In the Hands of Alchemy
In the Hands of Alchemy
In 1979, I destroyed all the art I had created, gave everything I owned away, and began a new life. I sensed an inner and outer world in perfect order. I sensed that I could become a willing participant in that order, and that it allowed for my individual expression and unique contribution. I know now that my participation was conditional on how well I learned to listen and to see the inherent patterns within the natural order I sensed. The return of a physical creative expression came later, after I learned what was required by the inner life. The new life that I gave myself to required unconditional trust and noninterference. I asked for nothing from any human being. I needed to know if there was a God and I risked my life to find that out. I know now that we risk far more when we attempt to create a life devoid of a personal relationship with our God.
I ate when I had food and I fasted when I did not. I accepted whatever came into my life. It was that simple. I was familiar with fasting; I had done it once a week since I was twenty years old. Now, eating became a miracle. At first, I had something of a small following as an artist, and people were still interested in what I did, so they gave to me. Soon it became apparent that I was not going back into art, and many of these people faded from my life. I had a close circle of friends of the spirit who understood what I had given myself to, to some extent. They had their doubts, and so did I. My life was just too much for our modern western mind to consider. Eventually I saw the ways in which the miracle carried my life. I could never have continued this strange and lonely journey if I had not seen that. My joy and my ability to help others were gifts of that miracle and were my only tools for disarming the fears that were inevitably projected onto me. Fielding the fears of others was probably the most difficult task of the new life. I had to confront the fears within myself first. I had to give to others unconditionally and expect nothing in return. This is a society where everything is not enough.
On the surface, I looked like what most of us put all of our energies into avoiding. I became nothing. I had chosen to make an intuitive and conscious leap into the void so I did not have the luxury of asking for sympathy when the journey became frightening or impossible. Even the least intelligent among us would have suggested that I get a job and feed myself. I knew that I did not have that choice. I knew that once I jumped into the vast and empty ocean I saw before me, there was no measure in between that could save me. I would swim or drown. In water up to my neck, no choices and no turning back would be possible. I knew this was real.
“One of the magnificent things about Jerry is his profound and courageous innocence. He has created a friendship with a part of himself which is in love with the world, and his art displays that. Jerry is one of the few people I know who, in a very quiet way, has actually claimed his happiness in existence.” – David Whyte, author, The Heart Aroused and Crossing the Unknown Sea:
In the cyclical rhythm of life, we eventually come up against a profound moment in which we must decide how much faith and courage we are willing to give ourselves to. Most often, in deciding this, we also establish how much courage we will live with for the rest of our lives. This crucial point usually comes to us at around the age of 30. The opportunities at that time are like no other.
Only the rare human being can leap into a deeper faith beyond that opportune stage in their life. Usually, if we have not done it under the best of circumstances, when the physical and spiritual winds are at our back, then we rarely find courage or reason enough to do it later in life. However, grace has no limits, and this is not written in stone. Only we know what we do with that moment once it arrives in our life, or where we may have set it to rest. Have we chosen the safe life, its foundation rooted in fear? Or have we chosen the Mystery, in which all may be lost or gained? We have only our inner knowing, and as an external indicator, the miracle, which informs us of the power of our choice. No one can judge, yet everyone intuits our choice by the ways in which it resembles their own.
In the Hands of Alchemy | Part 1 of 3
In the Hands of Alchemy: Art & Life of Jerry Wennstrom is directed by Phil Lucas (“Native Americans”) and Mark Sadan (Sesame Street). It includes Depung-Loseling Tibetan Monks blessing a tower that Jerry built. www.handsofalchemy.com
“In the Hands of Alchemy is a delightful film, an alchemical mixture in itself of inspiration, spirituality, art and the story of a remarkable human being.” – David Spangler
Heron Interactive Art Piece
Blaxit
Blaxit
he wants us all
gone from Amerikkka
purge all 52
Main Streets there’s a
main street in every
state your name for the record and
your color state your
color me paranoid color me
afraid of civil war
I would gladly leave this country
voluntarily than stay and be forced to leave this earth
if all the colored people
black and brown go
back where we came from it will
be a pretty bleak bland
picture BLAXIT
all spices are coming with us along with
sweet potatoes / peanuts / mac’n cheese / ribs
all greens are coming also watermelon / peaches / mangos,
all berries / coconut/ pineapple/ avos
pears can stay coffee will come and all manner of liquor and whiskey
we harvest chocolate so it’s coming
gone by sundown
goners we will be if we stay
I don’t have a country but no
matter I will find something
you-all will have
no music it’s
coming with us jazz
and rap and soul and be-bop and
blues always blues
you all can have country
western and classical
we’re taking Beyonce, Toni Morrison,
Oprah, Rihanna you
can have Kanye
Wakanda is us
all black inventions will come like
ice cream / peanut butter
potato chips / guitars
traffic lights / elevators
refrigerators / lawn mowers
baby buggys
we’ll take all living poets of color from
the beat period on
Pete Seeger was wrong: this land IS your land
enriched by OUR blood /sweat / tears
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Two Poems by Joy McDowell
Those Shoes
Three hours inside
the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum.
….Those shoes. The faces and stories.
A long walk across the mall
….underlines my fortunate life.
Grief nibbles at my eyes.
Then a weekend in Miami.
….A niece appears in the opera,
….The Passenger, a moving work
about Auschwitz and the fear
of a former guard who believes
she has seen one of her inmates
on board a ship bound for Brazil.
….Arias spill the misery and torture
….of that brutal slaughter place.
On the stage, the revolving set
alternates between white ship scenes
….and a color worse than somber
for the filthy camp barracks.
….Bonds develop among inmates.
….Callous indifference directs guards.
Then I am back poolside
at my resort eating fruit and
….watching healthy bodies swim.
The air is balmy, the sounds happy,
only inside my head does it remain
….dark and dim.
From an orchestra of organized
horror the sweet sting of a violin
….needles my mind.
