“we can no longer afford to have petty, controlling, abusive, relationships in which denial is supported. We do this to ourselves, we do it to our families, our neighbors and we do it to nature.”
F. gave me a valuable lesson in “doing what it takes” in order to liberate sentient beings. I’ve always said, to myself and to my students, to not “mix traditions.” But last week taught me the value of going open source when it comes to spiritual traditions. What I brought into the lodge was essentially a sadhana, and how well it fitted there, underneath the willow saplings! I’m afraid I’m not much of an agriculturalist. I mean, not like T., or the people from the Permaculture School. I see the connections, and my spirit is touched by the aesthetics of permaculture design. Rather, to me, it is a cultural phenomenon and our spiritual practice is the carrier-wave of that culture. I think that what F., and T., and C. are doing is perhaps of more importance than giving people access to the permaculture tools. Because it is clear, to me and to many others, that the root cause of the destruction we are causing for ourselves can be found in our psychological wounds. Wounds we inflict upon each other as a culture, upon ourselves as fellow humans, wounds that do not get healed. It is this that needs to be healed: our addiction, our grasping, our focus on the short term and on personal survival to the detriment of others. This is where our spiritual practice comes in, stemming from many sources, practiced by men and women such as you and me. We are broken healers, the path is long, there is no rest, no respite, from this healing, from healing ourselves. There is a growing number of us, and now that there is still opportunity, we must take the time to learn each other’s practice. And teach people to heal themselves. Someone reminded me of the fact that this is a prophetic mission in the truest sense of the word, and that in that sense permaculture as a spiritual discipline is prophetic. Inside the lodge, on the second day, there was a lot of praying. I prayed that broken healers would acknowledge their wounds fully, in order to heal those of others. There was more praying, requests for assistance, because the path is so long. Wishes for respite, in the knowledge that none is to be had, except those brief moments of companionship. We look into each other’s eyes. There’s a fire burning in each of us. May it give warmth to those who need it. May it light the way. May it benefit sentient beings.
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from a merely sentimental perspective, this stance resonates fully with how things are at this moment, where mind & heart abide, in the stillness of what could be named a “home” without roof and walls..however, given how late it is in this episteme called ‘humanity’s passage through consciousness’, methinks, humbly, that more expedient , urgent - and may i be daring enough to enunciate - unprecedented.., measures, acts, images, movements, connections, etc., are called for in order to reach the other shore, even if for just the briefest of flutters, as in the umwelt of the dragonfly. thus, on my daily perambulation through this invisible city, i armed myself today with newly inspired smells, sounds, dreams, memories, vernacular allies, and buckets full of hope..
we’re thrusting ourselves forward, to the future, not knowing what we’ll encounter beyond the bend. if because of our work only a small group can continue to heal and teach others, and if that, in turn can be the cornerstone of “how we will be” in that time, then it’s worth it. expedient measure will, if taken in the context of a striving for utopia, only lead to bloodshed. what is necessary is our “rewilding”.
“poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful”.
(douglas hofstadter, “i am a strange loop”, basic books, 2007)
how you love words, how words love you
to be completely frank, these symbols are but fleeting horses on the moonshine, running wild until the rest that has to follow falls asleep, so that what is here to learn can slide into a state of more wakefullness and clarity; in a certain way, to then perchance be able to see the face of the buddha before he was even born, as it were. words are just inevitable pointers, all we can do is try not have them stand in front of the sun..
RE: wilding -
paul is my shepard:
http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Shepard/
http://environment.harvard.edu/religion/religion/buddhism/index.html
&
..”mountains and rivers without end”..
http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/snyder/index.html
beautiful piece this… amen to your blessings for the work …for the world… for the healing
In the teaching work, F.’ and A.’s focus was very much on “leadership”. Again, this, to me, points to the “you don’t need to declare yourself, but you mustn’t hide” wisdom of someone like Raven Caldera, who comes from yet another tradition. Yet I also think (or rather know) that it is no coincidence that knowledge like this now starts to be embodied, again, by people in the West, as a living tradition. And this I saw clearly in the lodge, through the prayers that both F. and A. offered there. Over breakfast, one day I explained to G. how incredibly fortunate the Chinese actions towards Tibet had been, if the result is that the dharma came to the west. I would not have met my own teacher were it not for the Chinese invasion of Tibet, so I’m eternally grateful to Mao Zedong!
For us the healers and the teachers, such as you are a healer and a teacher, there is no respite. We can serve others, in this capacity, not in spite of our own wounds, our own brokenness, but because of them. That is our healing tradition and our vocation as we embody it, to serve future generations. Emaho! Amen.
similar to a ripe pomegranate, the wounded healers of all ages are converging on this very moment to spread the many seeds of healing dharma on this unique planetary constellation, with all its vicissitudes, ebbs and flows..
