Worldviews Conjured by Words
Worldviews Conjured by Words
featured photo | Pixabay
Originating from profound antique cosmologies—composed of chirping birds, murmuring springs, thundering skies, and echoing mountain ranges—an assembly of sounds informs human languages with meaning in naming and identifying things in the world around us; describing and defining sensations, relationships, and codes of conduct; understanding and expressing complex realities of time and space; and so much more. All of this is bundled into utterances that strive to verbally convey our very existence and lived experiences.
A significant component of shaping our worldviews resides not only within our cultural stories but also within the very words and the language we hear and speak. Questions stir within me as I make my way through the Tongass forest with my Tlingit friends:
Where are the Earth-honoring words in our minds and upon our tongues in the dominant culture? Where is the language that animates the land and inherently connects us to place, a living Earth, and an alive, story-filled landscape? Is there any chance that the poetry of our living Earth can still be heard, hidden fugitive-like in the ancestral tongues of the dominant culture? How can we support the leadership of Indigenous Peoples who are working to protect and revive their languages that carry invaluable knowledge, and which are hanging by a thin strand due to the relentless assault of colonization?
I have always been fascinated by words. Not just their meanings, but their etymology—a word’s origin and development. But my interest reaches further into a word’s actual sound and how it affects our senses and how the word-sound connects us to our antecedents, who formed speech to transmit what is choreographed in the mind.
As many of us learned in high school physics class, sound is produced by waves, passing through air or water in the form of vibrations that most of us can hear with our ears and feel with our bodies. But science alone cannot account for the magical conjuring that transforms sound waves into declarations of poetic “amore” or fiery calls to action that raise our adrenaline; or recitations of wisdom that ring true in our inner knowing; or eloquent prayers and incantations that alter our very consciousness; or the distinct and familiar voices of loved ones that thrill our hearts and make them flutter.
By joining consonants and vowels, we can conjure concepts, actions, realms of existence, mystical imaginings, and a surfeit of emotions into existence. By spelling out words, whether using a written alphabet or a series of phonemes, we create communications that can influence our human experience and perceptions, from the intimacy of a meaningful exchange with a beloved to a visionary oration to the global community. While the ability to use language is a seemingly mundane, everyday experience, it is one of the most puissant agencies we have as humans—one that must be wielded with care, wisdom, and accountability. Language is foundational in influencing and informing our worldview and the way we imagine, experience, and actualize the world around us.
I am particularly interested in how we can redevelop an Earth-loving language that respects nature and the staggering and awe-inspiring reality of existence itself—a language that can hold the multivalent auspicious nature of our living Earth; a decolonized, anti-racist language of equity and care; a language whose very syntax and timbre convey the remarkable and ancient kin relationships within the web of life; a sumptuous, multidimensional language that those of us speaking modern languages can employ to share our histories, cosmologies, and traditions; a language of animacy and enchantment that can knit us to the land, grounding us to a specific place and opening our hearts and minds to the aliveness of the world and our love for nature.
Do we have access to words and languages that are life-enhancing, that awaken our consciousness to an animate Earth and our place in a living cosmology? Do the words we choose, and the order in which we string them together, depict the world as a web of sacred systems with agency, or instead, tragically, as a vault of commodities and dead-matter resources for human use?
Of course, evolving our language is not enough on its own to completely transform our worldviews or our actions toward the sacred land. Using words that convey a living Earth does not necessarily guarantee that speakers will respect the web of nature. That said, the vocabulary, syntax, and word meanings we use every day, out loud and in our minds, do, in the larger cultural context, shape the way we perceive the world, deepening the well-worn paths in our minds that reflect our cosmologies, societal assumptions, and values that ultimately affect our actions. Altering the way we communicate, and exploring new ways of conceptualizing and imagining, can forge new thought patterns and perceptions. Thus, part of making space for diverse worldviews, healing our relationship with nature, and finding new ways of being lies within the realm of language, memory, and a storied living landscape.
It is fortunate that the articulation of a multivalent Nature is brilliantly alive in hundreds of Indigenous languages around the world today, describing the natural world with powerful agency while also transferring invaluable wisdom of ecologies and land relationships through generations of memory.
Tragically, however, Indigenous languages are seriously threatened by the assault of modernity and colonization: in fact, many profound languages have already died, or are dying, due to the ongoing attack on Indigenous Peoples. And in this great offense, we cannot underestimate the truly devastating loss of worldviews and immense knowledge. As philosopher and polyglot George Steiner comments, “When a language dies, a possible world dies with it. … a language contains within itself the boundless potential of discovery, of recompositions of reality, of articulate dreams.” There has also been a significant loss of words and languages from older land-based times the world over. Noam Chomsky points out, “Some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe. If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages.”
Indigenous author and teacher Martín Prechtel recounts one of his many experiences with language in his book The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, offering a particularly insightful look at the verbs many Indigenous languages use and the need to keep this knowledge alive. He grew up speaking a refined Indigenous language on a reservation in New Mexico and later spoke Tz’utujil and other intricate Mayan dialects while living in Guatemala. Within this context, he makes the distinct point that none of those ancient, complex languages possesses the verb “to be.”
For those of us whose first language is English or another Indo-European language, it can be difficult to imagine a conversation without “she is,” “they were,” or “it is.” The primary way to express ourselves without “to be” is through copious use of metaphors. But Prechtel tells us, “The brilliant ingenuity of Indigenous language and what is indigenous in all languages, especially the language of origination, ritual and sacred, though often mounted on rails of metaphor, is the way they zoom way past metaphor into realms of understanding that have metaphor looking rather naïve.” Speakers of non-to-be languages do use idioms for other purposes; however, in places where we would use a “to be” construction, they express that connection in ways that reflect their way of thinking about the world and, specifically, the relationships between beings living in the world.
The dependence of Indo-European languages on “to be” constructions also informs the way we interpret a culture’s rituals. An Indo-European speaker, for example, often will view an Indigenous ritual as a metaphor: this represents the universe; that represents the sun; this is a fertility symbol, and so on, instead of seeing that the universe is versus that it is being represented. Prechtel goes further to describe how the verb “to be” is the way English speakers normally express a connection between two entities. Indigenous and non-to-be languages can express these connections in ways that reflect—and shape—the speakers’ understanding of relationships. Prechtel shares an example from the Tz’utujil language, which uses the verbs “ruqan” and “ruxin.” Both are often incorrectly translated as “to be,” but in fact they mean “carries” and “belongs to”; for example, “Ruxin wa ja vinaq” literally means “It belongs to those people,” but an English speaker would say “That is how those people are.” If one were to translate “This is my land; this land is mine” into Tz’utujil, it would become “Javra uleu ruqan cavinnaq joj; ruxin joj ja uleu,” which literally means “This soil carries my people; we belong to this land.”
It requires extra attention for a speaker of a “to be” language to create a sense of belonging to a place and the precise nature of the relationship between humans and the land, and between beings and their attributes or states. While English speakers can also misrepresent a relationship using the verb “belong”—for example, “this land belongs to me,”—using a verb other than “to be” forces a speaker to stop and think of what they are saying.
On occasion I have experimented with phrasing where I grew up as “The coastal land of Mendocino carries me,” or “My family belongs to the land of Mendocino.” It might seem strange at first, but if I belong to the land of Mendocino, and its soil carries me, what then is my responsibility to the land, to other beings who live there, and to the original peoples of these lands?
Most Indigenous languages recognize non-human beings with agency as “persons” and express these relationships as sentient kin. In contrast, many Indo-European languages such as English are human-centric, and they tend to objectify the land and her natural systems, portraying them grammatically and lexically as non-animate beings without agency. Internalizing this kind of language and hearing it daily reinforces the dominant culture’s worldview of the other-than-human world as separate from and lower than humans, and therefore existing solely for human benefit.
Anishinaabe and Métis scholar Mary Isabelle Young, in her book Pimatisiwin: Walking in a Good Way, gives several examples of the way her language treats non-humans as living beings with a spirit. An Anishinaabe-speaking participant in Young’s project shared that the Anishinaabe language uses two suffixes to pluralize a noun: one for animate nouns and one for inanimate nouns. Trees and rocks are animate, living, so they take the same animate suffix used for humans and animals, while the inanimate suffix is reserved for non-living things such as dishes.
Similarly, in Mundari, a language spoken by the Munda peoples of northeast India, forces of nature such as wind, rain, and rivers are grammatically “animatized” when they appear as the subject in a sentence with a transitive verb—animacy is indicated by agreement elements affixed to the end of the verb, indicating that their agency is equal to that of humans, animals, deities, and the astral bodies.8 This is not surprising, given that the Munda peoples hold an animate cosmology worldview, and the Munda revere their deities, including the Mother Earth Goddess Chalapachho Devi, in sacred groves called sarna.
When I consider the kind of human beings we in the dominant culture need to become to live in a post-colonial context and navigate the Anthropocene, I realize our work is not only to support Indigenous-led efforts to revitalize and protect their languages, which is absolutely critical, but also to transform our own tongues into languages of belonging and kinship by learning to bend, circumvent, liberate, and stretch language that currently objectifies nature until we become speakers of languages that affirm a living universe. No doubt, this is a long-arc cultural transformation strategy, but one I think is necessary.
Excerpted with permission from New Society Publishers
The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis
by Osprey Orielle Lake
Return to Kosmos Edition 24, Issue 2, The Call of Your Heart
Earth Hospice
Earth Hospice
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot more where that came from,” says Mike as we gather another armload of ash logs from the back of his truck and carry them into my shed. Mike and his family live in a log cabin on ten acres of woodland composed mostly of white pine and ash, and the ash is dying.
“I know,” I say as I stack the firewood on the growing pile. “It’s so sad.” An insect that probably hitched a ride to the U.S. from Russia in a wooden packing crate about thirty years ago is decimating ash trees across more than thirty-five states and five Canadian provinces. The emerald ash borer is a showy creature, with a sparkling green back and a scarlet belly, but its glamourous appearance belies a monstrous appetite, and it has already killed more than fifteen million trees.