In the Dark
Homeless kids pass midnight
on worn couches, do homework
in out-of-gas cars, search a kitchen
for food and don’t have a shower.
Homeless kids don’t take
vacations. A night at the Mission
doesn’t count. They wait in bushes
while their mother begs.
These kids keep changing schools.
Babies wear saturated diapers.
Good kids lie to cover
for drugged-out dads.
Their world doesn’t rely on wrist watches
or calendars and they can only imagine
a bad day getting better, so they
push anger into mouse corners.
Homeless kids have at least one friend
who is a police officer. Homeless kids
help damaged parents. They sleep light
and recognize bad noises.
True Health | What if the Virus is the Medicine?
True Health | What if the Virus is the Medicine?
The emerging pandemic is already a watershed of the early 21st century: things won’t ever be the same. Yet for all that the havoc that the virus is wreaking, directly and indirectly, it may also be part of the bitter medicine the global body needs.
How could adding another crisis to an already crisis-ridden planet possibly be medicinal?
Before we explore that question, we want to be clear: our intent is not to downplay the severity or minimize the importance of lives lost to this disease. Behind the mortality figures lie very real pain and grief, and these numbers, often discussed so casually, are personal, representing the potential loss of our parents, elders, teachers, dance companions, grandmothers or immune-compromised friends. Already, our hearts are breaking for the physical distance with our aging parents until we know if we’re infected. There’s not only a risk of losing beloveds in this time, but having to do so from afar. Our hearts are breaking for those who may die or suffer alone, without the touch of their loved ones. We honor death as a sacred passage, but we do not minimize death, suffering or sickness in the slightest. We pray that each one who transitions from this virus (as from the many other deadly diseases, accidents, overdoses, murders, suicides, mass shootings, and on and on) be met with on the other side by unexpected blessing, connection, peace.
Neither are the economic implications to be taken lightly. Many in this country have already seen massive impact, and the recession has only begun. As always, those closest to the edge will be hit hardest. For some, a month sequestered in beauty could be a vacation. Others have a few months before financial panic sets in. And for others living paycheck to paycheck or gig to gig, there is a great immediacy of struggle. The economic ‘side effects’ of this coronavirus could be catastrophic.
And yet.
For many in our world, the pre-coronavirus status quo was already catastrophic –indeed, for many species and many peoples, the world has already ended. We are in the midst of a crisis of unprecedented magnitude: the choice for humanity is change or die. No one said change would be easy. (Neither is dying.) And incremental change is not enough. It will take radical change to shift our current, calamitous trajectory away from massive environmental devastation, famine, energy crises, war and refugee crises, increasingly authoritarian regimes and escalating inequalities.
What is unsustainable cannot persist, by definition, and we are starting to see this play out.
What hope is there, then? There is the hope that breakdown will become, or coexist with, breakthrough.
There is the hope that what is dying is the caterpillar of immature humanity in order that the metamorphosis yields a stunning emergence. That whatever survives this collective initiation process will be truer, more heart-connected, resilient and generative.
We are entering the chrysalis. There’s no instruction manual for what happens next. But we can learn some things from observing nature (thank you Megan Toben for some of this biological info). For one thing, the chrysalis stage is preceded by a feeding frenzy in which the caterpillar massively overconsumes (sound familiar? We’ve been there for decades). Then its tissues melt into a virtually undifferentiated goo. What remain separate are so-called imaginal cells, which link together and become the template from which the goo reorganizes itself into a butterfly. Does the caterpillar overconsume strategically, or out of blind instinct? Does it know what’s coming and trust in the process, or does it feel like it’s dying? We don’t know. It’s natural to resist radical, painful change. But ultimately there’s little choice but to surrender to it. We can practice welcoming the circumstances that force us away from dysfunctional old patterns, be they economic or personal. We have that opportunity now.
Let’s return to a crucial word, initiation. On an individual level, initiations are those processes or rituals by which one reaches a new state of being and corresponding social status: from girl to woman, from layperson to clergy, and so on. Initiations can be deliberate or spontaneous, as in the case of the archetypal shamanic initiation, which comes by way of a healing crisis. To paraphrase Michael Meade, initiations are events that pull us deeper into life than we would otherwise go. They vary widely from culture to culture and individual to individual, but two characteristics they share are intensity and transformation. They bring us face to face with life and with death; they always involve an element of dying or shedding so that the new can be born.
Most all of us have undergone initiations of one sort of another, from the death of a parent to the birth of a child. Many have experienced initiation in the form of a crisis or trial by fire. Those of us who have gone through more deliberate, ritualized forms of initiation can state unequivocally: the process is not fun, comfortable or predictable. You may well feel like you’re going nuts. You may not know who you are anymore. You don’t get to choose which parts of you die, or even to know ahead of time. One of the overriding feelings is of uncertainty: you don’t know where you’re going, only that there’s no going back. And there’s no way of knowing how long the transformation will take.
It can help to remember that the initiatory chrysalis phase is a sacred time, set apart from normal life. That it has its own demands and its own logic. That it cannot be rushed, only surrendered to. That it may be painful, but also, ultimately, healing.
Imagine what happens when an entire society finds itself in the midst of a critical initiation. Except you don’t have to imagine: it’s already happening, or starting to. It looks like chaos, a meltdown. We’re in a moment of collective, global-level crisis and uncertainty that has little precedent in living memory. The economic machine–the source of our financial needs and also a system that profits from disease, divorce, crime and tragedy–is faced with a dramatic slow-down. We are all facing the cessation of non-essential activities. There is opportunity here, if we claim it.
This is a sacred time.
However, unlike a traditional rite of passage ceremony, there’s no priest or elder with wisdom born of experience holding the ritual container, tracking everything seen and unseen. Instead, all at once there are millions of personal quests inside one enormous initiatory chrysalis. And yet, look closely: amid the goo, you may start to notice imaginal cells appearing. Pockets of people who are aligned with something they may not fully understand, in receipt of a vision or pieces of one, beaming out their signal to say: let’s try something different.
