The River Threshold
The River Threshold
THE ENDING CAME three years ago, from the day before we went to the river. One version of the ending, anyway. She and I sat at a picnic table near a stream with a therapist who was also my uncle, and we said out loud in the summer June air that we couldn’t give what the other wanted. She said she couldn’t live with me anymore and be who she wanted to be. I said I couldn’t live indefinitely separate and fragmented. We said these things for the purpose of freeing each other, though freedom didn’t liberate like we thought. There have been numerous endings. Another ending came down by the river, three years and a day later.
I’ve come to learn that transitions don’t often look like crossing a straight line. We circle back, or in some way forward, because circling is rarely a straightforward repetition of what came before. Instead, it’s a need to follow-up, continue, revolve. Grief is the emotion and the practice that accompanies irreversible transition – like final goodbyes, certainly all kinds of death, even births because all beginnings start with an ending.
Grief never completely goes away either, circling like water cycles, tears turned to thunderstorms, so pieces left from these endings didn’t get cleaned up, growing back together again in a hurtful dark. John O’Donohue, poet-priest from Ireland, pictured this process like being “ambushed” in the middle of daily tasks, when you think you finally have your heart back. Ambushes, small and large, kept surprising me, so I knew I needed to transition again, or make visible a practice of my transition. I felt ready to cross the threshold into the next time of my life, to leave behind an architecture I no longer lived in but perhaps occasionally squatted in, a memory palace where particular dreams still had a haunting life. As far as I was concerned, those dreams were welcome to remain encamped there, but I needed to move out.
Another poet, David Whyte, once remarked that the greater difficulty of a relationship’s end may not be leaving the person but leaving the shared dreams. No matter who or what comes next, he said, “no matter what species of happiness you would share with them – you will never, ever share those particular dreams again, with that particular tonality and coloration.” The end is an extinction.
But I was ready, really actually ready, for a new lease on a house of life. Life was moving on, as it always does, and I was mostly living it, though parts of me weren’t. I needed help to step through the doorway from this dying house. So two friends came to help me cross the threshold.
***
DAVE AND KYLE have been involved in all this from the beginning, from building that house, talking about its construction, to sitting in its loneliness with me, now helping me move out. Kyle and his wife Ginger even officiated the wedding, the ceremonial moving in, talking in the thick damp Arkansas heat about marriage as coevolution, which confirms the end is indeed an extinction. Kyle also first offered me the language of architecture for understanding the close intimacy, the careful maintenance, of inhabiting a marriage, and the many painful ways its borders can be violated. Dave was at the wedding too, reading Wendell Berry’s “The Country of Marriage,” a long poem about marriage as a place to adapt to, where general affection becomes particular love and an unfamiliar landscape becomes home. Country is a distinct metaphor from architecture, though similar enough that selectively re-reading the poem now eerily surveys a different country. Or perhaps the same one, now seen with grief after exile, anguish after extinction.
Instead of moonlit longing and restful union, consider insomniac nightmares held captive by the one you love: “I dream of you walking at night along the streams . . . You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.”
Or the dizzying unknowing of why we were drawn together at all, times when no words came, ambushed instead with unexpected visions:
Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
. . . the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed . . .
And then, with a twist of finality, twisted from the abundant freedom of self-release into the suffocating abandonment of drowning:
What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much.
Grief can do that to you, make you question everything you thought you knew or understand, like poems or people. Did I hallucinate all that tenderness? Those times that felt easy and comfortable? Did I make that whole country up?
Dave has crossed through this country in his own life. I’ve sometimes been jealous of his journey because he was much less responsible for its ending than I am for mine. But I no longer want to linger on the sharp fault line edges of my flaws, though the voices in my head, sometimes spoken in her tone, remind me of who I’ve been when I tried to defy my failings. It always takes at least two, but could I even be good, the voices asked, when I’m so imperfect? Doesn’t imperfection mean I deserve what I got? “Flickers of guilt kindle regret/For all that was left unsaid or undone,” wrote John O’Donohue about the heat I’ve felt. Guilt is a real condition, regret a necessary emotion, but I no longer hate myself and I want to keep it that way.
My friends came for a June weekend and we talked, hiked, looked at my gardens and the nursery where another friend and I grow trees and ourselves. That first night, successively drinking whiskey, bourbon, and gin, I told them that I couldn’t shake the image of threshold, its old word-roots grown from a double sense of treading and separating, walking and winnowing. Crossing over something into somewhere else, returning changed to a changed place. In her manual on power, Cyndi Suarez reminds that rites of passage always “begin with a threshold – a challenge one cannot meet without transcending one’s current idea of oneself”: a strategy for meeting needs no longer works, a story no longer rings true, an initiatory move into a new age. That transcendence was what I was looking for. The earth also has thresholds, from one biome to the next or when slow small disturbances finally crest into quick changes. That’s where I was, at the biome doorway. I needed to physically walk through a threshold, to separate myself from the past by treading, not just talking about it.
They listened, asked questions. Dave wondered if there was anything else I needed to say to her. I knew there was, especially towards the very end, but I’d never really let myself speak directly to her those words out of fear of making it worse, out of fear of sounding like I was avoiding myself. I spoke countless things to her in our short shared life: some beautiful, some vulnerable, some cynical, some that still taste bitter in the mouth. After too much time defending and deflecting, the bitterness baked into a story solely filled with all my dysfunctions and imbalances. Usually all I could see were those sharp fault lines, all my worst moments carved in stone. Dave told me that a grief ritualist suggested to him that he say his unsaid words out loud, as if to his former partner but directed to a rock. Your soul, the ritualist explained, doesn’t know the difference between the firmness of the rock and the firmness of her. Your soul simply needs to speak. Maybe, Dave added, I also needed to say out loud a counter-narrative to the bitter stone story.
I told them I wanted to be by the river. I’d spent a lot of time there, crying my grief into the flow, ritualizing my return to this chosen home, joyful play with friends floating in the current. The river felt right. Partly because I think emotions move like water, and grief is like their river. My friend Karla McLaren, loving guide to emotions and empathy, says that grief is unlike sadness, which arises to help us let go of what’s no longer working but we could choose to hold onto. Grief arises when something is actually lost, a never-to-return loss, taking us down to the deep places because they are the only places left to go. Grief moves at extinction events, when things die. I decided to take grief to the South Fork of the Shenandoah, to the river I know.
Before Kyle and Dave came, my grief had already moved me to the river, stepping in, lifting my feet, floating further down. I swam over to a shelf of rock cropped out from the steep bank beneath the road. I undressed, reentered naked, with my grief, to midriver where the current swept swiftly. I bore my feet down into the stone and used an old drifting mop handle to anchor myself. I didn’t know what I was going to say, with so little to draw on in my so-called culture, this whitewashed colonizing culture, death-denying and therefore grief-avoidant. Martín Prechtel says that it “is a terrible source of grief in itself to not be able to grieve.” So I made up what I needed to say on the spot. “So be it,” wrote Cormac McCarthy in The Road. “Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.” I constructed a ceremony out in the otherworld of water and I screamed it under the thudding slip of the current.
Unable to grieve, we’re haunted by what we’ve lost, trapped in-between, never separated enough from the loss to tread to another union. Grief can’t be outrun, outthought, though it can be outsourced, pushing the burden to someone and somewhere else with unforeseen consequences, grieving turned to grievance. Grief is a powerful enough riverine force that it needs ritual, instinctive or inherited, to help responsibly shape its course, charting the changes that always shape our lives. Francis Weller identifies two gifts ritual offers grief: containment and release, the safe holding and the free letting go, a kind of vessel for pouring. Ritual doesn’t erase wounds, doesn’t forever remove the burden of grief, but it maintains and tends, helps us offer gratitude where we can, provides regularity for the maintenance and tending. Repeating a ritual doesn’t mean anything is broken. Maybe my grief wasn’t stuck, just unfinished, maybe never quite done, the ritual never completely over. My desire for a threshold was a need to find my ground, to create an altar or shape, like the river itself. An actual river to correspond to what Weller names “riverbeds in our soul” carved by sorrow.
Maybe, I told Kyle and Dave, we could make a threshold on the ground with sticks or stones like my fault lines, dismantling them once I crossed to recognize the movement. But the image still looked too much like crossing a straight line, even though taking it apart afterwards disrupted the linearity. Whatever the threshold, it needed to be actual, made with the world itself. Dave encouraged me to write down what I needed to say, then burn it. Then Kyle said maybe the river is the threshold. We should cross it and on the far shore make a fire and burn the words there and then cross back over. The flame and the flowing moving place were to be the doorway in time, a grounded sense of time, which moves in cycles and not lines. I said that’s what we needed to do.
***
Moving in circles, I had carried grief to the river before and yelled an underwater ceremony. I had also burned words before, a disposal to signify an end. Nothing broken, only maintenance and tending, moving in circles. Six months after the picnic table ending, I moved out of the Shenandoah Valley to be near family, to separate and heal, maybe to run away. In the ensuing weeks I couldn’t sleep for feverish turning, fitful weeping for her. For months prior I carried a stack of printed emails, ostensibly to provide a thorough history for therapists, but also somehow evidence of chaos-making communication, a paper trail to defend myself.
One late night I evoked the form of a ritual. I typed her a new email, this time in a different tone than before, no more ands or buts or also, simply “Yes, I am sorry.” No excuses or defenses, just responsibility for my part without expectation and a list of all the gifts she’s given me. I told her I felt more broken open than ever before, remembering all the instances when I was demanding, stubborn, condescending, overly assertive in my presence and desires, the ways she then backed away, lay low, withdrew in response. I told her I felt sick at my immaturity and misunderstandings that led to arguments, silences, turnings away. I could taste the dismissing tones in my mouth, could hear their off-key pitch, could feel their imprint in the squint of my face. I told her I was sorry. I apologized because I needed to so I could be who I wanted to be. Because apology is a kind of naming. Because sometimes we do wrong things, and it’s important to admit them. Then I shaved my beard, cropped my hair close, stripped, and made a fire in the yard. I burned the hair and I burned the paper trail so I couldn’t follow it again. The ritual did something only it can do, what talk therapy can’t get at. After sending her the email and burning the papers I slept more soundly than I had in recent memory. I also still had my grief when I woke up.
At some point, a time between the burning in the yard and the burning by the river with my friends, after many more things had been said, she also wanted a ritual to end our marriage. She told me she wanted to break the wine glasses I gave her for our first anniversary, at the homestead where our marriage lived and struggled the longest. After a week of trying to convince myself to do it, I replied no, thank you. I understood, even respected, the intention, but the tone and the act felt nearly violent in the midst of unrequited words, unreciprocated responsibility, and premature for what I actually wanted at the time but felt was no longer possible: to repair all this shit, to resurrect extinct dreams, to be with her light and warmth.
***
I feel some awkwardness writing all this down now, a little embarrassed at the melodrama of it. Perhaps that’s true of intimate moments of transformation told aloud. I’m tempted to temper the personal focus, abstracting my experience into a general meditation on marriage or the grief of this time, from viruses to civil war vibes. But that’s not what this story is about. I’m attempting to write vulnerably, a version of truthfully, without self-pity but with detail to the ritual of grieving heartbreak and mistake. I don’t want to distract from that with generalities or dilute it by drawing attention to all the ways I was hurt too. Each ritualized time felt ordinary, almost exactly natural, an invitation to feel deeply without selfishness. Weller believes that sorrow connects us to the world, the personal to the planetary, and all this personal talk of endings does make me think of the planetary ones. He says that grief finds us through five gates: the reality that we lose everything we love; the places that haven’t known love; the loves we expected but never received; the sorrows of the world globally known but individually felt; the unmetabolized grief inherited from our ancestors. Gates are, after all, thresholds, and all of Weller’s gates involve separation and treading. They all weave together the solitary and the social, the personal and the pandemic.
As for embarrassment, Prechtel affirms that this is grief’s natural and necessary sound, indifferent to misunderstanding. Purposely done, he believes, true and free grieving as an entire people could revive entire cultures, it could “make life more deliciously alive.” And Grief is in fact the best friend of Praise, dwellers in separate chambers of the house of Love, which is the heart. “Grief is praise,” Prechtel vows, “because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.” Both “are very practical versions of love in motion,” a river not a bog.
We can never praise if we never grieve.
***
WE DROVE DOWN out of town to the river, in the gray spray of rain. Parking roadside, we descended a footpath to the wide floodway, filled with trees along a tributary creek. The green of the place met my vision and focused me down under the canopy to the cool wet air and earth. Dizziness clouded me in recent weeks, unable to steady my gaze, as if I were looking through a screen or the long lens of a telescope. But the green and gray, the silvered brown of the river, brought me to attention.