“as one teacher said, ‘the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it’. love is the bridge..we let the mind float in the heart”. (stephen levine, “healing into life and death”, gateway books, 1987).
yes. and it is why now that we still have the means and the opportunity for global communication, we need to connect and associate. it is the permaculture way: use surplus that exists now for future contingencies.
From beginning to end, a wonderful dialog. Your concept of open source spirituality resonates for me, and I think of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” in a different light. And “use surplus that exists now for future contingencies” is where I’ve been for the past several weeks, re-discovering the fertile surplus in gardens I thought I’d neglected, which thrived without me and offered healing when I returned to them. Much to murture in the magnitude of uselessness.
..& even more resonances - munching, mulching murturing = nurturing, maturing, manuring, manners, manors, magnanimity; thus, a fertile ecology of “uselessness” has come into being, bearing the fruits of hibernating growth, or evolution by translucent and discreet threads..some gentle spiders are deeply at work, patiently and persistently!
ultimately, going into the SOURCE of things, in all senses and dimensions, is about new beginnings, even at this tardy hour; it is about re-forging alliances, re-finding our voices and renewed inspiration, it is about re-connecting in novel and loving ways, about letting go of strictures and wasted structures, about going beyond.. as, for example, this lone warrior expresses so poignantly:
“Finding, being the radical midwest”
* May 28, 2008 at 6:10 PM
This text was originally published in the Journal of Radical Shimming, vol. 4
(Early notes on the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor)
I spent most of my childhood years in a rust belt town undergoing deindustrialization. I am accustomed to people badmouthing the place, calling it an armpit. But I feel lucky to have lived there, precisely for the close-up view I had of America’s industrial heartland in the 1970s and 80s. Seeing change all around me as a child and apparently not for the better, was what opened my eyes to the alternatives, which were, I think to the surprise of many people from other parts of the country, readily available. Later, as my experience expanded to living in other towns and cities in the Great Lakes region, I came to feel a broader connection to place, and, specifically, to the countercultures of the upper midwest. Let’s call it a region made up of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and the border areas of Ontario. I can say now, with some satisfaction even, that I am a product of this place. Now looking back, I would not trade having grown up where I did for any other town in the world.
I am not the only cultural worker feeling this strong sense of regional identity, though others may have arrived at it through a different path. There are many of us, and the conversations have begun. We understand the countercultures of the upper midwest as live, deep, dispersed, and varied. They capture our imaginations, and send us into dreams of what these places where we live and have lived might yet be. But articulating this belonging through some kind of regional practice remains challenging and only partially modeled, especially when compared to the easy and accelerating flow of city-to-city cultural work. The task involves resisting the many structures (business, educational, political) heavily invested in keeping cities connected to each other, and which through equal parts antagonism and neglect maintain separations between city and suburb, town and country. An effect of city-to-city cultural production is one of flattening, of reducing variation and effacing particular, site-bound histories. This we must also reject.
On the positive side, we conceptualize our belonging by projecting back and forward, and learn to see ourselves in relation to others. Projecting backward, we ponder the continuities and ruptures between ourselves and those who came before us in this region, beating their own paths to a world different from that which they were offered. Hundreds of projects, groups, movements, businesses, neighborhoods, farms, bands, publications, radio shows, artists, explorers, naturalists, campaigns, authors, events, and spaces inspire us, from Aldo Leopold to the Detroit newspaper strike of ’95, from Gwendolyn Brooks to the Bolt Weevils, from P-9 to New Harmony, from Antler to Jane. They gave to us work we seek to remember and comprehend, and, most importantly, which we continue, sometimes in radically different clothing. But here in this place, the place we share, the upper midwest. Considering these histories, rich with paradox, shortcoming, humor, militancy, creativity, and love, and ultimately liberatory, the question then becomes, how could we not be who we are, doing the kinds of work we do?
Projecting forward from this moment, we see the end of cheap energy, and the increasing costs of transportation, food production, health care, and fresh water. All trends point toward the exhaustion of resources, and toward the wisdom of regionally sustainable lifeways. And, as the critical source of hope, toward a world populated by people hungry for a different way. In the face of powerful forces invested in the current arrangements, oblivious or neglectful of the catastrophic probabilities, cultural workers must help lay the ground work for an emergent society based on a different grade of wisdom, a different set of ethical priorities. There exists a window of opportunity in the exploration and re-imagining of regional connections in this moment of global urban dominance, one we must seize by making the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor visible to itself.
http://prop-press.vox.com/