This is an opportunity to loosen our grip on old and familiar ways. Those ways worked for as long as they did, and they got us here, for better and for worse. They seem unlikely to carry us much further. What if we’re instead being asked to feel our way forward, from the heart, without benefit of certainty–which, when concentrated, quickly becomes toxic? No one has all the answers in this or any other time. Right now the questions may be more valuable.
What if we honor this time with sacred respect?
What if we take the time to listen for the boundaries and limits of our Earth mother?
What is truly important?
How can we receive the bitter medicine of the moment deep into our cells and let it align us with latent possibility?
How can we, with the support of the unseen, serve as midwives to all that is dying here and all that is being born?
With these questions resounding, let us s l o w d o w n and listen. For the echo back from the unseen, for whisperings from the depths of our souls and from the heart of the mystery that–no less so in times of crisis–embraces us all.
Initiation of the Butterfly
Both moths and butterflies belong to the Lepidoptera family, meaning that their magnificent, detailed wings are comprised of hundreds of tiny scales, visible only at extreme magnification.
Images | Shutterstock
The Evolutionary Potential of Wealth
The Evolutionary Potential of Wealth
True Wealth | What Matters Most?
We have crossed a threshold, and life just a few months ago feels like the distant past. What matters most now?
When we started working on this edition, fires were raging in Australia, new alarms were being raised by indigenous leaders to protect our waters from dangerous fracking and pipelines, and ‘regenerative agriculture’ was finally gaining some currency in the mainstream. Surely, we decided, our forests and animals, clean water, and rich soil are all true wealth!
And now…wellness. Our health and the wellbeing of our loved ones has suddenly come into laser focus, the freedom to simply take a deep clear breath. Take one now and send loving gratitude to your lungs, your body. Yes, it is true wealth just to breathe. The ability to breathe unites us all.
So, where is ‘money’ in all of this? Is money wealth? We know that the race to accumulate monetary wealth has played a historically destructive role extracting, commodifying and exploiting Nature’s abundance and living beings. And, as the dual forces of the stock market – greed and fear – play a tug-of-war with the economy, millions are losing their small savings, needed retirement funds, future dreams. For those with no savings at all, not having enough money to provide for hungry families is a very deep form of suffering.
So, I’m hesitant to uplift other forms of ‘capital’ right now – intellectual, spiritual, relational…or to speak of the pandemic as a unifying force for good. I’m reminded instead of a gatha one of my teachers recently shared. ‘Breathing in, my mind is clear; breathing out, I don’t know.’ We don’t know where things are heading, whether the virus will unify or divide. Mental clarity though, is more precious than gold – awareness of the body, of the breath, appreciation for the sky and the trees, helpfulness toward our neighbors, compassion for our communities.
Still, I find myself wondering, what is the evolutionary purpose of material wealth? What role could and should money play at this time?
We may think that economic disparity is the inevitable result of human economic activity. I’m not an economist, but what I understand from the study of cultures is that for about 99% of our time on Earth, it wasn’t the case. Only with the rise of agriculture and sedentism, living in one place for a long time, did ‘surplus’ emerge. Prior to that, and even to this day, humans bartered. But barter was never necessarily a direct trade, ‘this for that’. Instead, in most pre-agricultural communities, complex systems of reciprocal exchange, based on kinship, communal memory, and trust were the norm. I might give you a basket of fruit today, and you will recall that my cousin helped you build your home last season – and so when my mother becomes ill next winter, you will send your daughter with healing medicines to help care for her. These agreements were mostly unspoken and mediated by the entire community.
Today however, greed is the norm. It is easy to vilify the ‘one percent’, to blame ‘them’ for the entire mess of greedy modernism. But, looking deeper, we can acknowledge that the seed of greed lives in each of us and is baked in the cake of the consumerist mindset. And to be fair, wealth and generosity can go hand-in-hand.
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. – Matthew 19:24
What do we make of ‘the wealthy’? Some people say Matthew’s pronouncement about the “eye of the needle” may have referred to a literal small gate in the old city of Jerusalem that a camel could pass through only once it shed the belongings strapped to its sides. True or not, we have all heard the phrase, ‘you can’t take it with you’. Then why do we live in a world where the richest 1% own half the world’s money? Could this extraordinary disparity have an evolutionary purpose?
Let’s consider the argument that many of modernity’s increasingly complex problems will require vast sums of concentrated wealth to ‘fix’, or at least address. New viruses need new vaccines. Worldwide carbon sequestration, forest conservation, soil regeneration, wildlife protection, water purification, and global education all require investment and charitable giving on massive scales. That ‘spike’ on the right-hand side of the wealth chart? Could it be the evolutionary sword that helps us break through to the next planetary era? Wicked wealth to solve wicked problems?
Brian Swimme reminds us that all accumulated wealth is comprised of surplus photons from the Sun. If we are looking for a model of supreme cosmological generosity, we can find it at the center of our solar system, he says. The Sun sacrifices more than 4 billion tons of its body into energy every second, radiating freely in all directions, with no discrimination. Swimme likens this to the evolutionary urge in the human heart to give freely to others – our time, attention, and care – to our children and loved ones, our communities, and beings in distress.
Right now, the greatest generational wealth transfer in human history is underway. Over the next 25 years, 45 million U.S. households will pass a mind-boggling $68 trillion to their children. Can Swimme’s cosmological model point young inheritors toward a new vision for giving during this pivotal evolutionary moment? To learn more I convened with millennials at Family Office and Family Foundation events, and at the NEXUS USA Summit in Washington, D.C. NEXUS serves ‘the next generation of influential families around the world”.
What I learned was encouraging, and even inspiring. There is a growing cohort of young inheritors of great wealth who are waking up to the evolutionary potential of their money.
This cohort wants to do the right thing, but just like us, they need help overcoming their fear, and in some cases, shame about money and the historic trauma attached to it. They need to unravel complex family dynamics and archaic family investments. They need wise guidance and initiation experiences to help them understand the unique role they can play when they align their values with highest Purpose. Let us not disparage their aspiration. We need them, and they need us. Much good can, and has been done by philanthropy and social-impact investment when it is driven by compassion and fairness. Innovation, guided by spirit, transforms.
