Imaginal

I watch as the two pelicans soar high above the river, as they glide on unseen thermals and turn ever so gracefully. The wind is singing its boisterous song through the choir of trees around me. It feels wild, ever shifting, and I sense I have lost some solidity here on the banks of Myall Lakes. Perhaps it would be better to be like the trees and allow my whole being to sway and bend with the wind? Or be like the pelicans who just seem to be playing in and with the wind?

This experience caused me to wonder about how the weather affects my moods and my experiences. And how we have constructed the weather as something to avoid, as we become increasingly an indoor species. When was the last time you danced in the rain, or felt the sensuous touch of wind on your body?

I offered this question to Kali, a friend of mine, and she provided some extraordinary and beautiful insights into weather and how it affects her moods. During a particularly windy period, she said: “This particular wind has been lifting my spirit like a young woman’s dress for days now… I feel so fine and tell it regularly how much I love it. It seems to like that.”

She added: “And then there was the invitation to get wet in the rain on Tuesday night. How could I possibly turn down such an arousing offer? And the soft warm earth through springy grass against bare rain dropped skin? Simply priceless! The elements tickle and tease me, an open invitation to play. And I sometimes run headlong into their embrace. Other times I smile and sigh as the allure proves greater than whatever human-constructed task I happen to be working on at the time. I surrender to the invitation to open myself to the very alive natural world. It’s all about what the elements do with me once I invite them in.”

This is delicious writing and reflects a completely different worldview to that usually presented on news weather reports! It is a world alive and full of meaning. Kali fully embraces the elements of air and water (and I am sure she would also embrace the elements of earth and fire). She co-creates beauty out of the elements, and treats them like a lover beckoning her to come out and play (or dance or sing). Most moderns simply complain about the weather: it’s too hot, too cold, it’s never just right.

The key question, as put by David Abram in Orion Magazine, is whether we are projecting our own interior mood upon the outer landscape. He answers this by posing this question: “What if our manner of understanding and conceptualizing our various “interior” moods was borrowed from the moody, capricious Earth itself?” What a great question! He continues with an example: (What) if our emotional release has been fed not only by the flow of tears, but also by our experience of rainfall?

How would your “interior mood” change if you perceived every weather event not as something to avoid, but as an invitation to play, to dance, to sing? And accepted the offer, and allowed that event to “tease and tickle you”?

On the weekend at my place in Kangaroo Valley I was doing some work around my vegetable garden. The garden is covered in netting to protect the crops from local wildlife who are tempted by the joys of human grown food.

As I pulled up the netting I saw a snake, a red-bellied black snake. I jumped back, startled. Then I looked more closely and realised that the snake was dead.

This snake had been with me for years, and our paths had crossed occasionally when I wandered around my property. We were not what you would call the best of friends, but we were good neighbours. We shared the land together. We acknowledged each other’s presence. We allowed each other the space to live separate but connected lives. Now through my worthy intention of growing vegetables, this beautiful snake died.

Looking at the snake, I knew she had to be cut out of her last torment. With scissors I gently cut away the netting, and handled her sensuous body for the first time. I felt the fullness of her weight, her black skin surprisingly soft to the touch, and her red (I thought it more pink) underside still bright. Her elegant head, her eyes wondering how life could end this way, suffocated by synthetic netting. I wondered how painful this would have been for her.

I stood still and apologised to the snake, for taking her life, even it unintentionally. I felt enormous sorrow. She was an important part of the life of this land, and now she was gone. Did the land feel this loss also?

I needed to ceremonially bury the snake. I dug a hole on a short rise, just in front of the bend of the creek that runs through my property. I placed her gently in her shallow grave. I placed some red sand over her body, the sand of the old dreaming country.

Such sadness. Just one snake? How much more destruction goes on every day, in every place, by industrial civilisation. But I killed this snake with a veggie garden net! Death is still death, whether caused by a machine, or by carelessness. But this was not the death of just one snake; it was the death of another who lived on the land that I “own”, a fellow inhabitant.