We treaded the soft last path to the bank, colonnaded by rows of Sycamore and Cottonwood, some of the tallest and roundest of either tree I’ve seen in this great valley. Every time I walk that path I stop short before them, each time struck by the size of their immense gorgeous growth. Tree size isn’t a good gauge for age, and both Sycamore and Cottonwood grow very quickly, but those trees have certainly been there a while. Some of the trunks would take all three of us to wrap our arms around. On this day, Sycamore and Cottonwood appeared out of the gray like gatekeepers, druidic in their rooted silence, calm in the lengthening rings of their lives that regard as restless my sense of patient time. Prechtel says grief “is what living beings experience when what or whom they love dies or disappears.” Living beings: more-than-human, more-than-mammals, more-than-creatures-with-brains. I wondered what loves those trees have seen disappear, and what arboreal grief sounds like. I touched the living barked beings closest to the path as we passed, toward a ritualized past.
I felt my stomach coil as we came out of the trees to the water, heard before seen. Not a resistance to what we were doing, but a hesitance. I had symbolized my grief here before to make this place home, but the invitation for grief to come in the company of these friends, to cross a threshold at and as this river, moved down in my body with appropriate gravity. What moved in my gut also seemed to move through the land, circulating through me and the water and wind, then grounding itself in the imagery of a house, with a doorway I needed to cross to make a new home, one I was already preparing for and should step into, resolvedly, committedly, readily. I was now in a relationship with a wonderful person, Christen, and we had been dreaming about that new home, both relational and physical. But I hadn’t been fully ready to plan, with dates and announcements and communal ceremonies to witness the commitment made, which was another threshold I would need to cross. First, I needed to step over this one, to separate and tread, winnow and walk, in a communal ceremony with my friends.
I looked at the river and questioned if we should cross. The current’s clip was swift. Not dangerously so, but enough that we needed to move carefully and alertly. Dave found a soda bottle with a twist-on cap and shoved into it a lighter, a pen, and some paper. We stripped to our boxers and I descended into the cool water, kept a foot on rock until I was part of the way over before shoving off and plunging at an angle for the river to sweep me across. A thick stand of young Sycamores greeted me on the stony sandbar, with river’s fast flow behind me and slow pools ahead before the actual bank. Dave and Kyle followed and we crossed the shallow divide beyond the Sycamores and came to the far shore. For our purposes, we came into the otherworld.
The gray rain gave the world the pallor of ash. Lament was in the air, rain falling steadily like a kind of sadness. John O’Donohue heard in water the “voice of grief.” In one praise poem, he hailed the “grace of water,” its “liquid root” working through “the long night of clay,” and also the “humility of water,/Always willing to take the shape/Of whatever otherness holds it.” The water from the sky shivered into the water through the land, expressions of a cycle turning over and over into one another. They met, flowed with persistence, a quiet but firm insistence that this day is what we had to work with, the water and the grief will not be unbearable, but they’re also not going away. So we made our ceremony with what we had, and I tried to imitate the humility of water by taking the shape of its own liquid root.
I separated from the shore and ducked further inland, just enough to where I had some solitude. I found what seemed like a path, another shape humbled by the flow of water. I knelt, opened the mason jar in my hand that held some torn pieces of envelope and biochar, wood from the stream in town cooked down into carbon to absorb nutrients. I carry the jar in my backpack, my homemade version of incense or anointing oil. When I remember, I leave a sprinkle at the feet of plants where I harvest food or gather seeds, or at the landfill when I contribute to its leaching burden. Biochar takes what is often discarded and turns it into a sponge to hold fertility, which is a kind of memory releasing over time.
I enclosed myself in a circle of char, smeared the stain on my fingers onto my forehead. Then I wrote. The rain quickly dampened the paper, but it took the words I needed to say. I wrote to her as if I spoke to her. I said the words that still stung me, the stories still hounding me, the regrets still hanging over me. But the only water that fell was the rain. I felt the heaviness of grief’s gravity pulling at my face, but my tears remained up.
When I finished writing, I slowly walked toward the bank. I smelled smoke, then saw clouded curls of it. Despite the damp, my friends had made a fire beneath a Sycamore and a Walnut. Between the two trees, past floods had packed bark, leaf, and twig into a dam from which Dave pulled enough dry material to ignite with the lighter. More sticks and small branches fed the smoky flame, the smoke becoming part of the overhead gray. We began placing rocks around the fire’s edge and huddled close to feed and feel its small warmth. I bent over my knees, elbows tucked down, face close to wet earth, holding wet paper that held the marks of my grief-wet words.
I read them aloud, parting the rain with their clearness, and my tears broke through to fall with the rain. My body had been holding more grief, a flow in need of moving before I had enough room for my life. I could have forced my way forward with it stuck, but I’d done that before, trying to be ready to move on when I wasn’t prepared, and I knew eventually grief would flood me again. The ritual made room, both to feel and for the feeling to pass on and make room for something else to move in. “It becomes hard to trust yourself,” wrote the again-wise O’Donohue.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
My tears kept falling, uncoiling themselves as I spoke words I’d wanted to say to her but never fully said, now without concern for consequences. No attacks, no excuses, only honest and unhedged, stitching two stories out of the fault lines. Kyle and Dave didn’t react, saying nothing, maybe listening, watching the fire and offering company.
I finished what I had to say and crumpled up the sorrowed paper. I tossed it into the fire and despite the damp it too caught the light. I breathed audibly, a gasp of relief as those words turned red, then white into ash, then were gone. Dave gently stacked more of the river-racked tinder from between the two trees, our huddled shapes under them converting them into altars.
I heard the river rumbling, somersaulting in currents down toward the sea. Everything around us – the leaves, the rain, the airy nutrients – gravitated downhill with the river, including our tears, including my grief, anything with the slight weight of loss. O’Donohue calls this the “courage of a river” continuing to believe in the gradual descent of ground. I had no more words of my own, so I sang a song to match the plumb line of that courageous direction, my voice cracking from the strain of being honest. Dave knew the low rolling tune so he sang too, and Kyle hummed until we sang through the cycle again.
We sat a few minutes longer, wind shushing through us, until I said I was ready. The fire died enough that I could scoop some white ash into the jar of black char, a symbol of dark carbon absorbing the nutrition. We spread the stone circle back out and let the rain dowse the embers. I picked up a small smooth stone, warm to the touch, about the same size as one I plucked from the shelf in my apartment at the last minute before driving to the river. The one she gave me after the last time she left, with a note telling me she was giving me this small stone, “a little guy” that she’d put a lot of love into.
I didn’t want to let it go. I wanted to keep holding it with a special place on my shelf-top altar. I could have done so and doing so wouldn’t be wrong except I knew it was no longer right for me. The small stone was just large enough to block the threshold into the next room, the room made by walking and moving the grief and that one small stone with love in it.
Kyle and Dave crossed the river first, fumbling in the rapids with goofy grins and laughter. I waited in the otherworld, crouched on the rock-rolled shore beneath the Sycamore stand until they crossed. Then I waded into the same river where I had shouted my grief the summer before. I swam to midriver, slipped underwater to the underworld, braced myself against the turning current. I opened the jar and poured the ash and char into the pastel river, bending up by the mountain but carried down to the sea. I came up out of the river and across the threshold.
I later learned that Karla McLaren suggests five rules for a good ritual. First, be clear about your intentions, to know why you’re having the ritual in the first place. Second, mark a clear beginning, with a phrase or sound or movement, so you know what came before and what comes after. Three, define the location of your ritual, with clear boundaries to know where the edges are in time and place. Four, feed and tend your altar or shrine, to stay alert and aware for as long as the ritual lasts. And five, close the ritual with intention, with a phrase or sound or movement, clean up what needs cleaning, remove what needs removing, and celebrate because good work has been done.
The three of us sat on the trunk of a branch, worn smooth by water. I retrieved a pipe from our bundle of shirts in a stump, along with a jar of dried Mullein leaves. We lit a small fire in the bowl, passed it between us, puffing herbal smoke into the smoky rain. We didn’t talk, just smoked, a quiet sober celebration at the ritual’s end. Dave and Kyle grabbed their clothes and I stood at the water’s edge, small love-filled stone in hand. I let it go in an arc to midriver where it crossed the surface line of the water, following the liquid root down, a disposal to signify an end. A story in firm stone to heal a fault line. Maybe my grief wasn’t stuck, only unfinished. Maybe never quite done.
We passed along the soft path back up the creek, beneath the cathedral Cottonwoods and Sycamores. Kyle hugged us, got in the car back to Connecticut. Dave and I drove up out of the river’s floodplain and back into the heights of town.
***
ALMOST FOUR MONTHS later, Kyle and Dave came back to the watershed, only a score of miles upstream from our river threshold, for my wedding ceremony. The two of us, Christen and I, decided a few weeks after the ritual that we were ready to move into the next room, the biome beyond the many small disturbances. We stepped below the spring house and across the small stream that cuts below our new home, carrying the water down toward the creek that enters the river at the point where my friends and I crossed to release my grief. She and I stepped on stones over cool water to the gentle otherworld bank, to plant two little Willows while loved ones sang to us, waiting for us to cross back from our past grief, from the future of those Willow roots, to the present of our lives on the other side.
Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom
Hope Leans Forward | The Body as Grounded Wisdom
The body is our house—and how we live in it and where we
occupy it are uniquely ours, as well as being part of the common
human experience. The body is a treasure trove and an exquisite
vehicle for our practice of waking up and being with what is.
—Jill Satterfield
My grandmother, Lillian, like my mother, was a domestic and tough, but she also had a tender side. I absorbed her toughness more than her tenderness, even though I admired her tender side. When they came, the tender moments took me by surprise, and I cherished them. We had a ritual every week where she would get out the foot basin and the Wray & Nephew overproof white rum. My job was to wash and massage her feet with the rum. She believed white rum would cure her debilitating arthritis, and I felt special, being asked and sharing the time.
Her feet were muscled, boxer-like and built, evidence of a hard life of little ease. At that time, she was well into her seventies, youthful by today’s standards, but back then, she was worn out, nearing the end of her life. Consciously or not, I absorbed many messages from this ritual. Two stand out. First, it’s exhausting to be a Black woman; it runs your body into the ground. Second, self-care is essential, indispensable when life is hard. She deserved, she earned, this moment to care for herself and for her body.
This memory lingered in me when decades later, following an intuitive sense that I needed to care for myself in a different and unaccustomed way, I began studying Kundalini yoga. My work was punishing my spirit and my body, and I needed to find a way out of the mess. I had worked myself into uterine fibroid tumors that eventually contributed to several miscarriages. While I received medical treatment, there was no safe place for me to talk about what was happening to my body. I joined a support group for women who had experienced miscarriages, but I felt isolated as the only Black person in the group.
To heal myself from the pain, I created rituals of healing, much like my grandmother did with me. I attended retreats for women who had experienced miscarriage. I lit candles. I prayed. I read books on loss and grief. Yet all this and more couldn’t dislodge the grief that had me like a straitjacket. It wasn’t until I traveled to Japan on the eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage of Shikoku that I began to heal, an experience I described in my first book, The Road That Teaches: Lessons in Transformation through Travel.
Our pilgrimage began in Osaka, and we took the high-speed train to Mount Koya, or Kōya-san, a World Heritage Site and the birthplace of Kobo Daishi, the founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism. The pilgrim officially begins at the temple gate at Koya as a symbolic act of commitment. Passing through the gate, the pilgrim takes a vow to complete the pilgrimage, not just for themselves but for the benefit of all beings. With moss-covered rocks, the scent of incense, the sound of temple bells and fast-moving water down forested hillsides, Mount Koya is a “thin place,” where the material and spiritual world meet.
As I entered the graveyard and passed through the temple gate, I bowed. The cemetery was partly dedicated to Jizo Bodhisattva, the Japanese deity said to aid pregnant women and travelers. Jizo is the caretaker of deceased infants and children, including fetuses lost to miscarriage and abortion. Hundreds of stone statues of Jizo line the cemetery stone walls. Some wear handsewn capes and hats, others stand atop mossy rocks, and still others receive a love note written in longing and loss. A damp teddy bear, a bouquet of faded flowers, yet another story of loss and love.
For years after the miscarriages, I felt barren and broken by the loss, shame, and guilt. There was a ragged, dispossessed part of me that I couldn’t shake. Here in the cold spring dampness of Kōya-san, my loss and grief were acknowledged and shared, not by a handful of people sitting across a table in the basement of a hospital support group, but openly by a culture and a people. I sensed that those in the cemetery around me understood and, unlike the support group, made space for the grieving to be and to breathe. The Japanese people recognized and honored the grief of miscarriage and abortion through this cemetery and these healing rituals, which said to me, What happened to you happened to us. What you’ve done, we’ve done. You are loved here. You can heal here. All of you is accepted, loved here.