Sixty thousand years ago, a cascading series of events diminished the entire human population to about ten thousand freezing, scared, resilient members of Homo sapiens. These are our common grandmothers and grandfathers, the evolutionary portal through which each of us has passed. This is our tribe. The human family may be greatly diminished some day again, if not by this pandemic then by some other series of events. Or maybe this is the beginning of the great unraveling. ‘Sole’ survival should not be our focus. ‘Soul’ survival should.
Whatever happens, we have the capacity right now to breathe, to regard the sky in awe, to still hear birdsong, to smile to a child, and embrace a loved one. Let us unite our hearts and bring forward the best ideas, the best blueprints, the best stories and songs, humanity’s best efforts for those generations yet to come. Let us model the planetary era we wish to usher in, giving, receiving, sharing freely. We need everyone’s gifts, and we need to be able to offer our own, in all directions, like the Sun.
Please look to the wisdom of the writers and artists in this edition to inspire and guide you. Kosmos is a refuge and a wellspring of hope in troubled times. A new world and a new human is evolving, and you can track and participate in this unfolding through Kosmos.
May all beings be well.
Economic Justice and Ecological Regeneration
Economic Justice and Ecological Regeneration
(Editor’s Note: In honor of the upcoming 20-year anniversary of the Earth Charter, Great Transition Initiative has published a forum on the legacy of the Charter role of universal ethics. For the full forum, see https://greattransition.org/gti-forum/great-ethics-transition.)
It is of the utmost importance to establish the right framework of values for the deep transformation of civilization that is needed. As I have laid out in The Patterning Instinct, different cultures have constructed vastly different systems of values, and those values have shaped history. Similarly, the values we choose today as a society will shape our future. The stakes for getting it right could hardly be higher.1
In recent decades, neoliberalism has established a dominant pseudo-ethical regime based on a flawed notion of untrammeled, market-based individual freedom. Our overriding task is to substitute this with an ethic of shared responsibility and interdependence. We need a solid, rigorous foundation for this ethic. Where do we find it?
Too much of the conversation on ethics focuses on binaries. But binaries simply encourage different camps to put up barricades against each other. We must move beyond binaries to a truly integrated ethical framework—one that incorporates the rational and intuitive, the scientific and the spiritual.
Fortunately, in recent decades, the combination of complexity science, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and systems thinking has given us a platform for the kind of integration we need. Recognizing an evolutionary basis for values does not mean falling prey to the reductionist determinism of outmoded theorists such as Richard Dawkins, whose “selfish gene” myth has been superseded by modern evolutionary biology.2
The major evolutionary transitions of life on Earth have, in fact, been characterized by increases in cooperation, the most recent of which was the emergence of hominids. Facing perilous savannah conditions, our ancestors discovered that, through collaboration, they could protect and feed themselves far more effectively. They evolved moral emotions, such as a sense of fairness, cooperation, and altruism, which enabled them—in what has been called a “reverse dominance hierarchy”—to collaboratively restrain the occasional dangerously aggressive male driven by the atavistic impulse for domination that we see in other primates.3
These moral emotions formed the basis of the morality that characterizes our species. Sophisticated tests have shown that, faced with a choice, our initial impulse is to cooperate, and only after time to reflect do selfish behaviors emerge. In various experiments, prelinguistic infants show a rudimentary sense of fairness, justice, empathy, compassion, and generosity, along with a clear ability to distinguish between kind and cruel actions. Morality is intrinsic to the human condition.4
So why do we live in a world filled with endless examples of outrageous immorality, where dangerous aggressive males still wield power? With the rise of agriculture and sedentism, the power balance shifted to those who succeeded in establishing hierarchical dominance, leading eventually to the rise of patriarchal societies that rewarded machismo and violence—what Riane Eisler has termed “domination systems.”5
The world history of the past millennia mostly chronicles conflicts between different domination systems, one of which—European civilization—eventually became globally dominant in the past few centuries, forcing its unique dualistic cosmology on those it conquered. This is the worldview that most people now take for granted—one based on separation and domination, seeing humans as selfish, rational competitors, defined by their individuality, utterly separate from a desacralized nonhuman nature that has been relegated to a mere mechanistic resource without intrinsic value.
This worldview is a far cry from the shared ethical basis of cross-cultural traditions throughout history, and has been comprehensively invalidated by modern scientific findings. Instead, systems science confirms the insights shared by wisdom teachings across the ages: that we are all intrinsically interconnected. The deep interpenetration of all aspects of reality—what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing”—must be at the heart of an ethical framework for political and cultural transformation.
Our expression of morality is, to a very large extent, a function of our identity. If you see yourself as an isolated individual, your values will accordingly lead you to the pursuit of your own happiness at the expense of others. If you identify with your community, your values will emphasize the welfare of the group. When you recognize yourself as part of nature, you will automatically feel drawn to nurture and protect the natural world.
Over the past several centuries, even as European imperialism ravaged the rest of the world, there was also a gradual expansion of identity, from the parochial to a broader vision of shared humanity, which has led to what Martin Luther King famously referred to as the “moral arc” bending toward justice. This has inspired concepts such as inalienable human rights and led to ever-widening attempts to legislate moral justice into national and international codes of conduct. The Earth Charter stands as an exemplary model of this kind of expansive moral vision.
However, in our current predicament, facing impending ecological catastrophe and the potential of civilizational collapse, we must ask whether this moral expansion is a case of too little, too late. What can be done to catalyze it and redirect our terrifying trajectory? Is it possible to develop a cross-cultural global moral vision for humanity that extends to all life on Earth, and could inspire a comprehensive transition toward economic justice and ecological regeneration?
