Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Reflections (again) on Art and Spirituality.........

 

 

"A Navajo rug may be a commodity for trade.
It also may be the voice of the weaver’s prayers and dreams"

(unknown Author)


 I once had a brief conversation with a young woman who mentioned that spirituality (or religion) is "taboo" in the world of contemporary art. I agreed at the time, although  perhaps things have changed  since the 1980's when I received my MFA.  To be honest, I don't keep up with what's happening in the contemporary art world much, finding my relationship to my art mostly contemplative and devotional.

 I remember emerging from graduate school with a body of work ("A House of Doors" and "When the Word for World was Mother") very much concerned with metaphysical and spiritual exploration, and I felt  angry at the resistance I received in the program for my subject matter.  This was the height of "New Age", and  I had an enormous desire to find out who, what, and where art and spirituality were united in contemporary life, outside of the church, of course.


"Hands"
 by Lorraine Capparell (1987)


"If you bring forth what is within you it will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will harm you."

.....from the Gospel of Thomas

So I did what I've always done, took off travelling on a "vision quest" that lasted almost 5 years, visiting California and New York City, and points in between. The result was a collection of interviews I intended to make into a book called "Seeing in a Sacred Manner:  Interviews with Transformative Artists".  The book was never published, although some of the interviews were published in small journals with the kind permission of those artists who granted them to me, among them Alex and Allyson Grey (The Sacred Mirrors), Rafael Ortiz  (Physio-Psycho-Alchemy), Rachel Rosenthal (Pangaean Dreams), Kathleen Holder (The December Series), and others. In retrospect, I wish I could have made their conversations more available to other artists, because what they had to say was so profoundly inspiring to me.  Some of the interviews are on my website  https://www.laurenraine.com/seeing-in-a-sacred-manner.html


Reflections from a stained glass window


Many artists in our world have an "identity crisis". We are surrounded with structures that say art is important - schools, museums, galleries, magazines, books, churches. And yet, a contemporary practicing artist is often not given credit for pursuing her or his profession, often not seen as doing something with social significance.   I cannot tell you how many times people have asked me what I do, and afterwards responded with "so what's your real job?".  "Real job?"   We define value in monetary terms, and equate quality or "professionalism" to how much money a "product" makes - which is an insane way to evaluate the "worth" of an innovative work of art, or any innovative work for that matter.  Or the value of a person.  
 
Illuminated manuscript
by Hildegard Von Bingham
 (11th century)


Many of the greatest, and most profoundly transformative, contributions to our world had no "monetary value" whatsoever. Among them, the works of poets such as Rainier Maria Rilke, Rumi, and Gary Snyder, the solitary musings of Emerson at Walden Pond, the great visions of Lakota Medicine Man Black Elk and Hildegard von Bingam. When Van Gogh went into the fields to ecstatically paint the energy he saw in sunflowers or a star strewn night sky, when Georgia O'Keefe gathered bones she found in the New Mexico desert and contemplated them in her studio, when Louise Nevelson found pieces of cast off wood and furniture in the rain- slick streets of New York city.....they were responding to the beauty and story they each saw, the creative energy that welled up from that source.  And they wanted to communicate what they saw.


"Compassion is the rooting of vision in the world, and in the whole of being"

....David Michael Levin

I often think of Bali, the amazing way art making, ritual making, music making are so much a part of daily life.  From the woven offerings that women make first thing in the morning to the elaborate festivals held on specifically auspicious days. For the Balinese, art is a devotional activity, constantly renewed within the traditions of their Hindu religion.  Certainly, our modern "identity crisis" would not be understood by such a traditional society, the questioning of "what is art", the sometimes arbitrary separation we seem to make between "high" and "low" arts, "fine arts" and "crafts", etc.  I'm not sure, after 50 years of being an artist, I understand it myself.  I was in Bali 25 years ago, and I remember feeling quite at home there, and when I studied mask making, I observed the flow of art, ritual, and culture there.  It seemed seamless to me.  I have not been back to Bali since then; I hope things have not changed.

 So what is "art process"?  It helps to think of it as a  spiritual practice.   You don't have to live in a traditional culture like Bali, or even be affiliated with a traditional religion, to give the making of art that devotional respect.   I think if one considers it in that light, it becomes so much easier! Making art gets me out of the tyranny of my mind, the "laundry lists" and preoccupation with money - and into a greater world of seeing, sensing, color, light.  Of being. I can engage with my ever evolving, personal, and yet archetypal, symbol system.  The emergent place.  Sometimes (like with the "Prayers for the Dying" series I did for my brother) it helps me to understand grief, to heal emotional losses or conflicts. Increasingly, I am interested in sharing the creative process with others, finding ways to connect with others in creative community; in this light, it becomes a form of entrainment, of ritual, of prayer.