The loss from the miscarriages is still there, though less so; less chokingly devastating, but there. Looking back now, I realize that in some ways, the miscarriages were fueled by fear of further loss, of the uncertainty and fragility of relationships that held me back from loving and being loved. I kept second-guessing myself with questions: Was it my unrelenting drive to “succeed”? Was it the running from poverty and toward a legal career? Was it the years of weight training and intense exercise that had eventually molded my body into an impenetrable shape? The one thing I did know was that the healing I was seeking wasn’t in the support groups with people comparing and one-upping their loss. The beginning of my healing started in a very unlikely place, halfway around the world in a cold, damp cemetery in Japan, where the collective grief was free to breathe and be held by everyone. With all this, I arrived at my first Kundalini yoga class: tough-minded and tough-bodied.
I started studying and practicing Kundalini yoga at about the same time I began studying meditation in the Plum Village tradition. Yoga and meditation were part of my healing process after a surgery for the uterine fibroid tumors, after my painfully short first marriage, and while pinned beneath the weight of my Big and Important Job as a lawyer-lobbyist.
As I began to practice yoga, one of my first realizations was that my breath and body were frozen and rigid, like a block of ice. I could barely turn my spine from left to right. My fingers dangled a couple of feet away from the ground as I folded my body forward, my hamstrings screaming with tension. Most shockingly, I couldn’t feel my breath.
My years of living an intellectual, success-driven life set me up for intellectual breathing. I was largely in my head, cut off from the wisdom of my body. My breathing was frozen. I was so focused on “getting there” as opposed to “being there,” and had spent so much time trying to outrun poverty and prove my own worthiness to myself and others that I had forgotten how to breathe. My breath, mostly in my upper chest, was shallow, and I recruited the secondary respiratory muscles of the neck, upper chest, and shoulders instead of the primary respiratory organ of the diaphragm, abdominal muscles, and the intercostal muscles between the ribs. I had forgotten how to breathe with my whole body.
In studying yoga, I recognized and acknowledged patterns from decades of living remotely in my body. In law school, I studied torts, evidence, commercial law, but I learned nothing about my body, the breath. And years of working hunched over a computer left me nearly inflexible in body and spirit. Though breathing fully and completely lies at the very center of life, I was stuck in a shallow pattern that mirrored my stressful life. With Kundalini yoga, I set out to reclaim my breath and my body.
Before I began Kundalini yoga, I experienced chronic pain in my jaw, upper back and shoulders, and sides of my neck from poor breathing and a habit of bracing myself, which even affected my mood. Unconsciously clenching muscles in the anal sphincter affected my back and shoulders. I was hyper-vigilant and impatient with a nasty edginess. Even today, when I have a flash of impatience, I still catch myself and notice that my breathing tracks the feeling in my body. I feel my breath weak and uneasy.
After my return from Japan, I began reading the books of Judith Hanson Lasater and Donna Farhi, long-time yoga teachers, and then took breathing-focused classes with them. In The Breathing Book, Farhi points to several important characteristics of “free breathing,” which helped me understand the crucial, essential link between the mind, the body, and the breath. It was time to practice, even though I had plenty of resistance and plenty of skepticism. I’d lie on the floor with my knees bent or resting the back of my knees on the edge of a chair and listen to myself breathe. I felt dumb, like “This is a total waste of time.” I thought, “I could be squatting or deadlifting weights. I could be walking seven or eight miles, uphill. What am I doing here?”
I’d force myself to lie there being still, waiting for something, anything to happen, waiting for a signal. I stuck with it, and after a couple of weeks of this “do nothing” breathing exercise, one day I felt something. It was my breath but not in my chest and shoulders. I felt it at my reproductive organs and below the navel. It was like my body was opening and closing to the rhythm of my in- and out-breath. Oscillating, at first the breath was moving my tailbone and then rolling upward and outward to my shoulders and hands and then downward and inward to my legs and feet. Like boneless seaweed, the breath moved higher and lower, left and right, circular and in, multidirectional, then becoming calm and effortless. Through quiet attention, patience, and perseverance, this bruised and battered part of my body was beginning to move in freedom and harmony.
Slowly, incredibly slowly, I was being invited to trust and allow the breath to emerge and to release naturally. As I practiced this “do nothing” breathing, these words came to me:
Allowing ease and release
Allowing body to soften
Allowing breath to know ease
Allowing kindness
Allowing in-breath to meet the out-breath
Allowing pause between the in- and out-breath
Allowing lungs to be free
Allowing belly to be free
Allowing the heart to be free
Rise
Fall
In
Out
Deep
Slow
Breath.
As I invited the breath, I was being invited to inquiry, not only about my body, but also about my hard-driving life, my values. As I began with this foundational breath and body awareness practice, I retrained how I was breathing. And as I did, a lot of my chronic neck and upper-back pain was alleviated. But more importantly, through the breath, the real me—the vital me, the whole me—was rediscovered. I had found a different kind of intellect, a wisdom from inside my body that felt whole and right.
* * *
“Do nothing” breathing is now one of my most important rituals and I offer it to individuals in my coaching and leadership work, as well as to groups on retreat. Several years ago, I was invited to open the annual conference of Spiritual Directors International with my dear friend Karen Erlichman, and we offered a version of the “do nothing” breathing. The grand ballroom was packed with maybe six hundred people all practicing the breath I stumbled upon at the height of disconnect from my body. Most people were standing with their hands on their belly, breathing. Some people were laid out on the stage flat on their back, eyes closed, following this essential breath back, way back to an essential part of themselves. Still others sat in chairs, gently swaying from side to side. It was beautiful. Here’s what we did:
“Do Nothing” Breath Inquiry Practice
Choose what’s best for your body to sit, stand, or lie down, and allow yourself to get in a comfortable position.
- Allow your eyes to be open or closed. Notice what feels most comfortable.
- Notice the shape of your body without judging yourself.
- Feel your feet on the floor if standing.
- Feel your legs, hips, torso, arms, chest, face.
- Allow your spine to relax, and become aware of the back, sides, and front of the body.
- Bring your attention to your breathing.
- Feel the breath come in and go out.
- Notice and feel the in-breath.
- Notice the pause between the in- and the out-breath.
- Notice and feel the out-breath.
- Feel the belly rise and fall.
- Practice gently bringing your attention back to the sensation of breathing; feel the rise and fall of your belly.
- Feel yourself breathing in and out.
- Imagine your body like boneless seaweed with roots, grounded yet totally free.
- Notice how you’re feeling physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
- Take a moment to sense your breathing and ask yourself, “Where do I feel my breathing?” and simply wait.
- Return to the question over and over: “Where do I feel my breathing?” Let whatever perceptions you have be here without editing them. Don’t discount tiny movements.
- Place one hand on the belly and the other at the chest or any place on your body, if that’s appropriate for you, and feel the movement of the hand at the belly and at the chest or that part of your body.
- Ask yourself, “What does my breath feel like?” and simply wait without judging yourself. Gently keep returning to this question: “What does my breath feel like?” Become aware of words or images that might arise to describe your breath. Again, let whatever perceptions you have be here without editing them.
- Return your attention to the body and mind, gathering an impression of how you are doing at this moment. There is no need to change or edit this moment.
- When you are ready, stretch gently to close this practice and notice how you feel.
My grandmother had little chance to practice “do nothing” breathing. Yet our ritual of washing her feet with white rum taught me that you’ve got to make doing nothing a major priority, no matter what. And I do and will continue to practice that for her now.
Excerpted with kind permission from:
Hope Leans Forward
Braving Your Way toward Simplicity, Awakening, and Peace
by Valerie Brown
PUBLISHER Broadleaf Books
PAGES 275
PUBLICATION DATE November 8, 2022
Recipient, Nautilus 2023 Gold Award for Eastern Spirituality
From Expansion to Harmonisation | a new economic trajectory
From Expansion to Harmonisation | a new economic trajectory
Many people realise our economic system is stopping us from averting the environmental crises that are currently threatening to cause catastrophe. Various approaches to resolving this situation have been suggested. Some people propose individual government policies for each issue we are faced with; others think we should slam on the brakes with planned economic degrowth; yet others say we should keep the economy as it is and concentrate on accelerating the energy transition. But to truly resolve the concatenation of problems before us, we need to change something fundamental: our trajectory of development.
For hundreds of years, Western development has been on a trajectory of expansion. From the days of empire-building and colonisation, through industrialisation, to the recent fixation with economic growth, our economy has always been expanding. This expansion increased rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, a period known as the Great Acceleration. Many measures of human activity grew exponentially: global population; real GDP; energy use; food production; and much else besides.
The Great Acceleration
This accelerated expansion of the last century had many positive effects, because it enabled us to greatly increase our quality of life. But it also increased our environmental impact dramatically, and this is now threatening to damage, and perhaps even destroy, our civilisation. The fact is that we have expanded as far as we safely can, because we have expanded to a global size: we are now a planetary-scale species. Virtually everyone in the world relies on the global economic system to some extent, and we are collectively affecting the natural world on a global scale. We cannot keep expanding without undermining the ecological basis upon which we rely, with disastrous consequences.
We need a new trajectory, one of harmonisation. If we do not stop degrading the natural environment, it will collapse, so we must harmonise our global society with the natural world. If we allow global inequalities to remain embedded, we will perpetuate hardship on a vast scale, so we must harmonise our human cultures with one another. And if we continue to desire ever-increasing consumption without regard to its negative effects, we will suffer terrible consequences, so we must harmonise our aspirations with our opportunities.
Our current economic system is a system of expansion, so although it was suited to the expansion of the last century, it is no longer appropriate. We need a new system, and it must be a system of harmonisation.
The components of an economic system
To understand how to move to a system with a better trajectory, we need to understand those aspects of the system that combine to create its trajectory. We can then see what those components are comprised of in the current system, and what they should be comprised of in the new system.
The relevant components of an economic system are as follows: there is the goal, what it is that constitutes progress; the development dynamic, the method society generally uses to reach the goal; and the economic agents, the individual units that use the dynamic to reach the goal. These combine to create the trajectory of the system: the goal sets the overall direction; the dynamic determines the routes available to get there; and the economic agents decide which specific pathways to take.
The specific elements that make up those components in the current system are these: the goal is economic growth; the development dynamic is capital accumulation for profit; and the economic agents are shareholder value maximising businesses and people encouraged to model themselves on ‘rational economic man’. Each of these is very well-suited to the current trajectory of expansion.
Economic growth is the main economic goal for governments the world over, because it is generally taken to be a proxy for overall human welfare across society. For much of the twentieth century there was quite a strong correlation between economic growth and other indicators of human welfare. But economic wealth and other important indicators aren’t necessarily correlated – for example, according to World Bank data, the US has the 12th highest GDP per capita but only the 62nd longest life expectancy. Ultimately, economic growth is a dubious proxy for human welfare. But it’s a great aim for an economy built on expansion, as growth and expansion are synonymous.
The second component is the development dynamic of capital accumulation for profit. This was already entrenched as a driver of economic expansion when Marx wrote Das Kapital, and continues to be a core element of our economic system. It is based on the belief that the best way to attain economic growth – and therefore, in this paradigm, the best way to improve society – is for the owners of capital to strive to increase the capital they personally own, and the profit they make from it. Whether or not capital accumulation is a good way to improve society, it is certainly a good way to cause economic expansion, because an efficient method of getting more capital is creating new capital – which means expanding our economic footprint.
Finally, there’s the third component: the economic agents of shareholder value maximising businesses and ‘rational economic men’. These are the idealised agents of efficient capital accumulation: people and organisations whose sole criteria for decision-making is that which will increase their own wealth most effectively.
In the case of people, this is of course an idealisation, because in reality people have many other criteria for decision-making. But acting in an ‘economically rational’ way is both used as an assumption in economic modelling and encouraged as a way to actually behave, because it aligns people with the logic of expansion.
In the case of businesses, the ideal has been attained, because businesses have essentially been defined like this. The directors of businesses are duty-bound to work on behalf of the interests of the owners of the business, and this is interpreted as working to increase the economic value of that ownership.
In both cases, these economic agents are very good at moving our economy along the trajectory of expansion. All such agents try to expand their own economic wealth, with the net result of expanding the economy as a whole.
The components of the new system
To create a new system of harmonisation, we need replacements for each of these components, and we need the replacements to be ones that will help us achieve our aim of harmony.
The meaning of harmonisation isn’t quite as clear as the meaning of expansion, so let’s take a moment to think about what it means in practical terms. Firstly, to begin harmonising with the natural world, we need to stop destroying it. If you are in harmony with something, you do not harm it.
But harmony goes further than not causing harm. If we are to have a truly harmonious global society, we must actively enable the billions of people living in poverty to escape that poverty and live fulfilling lives – to be rich in a broad sense. If you are in harmony with someone, you have a mutual respect and collaborative generosity that balances independence with interdependence, and results in both of you having better lives than you would alone.
Finally, a harmony combines many different parts into a pleasing whole. To reach global harmony, we should seek fulfilment in making our own contributions to the whole, and we must avoid enabling small groups to dominate or undermine it.
The new goal: bounded abundance
We have expanded beyond important bounds set by the nature of the world. Remaining beyond them for much longer would be catastrophic, so a foundational goal of society must be to return within the bounds, and to stay there. But being bounded needn’t feel limiting, if we understand those bounds as a framework within which to thrive. Combining those two aspects into a single goal, we should be aiming for bounded abundance.