While those of us enculturated in the West have had to rediscover our interconnectedness, traditional cultures have maintained the deeply embedded principles that characterized core human morality from earliest times. Comanche social activist LaDonna Harris has identified four central values known as the four R’s that are shared by indigenous peoples around the world, which together affirm the interconnectedness of all aspects of creation: Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Redistribution. They each pertain to different types of obligation that inform a person’s life. Relationship is a kinship obligation, recognizing value not just in family but in “all our relations” including animals, plants, and the living Earth. Responsibility is the community obligation, identifying the imperative to nurture and care for those relations. Reciprocity is a cyclical obligation to balance what is given and taken; and Redistribution is the obligation to share what one possesses—not just material wealth, but one’s skills, time, and energy.6
Other sources of wisdom, such as Taoism, Buddhism, or Confucianism, each offer unique teachings into the ethical implications of the fundamental unity of all life. “Everything from…husband, wife, and friends, to mountains, rivers…birds, beasts, and plants, all should be truly loved in order that the unity may be reached,” declared Neo-Confucian sage Wang Yangming.
Our crucial task is to incorporate these principles of traditional wisdom into an integrated system of values that can redirect humanity away from catastrophe, and toward a flourishing future. One where our shared identity expands beyond parochial boundaries to include, not just all humanity, but all sentient beings, and the vibrancy of the entire living Earth. Ultimately, it is our values that guide our actions—and will shape our future.
Endnotes
1. Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2017).
2. Patrick Bateson, Nancy Cartwright, John Dupré, Kevin Laland, and Denis Noble, “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives,” Royal Society | Interface Focus 7, no. 5 (2017).
3. Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
4. Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2013).
5. Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry, Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
6. La Donna Harris and Jacqueline Wasilewski, “Indigeneity, an Alternative Worldview: Four R’s (Relationship, Responsibility, Reciprocity, Redistribution) Vs. Two P’s (Power and Profit). Sharing the Journey Towards Conscious Evolution,” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 21 (2004): 489–503.
Hopeful Essay Penned by Firelight
Hopeful Essay Penned by Firelight
May I begin my hopeful essay with negatives? We can’t ignore their reality. Can we just get them out of the way? We all know them.
Or do we?
We know about the bees and the bugs.
In my retirement, I am engaged in bee conservation. Unheralded in the media, recent studies found native bee decline up to 90 percent in some places around the world, including parts of the northeastern United States. I remember when you couldn’t drive on the highway without your windshield smearing with dead bees and bugs.
We know about the ocean.
This is the kind of information you can know is true but still can’t believe. An island of plastic in the Pacific, growing daily, the size of Texas? Texas? The ocean kelp off northern California, where I live, is now considered decimated beyond recovery by acidity and invasive urchins. The urchins that have eaten the kelp to extinction are now dying for lack of food. As are the otters whose population exploded feasting on urchins.
We know about the birds.
People seem to understand about the birds. The loss of birds illuminates the big picture. I find even today’s young adults remember there were more birds. More songbirds. Even the annoying starlings; there once were many more. The same pesticides killing insects are hurting the birds outright, and again, by destroying their food. All birds eat insects at some stage of their lifecycle.
And many insects eat other insects at some stage of their lifecycle. And so goes the spiral of extinctions.
It seems difficult to get the negatives out of the way.
What questions started this? Is the needed transformation gaining? Do I have hope for our future?
I am writing in the harsh light of a lantern and my blazing wood stove on the fourth night of a “public safety” blackout currently forecast to last for three more days. I am not near a fire or an evacuation zone. But that could change as quickly as a new fire report.
I ventured out this morning for coffee, using precious gas. The only coffeeshop open had a huge line. The crowd was relaxed, even jovial, patient. Everyone understands the roar of the generator; the menu is limited. We are mostly locals. The highway reopened yesterday, and evacuations to the south were lifted, so many refugees left. Talk is of the gas shortage, new evacuations to the east, the latest rumor on when power will be restored. Everyone is angry at the utility company.
The gas shortage is especially dangerous. We live on a land island. Ocean to the west, mountains to the east. Rivers and floodplains to the south, the no man’s land of the Lost Coast to the north. There are only two roads “over the hill,” as we call it. Only two gas stations open. In an evacuation, there would not be enough gas to fill enough tanks to get us all “over the hill.” Nonetheless, we feel safe. We are at the ocean; this is not a fire zone.
We all know that Sunday night Sonoma County was evacuated all the way to the ocean. First. Time. Ever.
I drove home feeling resigned, fearless, making the best of it.
That’s what we do here. We often have lengthy outages during winter storms. For several years, the outages in my town have been hours, not days, but more remote areas of our rural county are seldom as lucky.
Later in my day, I talked to a family member who was outside the fire area anxiously monitoring news. I heard for the first time of people pelting utility workers with rocks.
I will say I was stunned. But that does not convey the complexity of my feelings. Appalled. Scared.
But here, on our island, we know the line workers are the heroes. Right?
Or am I fooling myself?
Why is it so hard for people to understand how things really work? To recognize who are the real criminals in this disaster?
Do I have anything more than questions?
Where is the hope in this hopeful essay?
For a current volunteer project, I drafted an article on gardening to support bees and shared it with an associate for proofreading. They returned it completely rewritten. Every bit of urgency gone—replaced by a breezy style and the assertion that helping the bees is easy.
I told them impatiently we will not use the word ‘easy’ in the article.
Their critique was that my copy was too insistent; it implied the reader “should” act; that we must act to save the bees. The “should” word is one of dubious repute, often deserved. But it did not appear in the article. I realized during the discussion they were resisting the very idea of a moral imperative, a responsibility to act. As I believe we have.
On a recent Friday, I staffed a bee information booth at a city block party in Fort Bragg, population 7,300, nearby my home. Interest was high, many visitors, many conversations. Toward the end of the evening, a local rancher, definitely not retired and in his late 80s, approached and asked, “What can I do to help bees?” “You can stop using Roundup,” I answered quickly. For a second, he looked like I’d slapped him. Was I too flippant?
“I’ve already done that,” he replied, “What else can I do?”