Mike picks up one of the logs and draws his finger over the wheat-colored wood. “Here, you can see the tracks they make.”
Like a ribbon of toothpaste unfurled by a toddler engrossed in a stealthy experiment, the pale white trails loop and wind through the cambium. It is this tissue just under the bark that draws water and nutrients through the tree; by eating their way through it, the beetles slowly interrupt the vascular system, and the tree dies. The emerald ash borer, or EAB, is aided in its march through North America’s forests by climate change, for fewer very cold days give it more opportunity to keep flying on to new and tasty locations.
We both fall into the silence of helplessness.
“So,” says Mike, trying to put a positive spin on the conversation, “just let me know if you need more.”
Climate change, a fairly benevolent term on the surface, is seeded by heat. However, despite one cheery report I heard on the radio a couple of decades ago, this is not the simply kind of heat that could make it possible for vineyards to flourish in Maine. Climate change brings heat that spawns calamitous reactions in multiple directions, each of which spawns new problems. It is a fearsome process and one that will go on expanding, shattering, and rearranging until, finally, the world ceases to pump excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Climate change itself is the biggest invasive beast in human history.
The bravest among us despair, even as they resolve to buy local foods and electric cars, plant pollinator gardens, and refrain from getting on planes. The more timid console themselves by evoking hope and an abiding belief that God or scientific ingenuity will somehow yank us out of the boiling pot at the last minute. However, the chance that the nations of the world will, without delay, take the steps required to reduce carbon emissions radically enough to prevent the most devastating effects of climate change looks unlikely. Scientists now say we will probably not be able to prevent the temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the goal set at the 2015 climate summit in Paris.
We must take a deep collective breath and say, Yes, the Earth as I know it is dying.
***
The Earth itself isn’t dying, of course. This planet has endured and remade itself countless times over its four and a half billion-year lifespan and will do so again. It has burned, flooded, tilted and retilted, frozen and thawed, poured out seas, thrust up mountains, and devised such an extraordinary variety of creatures that we can only gasp in astonishment that, for instance, it took only 541 million years for the eye to develop into the organ with which we can gaze upon the wonder of it all. So, yes, the Earth will continue to adapt, even to catastrophic climate change.
But something very dear to us humans really is dying, and that is our relationship with the Earth. We love our places—all the lives they contain and foster and all the physical and emotional nutrients that they infuse into our own lives. And when our places are hurt, we hurt too.
What is dying now is our conviction that, even if some calamity of fire, water, or wind takes our home and our neighborhood, we can stoke up our vaunted human resilience, rebuild, and get back to normal. What is dying is the assumption that drastic weather is only an anomaly and that “nature” will soon right itself. What is dying is the expectation that our grandchildren will awaken on summer mornings to birdsong. What is dying, if we’re honest with ourselves, is the hope that we can fix this.
Facing brokenness, the human impulse is to rush in and take action. Things can be done to correct the problem. Things must be done. And as the world confronts climate change, much can be and already is being done, like the construction of floating schools in Bangladesh, built of wooden decks atop plastic drums to accommodate rising waters, and the “green corridor” of lands that The Nature Conservancy is purchasing and piecing together along the Appalachian Mountain chain to ease the northward migration path of birds and animals. A bean-bearing tree, the pongamia, grows wild in Pacific regions yet thrives in almost any soil and requires no pesticides and minimal irrigation. Agriculturists believe it could provide not only a food source, but also a biofuel. Individual choices matter too, such as reducing consumption of meat and refraining from the effortless satisfaction of our whims through a simple click of the mouse.
However, another kind of action is crucial too, and that is the practice of Earth Hospice. We need to stand by the places and creatures that have supported and inspired us as they go through changes we abhor. We must care for the natural world we love, from the tree in the backyard to the birds and squirrels in our city park to remote mountains and oceans, as we would care for a dying family member. We need to lament the losses, even as we develop practices of compassionate attention, mourning, and celebration of all that remains. We have to form a new relationship with what we have taken for granted, including our human communities and our familiar forms of activism, and find a way to live with what is evolving without succumbing to greed, despair, and hate. Earth Hospice will not be an easy undertaking, but it can be a meaningful, even sacred, avocation.
Hospice for humans is a place, time, and practice we may choose when it becomes clear that a person who is ill can no longer recover. Death nears. Unlike active medical care, hospice is largely non-interventional. A person who is dying in hospice may receive drugs to alleviate pain, but extreme measures such as feeding tubes, CPR, and other forms of life support cease. The atmosphere, unlike that in a hospital, is quiet, calm, and devoid of alarming noises and flashing lights. For the dying person it is the final project, which some take on willingly and even welcome, and others fight till the very last breath. For loved ones, hospice begins the process of the permanent goodbye. We acknowledge the loss that looms and take our first steps into an absence that will never again be filled. Hospice is the occasion for bearing witness to the great mystery of death, drenched, yes, in grief, but also filled with awe. It is a time for tears, touch, gratitude, waiting, weeping, and, especially, love.
Like hospice for people, Earth Hospice is a way of saying goodbye to what we are losing in the natural world with the same mindfulness we would wish to bring to the bedside of a dying person. We bear witness to what is passing—from our lawns, our riverbanks, our bird feeders, our winters and summers, our livelihoods and our expectations of the future, as we declare over and over again: I will not turn away. Earth Hospice means attending to what we’re losing, knowing that we can’t save it, but also that we don’t have to abandon it. Just the opposite: we can abide by it and open our hearts to all it means to us.
The call for humans to bear witness to the many lives endangered by climate change first arose in 2014 with Carolyn Baker’s article, “Welcome to the Planetary Hospice,” on the website opendemocracy.net. Baker proposed a response to climate change in which “conscious grieving is an integral component of the maturity required to balance compassionate action with the discerning acceptance of our predicament.” More recently, psychologist and hospice worker Zhiwa Woodbury has written of the need for a new and widespread “planetary hospice movement” to shift attitudes about “the difficult contractions and painful pangs of the Great Dying.” The time has come not just to recognize the urgency of beginning this process of conscious grieving, but also to engage in practices that will help us to live with loss.
The practices of Earth Hospice—I prefer the term “Earth Hospice” to “planetary hospice,” for there are many planets in the cosmos, but only one Earth—have to be simple enough so that anyone can do them. They must require no special tools, expertise, or elaborate planning. They must be adaptable enough to be relevant to people of any race, religion, or ethnicity. They might have a spiritual component or they might not. They are devoted to sharing emotions and interacting with endangered places and beings, rather than to more pragmatic projects like protests, restoration, education, or community gardens, but they would enhance any of those gatherings. Here are a few possibilities:
Vigil
The average stay in a hospice facility is two days. Earth Hospice will require a longer commitment. Unlike the death of a human, definitively marked by that last breath, nature’s endings will often not be so clear and precise. Species of frogs and trees don’t crash to extinction in a few days. Wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes will wreak more immediate, more drastic damage. People who have lost their homes may tell themselves that it’s safe and even brave to start rebuilding as soon as possible. However, even as charred forests persist in regenerating, or one rainy summer pours some hope into a parched lake, the fate of these places, like that of the frogs and trees, is far from secure. With Earth Hospice, we seek out damaged or endangered places and sit attentively with them as we get acquainted with their new and hard reality. During a vigil, even if it lasts only a few moments, time warps out of its ordinary patterns. What is before us takes on a new vividness. The movement of light over the land, the arrival and departure of breezes, and the sounds of birds, water, and leaves become significant events in the life story of this place we’ve settled into. The borderline between ourselves and the other softens, as if both of us have slipped into a kind of shared space, where our individual identities—human/lakebed, human/ash tree—meld into some ineffable existence we share.
At a weeklong vigil I organized in an old-growth clearcut forest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, one woman spent hours each day on a split stump of cedar so wide she could lie almost full length across its ringed remains. She began to reflect on the life story of this tree and all that had passed before it during its seven or eight hundred years of life. The tree came alive for her, despite, or through, its death. She realized that, when she and her husband had installed cedar paneling in their den a few years earlier, she had never even considered the trees that had given their lives to become those walls. After she returned home, she made a point of thanking the wood that had once been trees like the one she had gotten to know.
Ceremony
A ceremony is an event that models in a limited time, a specific location, and symbolic actions a path the participants intend to follow for a prolonged time and over many places and experiences. A funeral, for example, is a formal goodbye. A wedding brings together the friends and family of the couple as witnesses to their vows to love and care for each other all their lives. Both ceremonies have a clear beginning and ending and often include stories, music, readings, and prayer. These elements, easily adapted for an Earth Hospice ceremony, invite those who are gathered to share their feelings about the place or species they’ve come to honor and to manifest those feelings through some kind of action or gesture, as the exchange of rings or the shoveling of soil onto a coffin concretize the spirit of a wedding or funeral. An Earth Hospice ceremony might be an expression of sorrow or gratitude for a place harmed by extreme weather, an opportunity for people to pay tribute to a plant or animal species that’s under threat, or even a tribute to a favorite activity, such as ice skating on a frozen neighborhood pond, which may never be again be possible. Statements of resolve, hope, or commitment to act might be part of the ceremony as well.
A woman whose small oceanside house was destroyed by Hurricane Irma in 2017, conducted a private ceremony. As she sat on what remained of her dock, she tore a length of saffron-colored fabric into long, thin strips, speaking aloud with each rip an emotion she wished to release: grief, pain, lack of confidence, blame, guilt, anger. Then, on pieces of paper, she wrote positive qualities that she wanted to foster on the small plot of land where she intended to rebuild her house. These emotions included joy, beauty, stability, meditative solitude, abundance, friendship, and spirituality. She wrapped the paper messages in the fabric and tied them to the broken bushes that had survived the gale winds that took her house. The ceremony helped her to accept what had happened in a new way and to fortify her as she moved forward.