The first set of bounds we must learn to abide by are environmental. Our greenhouse gas emissions are destabilising the climate; our land use is close to causing a mass extinction; and our plastic is polluting the whole world. We must decrease our environmental impact. Exactly which environmental limits are important, and what levels are safe, have been studied and calculated.
Prof Johan Rockstrom and his team at the Stockholm Resilience Centre have identified nine planetary boundaries, within which we must stay if we are to avoid destabilising critical environmental processes at a global level. Their studies have shown that we have already exceeded the thresholds for seven of the planetary boundaries, so if we do not decrease our negative impacts in all of these areas, we are risking environmental catastrophe.
Another important set of bounds are those of resources. Our current society is reliant on resources whose supply is ultimately limited, such as metals and other elements, so as we use more of these resources, we are beginning to run out of them.
There have been calculations of resource limits over many years – the Limits to Growth reports by the Club of Rome have been particularly influential. More recently, Dr Simon Michaux has shown that limits in our resources and mining capacity mean it is impossible to perform the energy transition as governments are currently planning to: we simply won’t be able to produce essential materials in a large enough quantity.
A third set of boundaries are equally important to creating a trajectory of harmonisation. These are lower bounds, the minimum each person needs to meet their basic necessities – everyone in the world must have enough food, shelter, social networks, and so on, to have a decent life.
Kate Raworth, through her invention of the Doughnut, has combined the planetary boundaries with the social necessities into a single goal of aiming to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’. She has created an image that encapsulates this beautifully, with two concentric rings representing the social foundation and the ecological ceiling. It looks like a doughnut, hence the name, with the goal being to ‘get inside the Doughnut’.
It is essential we get inside these bounds if we are to have a better future. But to decrease our negative environmental impact, the rich West must decrease their material consumption. For many people, this is a dishearteningly austere aim, because their subjective quality of life depends upon their material consumption.
There are ways of having a good material quality of life despite using far less resources, such as by creating a circular economy, and through ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’, as described by George Monbiot. But there are much greater possibilities for improvement if we take a wider view of what might constitute a good life: a wider view of abundance.
Our current culture focuses on increasing our abundance of material goods, but in doing so it limits our access to many other things. The necessity of full-time work limits the availability of time, and the monetisation of social spaces limits opportunities for social connections, for example.
We can stay inside the bounds of the world while improving our quality of life if we take a wider view of abundance, and we recognise that true abundance means different things for different people. To have a fulfilling life, some people need an abundance of time, an abundance of social connections or an abundant connection to nature. For many, it’s important to have an abundance of creative expression, of learning and sharing knowledge and skills, or of adventure. Perhaps you would prefer an abundance of joyful celebration or an abundance of cultural expression. All of these can be compatible with a bounded world, and together they can create the abundance we should really be aiming for: an abundance of human flourishing.
The new dynamic: cosmolocal collaboration
Getting from where we are now to a world of bounded abundance is not an easy task. A team at Leeds University has shown that, at the moment, not a single country is ‘inside the Doughnut’. Not only that, but different countries have different challenges to get there. Poor countries must begin providing for the basic needs of their citizens without overshooting environmental limits. Rich countries must decrease their environmental impacts, while continuing to provide for the needs of their citizens. Some middle-income countries need to do both: they are currently overshooting environmental limits without achieving the social thresholds for their whole populations.
On top of this, ‘abundance’ will mean different things in different cultures. Clearly, a one-size-fits-all solution to reaching bounded abundance is not realistic. Instead, we need a flexible approach that enables communities to meet their needs in an environmentally sound way, without forcing them to adhere to a particular way of life.
Such an approach does exist, and it is called cosmolocalism. The basic idea of cosmolocalism is to combine local manufacturing with a digital knowledge commons, so that communities can provide for their own needs while drawing on, and contributing to, a global database of knowledge and experience.
A good example of this that exists today is Fab Labs. Fab Labs is a network of makerspaces – places with tools to enable people to ‘make (almost) anything’. It was started at MIT in the early 2000’s and there are now thousands of Fab Labs around the world.
All the Fab Labs have a similar design – the Fab Foundation has put the blueprints for an ideal Fab Lab online, and other Fab Labs base their own designs around this. But the labs don’t have to be identical – they just need to have approximately the same capabilities. They also need to agree to a Charter and abide by some conditions. A key condition is that as soon as something is invented in a Fab Lab, its designs must be put onto the Fab Cloud, where they are immediately available for anyone in a Fab Lab anywhere in the world to download and use. Information about the equipment used in the labs is also shared globally, so that if one Fab Lab begins using a new piece of equipment, other Fab Labs can learn about it immediately.
A similar system can be applied to manufacturing, so that local factories can connect through global networks and share designs of factories and products. This sets up a powerful collaborative development dynamic. Everyone can draw on the knowledge and experience of everyone else, while being free to apply it in ways appropriate to their local situation.
If this is combined with regional circularity, so that materials used cycle continuously around the local economy, and community ownership, so outside owners of capital do not extract value nor direct development, it can simultaneously increase access to material goods, decrease production of waste, and maximise the freedom communities have to choose their own way of life.
The new agents: networked communities, Future Guardian companies, and responsible humans
Clearly, the main economic agents of cosmolocalism are globally-networked local communities. But the current system is dominated by corporations, that are not only profit-maximising but also highly centralised. We need a corporate form that enables corporations to overcome the primacy of the profit motive and have more positive impact. Fortunately, such a form has already been invented. It’s called the Future Guardian model and it’s being pioneered by Riversimple, a hydrogen fuel cell car company based in Wales.
In the Future Guardian model, the articles of association of the company are rewritten so that the company has an overall purpose and, subordinate to the purpose, a group of six aims, one for each of six stakeholder groups: the customers, the employees, the investors, the commercial partners, the community, and the environment. There is a system of Custodians and Stewards to ensure the aims of the model are manifested in the functioning of the company.
The articles state that the company should pursue its purpose while ‘balancing and protecting’ the benefit streams – effectively mini statements of purpose – that relate to, and in fact define, each of the stakeholder groups. The purpose itself can be explicitly social impact-based, but it doesn’t need to be – for example, a low-cost furniture company could make its purpose ‘to provide durable and desirable furniture that is affordable to at least 95% of adults in each of our markets’.
As one of the stakeholder groups is the investors, the Future Guardian model does not require companies to do away with the profit motive completely – it just says it must be balanced with the aims of each of the other stakeholder groups. The company’s profits must be no more important to it than its environmental impact, its contribution to the local community, and its effects on each of the other stakeholder groups.
There are various other governance structures, such as community interest companies and non-profits, that are appropriate in some situations. But the Future Guardian model is unique because it combines two important attributes: firstly, it overcomes the primacy of the profit motive without doing away with the profit motive completely; and secondly, it is just as widely applicable as the current default model of profit maximisation. This means it can truly replace the currently dominant corporate model and in doing so improve the entire business world.
From rational economic man to responsible human
Chartered cosmolocal networks and Future Guardian companies effectively embed social and environmental responsibility into their structures. It’s equally important that people behave responsibly: if we all act as rational economic men, even within this new paradigm, we are unlikely to reach harmony.
In today’s West, after decades of ‘economic rationality’ and the associated selfishness being held up as a virtue and materially rewarded, it’s easy to be cynical of escaping the power of greed. But in reality, the ideal of acting responsibly is much more reasonable than the ideal of economic rationality. In our daily decision-making, we all take into consideration many factors, including our financial well-being but also including our relationships, our effects on society, and our environmental impact. Aiming for a society of responsible humans is simply saying we should get better at balancing such factors.
There are, however, two aspects of this that need particular development. The first is the need to foster global solidarity. The modern world is so interconnected that our choices can have consequences thousands of miles away, and there are so many of us that our individual actions combine to create global effect. The need for consideration of such distant and cumulative impacts, both on the environment and on people we will never know, is a relatively new development.
From the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the recent movements for climate justice, there are many signs that global solidarity is becoming part of our collective consciousness. But we are a long way from everyone effectively including global considerations in their decision-making, and the current situation means we need to develop this competency rapidly.
The second is that at the moment there is a strong cultural belief that using one’s capital to increase one’s personal wealth is not just acceptable, but a good thing to do. But in our new dynamic of cosmolocal collaboration, it is important that major capital assets like factories are owned democratically, and that extractive behaviour – upon which much individual enrichment relies – is minimised. To enable this, not only do we need to create a shift in our cultural values, we also need to set up mechanisms to facilitate a movement of capital from ownership by people accustomed to acting as rational economic men to stewardship by community organisations with responsibility and accountability built into their structures.
A new trajectory
Together, these components create a system with the new trajectory of harmonisation. The goal of bounded abundance allows us to harmonise society with the natural world – through recognising bounds on how we can treat it – and to harmonise people across society – by allowing everyone to have a life of abundance. The dynamic of cosmolocal collaboration allows global society to move forward as a harmonious whole while giving individual communities the freedom to develop in their own ways. And the economic agents of Future Guardian companies and responsible humans take into account the interests of everyone they affect, so they act in harmony with their surroundings.
Many important components of this new system are already being developed – the Doughnut Economics Action Lab is doing brilliant work to put the Doughnut into action, and there are many cosmolocal networks already in existence, for example. My recently published book, Building Tomorrow: Averting Environmental Crisis With a New Economic System, describes how we can transform the current system into the new one. It includes chapters on the Doughnut and the Future Guardian model and has an extended description of how cosmolocally collaborative development could be applied to regionally circular manufacturing. The Cosmolocal Reader, edited by Jose Ramos and others, is a compendium of essays on many aspects of the theory and practice of cosmolocalism, and it includes many case studies of cosmolocal organisations.
We are still at the beginning of this journey. We need a proliferation of new cosmolocal networks, the development of new mechanisms for distributing capital fairly, and new strategies to engender a sea change in our economic development and a shift in our cultural values. And of course, there are many other areas of the new system we are yet to envision and build. We must put our time, intelligence and resources into creating this new system of harmonisation based on collaborative cosmolocalism. If we do, we will be able to not only avert the impending environmental catastrophe, but also improve the quality of life of the whole of humanity.
Being Taught by Sacred Pain
Being Taught by Sacred Pain
When I mention the sacredness of pain, I am locating this argument at the interface of our rational and metaphorical minds. Therefore, my argument is not completely linear and draws on symbolic devices like stories and metaphors as ways to invite readers to look at pain differently, beyond what we have been over-socialized into through over-exposure to Western philosophies, ways of knowing and being, methodologies, institutions, and perspectives. These ways of knowing are now part of all of us, and decolonization does not necessarily mean banishing these knowledges from our being, but instead it may involve learning the lessons they came to teach, both good and bad, and integrating their medicines with other medicines.
Dr. Cash Ahenakew
If we look at this colonial over-socialization and over-exposure as a teacher, we can shift our position from being victims of a tragedy, to that of being observers of a painful poisonous phenomenon happening around and within us. Decolonization, in this sense, is not an event but a continuous, life-long process of turning deadly poison into good medicine available to all, based on the teachings of the trickster poison itself.
The first metaphor I invoke is that of the shine and the shadow of modernity (Ahenakew et al., 2014; Andreotti, 2012; Mignolo, 2000; 2011). Mignolo defines modernity as a local (European) ‘imaginary’ (the container that determines what counts as normal, natural, real, valuable and ideal) that turned into a global design, which started in Europe with the incorporation of the “Americas” into the trans-Atlantic trade circuit. This imaginary is driven by the desire for a linear, seamless and teleological notion of progress, as well as human agency, and all-encompassing (objective and totalizing) knowledge used to engineer and control an effective society through rationality, science, and technology. Mignolo talks about the fact that for us to believe that modernity is good and “shiny,” we have to deny that it depends on violence, exploitation, and expropriation (its “darker” side) to exist. In other words, violence is the condition of possibility of modernity. In this sense modernity is both grounded on violence as well as on the fantasy that we can objectify and control reality through rationality in order to engineer a perfect society.
Mignolo says that the effects of the darker side of modernity, such as war, poverty, hunger, and environmental destruction, are perceived by those who champion modernity’s shine as a lack of modernity that needs more modernity to be fixed. For example, globally we believe that more capitalism, Western schooling, and modern development are necessary to fix the problems of the so-called “Third World.” However, these problems were created and are maintained precisely through the exploitation of modern capitalism and the expropriation of colonialism, and through modern development (neo-colonialism). In addition, these problems are exacerbated by the universalization of Western schooling as a form of cognitive imperialism (Battiste, 1998).
Similarly, here in Canada, we believe that more money, more credentials, and more positions of power for Indigenous people in Western institutions and corporations will create a more just society. We forget that what is called inclusion in an inherently harmful system requires the expansion of violence towards the land, other species, and people somewhere else.