The ensuing conversation showed me one man’s awareness and concern for bees—and his clear understanding of their importance to life as we know it. Against my assumptions, he has already taken action on his concern.
We only move forward by action.
We should hope. Hope is imperative.
And as long as I see people ready to act, I have hope.
The prompt that inspired this may await its answers, but I drafted this in the semi-dark in a flash of emotion, and I will brook no rewrite.
Closer Looking | Microscopy and Aboriginal Art
Closer Looking | Microscopy and Aboriginal Art
Featured image | Cultural Conformity, by Graham Toomey
“This artwork captures my spiritual experience of walking along the river and gazing into the water and feeling the energy and presence of my land and people. Just as an electron microscope can allow us to visit a world far away from normality, Aboriginal spirituality too provides a world of beauty and magic that lives and survives around us.”
This exhibition is a conjunction of many strands for me as a curator. My background is as a researcher in biomedical science with a PhD in molecular biology. After years in the lab, I began collecting and managing microscopic, medical, and conceptual images for the Wellcome Trust in London. The power of these images to communicate and inspire has always been clear to me.
Ever since I was a child, I have also been interested in Aboriginal culture and art, ecological sustainability, and the need for a more integrated and holistic view of our world. So, on returning to Australia to work as Marketing and Business Development Manager for Microscopy Australia, I seized opportunities to bring stunning microscopic images to the public through touring exhibitions. – first through Incredible Inner Space and now through the creation of Stories and Structures – New Connections. These strands are all evident in this exhibition, revealing some of the rich parallels between Indigenous Australian visual story-telling and the microscopic structures hidden in the natural world. In some works, you can see that the artists have incorporated aspects of the micrographs, and in others, the artists have painted what they normally paint and let the inherent similarities reveal themselves. In indigenous cultures, important stories, holding traditional knowledge in the paintings, serve as a record of how the land and creatures were created, how they interconnect and how people relate to them.
Stories and Structures – New Connections delivers a new vision of Australia and its stories. I hope this exhibition will open new conversations and provide opportunities to make new and lasting connections and cross-cultural reconciliation. (Jennifer Whiting)
Haplosporidium parasite
These organisms mainly invade the cells of saltwater and freshwater invertebrates such as oysters, mussels, abalone, and crabs. Infestations are worst in the more intensively farmed situations and can result in considerable death and destruction.
The whole cell is approximately 5 micrometres wide. (1 micrometre is one thousandth of a millimetre).
Image: Ian Kaplin
Beauty in Survival
I made the connection with colonisation in this image. As one cell (entity) is being attacked by another. I wanted to create an image that displayed the versatility, agility, and survival of different Aboriginal groups within a larger context. There is immense beauty in survival.
Artist: Bronwyn Bancroft
White Ochre
This image shows the overlapping plates found in this naturally occurring white pigment, also known as kaolin and china clay. These plates reflect the underlying arrangement of the layers of aluminium, silicon, and oxygen atoms in the crystal lattice and give the ochre its slippery feel. As well as its use as a pigment, this mineral is used in the production of porcelain, paper, cosmetics, as an aid to blood clotting, and used to treat upset stomachs and diarrhoea.
This image shows an area 185 nanometres wide (1 nanometre is one millionth of a millimetre)
Image: Hongwei Liu
Birnoo Country
This painting shows the hills of Gordon’s country, Birnoo Country. Gordon was born there, and when he grew up, he mustered cattle all throughout this country for many years—the way his father taught him to. This Country today covers what is currently known as Alice Downs Station.
As he walked across this land with family, there was always an abundance of bush food for everyone. The White Ochre micrograph reminds Gordon of the hills that surround his country, and he depicts the tonal variation through different coloured ochres employed.
Artist: Gordon Barney, Warmun Art Centre
Fish Eye – Blood Flow
This micrograph shows blood vessels at the back of a fish’s eye. There are larger vessels at the top left and many smaller vessels at the bottom right.
During dry periods, many freshwater fish retreat to water holes and damp areas where they remain until rain replenishes the rivers and creeks. The widest part of the pigment granule layer is about 2 micrometres (1 micrometre is one thousandth of a millimetre).
Image: Shaun Collin
Dry River Bed
The painting is about a dry river bed. The big red area at the bottom is our camp—it is alive. The red water holes still have life. The red is the life blood.
Artist: Kurun Warun
If you like this painting, Kurun has any related ones for sale directly or through Artlandish Art Gallery, Japingka Aboriginal Art and Aboriginal Art Galleries.
Moreton Bay Fig Leaf
Cells in a fig leaf. Like the gum leaves, the fig leaf cells contain dome-like chloroplasts that capture the Sun’s energy to make starch. The starch fuels the tree’s growth allowing it to provide food and shelter for birds, animals, and insects. These trees also provide a wealth of resources for Aboriginal people.
The identity of the black areas remains a mystery.
The area in this image is 52 micrometres across (1 micrometre is one thousandth of a millimetre).
Image: Kathryn Green
Fig Tree Leaves
The Fig Tree is very symbolic to the Yaegl people. It is the tree that is at which centre of many of the creation stories from around Maclean (NSW). Today a large Fig Tree stands proud at the centre of Ulgundahi Island, a small island in the Clarence River that my mother and her family, along with other Aboriginal families, grew up on. I chose to look deeper into the leaves of a fig tree and was fascinated to see the build-up and layering of cells that go into making these beautiful leaves. When creating this piece, it was important to represent the cellular layers within the painting as they assist in telling the story.
Artist: Frances Belle Parker
Collagen Fibrils
These long fibrils of collagen protein give skin its underlying strength and toughness. The fine lines running across the fibrils show the precise arrangement of the individual collagen molecules that make up the fibril. The ones on the left are lying flat, and the ones on the right are dipping downwards and have been sliced through at an angle giving rise to the more oval shapes. Having the fibrils running at different angles helps strengthen the skin when it is pulled in different directions. Skin can be processed into leather, and it is the intermeshed collagen fibrils that make leather so tough.