Sharing of Stories
When we gather together in a place that’s important to us and take turns speaking about what it has meant to us, the connection between people and place takes on a new and robust form, even though the place itself is damaged or destroyed. Each person’s story of past experiences with the place and current response to what has happened to it builds on every other person’s story. It is as if the trees, rocks, animals and waters come alive again as they are evoked by those who have appreciated them and now mourn their passing. An opportunity to share stories might be the sole activity at a dessicated lake or a rose bush no longer supped on by honeybees, or it can become an integral part of any other activity.
Gift Giving
When we visit someone in hospice, we might bring a gift of flowers, music, or a soft blanket to make the dying person feel comfortable and surround them with beauty. Places, too, can be the recipients of gifts. We can make a mandala on an eroding beach, create an altar on a dead tree, or twirl along with the first snowflakes to fall in an unseasonably warm winter. Making a gift for a place, especially when we use only the materials that the place itself supplies us with, such as sticks, stones, coal, or seaweed, we affirm that a place, like a person, already has all the elements it needs for its intrinsic beauty to re-emerge. In my organization, Radical Joy for Hard Times, people have made gifts for a great variety of places, from a vanishing glacier in Alaska to a Balinese clove forest that has produced little fruit for several years, since unseasonal rains knock the buds off the trees, to a vacant city lot where a group of young people made a sculpture out of trash.
To make a gift for a place is to give something greater than any tangible object or act. We give to the whole complex existence of the place as we understand, imagine, and have experienced it. We make these offerings not to receive gratitude from the recipient, of course, but to express our gratitude for it, our sorrow for what has happened to it, and our connection with the other people to whom it means something. By gifting a broken place with beauty, compassion, and generosity, we often experience an inexplicable yet unmistakable burst of joy.
Joining Other Forms of Activism
As we confront the ravages of climate change, all kinds of responses will be necessary: education, protest, the development of new forms of architecture, food production, energy, art, litigation, and of course the moderation of personal habits. Earth Hospice is a practice that can interweave with any of these methods. For example, activists who gather to protest outside a coal-fired power plant can begin by sitting together in a circle, as each person speaks of their feelings about their own energy use and their hope for the action they are about to undertake together. Members of a local or national environmental group whose efforts to save a canyon from mining or a forest from logging have proven futile can conduct a funeral for the place on whose behalf they’ve worked so hard. They might wear black, construct a coffin for the place, and play somber music as they “lay to rest” what has gone before and will be no more. School students can take a field trip to a place that has contributed to global warming, like a power plant, or been a victim of it, like the river which that behemoth has overtaken, and then write an essay about what happened and what signs of resilience and recovery they discovered.
Amazement
This, finally, must be the practice that accompanies any other Earth Hospice activity: the cultivation of amazement for all we have left. Wildflowers popping out of the glossy black char of a burned forest, a chorus of wood frogs in a seasonal pond, the constancy of the moon and sun—these are revelations that affirm that, even as we grieve what is happening to the Earth we know, the Earth itself goes on—resisting, finding new ways, pushing through, and endlessly creating. As we learn to face so much loss in our world, greeting what thrives can seed us with life. We can embrace “hello” even as we are bidding “goodbye.”
Earth Hospice is a long-term responsibility, one into which we will have to initiate our children and grandchildren, that they may pass it on to their own descendants, for unlike the grief we feel as we sit at the bedside of a dying person, our sorrow for nature’s decline will not be soothed with the passing of time. The endings will keep on happening. The fading of nature as we know it will spread in ways we can barely imagine now. Attending the Earth through this process will be a difficult mission—and yet it can be a deeply meaningful one. We will come to know more intimately the ways of the places and lives we care about. We will recall, over and over, the intricacy of the connection between the landscape around us and the landscape within our own psyches. We will gain a new appreciation for qualities of stamina, stubbornness, resilience, and surrender, as forests, oceans, and animals respond to their challenges, and we will find inspiration for how we humans, collectively and individually, might also respond. We will activate reserves of compassion and come to know our neighbors in new ways through a shared love of place. We will open up to the beauty and complexity of this small orb in the midst of the universe, this Earth that gave rise to all of us: amoebas, leopards, nuclear power plants, Rachel Carson and Rembrandt, honeybees and coronavirus, you and me.
***
Every time I burned the ash wood in my stove, I thought of the trees whose remains fed the fire. I realized at last that an Earth Hospice ceremony was in order.
In a circle in my back yard I arrange a dozen ash logs, standing upright like proud little reminders of what they once were. Some bear the scars of the insects that gnawed through them. On top of each log I place a handful of birdseed. Then, turning slowly in a circle, I address each piece of wood, acknowledging the beautiful ash tree it was and expressing my sorrow that it and so many millions more trees have died and will continue to die. I tell the logs I’m grateful for the heat they give my house and, widening my focus, assure both the logs and the land around me that I will scatter the ashes from the fire around my trees and gardens to fertilize them.
As I speak, something happens. It is as if the life of these logs—all the seasons they’d grown in a central New York woodland; all the birds, animals, and insects they’d housed; all the weathers they’d absorbed—still radiate from them, as heat shimmers round my body when I step out of a hot bath. The logs become more than logs. They become vivid and specific descendants of the trees they were and ancestors to the smoke they will become. There is nothing supernatural about this new clarity. It is simply a form of the deepening intimacy we feel as we get to know a new friend or lover.
I step outside the circle and bow. Shortly after I come back inside, a chickadee lands on one of the logs and begins pecking at the seeds.
Return to Kosmos Edition 24, Issue 2, The Call of Your Heart
If My Soul Is Stone
If My Soul Is Stone
featured image | Ray Bilcliff
If My Soul is Stone
If my soul is stone
then all this anxiety
is glacial till
moving across my body.
Rough edges are dulled
by the constant rubbing
of worry, working away,
chipping and fracking
in the night, then spending the day
sanding and smoothing
all the broken places
with rationalizing and regret.
Eventually, all this stone-soul searching
tumbles everything into pebbles
and I feel them grinding and rumbling
when I move.
Silence helps them to settle.
If my soul is stone
it will find solace in its origins
in the earliest moments
of the universe.
All this anxiety is left over
from the first rupture
of light breaking through cloud.
If my soul is stone
it is an ancient remnant
of the earliest coupling
of creation and cataclysm.
My body imitates the strange mating
of gravity and fusion
in energy that surges and collapses
in patterns and particles.
Anxiety comes and goes.
When it sees me watching,
it waves.
Before Eternity Whispered
All these words are just gossip
about the cosmic secrets.
The truth is beyond description.
Poets prattle and praise the heavens
as if they can translate the mysteries
that science measures and commodifies
as time and space.
The truth is silent.
Beyond the dalliance of pen and page.
Imagination comes close
to reflecting the miracles
of death and dust
becoming life and water.
Blue-blessing skies and winter-weary fields
come close
to conversation with infinity.
But the truth is silent.
Before words, before images,
before nothing became everything,
before eternity whispered, “Now”
all creation lingered in love
waiting to create this moment
with you.
Together we pause
in the silent starlight
before we open our hearts
and sing.
Return to Kosmos Edition 24, Issue 2, The Call of Your Heart
Films for a More Sane Civilization
Films for a More Sane Civilization
Featured photo | Bess Hamiti
Katie Teague, has won awards and accolades for her documentary Money & Life and Sundance-granted project 99% The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film. With a Masters degree in Depth Psychology, she transitioned her focus from the counseling room to the edit room and the art of visual storytelling. True to her heart’s calling and what she calls ‘culture repair’, her films focus on healing and transformation – to bring forth a more loving, regenerative world that works for all.
A visual storyteller attuned to the unique complexities of the liminal space we live in, Katie’s work shines in collaboration with cutting-edge thinkers, philosophers, artists and writers exploring what it means to be human “in a time between worlds.” Under her channel In the Making, Katie independently crafts thoughtful, extraordinary short films derived from her extensive, intimate interviews.
In our speed-addicted, metric-oriented, attention-starved world I feel I can best serve the healing of the whole (and the irruption of a new structure in consciousness) in deploying my gifts and intuitions to this epochal shift we are living through. Through the creative blending of video, time-lapse photography, interviewing, script writing and deep listening I’ve developed a keen capacity to synthesize and transmit bits into a beautiful tapestry of multimedia transmission. – Katie
Equipment Used:
Sony A7Siii
Atomos Ninja V
Sony A7Rii
Mavic 3 Pro
THE PLANETARY IMAGINARY: COMING BACK HOME TO THE LIVING EARTH
with Jeremy Johnson
Jeremy is an author (Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness; Fragments of an Integral Future), publisher at Integral Imprint, managing editor of Integral Leadership Review, podcaster (Mutations) and integral philosopher. Jeremy has written as a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich magazine, OMNI, Disinformation, Evolve Magazine, and Kosmos Journal. His academic research, writing, and publishing advocates new forays into integrative thinking and praxis—aligning the scholastic, poetic, and spiritual—as existentially crucial work for pathfinding in a time of planetary crisis.
WHAT IS WISDOM? with Bonnita Roy
Bonnitta Roy’s teachings highlight the ’embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge.’ Author of the popular Medium publication Our Future at Work, she is also an associate editor of Integral Review where you can find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics.
THE WICKED MUSH OF THE IN-BETWEEN
with Bonnita Roy
Bonnita Roy is also a pioneer in post-formal education and founder of Alderlore Insight Center and the POP-UP School, where she teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills – thinking about thinking – and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from typical limiting patterns of thought.