We are led to believe that we can think (or research) our way out of local and global problems through the same frames of thinking and modes of existence that created the problems themselves. This is evidence of our attachment to the shine of modernity, which necessarily requires the denial of its shadows; the fact that for us to have the shiny things we want, we have to export violence somewhere else. We forget that someone else pays the costs of our comforts and enjoyments (now perceived as entitlements).
The Indigenous communities in Guatemala affected by Canadian mining companies are a good example (Imai et al., 2007; Nolin and Stephens, 2011; Pedersen, 2014). The violence committed against these communities generates profits that flow back to Canada, fund our welfare system, subsidize our universities, and sponsor scholarships for students—in addition to the pain and suffering that mining inflicts on the land itself.
Even the act of writing this article is complicit in the suffering of Indigenous people in Guatemala. Why do we insist on ignoring the violence we (systemically) inflict on each other and on the land? Why do we continue to want things that harm others? How is the pain that we are causing accounted for differently in Western onto-epistemology (ways of knowing and being) of individuality and in the Indigenous onto-epistemology of entangled relationality? And how can we experience these Indigenous ways of knowing/being of inter-being-relationality if we have been colonized by the ways of knowing/being that numb our senses to it?
We can imagine this numbing as a process of clogging. In an attempt to keep us feeling individualized and separate from the land-metabolism, modernity takes away our sense of the unquestionable value of life and instead creates a fundamental void that we associate with worthlessness. To feel a temporary sense of self-worth, we are made to produce stuff that modernity recognizes as valuable. To feel a sense of completion, we are made to accumulate stuff that we believe can fill the void. This stuff becomes an embodied prison, clogging our pores, our air, our blood, and our drain pipes, damaging our heart pump and blocking possibilities for us to sense and relate differently. We become addicted to feeling only what modernity wants us to feel and to imagining only what modernity wants us to imagine. And we start thinking that it is all there is to life.
The acknowledgement of our complicity in harm is really important. The socialization we receive within modernity is based on cognitive imperialism (Battiste, 1998), a form of knowing and knowledge that universalizes itself as the most advanced way of controlling reality—and that eliminates other possibilities, especially Indigenous forms of conscience and Indigenous languages. We all suffer from cognitive imperialism in different ways. For example, although I would like to think I am engaged in the lifelong and life-wide process of decolonization, I often fail. This failure humbles me and reminds me that this process of figuring out an entangled relationality is not just cognitive, conscious, or intentional; it is not something we can do without humility, generosity, patience, humour or (self) compassion. Neither is this an excuse for indulgence or complacency, which, by the way, I am very often also guilty of. This is not something that will be led by a courageous heroic righteous authority either.
What I mean is that decolonization is not something that can be done with arrogance, anger, or moral weapons pointing to the errors of others in denial of how others are part of us as well. As we harm others, we are harming ourselves and we will not be able to figure our way out of this individually or by focusing only on our communities. We need to consider our responsibilities to everyone and everything, because we are not separate. In this sense, there is no purity and way out (there is no outside). The only way towards somewhere else is through it, like a buffalo in a storm; with our heads down, but with eyes, hearts, flesh, and dreams wide open, without fear of looking at ourselves in the mirror and seeing what has been maimed, what calls for or offers compassion, what shouts for revenge, what has been turned into a weapon, and what yearns for wholeness, for reconnection.
I have used an image to animate this idea. From the perspective of entangled relationality, we are all part of the same body: humans, non-humans, the elements, the land, the ancestors (those who have been and those who will come again). Colonialism has worked like the (ongoing) severing of an arm; one hand of this body has tried (unsuccessfully) to cut off the arm on the other side, only maiming it. The arm is still hanging in there, all cells of that arm occupied in dealing with the situation of extreme pain. Some cells try to re-attach to the body, other cells try to numb the pain, still other cells are in necrosis trying to cut themselves off, and others reproducing the cutting against brother-cells in self-hate. You can imagine the scale of the problem. However, the other side of the body is in intense pain too, but it is also in denial, and therefore it numbs very differently, mostly in ways that defend the original severing of the arm. This numbing is based on strategies that justify the severing through the affirmation of self-importance, merit, superiority, benevolence, and exceptionalism, which validates a perceived entitlement to ownership, individualism, security, judgment, authority, and control.
Likewise, authors Duran, Duran, and Yellow Horse-Davis use the soul wound as a metaphor for the historical trauma I am referring to. They say that this wound involves the colonized, the colonizers, and the land itself, and that it can only be healed through a renewal of relationships, through a recognition that the wounding and the pain affects us all, and through an acknowledgement that numbing is not healing. However, there is a major challenge here for the healing process, because a modern onoto-epistemology of individuality and an Indigenous onto-epistemology of entangled relationality have different conceptualizations of pain, healing, well-being, and death (Ahenakew, 2011).
Dominant modern ways of knowing have conceptualized pain as an individual problem equated with suffering; healing as the elimination of pain; well-being as the absence of pain; and death as the end of life. Not surprisingly, people socialized into this way of thinking/ feeling are afraid of pain as they try to enjoy a pain-free life and avoid death. Meanwhile, many Indigenous ways of knowing conceptualize pain as something that is not individualized and that can have many functions; for example, it can be an important messenger, a visitor, a teacher, an offering, or a test.
From this perspective, well-being does not require the elimination of pain. Most importantly, suffering is related to turning one’s back to the message of the pain (of one’s body, of the land, of others) and, therefore, healing requires un-numbing and facing the messenger, facing the inevitability of pain, and developing the courage and resilience to have a relationship with it. This does not mean that people enacting this relationship with pain will not accept pain killers—they do—what it means is that they are not haunted by the fear of pain.
I often observe my modern self, the modern part of me, overtaken by cognitive imperialism when it is experiencing chronic pain. This part of me firmly believes in numbing precisely because it sees itself as small, weak, tired, and incapable of withstanding (more) pain. It feels it is going to be overcome by pain. And, if we can sense that we are really inter-related, this part inhabits all of us. But we have other parts too, and what I try to do is listen deeply to those as well. Another side of me wants to stop the pain, to exit this body, to go somewhere else, to return “home” (to leave the body), where there is no pain.
Adversity comes to Indigenous people from the moment we are born into settler colonial societies. Continuous macro- and micro-aggressions from settlers, stereotypes that either romanticize or see Indigenous peoples as deficient, performative expectations, exclusion and promises of inclusion, and recognition created to make settlers feel good about themselves are some of the things that become normalized for Indigenous people very early in their lives. The pressures most Indigenous people in North America face within communities marked by residential schools and intergenerational trauma make the task of healing practically impossible…
…The call that emanates from the land for healing and well-being, if picked up by even a barely functioning vital compass, can be very powerful. In my childhood this compass was kept alive by my loving mother, my sisters, my brothers, and by an extended family that reminded me through words and actions that the land wanted me to exist and that the world, despite all the pain, the cruelty, and the difficulties was still “home”. Therefore, my childhood and youth traumas and wounds, even though they involved poverty and violence, were not as devastating as those many other Indigenous people have experienced. This functioning vital compass set parts of my being in search of ancestral wisdom and traditional practices. These parts yearned for Indigenous ways of being and experiencing reality—experiences of non-linear being, for a steadiness of mind, for an expanding and collectivizing of the heart through ceremony. These parts of me wanted to surrender to the land and to welcome and hold sacred pain. I started using these practices as a form of neuro-decolonization. Voluntary pain is often necessary to remind us that, when connected, our (human and non-human) hearts are much larger than the pain we feel or have inflicted on others.
Indigenous pain and trauma impact not only the biological, physical, mental, social, or emotional domains of our being but also the spiritual one. The consideration of the spiritual domain is what is distinctive about Indigenous world views and experiences of sacred pain, healing, and well-being. However, I would like to argue here that what I call the spiritual is also reflected in our neurobiology—it is not an abstract concept. Despite its colonial origins and biases, neuroscientific research shows, for example, that people who meditate for long periods of time and achieve different states of consciousness present physical changes in their neurochemistry, neuro-functionality, and even in their neuroplasticity. In this sense, when we are talking about ways of being and experiencing reality, ourselves in/as the world, we are not talking about an intellectual choice of relationship, but about a different neurobiological configuration that opens up different possibilities of being affected and interpolated by everything around us—not just in abstract ways, but physically (and also spiritually). We are also talking about neurobiological capacities that are enabled or shut down by these affectabilities. In addition, if we are indeed entangled, and if this entanglement means we are a collective body, this neurobiological capacity extends beyond individual bodies.
This is the perspective many traditional healers work from when they are scanning and transforming dis-ease; they access the layer/field where we work as a collective neurobiology, a collective metabolism. In this sense, we are in each other. From this layer/field we can strive for balance in order to offer more balance back to the metabolism we are part of. However, we cannot achieve so-called purity, we cannot separate ourselves completely from the “bad” side, we need to treat the body as whole, including the good and the bad, the ugly and the broken. There is no good team versus bad team—there is one team, one body that is sick and self-harming.
This essay is from a booklet graciously available on the web. All footnotes are cited there.
https://decolonialfuturesnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/scarring_web1.pdf
This booklet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Deep gratitude to Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, “an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and de-activate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures. Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) is a practice that is multi-layered and rather difficult to explain, but we will give it a go.”
- It is about hospicing worlds that are dying within and around us with care and integrity, as well as attention to the lessons these deaths offer, while also assisting with the birth of new, potentially wiser possibilities, without suffocating them with projections;
. - It is about facing our complicity in violence and unsustainability and its implications with the courage of really seeking to connect with the collective pain, past, present and future;
. - It is about composting our individual and collective shit with humility, joy, generosity and compassion, trying to “dig deeper and relate wider”;
. - It is about holding space for difficult conversations and silences without relationships falling apart;
. - It is about recognizing and taking responsibility for harmful modern-colonial habits of being (in ourselves and around us) that cannot be stopped by the intellect, by good intentions and by spiritual, artistic or embodied practices alone;
. - It is about interrupting modern-colonial addictions, in particular addictions to the consumption of knowledge, of self-actualization, of experiences, of critique, of alternatives, of relationships and of communities;
. - It is about recognizing that we are an extension of the land-metabolism that is the planet, not the other way around, preparing for the end of the world as we know it, and showing up differently so that “another end of the world” becomes possible;
. - It is about dis-investing in desires for unrestricted autonomy, authority, certainty, control, protagonism, purity, popularity, superiority and validation to create space for acccountabilities, for response-abilities, for exiled capacities and for deeper intimacies;
. - It involves learning and unlearning, disarming and de-centering, dethroning and de-arrogantizing, detoxifying and decluttering, mourning, grieving and healing, digesting and metabolizing, seeing ourselves as cute and pathetic, so that the wider metabolism can breathe and move more easily within and around us;
. - It involves loosening our attachments to our self images and to what we think we want, so that we might instead step up, own up, clean up, grow up, wake up and show up to do what is really needed, whether or not it fits with our personal agendas
https://decolonialfutures.net/
To Lament | Dawn Songs and the Human-Bird Bond
To Lament | Dawn Songs and the Human-Bird Bond
NOTE: The excerpts included in this essay are from Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration, edited by Jamie K. Reaser and J. Drew Lanham for Talking Waters Press, 2023. The proceeds from Dawn Songs benefit the American Bird Conservancy’s Conservation and Justice Fellowship program.
The term ‘lament’ is typically associated with grief, with sorrow, with loss. Maybe the loss is physical – a beloved passes. Maybe the loss is etheric – a longed for dream of what could be is dissolved by circumstance.
Those who have awakened to the nature of dawn songs lament the loss of birds.
1.
“There is a poetics of grief, just as there is a poetics of migration. Both involve pattern and form. A grieving heart takes on a sort of pattern, just as migrating birds move together in a form. There is a rhythm and resolution to both, too. We presume peace and perhaps even joy will return to the grief-stricken, and migrating birds trust, in their birdlike way, that they too will find resolution – in blossoms, berries, or barnacles – at flight’s end.”
2.
“Falling. Falling out of the sky – in North America, a drop of 3 billion birds in fifty years – poisoned maybe, starved, some of them, lying dead at the base of skyscrapers or wind turbines, lying dead where cats left them on the welcome mats, dying with eggs in their bellies and no place to build a nest, their songs drowned, their wings broken. A swallow is a tiny thing – it weighs no more than eight pennies. But over 150 million years, it has learned to sail on the sky. When the last swallow plunges to Earth, surely the sky also will fall.”
3.
“I imagined the swallows returning the following May to look for their homes as they had for hundreds of generations. Imagined them finding their homes not just torn up but entombed in stone.”
4.
“Rivers of robins
Stream past in late October
Nowhere else to go”
As the birds go, so goes our innocence. So goes a connection, a belonging, to something beyond ourselves…
5.
“…your breaths dwindled
eyelids blinked slowly
closed longer each time
then came the stillness
of the absence of soul –
something undeniable
I first felt when
our first dog died –
from breath to no breath
in the slightest flicker of time”
6.
