the meanings of the interaction of different forms, of fuzzy edges, of loose boundaries. Where do I begin, where does the other begin? Do I have hard or permeable boundaries? When do I choose to let others in?

The seashore fascinates me. It is the place where ancestral beginnings tug on my memories, with recurrent rhythms of tides and surf. And the vastness of the ocean overwhelms the sense of my own importance, reinstalls my sense that I am just one part in this great cosmos. The horizon, as a place where sky and ocean meet, beckons as a doorway of possibility.

I see the Sun rise out of the depths of the ocean to greet the world once again. New beginnings. New dreams being created. I watch the Sun peek over the horizon, as it starts to colour the sky. I am excited. I am filled with awe. I am captured by this moment. What a simple ritual to connect more deeply to the rhythms of this earth, and this particular place.

I am reminded of what a Huichol shaman Matsuwa said in the book  Shamanic Voices by Joan Halifax:

“we have forgotten our life source, the sun, and the sacred sea, the blessed land, the sky, and all things of nature.” He warned us, “you are not getting (your) love up to the sun, out to the ocean, and into the earth.  When you do. . . (it) brings life force into you.”

The sparkles on the face of the ocean capture my attention, as does all the ways in which the watery domain expresses itself - froth, bubbles, movement. All separate, but all part of the whole. Each drop has its own existence, but only for a while, and when it forms a wave its existence is as part of the greater whole.

My body hears the drumming of the waves, the way in which the ocean scrapes its watery fingers across the sand. This place is full of great compositions of art, music, drama and life.

The edge here is magnificent - the edge of solidity, the edge of watery. I stand between both, on the edge.

I feel that one of the main reasons for the current confluence of crises we face today is our collective forgetting about our rightful place in the world and a forgetting of how we should live our lives.

So, a really big question for today: How do we find meaning and purpose in these troubled times?

Michael Meade from Mosaic, a mythologist and storyteller, has a rather different view of the crisis. He says:

Change, so greatly desired, is not easily accomplished. Genuine change requires that one’s whole life be altered mind and body, spirit and soul. Such transformations require accepting some element of loss as well as finding a new way to proceed. Usually, the missing ingredient when it comes to making changes is the soul. Since the soul prefers the depths of knowledge, as well as the deeper feelings, life usually has to grow darker and times become harder for soul to enter and meaningful change to begin.

Life seems to be growing darker, and the times seem to be getting harder. Are we ready for genuine change? Or are we just trying to get back to “normal”? I have to say that normal wasn’t so good: for most of the people of the earth, the earth itself, or other creatures! We don’t want to get back to normal; we need to imagine a new way of living, a way of living based on new rhythms, new principles, and a new way of relating (to ourselves, each other, and the earth).

What are we prepared to lose? Or are we all clinging to our securities (or insecurities), which holds us back from a new world emerging?

Perhaps the way “out” of the crisis, is to go deep “inside” it, to see what wisdom we can uncover? In the words of Michael Meade:

Soul would lead us down, past the “bottom line” into the real depths of life. Soul would make us go deeper in order to make us wiser. Secretly, our souls seek wisdom and wisdom is a darker knowledge found in dark places and in dark times.

So I propose a stimulus package for our imaginations! We desperately need more imaginative power than has been shown by business and political leaders, who are really proposing more of the same tired old way. By accessing our inner wisdom, our dreams and our imaginations, perhaps we can re-vision a world that is markedly different from the past, and a long way from “normal”. Perhaps we can all find our own path, not one that has been well worn by others, but the path that is uniquely ours to make.

I am sure that you can imagine a better future world that what is being presented to us at the moment. Do you want to share that with us?

When asked how to get Western society to understand the indigenous worldview, Melissa Nelson, professor in American Indian studies at San Francisco University, responded in Sacred Fire magazine:

“I’m interested in the eco-psychology movement because it’s critical of the more didactic approach of the environmental movement that says, “You must change! You’re ruining the environment! Be guilty and adopt these better ways, or else we’re all going to die!” We know that this approach does not work. It does not work for anything.”

Melissa also says that the most appropriate way to get others to understand a different worldview must be through an invitation. And an invitation, of course, is not manipulative, nor based in fear, since you can always decline the invite.

So, in this spirit, I would like to invite you (in a non-didactic way) to journey with me in 2009 to a different way of being through a radical re-imagining of the world, and a radical re-imagining of ourselves. This requires a deep imaginative capacity, so lacking in our literalised and fact-filled world.

While we mostly understand the world around us (and I suspect also other people) in strictly utilitarian ways, my approach to a new way of being is to imagine myself as one colourful thread in the rich tapestry of life on this planet. I try and see the earth, each other, and the many and varied forms of nature, with soft eyes, with compassion, with kindness, and most importantly with love. I also believe that mystery is at the heart of nature and ourselves. To get closer to that mystery, sometimes even just catching a quick glimpse, takes a lifetime of practice.

This “getting-to-know” others, especially non-human others, and the space created between, requires skills that are not associated with the intellect, or our educated, objective, rational, analytical minds. They are contained within the realm of soul - the symbolic, the mythical, the poetic, the not-knowing, and the imaginal.