The One Home Journey | Seven Years for Seven Generations
The One Home Journey | Seven Years for Seven Generations
Editor’s note: Dr. Rama Mani and Professor Alexander Schieffer are embarking on an epic journey. On Earth Day, April 22, 2024, their 7-year expedition begins – visiting every country while weaving a new narrative of interconnectedness and regeneration. Guided by grassroots organizations and local hosts each step of the way, their journey honors diverse voices and invites collective action towards a more harmonious coexistence on and with the Earth. Follow their itinerary and progress in Kosmos.
From an Earth Letter by the Authors
Recent and unfolding events are sorely testing our faith in humanity. Have we totally lost our capacity to prevent man-made devastation? Are we neither willing nor able to save each other’s lives or care for the Earth that gives us life? We all feel it under our skin more sharply than ever before: It is time to reclaim our humanity, and to re-weave the family of life on Earth. This is what we have undertaken to do, with our local and planetary partners.
On 22 April 2024, the day designated by the United Nations as International Mother Earth Day, we welcome you to join the journey as we launch a 7-year collective expedition to all countries on Earth – our One Home Journey.
Why?
- To restore our faith in humanity, and in our capacity to live in harmony with Nature.
- To weave anew the tattered fabric of the family of life on Earth.
- To co-author and co-create together a new shared story of life, grounded in the interconnected wholeness of existence, for present and future generations.
Despite war and genocide, displacement and drought, deforestation and excessive mining, and even in the face of apparent material abundance, in every part of the Earth, we have experienced first-hand over the past 30 years, how people and communities are today creating unique and diverse life-affirming ways of living the kind of future we wish to bequeath to generations to come. The Home for Humanity movement for planetary regeneration is initiating and stewarding the One Home UnivEARTHsity for regenerative future building, which will be built up country by country, culture by culture, and home by home as we travel during the One Home Journey: 2024-2030 – Seven Years for Seven Generations. In every country, we will be guided by local Home for Humanity partners who are pioneering local and planetary regeneration in their communities. In every country, we will honor Indigenous knowledge and cultural wisdom. We will celebrate Earth Artists, and be invigorated by their visions for our future. We will especially work with youth and women change-makers who have emerged from marginalization and violence.
This journey is undertaken as a gift and depends on the gifts of hospitality and wisdom-sharing of our local hosts in each country, as we travel simply home to home. The journey also depends on collaboration and synergy with partnering movements and organizations and the participation/engagement and co-creation of ‘Earth Citizens’ of all walks of life, everywhere, to collectively pursue planetary wellbeing. We feel honored that the gift of this collective vision we received allows the two of us to offer the next 7 years of our lives as our humble and unconditional gift in service to life on Earth – no matter how it unfolds!
In sum, the One Home Journey could be described as a Holomovement in planetary co-evolution, where every individual, every home, every community, and every initiative is an interconnected part of the whole of the new story and the new fabric of life.
With love for Earth, our One Home, and Humanity on Mother Earth Day
Rama and Alexander
Join virtually, with family, friends and colleagues for the launch of ‘a planetary journey to the rescue of the 2030 Agenda (UNToday), Monday 22 April 2024, from 6.30pm to 7.47pm Cairo/Harare/Geneva time (77 Minutes for 7 Generations) Register here.
Kosmos | Alexander, your career spans diverse fields from academia to banking and now transformative education and integral philosophy. So what were the moments or insights that led you to transition from these more conventional industries to focus on holistic transformation?
Alexander | I had an early sense that business has to be understood as an integral part of society, and that we need to look at economics and business in a much more holistic way than we do. After my own experience in investment banking, in running my own publishing company in Singapore for many years, I saw how distorted conventional education is in terms of not preparing us to create regenerative enterprises, but rather the opposite. In Singapore, around 2000, I saw how an entire country was sold out to a western paradigm, and had turned into a huge shopping mall. I felt something was utterly wrong if a country with such powerful cultural roots is so disconnected from its own origins.
Also critically important in my life, right at that time, my younger brother, my closest relationship in the family, contracted cancer. And within four months he was gone. At that time I knew that I had to give everything, full heartedly, to bring about a shift of paradigm. I supported the shift initially through education, then I co-created an organization called TRANS4M which worked on transformative education to help build regenerative (integral, as we call it) organizations, community initiatives, schools, universities around the world.
Kosmos | And Rama, how does your background in political science intersect with your approach to transformational peace building and justice work?
Rama | The only reason I chose politics was due to my experience growing up in India. I was madly in love with my country, but I was constantly horrified that a country that had such depth and such beauty could also be such a place of violence and injustice. I was horrified by what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, how casually a human being could treat another human being as subhuman. I just knew that we as human beings are capable of treating each other with so much more generosity and compassion – with, interbeing, to use the beautiful term that connects us so deeply. And I felt I had to give my life to bring about that transformation – in people, and in institutions and laws that instigate or justify inhumanity. That’s why I initially felt I had to enter politics.
Very fortunately for me, when I was about thirty, Spirit called me back with a huge bang and made me realize that it was not my life purpose after all to work within politics or indeed within any existing system or institution – but rather to transform the system and the paradigm of power itself, from the outside. It was my discovery of a beautiful Buddhist text on the compassionate warrior that awakened me to my soul purpose and to the realization that it all begins in here, in the soul, and that conflicts and injustices out there are a reflection of the unaddressed shadows inside us. This is today at the core of Home for Humanity’s integral approach of activating simultaneously the ‘inner home’ of personal transformation, the ‘local home’ of home and community-based transformative initiatives, and the ‘Earth home’ of contributing to planetary wellbeing.
Kosmos | Alexander, when did you hear your heart’s calling?
Some 18 years ago, I was moving to Geneva and looking for a place in nature. Through serendipity, I met Rama in 2007 in the midst of the French countryside near Geneva, in the home which has become the Integral Campus of Home for Humanity. Over time, we realized one very important thing: that in an integral, authentic expression of who we are, the very environment that one is living and working in, becomes part of the story. A calling has to be embodied. It has to be visceral. Yes, integral philosophy and yes to theory and academia, but if it’s not embodied, if it doesn’t lead to real social and personal change, I’m not interested. There was a radical commitment growing in me, to follow the heart’s calling. And from that evolved inner stage, the words ‘Home for Humanity’ landed in our hearts, as an expression of our collective hearts’ calling.
Together we placed the very notion of home at the center of our work. The co-creation of a new paradigm, would need to begin at the place where one lives and works. In fact, almost all the transformative organizations and initiatives, around the planet, that we had been working with in the past two to three decades, had been initiated in a home or “home-like” environment, with deep connections to local nature and culture. As we supported the emergence of such pioneers of regeneration in literally all continents, a deep sense of belonging and inclusion, of rootedness in space and story, became the starting point for such processes – and is at the heart of Home for Humanity.
A home for humanity can be many things. It can be an enterprise, it can be a school, it can be literally anything, but it has to be an authentic, rooted expression, to build the future. Every home has the potential to unfold its potential for systems change, if it stands on solid ecological, relational and cultural grounds.
Kosmos | And Rama, How do the Arts, and your Theatre of Transformation fit into the Journey?
Rama | I had just completed my PhD at the University of Cambridge in the UK, on restoring justice after violent conflict and genocides, and was living in Ethiopia, working for a non-profit, as a policy advisor for conflicts across Africa. On a peace mission in Somalia, in the middle of the night, I received my most powerful epiphany.
The central message was to create a place in the midst of nature where people of very diverse backgrounds, cultures and circumstances can come together, can feel at home, and can co-imagine and co-create the future. And that is indeed what has emerged with the Home for Humanity movement, not just at our own home, but with growing numbers of diverse ‘homes for humanity’ connected worldwide.
Art was at the core of this vision. That art has the power to transcend past, present, and future. And art is also a way to be really present to pain and to create the possibility of imagining a future that transcends the present situation.
And indeed, art, what we call Earth Artistry, will be central to the One Home Journey: as we shall encounter Earth Artists in every country, whose art heals and unites humanity, revitalises culture and regenerates the Earth.
Theatre of Transformation was born quite miraculously in January 2014 – at the instigation of Jean Houston – who remains Alexander’s and my closest friend and soul guide, and who serves as co-chair of our Home for Humanity movement. Jean hosted my first ‘recital’, where I enacted the stories of people who had transformed themselves and consequently their societies in the face of crisis. Over the past 10 years, through hundreds of tailor-made public performances and workshops worldwide I’ve enacted the real life testimonies of over 100 real-life people I’ve encountered and been inspired by – including many of our home for humanity pioneers. Each time, I discovered with my audiences and participants the truth of our interbeing – with each other, with the world, and with the future we most desire – and the power of transformation we hold within and between all of us. Theatre of Transformation will travel with us as a way to story the remarkable people we meet and to support their transformation into the future they long for. Alexander’s poetry too will be a key catalyst on this journey. Yes, Earth Artistry in all these forms will be central to the One Home journey.
Kosmos | So where does that bring us today?
Alexander | Over the past 17 years together, Rama and I incrementally brought together our respective work of previous decades in personal, local/cultural and planetary transformation with our communities of practice across Africa, Asia, the America, the Arab world and in Europe. We began to converge and synergise as the Home for Humanity movement for planetary regeneration, with an integral vision grounded in the scientific paradigm and perennial wisdom of the interconnected wholeness of life. The movement has grown rapidly across all continents. With the dramatic turn of world events, we could feel that our movement was being called to fulfill a bigger vision and mission, to support and accelerate whole systems’ transition. And then it happened! In the midst of our silent retreat in 2023 we received the vision of the One Home Journey, of traveling to all countries on earth, home to home, hosted by our local home for humanity partners, to seek responses to the single question: “How do we live together in harmony with ourselves, with each other, and with all life on our home planet?” And our hearts said yes. It wasn’t even a question.
Kosmos | What does a seven-year journey look like for you on a practical level the next few months? How will it unfold? When will it begin? How can people follow you and become involved?