“My heart swelled at your magic
then ached when my daughter cried because you were so beautiful.
I cried too
for your journey cut short.
And wondered where you felt pulled to be [as you migrated northward].
Gone.”
7.
“Fluffy is a birder, too,
I’m very sure of that.
She watches them intently,
From right there where she’s at.
Beside that dead bird’s carcass,
Placed on the front porch mat.”
8.
“Sometimes you are perfect as anyone but a storm comes too soon. And you’re caught in a bad place young and you get smacked too hard to ever stand up again. It’s just luck. It’s not you.”
9.
“I’ve been looking up since I was a boy
There are less now but I keep looking
I’ll never stop trying to find them
I’ll spend all my days searching
They have to be somewhere
The sky isn’t what it used to be
It was always so full
Now there’s much less to see
A sky without them is only blue
A sky without them is only grey
A sky without them is nothing but clouds”
Too, there may be the arrival of a painful kinship of familiarity when we realize our journeys – nature and human nature – are not so distinct.
It is from this perch – this vantage point – that we may come to realize that the absences we feel may be the greatest within…
10.
“You, who are a migrant,
You know well the pain
Finding that upon your return,
What you loved is gone.”
11.
“Come back to me.
Come back to me like a bird
Returns in the spring –
Famished and full of song.
Come back to me.
Won’t you come back to me?”
12.
“This morning she draws outlines of children
who have been killed in gun violence,
during border crossings, white chalk on cement.
The swallows circle overhead, a sweet call in B-flat;
They carry our hearts with them.”
13.
“One the same day three police officers pinned Mario Gonzalez
face down in the mulch
And watched as he drew his last breath
in a park right down the street from my house,
dozens of least terns returned to the six-mile island where I live.
Flying right over his body, the long-endangered birds arrived
in Alameda,
where they have built one of their most productive breeding
colonies in the world.
At only nine inches long with a wingspan of nearly 20 inches,
the smallest member of the gully family flies more than 3,000 miles
from Central and South America every spring to get to our
urban island.”
14.
“Oriental? Antipodes?
Words [bird names] are colonist loot
Tags whose meanings unroot and seize
And keep the “natives” mute.”
15.
“…The door swung shut
and the hummingbird was left to zip and swing
through all that vaulted space, to migrate only
from leather to brass and patter like a great
and solitary bee against sun-splashed windows.
Months later, after such luxury and no way to love,
this shimmery mummy. Another guest walks up,
grabs my wrist, and says, Oh can I have it?
I could make something! reaching for her purse.”
16.
“Each year, we are less
until soon
we may be only a hole in the sky
the size of a broken heart.”
Perhaps, then, the birds – coming and going – can remind us of our own animal need to be attentive to the passing of time and what can be lost if we fail to show up…
17.
“…they [the peregrines] rob you of time. From the day they appear, there is no rest. You have to sharpen the machete and get a new hat. The last thunder is near and the cornfields await you. Oh! and also, of course, because of the mask they wear on their eyes.”
18.
“Time never rests,
its ghost prints leading us over a horizon giddy
with insistent light
we cannot conceive will even end.”
To lament is an act of wailing, or moaning, or weeping, but it can also be a calling out and a calling in. Lamentation can be a releasing of what was, while simultaneously inviting a vision, a realization of what greater manifest is arriving. Lamentation might just be the phoenix’s dawn song…
19.
“Nor in fact
could anything be said
to move him now.
this is what we learn
from him, if
we learn at all: That he
is dead, stuffed
among the mystery
of all he has been.
Is changed as we
are changed,
gazing upon him.”
20.
“…I’d wish for an earth not dire or overheated
For people still enamored of the spell
where thrush and human in concert dwell.”
In the act of lamentation, there is an inherent honoring of life, a gratitude, and a leaning into something mysterious – something hinting of itself in verse…
21.
“We dug a hole behind the log, buried the murre in the sand, and decorated the grave with treasures the boy had found. Sanding erect, looking out to sea, he whistled a sad song for the dead bird. Then, hand-in-hand, we walked back down the beach under the terrible silence of the empty sky.”
22.
“But I also wondered, did the goose ever question if this
Changing world would be viable enough to support her young?
Did fear or doubt ever enter her hollow-boned body,
Haunt her dreams, alter her patterns of flight?…
I know that our children flew
Into the world alongside one another,
I know that she and I are life bearers
And that without us, there is no story
to tell. I know that when her family
eventually flew from the pond,
I missed them terribly
and that my daughter will hear tales
about their elegance and intelligence
for as long as there is wind in my lungs.”
When we enter the wilds accompanied only by the pale of human loss, might the birds we encounter there not be birds at all? Perhaps lamentation is a song that enables the necessary mystery to find us in ways that we long to be found…
23.
“This place you [mother] taught me
To know and love
Is blessed with birdlife,
And now these graceful cranes
Greet me here the first time ever.
A sign in the stillness.”
24.
“He caught me unawares, further out on the edge of the earth. Guard, or guardian. He stood posing, in profile, bracing against wind and wave. Great. Blue. Great blue here. In my nearly gone first week of living, there he stood. Sentry, or sentinel. It was his presence, I know, that caused my arms to reach to the sky and my lungs to exclaim “Yes-Yes” to the universe or to the heron or to the wind or to me. Yes. Yes. If this heron can be here, alive, fighting the elements, I can fly home, and stay alive, fighting my elements. Great blue. Message, or messenger.
And to this day of staying alive, I do not know if it was a heron, or my father.”
And, then, there is the healing that arrives through what birds visit upon us – our true nature found again – in the body of the human animal…
25.
“Even this heart, wounded
and bruised, can’t help but open
to the wheeling of nighthawks,
how they arc and sweep
as the sun disappears
and then continue their swooping
long after the light is gone.”
26.
“And now that I know this dove,
who’s sound turns itself like a key
into the quiet hallway of my bones,
is not misnamed as the administrator of mornings
but who knows mourning as a pathway to divinity—
who laments with the rising and falling tides of
this troubled world, who grants me permission
to grieve even when grieving has gone out
of fashion.”
27.
“Let a blue heron nest in my heart
This is how I start
Let my hands turn currents in rivers
Let me feel the shiver
May she weave my weary bones
Into the leaves that twine her home
May my eyes shine with her dreams
The world is more than it seems”
Those who have lamented well, who have consciously tended the ecology of grief, discover gifts – the resources of human nature – along the way. Now, what is found, is given – freely released. Life lifts and carries on.
28.
“Farewell, winged beauties.
How we will miss you!
My heart aches upon your leaving.
All I can offer are my blessings.”
The excerpts included in this essay are from Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration, edited by Jamie K. Reaser and J. Drew Lanham for Talking Waters Press, 2023. The proceeds from Dawn Songs benefit the American Bird Conservancy’s Conservation and Justice Fellowship program. 1. Rochelle L. Johnson, Plummeting; 2. Kathleen Dean Moore, Swallows Falling; 3. David Gessner, Homeless; 4. Renata Golden, How I Spend My New Summers; 5. Erin Robertson, To the Swainson’s Thrush; 6. Coreen Weilminster, Eulogy for a Moving Miracle, Pts 1 & 2; 7. Bill Hilton Jr, Birder Cats; 8. Carl Safina, It’s Just Luck; 9. Paul A. Riss, Lonely Sky; 10. Rafael Calderόn-Parra, Migrante; 11. Jamie K. Reaser, Come Back to Me; 12. Gwendolyn Morgan, Solace of Swallows; 13. Emily Polk, The Least Tern; 14. David George Haskell, Colonial Biogeographic Nomenclature, A Sonnet for Biological Textbooks; 15. Derek Sheffield, Christmas Party; 16. Kim Schnuelle, Vacillations/Flycatcher Lament; 17. Apab’yan Tew, Ri Elaq’omab’; 18. Pamela Uschuk, Western Tanager; 19. William Pitt Root, Arctic; 20. Walker Abel, Hermit Thrush; 21. Kathleen Dean Moore, Common Murre; 22. April Tierney, Mother Canada Goose; 23. Geoffrey Garver, A Sign of Life; 24. Pamela Norton Reed, Great Blue; 25. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, In Crepuscular Light; 26. April Tierney, I Am in Love with the Mourning Dove; 27. Deborah Levoy, Blue Heron; 28. Tina Asherae Fields, Autumn Farewell Blessing for the Migratory Birds.
The book can be ordered anywhere books are sold online and at many local bricks and mortar stores. We are encouraging purchases through Bookshop.org to support indie writers and presses | Dawn Songs FB page | Our YouTube channel
Seven Foundations for a New Era
Seven Foundations for a New Era
featured photo by Damir
Out here on the coast it is early Summer. The lavender is flowering, sweet smelling, attracting bees, the wild rose bush falling pink over the fence. The deer and her still-speckled fawn come in the evening to eat the grass near the house, as a red-tailed flacon alights on a branch outside my window. Today it was also announced that the world will experience record heat levels over the next five years, which “will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management, and the environment,” and it will be likely “to breach the 1.5C climate threshold by 2027.”
These two opposing stories, the beauty and wonder of the natural world and the polycrisis of our present civilization, speak to me of this moment in our shared journey. They make me wonder into what future are we are walking, and how should we respond? Some are working to spare us from the worst of the climate and biodiversity crisis, reducing our carbon emissions, rewilding and regenerative farming, a possible degrowth economy. Here climate and social justice walk hand in hand, as we can no longer afford to deny the history of our exploitation and greed, the burdens placed on the Global South. Others are looking towards a time of transition as our present culture unravels. What are the tools of resilience we need, or communities that can support us through possible social collapse?
I am drawn to look further, seven generations or more, to a possible future waiting at the edges of our vision: a journey together with the Earth and her more-than-human inhabitants, a way to live rooted in the living oneness that is the foundation of the ecosystem to which we belong. This is the future I am drawn to explore, a half-hidden path like the deer trails that lead from my garden into the deeper forest.
I do not expect many to follow this pathway, it is too hidden, too far from the images and structures of our present-day consciousness. It belongs to a past when we walked together with a fully animate Earth, when Her inhabitants spoke to us and we listened, knew Her stories and signs. When our dreams and visions were woven into the texture of the land. When we knew where we belonged. But I sense it can also belong to a future quite different to now, when we can once again be a part of the “great conversation” with the rivers and the winds, rather than existing solely in today’s blinkered world of rational consciousness.
I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds, shifts taking place that belong to this future, how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there is a need to begin to work with these changes, to lay the foundations for a radically different future—a new civilization emerging organically from the wasteland we have created.
One morning last Summer, I awoke long before dawn with the clear sense of a number of foundational qualities that belong to the next era. I express them here simply, with only a little amplification, in order to convey the way they came to me.
Here are seven foundational qualities for the next era:
- Respect for women and feminine principles, such as receptivity, patience, nurturing, listening (with the senses, the soul, and the heart). This does not mean that we will be returning to a matriarchal era, but that patriarchal oppression in all its forms will no longer be part of our culture. Without the return of the feminine nothing new can be born, nor will we be able to nurture a new way of being with the Earth.
- Respecting the land as sacred and developing different new and old ways of working with the Earth in harmony with life’s biodiversity and interdependence.
- Time no longer seen as linear, but a return to the rhythms and patterns of nature, the seasons—how Spring follows Winter—but also our place in other patterns of time, within our bodies and the world around us, for example the waxing and waning of the moon and the seasons of our human lives. Through this quality human life will no longer be seen as part of a linear image of progress, instead we will return to living in harmony with the many different rhythms of time, recognizing our place within nature and the cosmos. This will also help us to live more fully in the present moment.
- The coming era will be non-hierarchical. How the present hierarchies—their dynamics of power and patterns of control—fall apart will be one of the defining experiences of the coming decades, even as new, non-hierarchical ways of living and working together emerge, often experimental, like seed nurseries for the coming era.
- There will be a focus on forming communities of all types, which can connect together in an organic way, be interconnected and interdependent as in nature.
- Oneness will be a foundational principle. No one will be excluded, everything and everyone will have their own place and be intrinsically recognized for their own nature, their note in the symphony of creation. This will be the most simple and the most difficult, because it is counter to so many of the patterns of human behavior of the present time. But with this principle, life and humanity will reorganize itself, reconstellate into new ways, new patterns and connections, that reflect the unity that belongs to all of life.
- Love, love and care for each other and for the Earth will be the central spiritual principle. This will reawaken the Divine in a new way, returning us to an experience of divine presence.
These seven qualities will be held together in a new way of being, a new space, which is connected to the cosmos. Through it all will run the axis of love, from the center of the Earth to the center of the cosmos, present in every cell of creation.
Through these foundational qualities life will regenerate in ways at present we cannot even imagine. For example, there will be new sources of non-polluting energy which will be freely accessible. How long it will take before this new civilization fully emerges is not known, but it is my understanding that within two centuries it will become visible. The next 100 to 130 years will be a time of increasing insecurity, disturbance, chaos, and then out of this will gradually emerge a new civilization, quite different to now.