Living in the country one needs to get used to the presence of snakes. Through paying attention, and being fully aware, I was able to sense when the black snake was around, and take extra care. Better to develop a snake sense, I feel, than mowing the entire property, which some neighbours do to avoid snakes.

That sensory awareness, that ability to feel into the presence of a wild other, was a gift I received. I’ll treasure that.

Val Plumwood 1939-2008

The noted Australian eco-feminist philosopher Val Plumwood implored us to “re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to find ourselves in dialogue with and limited by other species’ needs, other kinds of minds”.

How could we imagine ourselves in dialogue with other species? How would we limit ourselves (such a radical concept today) as a result of the presence of other kinds of minds? What are these other kinds of non-human minds?

One key and important step is to understand how contemporary societies have become out of touch with our ecological world, and with ourselves as ecological beings. We have constructed an extreme opposition between humans and the non-human order. This is what Val Plumwood called the “human-nature dualism”, which she describes as “a western-based cultural formation going back thousands of years that sees the essentially human as part of a radically separate order of reason, mind, or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal, and the pre-human.”

This human-nature dualism (falsely) conceives the human as not only superior to but different in kind from the non-human.

We have set humans up as being mindful beings (within a  human-centred self-referential system), and non-humans (including nature) as dead matter, as spiritless, all mind and intelligence having being contracted to humans.

A dualism is not just a simple dichotomy. A dualism has a hegemonic flavour, and allows the colonisation, domination and backgrounding of other peoples and the non-human world. By setting humans as above nature, we deny our embeddedness and dependency on nature. The driving force behind “progress” is the attempt to build a human society beyond the limits of nature (we just hate limits!). And just is case you didn’t realise it: This is actually impossible!

Rather than constructing a dualism, or trying to transcend them, we can hold a creative tension between pairs of opposites. Tension between opposites can be healthy, allowing for the emergence of a creative holding of the pairing in its intrinsic pattern, beauty and rhythms, without domination of one over the other. There is a tension between night and day, between ocean and land, between breathing in and breathing out.

We are often offered a false choice between saving nature or saving culture. Or we offered a choice that implies culture is more important than nature (it’s not). Don’t buy into this. We want both. We can’t have one without the other. We can’t just breathe in!

Instead, take part in the radical project of re-imagining the world in richer terms. Allow others, non-human others, and places, to have a voice. The reality of nature is re-emerging now asking desperately to be heard.

Pause. Listen carefully. The word is beckoning you, waiting for your participation.

“The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism (ie the belief we humans are radically separate from nature) and a deeply-embedded cultural attitude to ‘nature’; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source which is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have use it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out.”

Tough words! This is an recent exchange of views (really an argument) between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth. Between “let’s-reform-the-current-system” and “the-system-is-collapsing-let’s-build-something-better” points of view. It’s a really interesting discussion, and really worth reading, but I lean towards Paul’s view (above), with some reservations.

David Holmgren, of Permaculture fame, has also discussed the same question, but with a much more rigorous analysis, on his Future Scenarios site. Worth a look. David says that: “A smooth conversion to a steady-state economy running on renewable energy without massive geopolitical and economic crises is unlikely.” David discusses the importance of energy sources in driving cultural systems and forms.

There are many who want us to adopt easy changes, like light bulbs, and driving less, etc. There are those who argue for “consciousness change” or “enlightenment” as a necessary force for change. All these changes will amount to nothing if we don’t change the “system”. As Paul Kingsnorth says: “The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth in order to function.”

The depth of change that is needed is generally unrealised, and unreported. Do you find all this depressing or difficult to read? I certainly do. But we are here, now, so we all need to find our own authentic way to respond.

David Holmgren believes we can ride the energy descent with creativity and appropriate design, especially permaculture design. In a really beautiful statement, David says:

Let us act as if we are part of nature’s striving for the next evolutionary way to respond creatively to the recurring cycles of energy ascent and descent that characterises human history and the more ancient history of Gaia, the living planet. Imagine that our descendants and our ancestors are watching us.

Let’s stop wasting time.  Let’s dream up some truly magnificent visions of our future together. Even if they are impossible!

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.

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?