Rama | It felt very appropriate that it start or be inaugurated on Mother Earth Day, which is the 22nd of April. And very beautifully, given that art has come up so often, the 21st of April is the international day of creativity and innovation. Those three words – Earth, Creativity and Innovation – summarize what the journey is going to be like. In every country, first and foremost, we will start by honoring the wisdom of Mother Earth in her specific geography, starting off with what is considered a the sacred space that symbolizes unity for its people: whether it’s a mountain, a river, or a forest. There we will deeply listen to the indigenous people or wisdom keepers of the land. Next, we will speak and work with artists, and co-perform with them, listening to their stories as I used to do in countries in conflict, and invite them to create beautiful imaginative visions of the future. Then, we will meet and hear the stories from the ecological pioneers and social innovators who are creating possibilities for a regenerative and inclusive future. We will also teach, mentor and catalyze aspiring future-builders, especially youth and women from marginalized and conflict-affected backgrounds, so they can innovate their purpose-based initiatives to regenerate themselves, their communities and the Earth.
We will be inaugurating the journey at Sekem, our home for humanity in Egypt, described as the miracle in the Egyptian Desert, together with World Future Council, which is one of the 15 partner organizations and movements that is collaborating with the One Home Journey.
Starting right on 22 April, everyone is warmly invited to accompany, engage with or support the Inaugural Season of the One Home Journey and the One Home UnivEARTHsity.
During this Inaugural Season, from 22nd of April, Mother Earth Day, till 21st of September, which is International Peace Day, we shall launch and pilot together all our key programs, each time from a different world region, with our diverse local Homes for Humanity and global partner organizations. People can join us live, onsite or online, for our extended ‘Happy Hours’ of ’77 minutes for 7 generations’, to experience and co-create each of these transformative moments with us.
On 22 September 2024, just as the UN’s intergovernmental Summit of the Future begins in New York, we will begin this collective expedition of humanity for our shared future in harmony with all life on Earth. Our first Season begins, naturally, in Africa, the cradle of humanity, with Zimbabwe and South Africa. Each year, over four seasons, we will circumnavigate the Earth, covering about 30 countries across all world regions, for seven years till 2030.
Week after week, people who join us can extend the web of connection and co-creation with the family of life on Earth. Through the One Home Journey and One Home UnivEARTHsity, each week, we will co-discover the infinite diversity and underlying unity of humanity and the interconnected ecosystem of the Earth that sustains us.
Alexander | The One Home UnivEARTHsity is the vehicle for literally everyone to engage with the One Home Journey. Via four 12-week-seasons every year, one in every major world region, aspiring Earth Citizens can join us in numerous ways. People joining from around the world can develop a whole new perspective on humanity, week by week – while growing into a planetary community of co-learners and co-innovators.
The One Home UnivEARTHsity is also a container for living knowledge from all countries, accessible, as a Global Knowledge Commons, to everyone. This is a very important aspect. The knowledge that is shared and surfaced, is a gift to humanity.
Kosmos | We love what you’re doing and we will try to be with you psychically, energetically, and even physically in some cases.
Rama | We are such great admirers of Kosmos, so it means the world to us to have your energetic support accompanying us! We would LOVE to meet with Kosmos in person perhaps once a season or at least once a year to exchange stories! We know we will meet MANY of the remarkable people and inspirational initiatives featured in your pages over the years as we travel around our One Home!
Kosmos | I feel a lot of happiness for you both. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. And we will keep an eye out for the Home for Humanity documentary film!
Summoned by the Earth | A Story of Healing and Protection
Summoned by the Earth | A Story of Healing and Protection
featured photo | Shashank Kumawat
Amid uncertainty, the crucial question arises: How can we bring healing and protection to the Earth? In 1990, Cynthia Jurs journeyed to the Himalayas holding this inquiry, seeking wisdom from a revered lama. Tasked with an ancient Tibetan practice, she embarked on a monumental mission: to carry Earth Treasure Vases filled with prayers and holy offerings and bury them in places around the world for healing. Her book, Summoned by the Earth – Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World, chronicles Cynthia’s journey – “sometimes harrowing, but always shining with beauty at the threshold between urgency and the timelessness of the sacred.” Through planting these humble vessels, an ancient sacred technology is revitalized, building a global community in its wake, dedicated to Earth’s protection. In this most critical hour, Cynthia’s story offers insight and inspiration, urging us to hear the cries of the Earth and answer our innermost calling as protectors of Gaia.
This brief video will familiarize you with Cynthia’s incredible journey.
Kosmos (R.Fabian) | So we’ve only met physically one time, and that was in Findhorn at the New Story Summit. I had fractured my knee and was hobbling around making movies. I remember regretting that I did not connect with you more deeply. You were already a dharma teacher in our tradition and knew our teacher, Thay (Thich Nhat Hanh) very well, while I had just begun traveling to retreats with him.
Cynthia | No worries. I felt you at that time and appreciated your presence very much at Findhorn. My life totally changed when I met Thay, but that’s another story.
Kosmos | I love this book; so many vivid scenes. There is a passage in Australia, where you describe how all the places you had planted the treasure vases, up to that point, lit up for you as a mandala.
Cynthia | Going to Australia was significant because the aboriginal culture is so amazing – their perspective, their awareness, their consciousness. You probably have seen the artwork with the songlines on the landscape depicting the country, the territory, the land, in between locations and the dreaming stories. So that whole notion became integrated into this idea of the treasure vases forming a global mandala, connecting places where things happen on the land.
When we meet for meditation every full moon, we invoke all the locations where the Earth Treasure Vases have gone, we name them, which takes a good amount of time! You get a feeling for each node over time, and it’s a way of keeping them alive. And then we imagine radiating our love and our healing intentions and all that is being carried into those nodes in the form of light as a technology of the sacred.
Through Joanna Macy, I also came to realize we are all holy vessels. It’s one thing to take this little clay pot and place it somewhere that needs healing, but we all have that capacity as holy vessels. So, then we imagine ourselves or our location as a node on the mandala too.
Each one of those places where a treasure vase has been planted is like an acupuncture needle. It’s a spot where those energies are going into the body of Mother Earth and doing whatever they’re going to do. And the rational mind can’t figure it out. There’s no way because it’s operating on another level. But that’s how acupuncture operates also, right? And the things that have happened are so miraculous and synchronous that you can’t not say, ‘oh wow, this is having an effect on some level’.
Kosmos | Yes, it is fascinating that in many places the treasure vases have catalyzed transformation. I’m thinking of your stories from Africa, in particular.
Cynthia | Yes. One was going to Liberia, which we described in a previous article for Kosmos and in the book. After it was planted in this village, the elders said, we have just come out of this civil war and peace is our most important prayer. And an ex-combatant, rebel general suggested building a peace hut in the village, a traditional round structure where people come to resolve conflict and work through issues and cultivate the sacred. So, we raised the money, and they built a peace hut.
Since then, we’ve built four peace huts with the help mainly of Sister Chang Kong in Plum Village. She’s been so generous with supporting the work because that particular Liberian, the former general, came to live at Plum Village for three years, and then some of his colleagues did too.
Taking the treasure vase to Liberia, into the worst fought area of the war, resulted in people realizing that they wanted to sustain those prayers. And so what did they do? They started a whole peace building program. We were working with the women who stopped the war, who are natural peace builders as well as ex-combatants and former child soldiers and community members in four regions.. So that is a huge outcome.
In Congo, a similar thing happened. I met Neema Namadamu through an organization called World Pulse. I wanted to go to Congo and needed some kind of connection to go there. And Neema said, ‘oh, yes, my sister come’. And so, we took a treasure vase there.
I ended up doing media training with women in Eastern Congo to get them to tell their stories. And then Neema got them online – teaching them how to get connected to World Pulse. It was very powerful. That was the beginning of what turned out to be her organization called Hero Women Rising when she came to the US.
I had this flag of the whole Earth that was kind of my altar cloth, and I set it out when we were completing the ceremony to bury a vase in the forest. I wanted to take it to the rainforest and work with the indigenous people, the Pygmy people of Congo, which Neema arranged. And when I held up the flag I said, ‘here’s Congo and here’s the United States, and the air that we breathe is generated in your forests’.
They didn’t know that. So, I connected Neema with Osprey Orielle Lake of the Women Earth and Climate Action Network, (WECAN). They started a tree planting program that is still going on in Eastern Congo.
Neema came to the US after that trip and stayed with us off and on for a pretty long time, and she used our nonprofit as her umbrella for a while until she got Hero Women Rising started. I consider her a living treasure.
These were the seeds that were planted and carried on. And that’s what happens, is that people discover their own deep calling, their own summons. And that’s what I feel I’m most interested in supporting. The treasure vases are filled with all these alchemical offerings and who knows? We can’t really know, but we see what happens when people take them where they need to go, and the inspiration that arises.
Kosmos | How many vases total?
Cynthia | Thirty originally. And at a certain point another forty. I call that the first and second generation. They were all made at the same time in Nepal. And I still have about five of these on the altar. In the meantime, I have gotten to know a woman from the Santa Clara Pueblo, in the Tewa world here in northern New Mexico. She is an activist, but she’s also an acclaimed potter. She agreed to lead a retreat to teach us how to craft earth treasure vases in the tradition of her people.
We used the clay from this land in the coil method, and everyone who came to the retreat had identified a location where they wanted to take a treasure vase. There were about 30 people at that retreat. And those are still in process, the treasure vases of the third generation. So that’s our focus now.