Do We Have Any Idea What Deprogramming Ourselves Looks Like?
Do We Have Any Idea What Deprogramming Ourselves Looks Like?
Via Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures
Trying to bring people together to address local and global challenges, such as climate destabilization or systemic inequalities in times of increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity is an enormous challenge in itself. Part of this challenge is that what has worked before in bringing people together is no longer working for many different reasons: reality is much more complex and more materially precarious for most; change is happening fast and differently from before, increasing dissonance between generations; there are more people involved and more diversity at the table, where many different ideas of “forward” compete for a platform (even between and within groups that have historically and systemically been marginalized) and stable authorities and enduring consensus are no longer possible. Another part of the challenge is that what is optimal for the process of learning and unlearning for one group of people can often be triggering and harmful to another and vice versa (with unevenly distributed harms and burdens).
This working list of invitations for “steps back” and “steps forward” was created to assist individuals and groups in the global north to address some of the contemporary challenges of bringing people together to respond to local and global challenges. The invitations were particularly informed by what we have learned navigating and negotiating the complexities, tensions and paradoxes of racial and colonial dynamics in group processes, as well as the complexities, tensions and paradoxes of negotiating conflicting diagnoses of problems and theories of change.
The invitations also attempt to interrupt a common dichotomy found in mainstream approaches to social change and problem-solving that pits a focus on solutions, action and hopefulness against a focus on complaints, inaction and hopelessness. We believe this dichotomous framing itself is part of the problem and reflects a severe limitation in mainstream problem-posing, problem-solving, accountability and coordination approaches.
The invitations also signal to the fact that we have been conditioned to create idealizations that make things more manageable, more positive, more hopeful, more comfortable and more actionable. These idealizations may address aspects of the challenge at hand, but since they are created to meet problematic conditioned emotional desires (for certainty, control, consensus, innocence, hope in secured futurity and validation), they disavow their own limitations, the harm they inflict and/or the human and nonhuman costs they generate.
Unless we can expand our capacity to hold space (cognitively, affectively and relationally) for all relevant aspects of reality, we have very little chance of approaching complex challenges or coordinating efforts in wiser (more mature), more sober, and more socially and ecologically accountable ways. This includes holding space for the good, the bad, the broken and the ugly within and around us, and the known, the unknown and the unknowable. We need to build stamina and “stomach” to navigate paradoxes, tensions, conflicts and contradictions, and to be comfortable with the discomfort of staying with the trouble and not turning away from what makes us uncomfortable, irritated, fearful and/or frustrated.
The 7 steps back and 7 steps forward exercise invites us to increase our capacity to hold the weight of multiple moving layers of complexity, complicity and uncertainty as we approach a contextual challenge. It also intends to support us to achieve deeper levels of insight, hindsight, foresight, analysis and discernment, to learn to build relationships differently and to develop stamina in order not to be immobilized and/or overwhelmed by discomfort, uncertainty, complexity, and/or complicity in systemic harm.
7 steps back
- Step back from your self-image: What are your real investments, fears, hopes and intentions and where do they come from? What emotions, insecurities, unexamined desires or unprocessed traumas could be driving your decision-making? What emotional states are you actively avoiding and at what cost? What does your ego feel entitled and justified to do? To what extent do these entitlements and justifications limit your capacity to face and address the challenges at hand?
- Step back from your generational cohort: How are the associated challenges perceived and experienced by other generations? How are different generations interpreting reality differently, experiencing it differently and expecting different things from it and how come? How fast are these changes happening? What is your generation being called out on? To what extent are the interests of incoming generations represented in your usual problem-posing, problem-solving, coordination and accountability approaches?
- Step back from the universalization of your social/cultural/economic parameters of normality: What does the privilege you carry prevent you from seeing and experiencing? How is your privilege also a loss? What are you projecting as true, real, normal and desirable for everyone and how does that reflect your own background? How can these projections become harmful to others and/or limit possibilities for relationship building and/or coordination? Who could refuse to work with you on legitimate grounds?
- Step back from your immediate context and time: How do the challenges in your immediate context reflect wider patterns of change in society across different timescales? What historical, systemic and/or structural forces are at work? What is your perspective of the larger picture? What are the boundaries of this perspective (how is it limited)?
- Step back from familiar patterns of relationship-building and problem-solving that you have been socialized into: To what extent has your approach to the problem been conditioned and limited by the culture it emerged from? What alternative ways of seeing, doing, relating and being are already viable, but are currently unimaginable to you and those around you? What are you missing out on? Who/what are you accountable to and how come? What accountabilities are you denying, rejecting and/or neglecting? What are you indifferent to and how come?
- Step back from the normalized pattern of elevating humanity above the rest of nature: To what extent and how is what is unfolding a consequence ofthe perceived separation between “man and nature” and/or the rendering of “nature” as property?How would you approach the problem differently if other species and entities (e.g. rivers, coral reefs, mountains) had legal personhood (if you could be liable for damages, negligence, injury and ecocide) and if they were accorded independent and inalienable rights to exist and to flourish (i.e. rights of nature)? To what extent are the interests of other species represented in your problem-posing, problem-solving, accountability and coordination approaches?
- Step back from the impulse to find quick fixes and expand your capacity not to be immobilized by uncertainty, complicity and complexity: In what ways is your approach to the problem part of the problem? To what extent are you being driven by desires for innocence, benevolence and hopefulness (e.g. a saviour complex) and how can these desires be harmful and/or detrimental to the task at hand? How can you leverage the recognition of complicity in systemic harm towards deeper and more enduring forms of responsibility and accountability? To what extent are you equipped to repair and weave relationships grounded on trust, respect, consent, reciprocity and accountability?
7 steps forward (and/or aside)
- Step forward with honesty and courage to see what you don’t want to see: commit to expanding your capacity to sit with what is real, difficult and painful: the good, the bad, the ugly and the brokenness of humanity within and around you. In what ways are your projections, idealizations, expectations, hopes, fears and fragilities preventing you from approaching the aspects of the problem that are unpleasant for you and/or that challenge your sense of reality and/or self-image? What aspects of the challenge at hand are you not willing or ready to see and how does this impair your ability to address the challenge itself?
- Step forward with humility to find strength in openness and vulnerability: commit to shedding your conditioned arrogance and sense of merit, status and self-importance in order to decenter yourself and centre the challenge you are trying to address. In what ways are you reproducing patterns that centre your desire for recognition, validation, prestige or protagonism (e.g. the saviour complex)? How can these desires limit your capacity to build relationships and to mobilize the coordination that is necessary for the challenge at hand?
- Step forward with self-reflexivity so that you can read yourself and learn to read the room: commit to tracing where your cognitive, affective and relational patterns of engaging with reality are coming from, where they are at, where they are going, their limitations and the ways they impact others and are part of the problem; learn to step back from yourself in order to read (the room) and to read how you (and what you are doing consciously and unconsciously) are being read in the room: learn to see yourself from other people’s perspectives, especially the unflattering parts, and learn to be ok with that (you won’t be able to control it anyway).
- Step forward with self-discipline to do the work on yourself so that you don’t become work for other people: commit to identifying and interrupting compulsions and impulses grounded on socially sanctioned and conditioned harmful patterns such as greed, vanity, arrogance, indifference, indulgence, extraction and consumption (of time, labour or energy of others). To what extent are you aware of your own compulsions and unhealthy reality-coping mechanisms? How do you justify the continuity of these patterns to yourself?
- Step forward with maturity to do what is needed rather than what you want to do: commit to the long-term project of becoming a good elder and ancestor for all relations. Taking into account that mainstream culture encourages and rewards self-infantilization and the denial of responsibility, how can you reorient yourself toward eldership and generational accountability? To what extent are you aware of the complexity of your own thoughts, emotions, investments and patterns of relationship building (the internal conversations that are happening within you)? What stories that you are telling yourself need to be further examined? What learning/unlearning have you been avoiding? Why and at what cost (for yourself and/or others)?
- Step forward with expanding discernment and attention: commit to expanding your capacity for discernment in proportion to the increase in complexity, this includes your capacity to read across time and across different layers of reality, and to hold paradoxes, tensions and uncertainties in view. What do you need to learn or unlearn cognitively, effectively and relationally in order not to be immobilized and/or overwhelmed by complexity, ambiguity, plurality and unknowability?
- Step forward with adaptability, flexibility, stamina and resilience for the long haul: move for the sake of learning to coordinate and be transformed by the process rather than arrive somewhere: be prepared to fall, to fail, to have your plans shattered, to be stretched, to have your heart broken (open, not apart), to change course and to find joy in the struggle itself rather than in the imagined prize at the end. To what extent are your desires and calculations to arrive at a predetermined destination preventing you from engaging in the experiments and experimentations whose failures will provide the “data” for new directions to take and better places we may aspire to go, that we cannot imagine from the outset?
Each of these steps (both steps back and steps forward) requires unlearning what we have been cognitively, affectively and relationally conditioned to think, feel, relate, hope and imagine in modern/colonial systems (including systems of formal education). This is very different from self-actualization because it is not about “mastery” of concepts or skills (filling a cup), but about “depth” (emptying that cup, shattering it and allowing the pieces to rebuild themselves into something you cannot imagine from the outset). The unlearning required for each step will likely be life-long and life-wide.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
This is a portion of the full article, available at Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures
Collapse and Expansion
In many of the science fiction stories I read as a child, technology accelerated on a linear trajectory, leading to highly advanced societies that colonized other planets and went where ‘no man has gone before’. I wanted to believe this narrative of rationality, progress and better living through technology, but things haven’t really gone that way for most living beings. Modernity, despite its human achievements, has let us down. Greed and ill-being are at the core of its converging crises, and many believe modernity’s collapse is inevitable as a result. Even if we don’t completely buy into “collapse”, we may have a very deep unease, the sense of something terrifying ‘slouching toward Bethlehem.’
And yet, the collapse of modernity is also a partial narrative. Contained in our disease may be a key to its cure.
Something other than ‘collapse’ is also happening. We are experiencing an expansion in our understanding of reality. Technologies ancient and modern enable us to peel back the very layers of matter, space, mind, and time, and touch their primordial depths. We are directly encountering congruences that our ancestors intuited and honored through myth and ceremony.
Consciousness is evolving. Evolution does not mean ‘superior’. The word comes from Latin ēvolūtiō – “unrolling a papyrus scroll, to roll out or away, uncover, unwrap, unfold by using the intellect.” We are unwrapping the reality of our unitive nature – our ability to harmonize with a living Universe.
This unfolding, or expansion of consciousness is inevitable. Many have said so. Joanna Macy argues that ecological and social crises compel us to recognize our interconnectedness and overcome our illusion of separation. Ken Wilber, says that expanding human consciousness requires the integration of various fields of knowledge, including science, spirituality, and art to transcend egocentrism. Collapse and expansion mirrors the natural cycle of our breathing as well as the Big Breath of creation. We see it in the rise and fall of civilizations and in the rise and fall of waves on the sea.
I have just returned from the inauguration of the Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health a Harvard. During a full day of presentations and practices with scholars and monastics, including Jon Kabat-Zin, Donald Berwick, and Sister Chan Khong, I was stirred many times by a kind of emotional relief. Researchers shared about the inseparability of mind-body, about interbeing, Oneness. This is not the kind of talk normally heard in the academic halls of health science! I experience similar joy when I visit certain communities, meet with deeply engaged young people, or sit with my sangha and Kosmos Circles.
None of this is to minimize the very real, horrifying, unjust and punishing consequences of climate chaos, war, violence, disease and disparity that are a daily reality for billions of people, plants animals and minerals worldwide. All people of conscience are duty-bound to reduce harm, practice generosity, and make effort to dismantle the causes and conditions that feed these realities. Harm reduction, healing and regenerating are the energies most needed right now. At the same time, we can view catastrophe as a ‘finger pointing to the moon.’ Dissolution and endings are painful reminders but should not be mistaken for the ultimate reality. The moon represents its true nature, which can only be directly experienced as the mind of love.
I have compared the mind of love to ‘building the ark of consciousness’. As we think, we go. We have to build the collective thought form that goes beyond “collapse.” Even if we can’t quite imagine the more beautiful world of the future, we need to follow its light. That is the intention behind this new issue and next chapter of Kosmos Journal.
I have compared the mind of love to ‘building the ark of consciousness’. As we think, we go. We have to build the collective thought form that goes beyond “collapse.” Even if we can’t quite imagine the more beautiful world of the future, we need to follow its light. That is the intention behind this new issue and next chapter of Kosmos Journal.
May your days be filled with the wonders of Life.
R. Fabian
A Cosmic Twist
A Cosmic Twist
Look up into the clear night sky, and after a time you will perceive how the stars rotate around a central axis, as if on a great wheel. The ancients saw this rotation as the movement of a cosmic spindle, with its whorl in heaven and its shaft, the axis mundi, invisibly extending down to earth. Life and destiny were the threads spun by this spindle, the fabric of the world woven by the movement of sun and moon, stars and planets.