Our world is becoming more and more urban. Over 50% of the world now lives in cities, and the trend will continue. In Australia the proportion of urban dwellers is an extraordinary 90%. In China they are building massive new cities of huge size, seemingly overnight. The human migration to the cities is simply overwhelming (both us and the world), with almost all the stuff we buy, consume, or do, having its root in the material world. So along with the human migration, we have an extraordinary migration of nature (in the form of embedded soil, water, forests and dead animals) to the city where they are transformed into waste products.

As well as being homo citicus, there are figures showing that we spend more and more time inside – inside our cars, inside our workplaces, and inside our homes. Some figures show we spend 90-95% of our time inside, often in toxic and artificial places. Are we all suffering from something akin to ‘cabin fever’ due to our addiction to being inside all the time? Are we becoming fearful of being outside?

While city dwellers sometimes seek solace and renewal in natural places, this often involves driving for hours to get some quiet in a national park or a forest somewhere, and then battling the traffic to return to roar of the city.

I believe that we need to establish a new relationship with the earth around us, and in particular a relationship with the place where we live (and also the places we affect), whether this is in the city or the country. So how does an increasingly urban population do this? How does one connect to nature when we live in places where humans, and human artefacts, are so dominant, where nature is a long forgotten backdrop to our lives?

Is it possible to connect to nature in cities? The answer is yes, but it requires developing an awareness that above the cities is the sky (blackened by pollution), the sun is always shining (through the haze), and the air we breathe envelopes (and poisons) us. And yes, there are birds, animals and plants to become aware of, even though they are generally domesticated.

It’s time to slow down. We need to get out(side) more! And walk in the forests (or parks) along beaches (or local streams), and also on our local streets among our neighbours. And listen and connect to each other and the land (or footpaths), and reconnect to our places, whether in the city or the country.

But I still believe that being in wild places more often will be better for our souls.

Here in Australia we are about to experience the Spring Equinox (23rd September 2008) when the Sun travels exactly over the Equator, and rises exactly due east and sets exactly due west. For many people this event will go unnoticed.

Even those who are aware of the Equinox, will not see any particular significance associated with this day, due in part to the stripping of all meaning and intelligence from the world around us by scientific rationalism and modernity.

In many cultures around the world, Spring starts on the Spring Equinox, but in Australia we celebrate Spring on the first day of September – so much for aligning with the seasons!

You don’t have to be a pagan to celebrate equinox! You may just want to feel the way in which the intelligence of the cosmos creates different seasons, and how we can feel different energies at this time of year, both inside your body and in the outside world.

So here is how I describe the Spring Equinox: It is a time when the darkness and cool grip of Winter give way to warmth and the birth of new light. The Spring Equinox represents the re-emergence of our souls after the descent of Winter, and enables us to set new visions, to feel the spark of new life, and develop new enthusiasms.

On the Equinox, the Earth and Sun are in perfect balance and harmony. So, it is a time of great harmony between the elements of light and dark – and a time when we can create some harmony in our lives. So, get some friends together, join hands, sing and dance together, and welcome the power of this celestial event. Send love to all beings, and the planet, so a new healing energy can come into play in the world.

In Kangaroo Valley, where I live, a group of us have organised a whole day celebrating the Equinox, and we have attracted over 60 adults and 20 children. For a small community this is really impressive.

The great summons of our time is to find our way home to our true nature in the living body of the Earth. Joanna Macy.

I have just been listening to a wonderful exchange of views between Bill Plotkin and David Abram. It’s quite long at over 80 minutes, but well worth taking the time to have a listen.

The topic of the discussion is how to generate a profound shift in our culture, in our consciousness. David talks about this great shift as requiring a shift in our perceptions. He says that we don’t see the earthly world around us with any clarity, we don’t hear the voices of the land, and we don’t notice the rest of the world with anything like a realistic apprehension. So, he says, we need to build our perceptual abilities so we can gain the needed clarity to learn what the world is really about, and to learn what our place is in the world, and to live appropriately.