The two most recent ones are Washington, DC which is going to happen soon, and one that is just being dedicated to Auschwitz coming later on this year. Last year I led a retreat in Italy and its steward buried one of the second-generation vases there recently. Also, last year we did a pilgrimage to Greece and planted it on the mountain above Delphi. That story is also at the end of the book because it was a very powerful kind of culmination that happened for me while making the offering to Gaia at Delphi.
click each image below for captions
For All Locations of the Earth Treasure Vases, click here
Read stories from selected pilgrimages below
Original ETVs
- The Dtao Dum Forest, on the border of Thailand and Burma
- Hiroshima, Japan
- The Biosphere 2, in Oracle, Arizona
- The Source of the Ganges in India
- The Source of the Amazon in Peru
- The Arctic Circle, Alaska, in connection to the G’witch’in People
- The Kogi lands of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia
- Telowoyan Village, Lofa County, Voinjama District, Liberia, West Africa
- The Blyde River Canyon, Limpopo Province, South Africa
- The Giza Plateau, Egypt
- Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii
- The Itombwe Forest, South Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo
- Avebury, England
- Bindaluk, Jawoyn Country, Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia
Second Generation ETVs
- Gabarnmang, Arnhem Land, Australia
- The Original Garden in Findhorn, Scotland
- The Great Stupa of Boudhanath in Kathmandu, Nepal
- The Flint Hills of Kansas in the heartland of America
- The Santa Cruz Mountains near Silicon Valley, California
- Purnululu (Bungle Bungles), the Kimberley’s, Australia
- The village of Utiagvik at the edge of the sea in northernmost Arctic Alaska
- The Hanford nuclear reservation on the shores of the Columbia River in the state of Oregon
- Mount Ryosen above Fukushima, Japan
- Back to where it all began at the cave hermitage of Charok, Nepal
- Margibi County, Liberia
- Didthul Mountain in the Budawang wilderness of Walbunja Country, Yuin Nation, Southeastern Australia
- Our root temple Tolu Gompa, in Nepal
- Serpent Mound in Ohio, USA
Kosmos | You really had a deep insight of Gaia being an embodiment of the Three Jewels.
Cynthia | I’ve been practicing the dharma since the eighties, and have such a deep connection to the Buddhist teachings, but I always struggled a bit because the connection to the Earth seemed to be kind of a missing piece in the Dharma. I mean, not so much with Thay and all of his efforts in that direction, but with the Tibetans it’s a little bit of a missing piece. There’s also the issues that I bring up in the book about some of the outdated, hierarchical aspects of the Dharma and the way it’s passed on, and the abuses inside the tradition. To me, the abuse of women is parallel to the abuse of the Earth. So that was a big thread for me personally. I had to grapple with a lot of things, and it was the Earth Treasure Vase practice and my connection to the Earth that was the biggest healing. Venerating Tara was a very important practice for a long time, but as I kept going with the treasure vases, I kept feeling the need to have a more personal connection to Gaia.
And then one day, as I describe in the book, I was in retreat, and the mantra for Gaia came to me and then the visualization of the evolution of Tara into a manifestation of the Sublime Mother Gaia! But even before that, long ago, I was writing and reflecting on how the Earth is such an incredible embodiment of the Three Jewels because you have the teacher, the teachings and the community all woven into this incredible web of Life. I adapted these Refuge Verses to express this:
Perfection of Wisdom; Mother of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and
all beings; nourishing, holding, and healing all; Great Mother
Earth, precious jewel of the cosmos, to you we bow in gratitude.
We take refuge in the Earth as our teacher, the one who shows us
the Way in this life.
We take refuge in the Earth as an expression of the dharma, the
teachings of interbeing, understanding, and love.
We take refuge in the Earth as an embodiment of the sangha, the
vast interdependent community of life in balance and harmony.Living within the web of life on Earth, we dedicate ourselves to
embodying awakened awareness on the path of healing in service to
all beings.We dedicate our lives to realizing our oneness with Gaia.
Gaia is such an amazing teacher, filled with so many remarkable teachings about being and interconnection with all the different communities of life on Earth. So that has been something I have carried for a long time, and it’s just grown. I feel the Earth is a really reliable source of refuge. Every time we go out in nature, we’re restored to our true self, we’re brought home.
The other key moment was in Nepal when I went back to where it all began and I had been made a lama, which I was somewhat conflicted about, because I really felt by that point that my source of refuge was Gaia. And then I fell off the mountain!
Afterwards, I was struggling to understand how my life had been spared, because really it was a near death experience. But when I relived it, which I did over and over again, I had the sensation of the Earth grabbing me and holding me to the slope of that mountain and literally saying, ‘not yet, you’re mine’! I survived, and I felt like I had to bring out this practice of the Sublime Mother Gaia after that because I had kept it to myself. The Earth was talking to me. Then, when I was writing the book, I recalled the whole story of the Buddha summoning the Earth to witness his moment of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, which is an image I always loved. And the fact that he touched the Earth in that moment is so significant. It is the only story where you have an awakened being relating to the Earth as the witness. Calling upon and recognizing Earth as the ground for this experience.
Kosmos | It’s beautiful – from the question you formulated going up the mountain the first time, “How can I protect the Earth”, and then falling into the arms of the Earth as you came full circle. As with most profound insights, it really is so obvious. The Earth is an awakened being and Her natural laws and rhythms reflect the Dharma. She is a vast and diverse ‘sangha’ of interconnected life forms. This is a tremendous contribution you’ve made through your lived experience and service. And I really hope this insight rings out beyond the book and beyond our lifetimes. I consider it such a profound offering, and I thank you.
I only have one final question. What does it mean, in your view, to protect?
Cynthia | Well, the words I most often use in this practice are protection, healing, and restoration.
Protection is called for in certain places. Healing is called for in certain places, and restoration is called for as well. So when you look deeply at what’s happened to the web of life, to Mother Earth, you can see that there actually are very few places left that need protection. Most of them need restoration and healing, but there are some that are still in need of protection. And so when we connect with what we love and care about most in our precious human life on Earth, (which is in relationship to the One who gave us Life), and if we look deeply at all of the cultures and ecosystems that are part of the web of life, it’s within the context of a whole living system, that everything is interrelated, interdependent, every single aspect of it is important. Before there was such destruction and such unraveling of this interconnected web of life, these living systems worked in harmony, whether they be human, animal, plants, minerals, waters, or all the elemental energies and ecosystems.
So, the aspiration and the wish to bring protection I take very seriously. This is life and death. But I don’t think that it’s appropriate to create more conflict in the world. So, if we are defending some of these things in an adversarial way, that’s only going to create more conflict. We have to find a way to carry out this task that is not going to create more problems. That’s where practice comes in. That’s where the practice of mindfulness or the practice of cultivating awareness and deep listening and calm abiding, comes in. Because when we practice cultivating our wisdom and compassion, what happens naturally is that our reactivity settles down and our capacity to respond is enhanced. And we see the way to respond much more clearly. We see the way to respond that is skillful and effective, and it’s not contributing to more, you could say, samsara, because we operate out of our reactivity all the time. We’re just spinning that wheel, the wheel of cyclic existence. It just doesn’t go anywhere constructive. And we know this in our own lives.
So, as Thay would say, we have to stop. Even if it’s for 10 minutes a day, and just take another breath and come back to our true nature. That gets back to our connection with the Earth. It is when we stop and come back to our true nature, we’re also connecting to this larger, interconnected web of life that is also our true nature. There’s no separation between us and Gaia.
Kosmos | I have to tell you – before this interview, just closing my eyes for a few seconds, I had an image of you. It was an image of you as this rainbow, flying around and wrapping the Earth in rainbow energy and light. I never really had an image of somebody show up like that!
Cynthia | Well, that’s exactly the visualization, not that it’s me, but the visualization that we do with the full moon meditation, visualizing this light going around the planet and bringing restoration and healing and protection to all the places that it’s called for in all the ways that it’s called for.
Each of us has an individual role to play, and each of us is a tiny little node on the whole web of life, the whole mandala. We each have our part within the whole. And so, it’s important to find our gifts, to find our offering. And it doesn’t have to be some big thing. It’s when we are acting in our lives from that place of deep caring, that is the summons, the calling that we are hearing.
Kosmos | Many blessings for your journey, Cynthia.
Cynthia | Thank you. And for yours.
Excerpt from Summoned by the Earth, Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World
The next day, the rains came. Most of the group left early to walk the final leg of the journey with Lama Tsultrim and make sure we had seats on the plane back to Kathmandu. But on this misty morning, I walked alone, slowly, contemplating what had happened to bring my global healing journey full circle. I was still wrestling with my conflicted feelings about being made a lineage lama when Gaia was calling to me now.
And then, my ankle turned on a slippery rock. Suddenly I lost my balance and went over the edge of the mountainside. It was a sheer, steep drop-off, and the moment I fell I left my body. As I was tumbling head over heels down the slippery slope, I momentarily returned to consciousness, realized what was happening, and told myself, Cynthia, you are falling head over heels down the mountain, and there is nothing to stop you. I was acutely aware that it was several thousand feet straight down to the raging river and boulder-strewn canyon far below, and I left my body again.
An eternity seemed to pass when suddenly I came to an abrupt stop. I opened my eyes and found myself spread-eagled, backpack on my head, water bottles and trekking poles strewn here and there, but alive. I had no idea how I could have come to such a sudden stop. There was nothing but slippery wet grass on the steep mountainside in every direction. I checked my body and found no major injuries. A little banged up but not paralyzed and no broken bones. Alive.
I tried to stand up but was shaking. The terrain was so terribly steep and slippery I could not find firm ground to stand on. A wave of panic passed through me. I could not get a foothold and was deathly afraid that if I tried to move, I would slip and fall again, and then it really would be the end. I looked up to see the edge of the trail a hundred feet straight up. I had no idea how I was to get from here to there. The only thing to do was to start calling for help as I wondered if I would ever be heard and looked up into empty space.
Excerpt courtesy Prospecta Press
Summoned by the Earth: Becoming a Holy Vessel for Healing Our World, by Cynthia Jurs (Author), Lama Tsultrim Allione (Foreword), Robert A.F. Thurman (Foreword)
For more about Cynthia’s work of sacred activism, subscribe to the newsletter, join the Full Moon Earth Treasure Vase Global Healing Meditation or learn the Sadhana of the Sublime Mother Gaia, go to: www.gaiamandala.net
Return to Kosmos Edition 24, Issue 2, The Call of Your Heart
Something Like Sanity | A Course Review of 'Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive'
Something Like Sanity | A Course Review of ‘Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive’
featured photo | Stas Parechyn
You would expect a course about collapse – both ecological and societal – to be depressing. Not so with “Surviving the Future: The Deeper Dive,” Shaun Chamberlin’s ten-week course about the end of extractive civilization, and what comes after, offered via Sterling College.