This image is remarkably universal. In The Republic, Plato beautifully describes the “spindle of necessity,” suspended from a rainbow-colored shaft of light, with an eightfold whorl of stars and planets, all singing in eternal harmonies, while the Kogi people of Colombia tell how the Mother Goddess set up a giant spindle to penetrate all nine layers of the just-created earth, still soft and unstable, which then solidified around it. The cosmic spider spins the world into existence in myths found all over North and South America, Africa, and Asia, and fate-spinning goddesses include the Germanic Norns, the Greek Moirae, and the Roman Parcae. In an apocryphal story, the Virgin Mary spins and weaves the veil of the Temple, which is the cosmos. 1
The primal activity of thread-spinning has become distant and unfamiliar to us today, through the mechanization of fabric production, but it is not difficult to recover a sense for it. Take a lock of sheep’s wool, which you can obtain from a craft store or fiber market, or perhaps even in its raw condition from a farmer. Carefully tease and puff out the short fibers until they form a fluffy ball. Starting at one point on the surface of this ball, pull out a small portion of the fibers, twisting them with your fingers. Keep pulling and twisting, gradually taking up more of the fibers, until you have a length of thread, or more likely a lumpy, unwieldy strand of thick-and-thin yarn—which may not be beautiful, but is nevertheless a transformation of the disorganized substance you started with.
You’ve just practiced one of the oldest of human handcrafts, dating back around 30,000 years, which, as we have seen, represented for our ancestors a human mirroring of the forces of the cosmos. When people became spinners, they were not merely serving a mundane need for clothing and shelter; they were establishing themselves as creators, bringing their own activity into play to shape the products of nature, no longer passive recipients or victims of natural events. Spinning brings a cosmic “twist” into the raw materials we encounter upon earth, giving them strength and continuity, and in so doing, the soul of the spinner is transformed, as well.
When we spin a thread, we are actually creating an extended, attenuated spiral, and the spiral is a cosmic form that repeats itself on all levels of our living world, from the shape of our galaxy to the helical structure of our DNA. More tangibly, spirals can be found everywhere in nature, in whirling clouds and swirling water, in unfurling fern fronds and seed-filled sunflower heads. Even the hair on the back of our own heads grows in a spiral pattern. The uneven, rotating crimp of sheep’s wool is actually what makes it much easier to spin than smooth fibers like cotton and flax; the wavy fiber complements the movement of the spindle, and locks the spiral structure in place.
The spiral dances of the moving stars and planets were tracked by ancient astronomers, and humans very early took up this motif in their artworks and cultic images, chiseling spirals on passage tombs in Ireland and rocks in the Arizona desert, carving them on Chinese jade animals and the Ionic column capitals of Greece. The originators of the art of spinning must have felt that they were echoing the forming of matter by cosmic forces.
Tools were soon invented to make the process quicker and the products more consistent. Probably first a stick was thrust into the fibers, which could then be rolled down a thigh instead of doing all that tedious finger-twiddling. This is something you can also try out yourself, using a small, smooth stick with a hooked end that you pick up in the woods and trim to suit your needs. A more complicated development involved using a length of spun thread to tie a flattish, roundish stone together with a protruding stick, thus making a weight to drive the turning motion and a handle that could be used to start the stone spinning, as well as to wind the thread around as it was produced. 2 In time, this evolved into human-crafted spindle whorls and shafts, which give us Plato’s cosmic image, and the spindles of countless fairy tales.3
Spinners were imitating a divine process, and their work and their tools were always invested with symbolic meaning. The discovery of a spindle made of precious silver and gold in a Neolithic grave site in Anatolia, Turkey, demonstrates just how far back this symbolic, ritual significance extends. Meanwhile, the familiar stories of spindles and spinning that have come down to us often make clear that dangers and risks are involved in such an undertaking. If performed without reverence, it could lead to disaster.
In “Mother Holle,” for example, a story about two stepsisters, the industrious spinner reaps a golden reward, while the one who is too slothful to complete her task is punished with a hideous fate. This is more than a cautionary tale intended to frighten girls into fulfilling their societal roles, for as Jacob Grimm himself described in his Teutonic Mythology, Mother Holle is a manifestation of a Germanic nature-goddess, Hulda; it is said that snowflakes are the feathers shaken from her bed. When the girls fall into her world by tumbling into a well, they enter into the world behind nature, the world of the elemental forces that cause snow and rain, growth and fertility. Diligence in spinning is a sign that one is worthy of taking up that cosmic task, of becoming a co-creator with the divine. The alert awareness and feeling-sense required for good spinning are equated with compassion; the good sister answers an apple tree and an oven that call out to her for help, while the lazy one ignores them. Her failure dooms her to be covered with pitch, an outer sign of her inner insensibility.
Mechanization and materialization of the cosmic spinning activity can also lead to dire results, as shown in the tale of “Rumpelstiltskin.” In this story, the girl is a poor miller’s daughter, and the mill, like the spindle, is a wheel that resonates with the cosmic motion of the heavens. But rather than a simple tool for bringing order into chaos, it is a huge machine that crushes and pulverizes the living grain into a lifeless powder, rendering the miller poor indeed. To return life and value to this material, turning it into bread, would require a further step of transformation, of hard work and patience, but instead of humbly acknowledging this, the miller is moved by an impulse of worldly greed. He makes a wild claim that his daughter can spin straw into gold, and a grotesque trickster figure steps in to do it. Faced with her impossible task, unable to admit her inadequacy, the girl enters into a bargain with the subhuman creature.
When he claims her child as his reward, the girl, now a queen, has to earn back her life-giving power of transformation. And this time the way is through language, through naming. She must name the unknown and feared element in her life, must know it intimately, in order to overcome it.
It’s no accident that spinning is associated with language, that we speak of “spinning” a tale or telling a “yarn.” This, too, represents a step toward cosmic awareness, a human participation in the processes that create our destiny. When we look at events with such a higher awareness, we can perceive the links between them and come to a better understanding of their true essence. Spnning is rescued from falling into a mechanical search for material gain, and transformed into a quest for meaning and knowledge.
As anyone who has tried it knows, spinning is not a mindless task. It requires constant attention not to end up with a broken thread or a tangled mess. At the same time, the rhythmical balance of hand and mind working together is deeply satisfying and calming. The spinner may find her own thoughts changing, becoming organized along with the fiber, leading to new inspirations and insights. An inner “golden thread” can be sensed, one that connects us to the cosmic rhythms which created us.
This is the value we can give to our own lives, when we accept what we have been given, and shape it in wise accordance with cosmic laws, rather than attempting to deny or subvert them. In taking the latter course, we spin ourselves into another form of disaster. When in the story of “Briar Rose” or “Sleeping Beauty” the king hears a prediction that his daughter will prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a deathlike sleep, he attempts to avert that fate by burning all the spinning wheels in the kingdom. Ignorance cannot turn away a hard destiny, though; the princess’s curiosity leads her to touch the first spindle she sees, ironically bringing on the very doom the king tried to avoid.4
A better solution is to observe, learn from, and imitate the cosmic rhythms that we perceive, and to create useful products full of beauty and harmony, rather than lusting after wealth and power. In “Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle,” a king’s son is searching for a bride, who he declares must be at once the richest and the poorest. He comes to a village where he is directed to the richest girl, but moves on with hardly a glance for all her finery. The poorest girl, meanwhile, is sitting and spinning all alone in her little house; he likewise glances at her and rides away, but she looks after him until he disappears, and opens her window.
Remembering verses that her godmother used to say when she taught her the handcrafts that now form the basis for her livelihood, the girl sends out her spindle, shuttle, and needle as messengers to the prince, trailing marvelous fabrics behind them. He recognizes that his destined bride is this girl who is at once the richest and the poorest: poor in material wealth, but rich in skill and wisdom. They are married with great joy, and the tools of her labor are kept with honor in the treasury of the kingdom.
It is tempting for us to turn to external, mechanical solutions for our problems today, but human ingenuity and honest work never lose their value, when coupled with reverent appreciation for the rhythms of nature. If we can become loving creators, spinning the threads of life in harmony with the turning wheel of the cosmos, then the promise of all the ancient tales will be fulfilled, and their dangers averted.
NOTES
(1) For these and many other fascinating references to the lore of spinning and weaving, see Michael A. Rappenglick, “Cosmic Spinning and Weaving: Making the Texture of the World” in Archaeoastromy in Archaeology and Ethnography, edited by Emília Pásztor (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007).
(2) In the short film “On Handwork” (viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfoByYLSBY8&t=43s&ab_channel=ChuckSmith), Renate Hiller demonstrates spinning with a stone tied to a stick, along with explaining its cosmic and human significance. I am indebted to Renate and her colleagues at the Fiber Craft Studio for teaching me much about both the practical and spiritual aspects of spinning.
(3) This tool, the handspindle, has been in use for over ten thousand years, and is still widely used today. The spinning wheel is only a few hundred years old. The many tales that feature spinning undoubtedly come from origins far earlier than their written incarnations, and would originally have referred to the older tool. This makes sense of a “Rumpelstiltskin” variant in which the girl is spinning on the roof (easy with the highly portable handspindle, not so much with a wheel).
(4) This tale may also have originally referred to a handspindle, or to an older type of hand-turned spinning wheel. Modern treadled spinning wheels seldom have sharp parts.
The four fairy tales referenced in this essay can all be found in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. Among other sources, the stories can be accessed on the site of D. L. Ashliman, https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html: “Frau Holle” (#24), “Little Brier-Rose” (#50), “Rumpelstiltskin” (#55), “Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle (#188).
Impermanent and Eternal | Portraits of Tibet
Impermanent and Eternal | Portraits of Tibet
Author’s Note | This is a brief introduction to “Portraits of Tibet”. I am now working on a second book, going into more detail about nomad daily life, provisionally titled “People of the Black Tents,” also published by Graffeg under their imprint Bird Eye Books.
My nomadic roots trace back to the 70s as a hippie living in a camper van in America, and at age 25 I met my first Tibetans, when the 16th Karmapa and his entourage visited Wales.
Later I became immersed in Tibetan lay and monastic communities in India and Nepal in the 1990s and was deeply moved by a culture that placed Spirituality at the heart of life. I began photographing the culture in exile for a small photo Library dedicated to Tibetan life inside and outside Tibet.
I think I’ve always had a feeling for earth-based cultures and when I first came across Tibetan nomads, or drokpa, in 2000 in the Changthang of Ladakh I realised that here an amazing, indigenous, earth-based culture was still alive and intact. I fell in love with the rawness, beauty and simplicity of their traditional way of life – deeply struck by an extraordinary sense of their connection, their one-ness, with the environment around them. I had never encountered this among any Tibetan group before and I determined to go into Tibet in search of more. I became aware, too, that this precious and unique group was one of the last great surviving nomadic communities in the world.
But for how long? Governments all over the world seek to control nomads and settle them, and they face the impacts of globalisation and “modern” education with their depressing emphasis on rationalism, materialism and market forces. The drokpa have also faced the impact of fencing and illegal mining, and now the devastating effects of climate change on the high-altitude grasslands that have been their home for millennia.
Ever since that first encounter the Tibetan nomads became my photographic obsession and the subject of my heart ,and I have travelled extensively in eastern Tibet (now part of Sichuan Province, Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and TAR, China) documenting nomad life. I was afraid that I was witnessing the dying of a beautiful earth-based culture.
It has been (and continues to be) a joy to be allowed to record the lives of these remarkable people – a kind of photo driven love letter to what could be a dying way of life. The experience of hanging out with families in their black yak hair tents has been both down to earth and profound, awakening some ancient memory inside me. I aim to portray the people I photograph with as much compassion and dignity as possible. They have allowed me into their lives, which is an enormous privilege. When on the move, travelling around with Tibetan friends, I also come across scenes spontaneously – dusty pilgrims returning from circumambulating a sacred mountain, Swaggering guys on the street, devoted local families at monastery festivals, and yogins and yoginis from nomad backgrounds.
I still don’t speak Tibetan, even after all these years, but that allows me to concentrate on being still and just looking while my Tibetan friends do all the talking and my hosts relax. Photography is a meditation for me.
‘These photographs are a valuable insight into a world where a land and its people are still bonded together, holding what is sacred, as well as expressing a deep kindness and joy.’ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
‘Her chronicle of the world of the drokpa is filled with hard questions relevant to anyone observing the rapid technological changes overtaking not only traditional communities, but across the world. Such questions are unforced because they are posed as reflections that concern the big questions of 21st century modernity.’ Raymond Lam, Buddhist Door
‘Many Tibetan people have never seen their homeland, and for them Portraits of Tibet provides a context that is rarely seen – a vital lens through which they and others will be better able to understand the culture and real-life experiences of its people.’ Yeshi Jampa, Taste Tibet