Perhaps we can best arrive at this “getting-to-know” place through non-intellectual ways: ritual, meditation, dance, art, wild encounters, a bodily felt sense, intuitions, and especially through our dreams. Perhaps by accessing these other ways, we can more fully participate in the dream of the earth, and the dream of our souls.

So, this year, I would like to invite you to explore other ways of knowing, as well as exploring the deep inter-relatedness of nature-self-others. And I hope we can have some fun on the way!

I will leave you with a short (haiku-like) poem I wrote:

Nature resides deep
Hidden from view, mostly
Whose eyes watch, from where?

Freya Mathews has written that every aspect of a culture takes on the colour of its basic attitude to reality.

So what is “our basic attitude to reality”? And is it time we brought our attitudes fully into our awareness so we can consider whether they remain appropriate to the current world situation? Are there alternatives that would assist us in the task of building a more life-enhancing and life-sustaining culture?

Our modern world-view draws a distinct boundary between humans (as subject or master) and world (as object or slave), and treats the world as non-living matter ready to be exploited for the sole benefit of humans. As a result we have created a lonely, meaningless world devoid of spirit and living presences. How we all long for a world of meaning and connection!

Earth wisdom teachers such as indigenous elders, eco-philosophers, eco-psychologists and holistic scientists, can provide us with an array of considered alternatives. They show us how we can tune into our own inner nature, as well as outer nature, and by doing so reveal to us deeper, richer and more varied ways of experiencing our selves and our world. It is a radical re-orientation to reality.

A day I spent with Uncle Max Harrison (Dulumunm), a Yuin Elder and teacher, revealed a radically different attitude to the world, one that is both respectful and very, very, slow. To walk a few hundred metres with Uncle Max can take hours as he teaches the way of nature, seeking out signs and listening for the voice of nature and/or spirits. He said that we need an attitude that allows nature to re-arrange us, in radical contrast to the modern way of re-arranging nature without listening to place, or respecting the voice of non-human others.

The alternative attitude being proposed by all these earth wisdom teachers is a world that is animated (all things are alive), radically ensouled, communicative and purposeful.

What a radically different world we would live in if our attitude to reality changed like this. It would challenge many foundational aspects of our culture, including the scientific interrogation of our world, our exploitative economics, our consumer lifestyle, our religions, our politics, and even the way we relate to others.

So, if you want to be truly radical, try going outside and really be in the world, just as it is. Imagine for a moment that the world is alive, and speaks, and all we need to do is stop, be quiet, listen and wait. and feel what comes. See the clouds, the sky, a tree, not as a spectator, but a participant. Feel the wind on your body. Take off your shoes and feel your feet connected with earth. Quietly sense and feel into your body (not your head). There might be a message in there. It might surprise you.

I recently spent a whole day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in a cave in a very secluded location in the Blue Mountains, NSW to try to re-connect to self and nature, and to the deeper mysteries at the heart of existence.

For most of our human existence, we have had a profound and reciprocal alliance with nature. We are now living with the consequences of breaking the covenant we once had with the living cosmos. So, I was called to spend a whole day alone to start to re-weave a deeper connection with myself and the living Earth.

So how did I go about reweaving myself back into the natural order? How did I compose my mind in such a way that I could be fully receptive to what was going on around me, and as well as  inside me at deeper (psychic) levels, so that resonances, and hopefully understandings, could occur between self and nature?

I am not sure that I was able to fully release myself from the shackles of a cultural norm that is ever and always distracted, is overly rational and objective, views nature as a dispirited and meaningless place, values abstractions over reality, and can’t conceive of nature as communicative other. But I suppose the most important aspect is that I tried!

On arriving at my cave, I simply took time to arrive, sit and be still. I dropped into my amazing sensory body, and particularly by allowing sight to just be one of many senses.  I let thoughts and distractions fade away.  I grounded myself in the eroded yellow sandstone of my cave floor, relishing the soft, sensuous qualities of this material.  I explored my cave, found footprints, which turned out to be lyrebird. I established my special place in the cave, with objects brought from home and local objects. I meditated. I danced. I cried. I slept. I felt deeply into my instinctual and intuitive body. I called to the world to let me know my purpose, my particular way of healing self and world. I sought to experience and resonate with the intelligence, beauty and subjective nature of my cave and locale.

Words lack the immediacy and depth of the senses, so my subjective experiences are difficult (or impossible) to convey. And to convey the voice of nature is impossible - it is not a human voice, but rather a poetic, mythical and richly textured one.

Freya Mathews shines some light on the voice of nature in her book Reinhabiting Reality.  She says: ” … the world must speak, if it speaks at all, in the poetic language of particulars … when one asks the world a metaphysical question, it often turns the beam of one’s enquiry back onto oneself, to highlight the wounded core out of which the question comes. You want to know about the nature of reality? it seems to say. Well, here, look at this. Before I can give you answers you’ll have to refine your questions. Let’s look at the secrets in the heart of the one who asks.”

The understandings from my day in the cave remain in a deep place of unknowing. For the moment, the secrets in my heart are being explored. Can I rest down into that place?