That’s not because the course peddles some overlooked strain of hopium with respect to reversing or “solving” the climate crisis. Rather, “Surviving the Future” often feels like a healing balm because it does not shy from the whole horrifying truth: we lost this one. Here is a place where you don’t have to pretend that there is still time, or that we can “green” our way to growth. Here is a space where you can shout “the emperor has no clothes!” and find understanding nods rather than awkward silences. In a world still so overwhelmingly in denial about “what time it is on the clock of the world,” to quote the late activist Grace Lee Boggs, this act of mirroring feels something like sanity.
I first heard about “Surviving the Future,” which takes its name from the late economist David Fleming, and the book by the same title that that Chamberlin published following Fleming’s death in 2010, from a roommate. I had recently fled New York City for Taos, New Mexico, hoping to get a bit of fresh air and critical distance from the media churn. I had been crying on a near daily basis about collapse since 2020, when the pandemic afforded me, and many others I suspect, enough respite from the hamster wheel to fully glimpse the breadth and depth of the polycrisis. “From my view down here on the carpet,” I wrote in an essay for the New York Times, “I see a system that, even if it bounces back to “normal,” I have no interest in rejoining, a system that is beginning to come undone.”
Yet even though I was firm that trying to save the system is a waste of precious energy at this point in the game, I felt alone. Friends got engaged, shopped for baby clothes, belted Taylor Swift at the karaoke bar. Meanwhile, I felt myself drifting away as the gulf between their sense of the future and mine unspooled. I did not know, back then, that “collapse aware” is a term that half a million people on Reddit alone use, or that several podcasts of this genre enjoy large audiences, or that thousands of kindred minds are signing up for courses like “Surviving the Future.” The greatest gift of the course, beyond the materials and lectures themselves, which are unusually excellent thanks to Chamberlin’s thoughtful curation, is the sense of community the course creates. This is no small thing given the extreme alienation of our times and what may be the only possible cure: intentional togetherness. In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, the next Buddha may be a sangha.
At first, I had some resistance to bonding with a bunch of internet strangers. I have always been a Luddite by choice, perhaps because I am too young to remember a time when the internet was fun. I also tend to worry that virtual happenings, even when they facilitate something “positive,” can give us the illusion of having taken more action than we actually have; the equivalent of playing with the symbolic even as we say we wish to reclaim the real. I would listen to the lectures, bookmark all the materials, and get in and get out, I thought.
Quickly though, my curmudgeonly attitude began to melt when confronted with the caliber of humans enrolled, their steadfastness, and generosity of spirit. One key aspect of the course is a weekly discussion post. Students respond to one of three prompts written by Chamberlin, then comment on several of their peers’. Usually, my opinions about the sooness of collapse, or the animacy of nature, are met by skepticism or disregard from mainstream editors, who are usually deeply invested in their New York lives, and proud of their hard-nosed atheism. So it was cathartic to give voice to thoughts that rarely find an avenue in journalism, and even more cathartic to have those thoughts valued and encouraged. It made me realize how deep the feminine fear of “being too much” runs, and how much we censor ourselves for fear of being “unlikable” or impolite. In these forums, I found space to be authentic, even ugly. To be witnessed and held in this way is probably one of the deepest medicines we can give each other.
The receptiveness of the group also made me think about if we are all really one interconnected ecosystem, as we assuredly are, then the greatest thing each of us can do is be outrageously ourselves. It does an oak tree no good to pretend to be a pine; similarly we disservice not only ourselves but the whole by expressing anything less than whatever makes us wildly alive. Self-discovery and expression are not just things you selfishly do for you, but necessary in order for the whole to thrive.
Now that the course is over, the biggest takeaway I’m trying on for size is the idea that collapse may really be okay; that perhaps it’s all part of a divine plan we cannot see. “The time of the lone wolf is over,” say the Hopi elders in one of their more recent prophecies:
‘Gather yourselves! Banish the word ’struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’
Weekly resources shared in the course include songs, quotes, numerous recordings with leading thinkers and excellent links such as this interactive flowchart.
I Want a Better Catastrophe
Andrew Boyd | Book and original flowchart
Similarly, Dr. Lyla June, an indigenous musician, scholar, and organizer introduced the idea to us that collapse may be the greatest gift ever from Creator. I admit I have a hard time reconciling this idea, (which is no doubt right on a cosmic timescale…after all, the arc of justice is long), with the idea that we will likely experience violence, and watch our loved ones experience violence, in our lifetime. Then again, the system is already violent, and has simply imposed those costs on other people somewhere else. When natural law takes effect, and the consequences of our actions are felt at home, we will be “deserving,” not in a sense that we, as individuals, have sinned, but rather that we are not special in our white Western softness and safety. Still, I wrestle – surely the impulse to protect your loved ones, and those in need, is not wrong? After all, Noah built his ark. Joseph told Pharaoh to store grain. Historically, the ones who make it are not the ones who underestimate the danger.
This is essentially my one criticism of the course: it focuses on imagined futures much more than practical matters. Despite the name, “Surviving the Future,” there is little airtime given to “prepping” or “planning,” which I found odd, and at times, overly romantic. How are we going to build a more beautiful future on the other side of collapse if we don’t live long enough to transition?
Yet the genius of the course is that its decentralized design encourages affinity groups to coalesce and continue on, long after the course is over. Already, a subgroup called “Practical and Realistic Imagined Futures” has formed, where members craving more greenhouses and HAM radios are continuing to meet. If there is one thing I know, it’s that we can only make it through together. Perhaps this has been the point all along.
About
The Course
The Deeper Dive offers a long moment — a 10-week opportunity — to slow down, pull back, and explore responses as part of a small global community, among and alongside some of the world’s leading thinkers and doers. Last time, we were joined in live conversation by the diverse likes of Vandana Shiva, Isabelle Frémeaux, Rob Hopkins, Nate Hagens, Eve Annecke, Mark Boyle, Lyla June and Iain McGilchrist. Always oversubscribed, the Deeper Dive nonetheless offers inclusive sliding-scale pricing and trust-based scholarships, to enable its diverse and global participation. Repeat enrollees most welcome! For notification when enrollment opens, signup at: https://tinyurl.com/StFDD
Course Developer and Moderator, Shaun Chamberlin
Shaun was involved with the Transition Towns network from its inception, co-founding Transition Town Kingston and authoring the movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline, in 2009. In exploring the cultural narratives charting society’s course, he has since been one of Extinction Rebellion’s first arrestees, chair of the Ecological Land Co-operative, a director of the campaigning organisation Global Justice Now and (for his sins) an advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. He has written and edited diverse publications, including conceiving and creating the book Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy from the work of his late mentor David Fleming, and spoken at venues from Occupy camps to Parliaments.
Return to Kosmos Edition 24, Issue 2, The Call of Your Heart
Vessels
Vessels
Colors In Motion is excited to share a ‘Touchstone’, one of our artworks in motion, called Vessels, as a way to introduce the Kosmos community to our work, and to invite us all to open our eyes, ears and hearts to this experience. Vessels captures the essence of shape, form, and transformation.
It is a human reaction that when we see something we love we want to hold on to it. When it falls or fades away we feel it as a loss, rather than an expansion to include. We can practice ‘unlearning’ grasping and clinging by using the beauty of Colors In Motion to entrain our minds and our nervous systems to accept flow. Flow is a healthy approach to the rapid changes humans are experiencing, and can expand our capacity to be present in every precious moment.
Instruction | Turn off all artificial lighting. Take several slow deep breaths and relax the tension in your body. Find a comfortable viewing position in a quiet place, (headphones preferred), Start the video and expand to full screen size. Experience what comes, maintaining focus on the sounds and images. When your thoughts stray, simply return to your breathing and refocus your attention. Enjoy.
Artists’ Statement:
The theme of this inaugural edition of Kosmos Quarterly- Unlearning Together- is a necessary one. As co-creators of the world around us, we must look to ways we can evolve with all Life: ways that require us to collectively form new pathways and leave old ones that no longer serve us behind.
Colors In Motion develops digital artworks-in-motion with the intention of bringing beauty and centered calm into our busy lives, to public spaces and to our homes. For a decade, we have been working to shift our culture away from assumptions about digital technology, the purpose of art, and factors in our environment that drive us to increased levels of speed, stress, and anxiety.
Our first goal is to challenge the notion that ‘screens’ in our environments are negative influences. Certainly, we have all experienced aggressive news shows and disturbing images coming from televisions in public places and waiting rooms that we could not control. What if these same technologies could provide a sanctuary, inspire delight, and create a sense of simple play for our minds at moments when we need them most- a panoply of slowly-moving colors and shapes with gentle music and soundscapes, to soothe our mind, body, and spirit?
Colors In Motion was born in an interest to help us collectively unlearn limiting assumptions such as these:
We have a limitless capacity to handle ‘messages’. Instead, we acknowledge that we have already reached a tipping point at which too much input from our devices and our screens is causing great emotional and physical stress in our lives.
Technology makes everything faster. Instead, we open ourselves to opportunities where technology can be used to slow us down.
Special skills are needed to ‘play’ with technology. Instead, we revel in dynamic artistic expression that enables us to play, simply by being present.
The experts know what we want to watch. Instead, we realize that just because programming exists does not mean all people enjoy watching it. In many cases, the opposite is true.
Art must be permanent. Instead, we embrace the notion that experiencing art that is constantly changing, trains us to delight in the unexpected and to find comfort and beauty in the shifting and unpredictable moments of our lives.