It seems clear that we forget that we have animal bodies, with animal senses, that co-evolved with the world around us, and that we are immersed in a word of others: animal beings, conscious presences, and elemental forces. It is interesting to reflect on the way “animal” is a derisory comment in our modern society, especially when applied to humans: You animal! They were just animals! But our animality is just a fact of life, and we should take the time to celebrate our animal bodies, by, at the very least, getting outside.

Bill says this shift requires a redefinition of what it means to be human. He talks about how our modern western societies have become locked into a patho-adolescent way of being, engendered by our consumerist culture and our schooling, and how we desperately need to grow up. But it is so easy to sell more things to immature people! So we need to develop new models of what it means to be fully and authentically human. We could all benefit from a careful reading of Bill’s nature-based model of human development.

Bill talks about the way in which a conversation between two people can shape each other in interesting ways. Similarly, David asks, could a conversation between a place, animals, plants, water, and winds, shape and inform our bodies, nervous systems, our very styles of experience? Only if we humans consider the world around us as being alive, being able to communicate to us, and if we develop the skills to enter the conversation, can this idea resonate with us. But we have become locked into a human centred way of being, without being affected by non-human “others”. Of course indigenous people around the world have understood that the world does speak, and not just metaphorically, but as experienced reality. Listen to the words of Bill Neidjie, a Aboriginal Elder who has returned to the earth:

I feel it with my body, with my blood. Feeling all these trees, all this country. When the wind blows you can feel it. Same for country … You feel it. You can look, but feeling … that make you.

So can we shake ourselves free from our (perhaps unconscious) assumptions that the world does not speak, does not have a presence? Can we become receptive to the voices and presences of the world around us, and our places? Can we awaken to the awe and mystery at the heart of the world around us? Can we feel this presence deep in our bones, deep in our hearts? Can we celebrate our nature?

So much so-called spiritual writing is about transcendence. But what are the writers trying to get us to transcend? Listen to this piece from well known “new-age” writer, Eckhart Tolle from his book New Earth: “Space consciousness represents not only freedom from ego, but also from dependency on the things of this world, from materialism and materiality.” Well, guess what Mr Tolle, this material world gave birth to us, dreamt us into existence if you like, supports us through our lives, and when we finally die, takes us back into the earth (when we become energy and food for other creatures). Why is there so much distaste for the lovely messiness of this world, and a desire for the abstract purity of “space consciousness”?

Now, I for one, don’t want to escape from this materiality, even if I could! In fact, I want to embrace if fully, and give thanks to it, and honour the material dimension of our lives. As I said in my last post, we need to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality and inclusion in the natural order as a major reason why we distance ourselves from nature.

Don’t confuse materialism and materiality. Materialism, is often the word used, perhaps incorrectly, for consumerism, our insatiable appetite for things. Materiality is the dimension in which we live, now (and this really is the Power of Now). We don’t live in space! We live on, or perhaps more appropriately, in the earth. We are not disembodied beings. And our “sensible” material bodies are brought into relation to the world around us through our eyes, ears, noses, skin, and tongues, as it has done for much of human history.

Listen to another view of earth and materiality, this time from David Abram who is a cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist, the creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics and the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. David says: “If humankind seems to have forgotten its thorough dependence upon the earthly community of beings, it can only be because we’ve forgotten (or dismissed as irrelevant) the sensory dimension of our lives”. And also this: “Sensory experience … is the way our body binds its life to the other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams.”

So, we need to acknowledge the aliveness of the world around us, and not see it as a trap for our spiritual journey. We are part of the body of the earth, not a spiritual being trapped inside a base material body. We do not need to aspire to a transcendent, abstract god (or spirit), living above us in an ethereal realm. What we really need, especially in this time of change, is to attune to the (multi-voiced and multi-faceted) spirits of the place where we are currently living – the earth, our locale, our place. We need, as David Abram says: “Practices that draw human groups into ever deeper accord with the exuberant nature that surrounds them, enabling community to thrive in reciprocity with a flourishing terrain.”

So stop, and listen: the earth is calling you. Can you hear the whispers on the wind? Can you feel the energy of the sun? Can you (will you) connect with the gaze of another animal, knowing that his or her eyes function just like yours?