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!

There is so much talk about the “environment” these days it would be easy to think that we are all turning green. But despite all the talk, we remain at a great distance from the more-than-human world; we are terribly alienated from “nature”, (as well as from our own natures).

Freya Mathews in her book Reinhabiting Reality says that for most environmental organizations “the environment lies elsewhere; it is not the great rolling, rippling back of the world-serpent, on which one stands, right here and now. The environment is all ideality; it is a scenario in the minds of environmentalists, a hope-for end point or a lost beginning, but not reality”.

I suggest that the modern environmental movement is partly to blame for our alienation from nature. With its dispassionate and often mechanistic language (natural resource management, environmental services, conservation auctions etc), and its voice being largely from a human, urban, economic and political perspective, it has created the “environment” as an abstraction, as a technical problem to be solved.

It seems to me to be a marked difference between the implications of being in or with “nature” and being in the “environment”. Most people have little direct experience of “nature”, of wild places, of non-domesticated animals. We watch our nature programs, read books, (and dare I say, read and write on computers), get green publications, but rarely do we actively participate with nature. Professionals now mediate most of our knowledge of nature.

Rather that using reason and objectivity to understand the world around us (as if we could ever understand the world), we need to establish relationships of care, connection and compassion for non-human others.

To really understand nature, (or if you like the “environment”), we must be in the place we find ourselves, whether in our busy cities or in “pristine” nature. I suggest if you want to understand nature, sit quietly under a tree for ½ an hour.

In spite of the deterioration of the global ecological context, in spite of the worsening social conditions under which most humanity live, in spite of the global financial crisis, we seem appallingly immobilised. We just don’t seem to get this simple fact: our lives are intertwined, deeply embedded and jointly at stake with “nature”.

We need to love the places in which we live. We need to participate in the rich, unfathomable mystery called nature.

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.