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan
Yorkston/Thorne/Khan
“Music, a myriad of styles and tastes, but it’s all branches on the same tree. One music, no prejudice.”
James Yorkston – Guitar, Nyckelharpa, Vocals
Jon Thorne – Double Bass, Backing Vocals
Suhail Yusuf Khan – Sarangi, Vocals
This is how Jon Thorne, a member of the trio Yorkston/Thorne/Khan, describes the band’s fusion of musical traditions. On their first record, Everything Sacred, the trio perfectly embodies this spirit of open-minded, diverse, and organic sound. James Yorkston (guitar, nyckelharpa, vocals), Jon Thorne (double bass, backing vocals), and Suhail Yusuf Khan (sarangi, vocals) came together as if by chance when really, it was their open and experimental mindsets that let it happen. James Yorkston, a Scottish folk singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, was playing at a music festival when met Suhail Yusuf Khan. Born in Delhi, Khan comes from a long line of sarangi virtuosos and is also steeped in Sufi writings and tradition. The two struck up a conversation about instruments which led to informal jamming followed by Yorkston inviting Khan to accompany him onstage.
Soon after, Yorkston invited Jon Thorne to join them in the studio to record. As a British bass player well-versed in jazz improv, Thorne rounded out the trio’s musical and cultural texture. The idea was to capture their sound on record in a free, fluid, and collaborative way. The resulting album, Everything Sacred, was indeed a cultural masterpiece and solidified the brotherhood. They have now released their second record Neuk Wight Delhi Allstars. (They hail from Neuk, Scotland; The Isle of Wight, England; and New Delhi, India respectively.)
We caught up with the band of brothers as they are getting ready for summer gigs to promote the new record. They took time out to answer some questions for us.
What special qualities or perspectives do each of you bring to the musical mix?
Suhail Yusuf Khan (SYK) – Well, I am a sarangi player and a Hindustani music vocalist. The repertoire I carry is pretty diverse. Being a sarangi player, one ends up getting exposed to varied sub-genres of Indian music—folk, devotional, regional, aesthetic, and film music too. Hence, I bring all those influences and share it YTK.
Jon Thorne – (JT) – From my perspective, I am trying to provide supple support through outlining harmony, playing with sonorous depth and rhythmic propulsion and providing counter melodies and textures that integrate and enhance the others’ performances. Much of this for me comes from a mixture of playing a lot of improvised jazz in my career and also from having performed across a wide musical spectrum, being open, and responding spontaneously.
James has a unique blend of literary skill in his lyrics and punky energy and drive in his songs. He’s capable of great intricacy in his guitar playing also. He writes wonderful ballads too. An arch storyteller. Suhail’s skills as a devotional singer and improviser are extraordinary, as is his ability to take traditional Indian music and blend it seamlessly with anything contemporary that he hears.
James Yorkston – ( JY) – That’s kind of you, Jon. For me, both Suhail and Jon have a vast, studied knowledge of music that I happily lack. I enjoy them talking about scales and modes and such, but I just try to use my ears. Suhail and Jon are both masterful musicians and I feel as though I am exploring a vast, colourful world of unexpected musical delights when I am playing with them.
How do you describe the music you create, this fusion of Scottish/Indian/British, lyrical/mystical traditions? Jon once referred to it as ‘indojazzspangle’. Do you have a name for it?
SYK – Well, you could label it with anything really. Although, for me, it is our signature YTK sound.
JT – “Indojazzspangle” was meant partly in jest, though it does illustrate how difficult it is to label the music that we make in a sound bite. I’m happy to help make the music together and let people call it whatever they want to.
JY – It’s a funny thing, music. Sometimes it’s better just to let people hear it and come to their own conclusions. I think Jon’s description is accurate in that it also suggests the fun we have whilst making it. Plus, I like the idea that Suhail supplies the Indo, Jon supplies the Jazz and me, well, I supply the Spangle…
In what ways are intuition and improvisation integral to your approach?
SYK – Surprisingly they are both interconnected with each other in many ways. If musicians are not able to recognize or judge their intuitions, it becomes extremely difficult for them to take risks while improvising in order to make the improvisation sound creative.
JT – For me intuition and improvisation are essential and part of the foundations of what we do. All of us are listening intently to one another and reacting in the moment, we have the bones of each song/instrumental, but how they are fleshed out is different every night and can change in a moment.
JY – It is important not to care what happens and just to let loose with our playing and see where it goes. We’re not a pop band with people wanting accurate replications of our most recent 3-minute hit. We just get on stage and start exploring. Sometimes we try to trip each other up, but mostly we encourage each other forwards.
You seem to fall within certain contemplative, oral traditions. What role does indigenous storytelling play in the music you make together?
SYK – Certainly. As I mentioned earlier, I am a trained Hindustani musician. In our tradition, musical knowledge is passed on from one generation to the other as an oral language. This age-old methodology of transferring knowledge is called guru-shishya parampara (teacher-student tradition). Hence, stories and thoughts behind tunes play a crucial part in our music making process.
JT – Both James and Suhail draw from and adapt Scottish and Indian traditional music respectively. All three of us bring in original material and we often blend all these elements within a song or instrumental. We never write within intentional parameters though. Literally anything could happen if someone has an idea that works.
JY – I guess my songs normally tell little stories, and the traditional tales I bring in also have strong narratives that have ensured they have been passed through the centuries. The stories provide narrative hooks for us to base the songs around; they suggest emotions and energies. But I don’t consider the stories indigenous, particularly. More so, they reflect the shared human experience.
What draws you to the songs that you cover? How do you choose them? Is it the artist that wrote them, the stories they tell, or is it something else?
SYK – It is a combination of everything that you mentioned. We try a tune during our practice sessions and try playing it at gigs too. If something is working or has potential, we keep trying it and then let the music do its magic.
JT – Each of us brings the sum of our influences with us when we write. James and Suhail usually suggest the cover versions. It may be the artist or the story, often the mood of the lyrics of one cover version will be matched by the mood of another seemingly unrelated song. Suhail has to translate his lyrics for us. It can be like assembling a new picture from entirely separate puzzle pieces. They both constantly introduce me to new things. That’s the fun.
JY – I take influence from everywhere, no strict genre, country or area of music. Anything that interests me, I follow, and sometimes I bring that interest to YTK. If it seems good to me, the guys are kind enough to at least give it a listen or two and usually we attempt the songs or tunes. Mostly the experiments work, but on occasion they don’t.
Can you reflect on your spiritual journey or path as individuals and as a group? Where is the edge for you in your practice?
SYK – I grew up in Delhi, a city where so many different cultures and traditions exist together. Delhi is also known for the Sufi legacy it holds. My mother used to take me to various Sufi shrines in Delhi when I was a kid. The shrines have the divine Sufi music being practiced there, the energy, the faith, the aura and charisma of these places is heavy even today. Hence, those visits and hours of Sufi music sessions at the shrines holds a huge impact on my life as an individual and as a musician too.
JY – I do believe there’s a Something Else—but I don’t believe for one moment any of us—and this includes any holy-man in flashy breeks—know what that Something Else is. Religion just seems to be about ego, power, and control.
JT – My personal spiritual path has ultimately been one of finding my true place among, and seeking connection to, everyone and everything without adhering to any particular belief system. I chose music as it is the best vehicle for this for me. I’m still trying to come to terms with mortality, an ongoing struggle.
I distrust organised religions, especially where money and superstition are involved. I trust my instincts, and I don’t need other people to validate my beliefs. My feeling is that being loving and kind is as religious as I ever really need to get.
We all have our own subjective beliefs in the band, but the music unifies us regardless. There are certainly moments when we are playing together when I feel genuine elevation, a sense of ecstasy, and a deep feeling of connectivity. That’s magical and it’s a joy to experience. That’s the edge, not found in practice, but always sought in performance. Sometimes it happens, but you can’t force it. You just have to stay open to the possibility.
Humanæ
Humanæ
Humanæ is a work in progress by the Brazilian artist, Angélica Dass.
Based in Madrid, Dass is documenting the range of human skin tones through her portraits. To create her human mosaic, she paired each of nearly 4,000 portraits with specific PANTONE® ‘guides’—reference cards used by the world’s designers since the 1960s.
Dass follows a system that intentionally strips away many of the decisions an artist might make. All participants are volunteers who hear about the project and agree to be photographed. There is no formal selection process. The background for each portrait is a PANTONE® color identical to a sample of 11 x 11 pixels taken from each face. Subjects are photographed without the cultural ‘markers’ of makeup, wardrobe, or jewelry and hair is worn naturally. All are framed the same relative distance from the camera, using the same lensing.
Using the iconic aspect-ratio of the PANTONE® cards makes each photo a mirror of all the others in size and shape.
Thus, without fuss, with the extraordinary simplicity of this semantic metaphor, the artist makes an “innocent” displacement of the socio-political context of the racial problem to a safe medium—the (PANTONE®) guides—where the primary colors have exactly the same importance as the mixed ones. It even dilutes the figure of power usually held by the photographer. — Alejandro Castellote
At present, more than 3700 images exist in the project. They have been taken in 28 cities, in 18 different countries: Madrid, Barcelona, Getxo, Bilbao and Valencia (Spain); Paris (France); Bergen (Norway); Chiasso (Switzerland); Groningen, The Hague (Netherlands); Dublin (Ireland); London (UK); Tyumen (Russia); Gibellina and Vita (Italy); Vancouver (Canada); Gambier, Pittsburgh and Chicago (USA); Quito (Ecuador); Valparaíso (Chile); Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); Córdoba (Argentina); New Delhi (India); Daegu (South Korea); and Addis Abeba (Ethiopia).
PANTONE® and other Pantone trademarks are the property of, and are used with the written permission of, Pantone LLC. PANTONE Color identification is solely for artistic purposes and not intended to be used for specification. All rights reserved.