The fibrils are 75 nanometres wide (1 nanometre is one millionth of a millimetre)
Image: Anne Simpson
Skin
Skin is a celebration of my family’s Totem, the Saltwater Crocodile, and our landscape. Even though I live in the Northern Territory, part of my heritage comes from the Torres Strait and creating this work represents my Skin’s affiliations and my place there, while paying homage to my heritage. The idea is to recreate the scales of a saltwater crocodile, the flow of the water and landscape. Skin can be read as a close-up of a reptile’s skin, and as a landscape both seen from a distance and as close-up details of rocks and sand. Everything is connected—the land, the water, and us. Like the Crocodile, we are Saltwater People with an ancient lineage.
Artist: Joshua Bonson
If you like this painting, Joshua has similar ones for sale through his website.
Moth Sperm
The dark, kidney-shaped areas are called mitochondria, which provide the power to the structures composed of the circular array of dots. These nanoscale structures make the sperm tail beat so it can swim toward the egg and fertilise it. They are, therefore, essential to continuing the circle of life. For example, the witchetty grub (ngarlkirdi) is the caterpillar stage of the moth, Endoxyla leucomochla, which wouldn’t be able to breed successfully if these structures were damaged or absent.
Each circle of dark dots is 220 nanometres in diameter. (1 nanometre is one millionth of a millimetre).
Image: Greg Rouse
All images © 2019 Microscopy Australia
Witchetty Grub Dreaming
This painting depicts Napaljarri and Nungarrayi women collecting ‘ngarlkirdi’ (witchetty grubs) in an area known as Kunajarrayi (Mount Nicker) 200 km to the south-west of Yuendumu. Witchetty grubs can be eaten cooked or raw and are edible in all phases of their life cycle. The design of this painting also symbolises important features of initiation ceremonies for young Japaljarri and Jungarrayi men. The area contains many caves (‘pirnki’) overlooking an important ceremonial site associated with the Ngarlkirdi Jukurrpa. This story belongs to the Nungarrayi/Jungarrayi and Napaljarri/Japaljarri Kinship Subsections. In Warlpiri paintings, traditional iconography is used to represent the Jukurrpa, particular sites, and other elements. Circular shapes are often used to depict the important sites for the ceremony and the long straight lines represent ‘witi’ ceremonial poles, which play an important role during the initiation ceremonies.
Artist: Jennifer Napaljarri Lewis, Warlukurlangu Artists of Yuendumu
A Story Still Unfolding
A Story Still Unfolding
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard
The creek behind my house seldom freezes. Her flowing waters can be seen from my back porch this time of year through the naked trees. Ridley Creek’s source is about 15 miles upstream from here and she pours out into the tidal Delaware River about 15 miles southeast. Yet, her journey is much longer than mere miles, for she has been a cloud, the tears of a child, and a rainstorm in some of her previous lives and her future is a story still unfolding.
Likewise, here we are at a singular moment. If we could freeze the river of Time, we might skate ahead and learn our fate. We can’t. However, we do know that in this moment the future and past are also present. We hold the past and future within us. Upstream…downstream. Therefore, we can’t explore the theme of our winter edition, Possible Futures, without looking deeply at the past.
I asked author Jeremy Lent, who has spent a lot of time studying human civilizations, where we lost our way as a species that shares. His insights bear reflection if we want to understand where our present trajectory may take us. Read our conversation in The Next Civilization.
We also look back to look forward at the works of Thomas Berry and Rudolf Steiner. The Rights of Nature movement, that Berry so strongly endorsed, is informing new perspectives about our living Earth, and Steiner’s ‘biodynamic agriculture’, among other economic insights, are amazingly fresh today with regenerative culture on the rise. Rob Hopkins, a cofounder of the global Transition Town movement, looks back at how his community transformed Totnes in the UK, to become a model for current and future transitioners worldwide. The fundamental ingredient is imagination, he says, as we move from What Is to What If.
Personal tragedy also shapes our perspective on the future and there are important, albeit painful, insights to be gained when sorrow strikes close to home. What does it mean when all possibility of ‘a future’ seemingly ends? Kosmos contributor Michael Gray courageously expresses the grief of losing his son to suicide last spring. And our dear poet-friend, Lee McCormack, receives a terminal diagnosis with inspiring grace and strength. How do we live into such experiences of finality? The Unexpected Journey of Caring, by Donna Thomson and Zachary White, offers some transformational guidance.
There is much more to share—wonderful galleries of art by Aboriginal artists and by Flemish-Congolese artist/activist Kito Mbiango, and music from prisons, Pros and Cons, a social justice program founded by Hugh Christopher Brown. Kosmos music editor Kari Auerbach has also assembled a sacred season gift for all of us—a collection of inspiring recordings from her two years with Kosmos. Play it here, while you enjoy this edition.
A strong current of hope runs through thoughtful essays by our readers, and a spotlight on Global Social Witnessing, our capacity to mindfully attend to global events with an embodied awareness. Or as Otto Scharmer says, “collapsing the boundary between me and the other more and more. And really putting myself into the service and support of the evolution of another and the evolution of the collective.”
Putting ourselves into service—like the creek behind my house which supplies 40,000 of my neighbors with about two and a half million gallons of clean drinking water per day. This spiritual quality of givingness is not separate from the creek’s physical existence, and yet it is transcendent. We, too, are this way. The phenomenon of human existence on planet Earth may be imperiled, yet our journey is much longer than mere miles. We are Spirit manifest in a web of Life and meaning, and our future is a story still unfolding.
Enjoy this edition. We have ambitious plans for 2020, and we are so happy to share the journey with you.
In Loving Service,
Rhonda Fabian
About Our Cover | ‘Witchetty Grub Dreaming’
Jennifer Napaljarri Lewis has been painting with Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation in Yuendumu, a remote Aboriginal community 290 km north-west of Alice Springs, since 2009. Jennifer belongs to the Pitjantjatjara people and her traditional land is Mutitjula at the eastern end of Uluru. She has a close connection with the Mutitjula Community and it was there that her family taught her to paint. She loves painting and uses an unrestricted palette with traditional patterns and design integrated with a modern individualistic style to depict her traditional Jukurrpa stories. To see more of Jennifer’s work or to contact her, go to warlu.com.
Art in a Time of Catastrophe
Art in a Time of Catastrophe
Featured image | Sketchbook drawing, Sarah Gillespie
“What can poetry say in a time of catastrophe?” asks the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, referring to the catastrophe of Palestinian exile, the Nakba. His question inspires us to ask the same question about the place of creative art at this time of ecological catastrophe: climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, the sixth extinction of non-human species.
We borrow Darwish’s word ‘catastrophe’ with care. We might have used ‘crisis,’ but a crisis is a turning point, often used to refer to that point in illness when the patient may recover or not. There cannot, however, be a simple ‘recovery’ of planetary health; the changes that have been wrought to Earth’s systems are too extensive. A catastrophe, in contrast, is an overturning, a reversal. Whatever we do, the oil has been burned, the carbon is in the atmosphere, the living world is impoverished. We are at the end of the civilization as we have known it; things are not going to stop falling apart. Human—Western—culture is overwhelming the great forces of nature and, in turn, nature will overwhelm culture.
At such a time, are the arts irrelevant, a luxury? To the contrary, they have an essential place both in grieving for what is lost and in imagining new human possibilities. Facts and figures don’t influence people directly—all science has told us about climate change has had little impact. It is the stories we tell ourselves, the metaphors we draw on, that create our world. The mess we are in reflects the stories that have dominated Western culture: stories of human supremacy, stories that separate humans from Nature, that emphasize economic growth at the expense of human and ecological wellbeing. Stories that we ‘rational’ creatures no longer need stories. Whoever can change these pervasive narratives can change our core beliefs—for better or for worse. Visual art, prose, poetry, music, drama can all help provide space and imagination for new stories to emerge and artful means to express them.
And yet, we don’t know what new stories we might tell. We modern humans do not know how to respond to the catastrophe of our times. The old stories have lost their power; there is a shared, yet scarcely articulated, sense of profound unease. As Leonard Cohen puts it, “The blizzard, the blizzard of the world | Has crossed the threshold | And it has overturned | The order of the soul.”
Then, there is art as beauty. Beauty can rip the fabric of the taken-for-granted world, create an opening to a different experience. And art may also offer us a place of beauty that can sustain us through darkness, even make beauty out of that darkness. This is what the poet John Keats was pointing to when he celebrated ‘negative capability’: “being in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact & reason.”
In our own art and writing, we seek to experience and communicate a particular story—a story which restores a sense of the living presence of Earth and ourselves as a part. How do we learn to listen, to hear the voices of the river and the trees once again? How do we move away from the conceit that humans are special, separate, and learn to take our place within the community of life? And as we learn how to do this for ourselves, how do we draw on our creative practices to communicate this possibility to our fellow humans?
Sarah describes working outside with a sketchbook: “After a period of settling, several hours into the drawing, I find myself becoming absent. In quieting myself, something shifts. Now less full of my ‘self,’ I sit still, looking, breathing, drawing. On a really good day, the presence of the tree, or the nest, or the light on the water, whatever it is I am making a study of, comes up and towards me. There’s nothing metaphysical or theoretical about this; it is a physical feeling of empathy, of absolute sameness. I find this an enormous relief. It is my way in. Having some sense that we are not separate, that is our biggest hope.”
Peter’s writing practice is similar. “I sit for long periods in my orchard. I listen to the wind high in the trees, watch the way it spins eddies across the meadow grass, follow the local jackdaws as they flock noisily across the sky. Sometimes, I am captured by something so simple that it draws me in—a dewdrop on a twig one misty morning, the pattern of light and shadow cast on the wall, the profound silence that appears to lie behind all sounds. Watching, listening, scribbling notes: if I am patient, I may find that my sense of self has become diffuse and uncertain, with no clear boundaries between in here and out there.”
Working in a studio is different, says Sarah. “I am inside, with doors, with learned skills and familiar materials. I can’t just put my sketchbooks out in the world and hope that they will do the same for others as they did for me sitting there. Work in the studio is the art of transformation: to make something with all the skill and years and hours that I have mustered to speak about non-separateness.” Peter adds, “Notes made outside, maybe written in the dark or on a notebook soaked in salt water, must be crafted into a narrative the speaks to a reader.”
So why, Sarah asks herself, do this in such an inefficient way, taking hours and days to make drawings, one tiny mark at a time? Surely the story could be better told with a video blog, and Instagram account. “But the materiality and the slowness of the work is more appropriate. I make gesso with bone ash and use rabbit skin size; draw with silver or burned wood; engrave on copper. I don’t use acrylics to paint or plastic to engrave. Partly because they just mean more plastic that gets washed down the drain. But, more importantly, these natural materials speak to me deeply and handling them everyday has an effect on me. It is a practice of preparation, like the Zen discipline of giving full attention to sweeping the floor.”
Peter’s process is equally slow: “I set out on two long ecological pilgrimages sailing around the western coasts of the British Isles, travelling at walking pace across the sea. Long, slow travel takes me out of the taken-for-granted structures and habits of everyday life: work, family, relationships, play, news, entertainment, all of which shape the story I play in my head and draw me into a conformity conducive to modern life. It is not easy to move across the boundaries between worlds when locked in everyday familiarity: the practical challenges of pilgrimage spin the human heart and mind into new realizations.”
So, what place art in a time of catastrophe? For us both, it is about making openings, like putting your fingers into a knot and teasing it apart, making enough space so others might share with us this precious and tenuous truth that we sometimes glimpse: that we are not separate. For if we know we are not separate, we are, perhaps, less willing to harm.
We see these as practices of humility, learning slowly—so very slowly—to take our proper place on Earth. And to offer glimpses of this to others.
This original essay can be found at the author’s blog, On Presence: Essays | Drawings available from the authors.