"It’s easier for people to anthropomorphize something abstract. That is where the metaphor of Gaia comes in - it is easier to think of a mother, a nurturing parent. By giving a name to it, you can talk to Her. That’s the purpose. Otherwise, you are lost in abstractions, and lose the emotional content of the issue."
 Rachel Rosenthal
I am reflecting much on the past these days, and take the liberty here of sharing (below)  the Introduction to the (unpublished) book of interviews I wrote back in 1990.  Perhaps I've mellowed, and understand things more comprehensively since then -  still, it's good to revisit.........
"The Sacred Mirrors" Alex Grey and Allyson Grey

 

"Everything was made for the greater meaning and use of the the tribe. A spoon was more than a spoon, and a sacred pot was also used to store grain in - because they understood that there had to be a weaving between the material world and the other worlds in order to live right and well. An artist was one of those who did the weaving."
 It was my privilege, in the late 1980's, to share conversations about art, spirituality, and cultural transformation with some extraordinary artists. Travelling across the country to meet some of them in New York City, in Arkansas, or in California, not long after graduate school, I realize now I was really trying to understand my own reasons for making art. "Your work is about your life" painter Kathleen Holder told me, "and if you are fortunate enough to do great work, it not only is about your life but it transcends your life and touches many others. "

As a student of art history, I find it ironic that spirituality was a significant impulse in the early development of Modernism. Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Anthrosophy, as well as Einstein's new physics, enormously inspired the work of such innovators as Mondrian, Kupka, Kandinsky, Arthur Dove, and many others. But by the 1950's, spirituality, indeed, the idea of context itself, had become a kind of heresy among the institutions that defined what "high" art was. I'm not sure that has changed very much today.  

In the 1970's, Tom Wolfe argued in The Painted Word that art was becoming literature, more a media creation of art critics than the artists themselves, who were (and still are) floundering about at the edges of society seeking any kind of identity, even one invented for them. Social context, works created for political, therapeutic, or functional means - or as spiritual revelation - were suspect. The quest was for "pure" aesthetics, celebrated by influential critics like Harold Rosenberg, who wrote, in 1952, 

"The turning point of Abstract Expressionism occured when its artists abandoned trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism), and decided to paint - just PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from Value - political, aesthetic, moral."

But to liberate art from aesthetic or moral value is to render it meaningless. It becomes a dissociative intellectual exercise, a lonely endeavor isolated from any larger social or cosmic context, isolated, often, from even personal significance. Performance artist Rafael Montanez Ortiz believes our aesthetics reflect a greater issue. "We can objectify" he said, "at the drop of a hat. We have no problem making an object of anyone or anything. If the logic of a culture permits you to abstract to that extent, it then permits you to live without conscience."

If we're to affirm an art with conscience, it must be, by definition, an art that provides an experience of context, of relationships of every kind. Social, ecological, spiritual, external and internal, visible and invisible. That's what transformative art is to me - artists who are reclaiming the roles of visionary, healer, community activist, and prophet within a grand context, an experience of communion that penetrates our lives on many dimensions of being. In traditional cultures, a shaman is one who "retrieves souls." That can also mean the collective retrieval of "soul", the redemption of imagination, beauty, and most importantly, a sustaining vision of the mystery and sanctity of life.

(1990)

Asherah,   Lauren Raine (2024)


"Vision that responds to the cries of the world and is truly engaged with what it sees is not the same as the disembodied eye that observes and reports, that objectifies and enframes. The ability to enter into another's emotions, or to share another's plight, to make their conditions our own, characterizes art in the partnership mode. You cannot define it as self-expression - it is more like relational dynamics.......Partnership demands a willingness
 to conceive of art in more living terms.
It is a way of seeing others as part of ourselves."

.........Suzi Gablick (The Re-Enchantment of Art) (1989)

                             "Between Land and Sea", Installation by Caroline Beasley Baker


 "I like the Aboriginal idea of "Singing the world into existence".  I once had a wonderful dream. I dreamed I was riding across the Australian desert at night. I was on a bus, and everyone was asleep. I looked out, across the dark, and saw, rising up out of the desert floor, these incredibly beautiful murals, in huge caverns lit by firelight. I knew they had been made by some consciousness predating humanity, that they had been here for millennia. They had never been seen in the world before, and were now rising up to the surface of the Earth.  Those paintings were more glorious than anything I've ever seen in my life! At the end of the dream, a voice said to me, "Caroline, that's the Earth dreaming".

 Caroline Beasley Baker (Interview, 198
9)

Saturday, June 28, 2025

" DREAMS, DEITIES, AND ARCHETYPES” - A Call to Visionary Artists

               

 Lauren Raine                                        Kathy Keler                         Carl  Gustave Jung

 

" DREAMS, DEITIES, AND ARCHETYPES”

Calling Artists for an Exhibition of Visionary Artists

January 31st  through April 21st 2026

The essence of a great work of art is its ability to rise above the personal

 and speak to the heart of humankind.” …… Carl Gustav Jung

The revolutionary psychologist Carl Jung was also an artist who saw art as a powerful expression of the unconscious, and as a way for the collective unconscious  to manifest. He believed visionary art often came from a transcendent or "outside" source, "flowing" through the artist rather than solely reflecting the artist's conscious will. Visionary art often departs from traditional realism to portray a less tangible world, exploring the mysterious “pentimento’s” of a “larger reality” that arises from the inner landscape of each artist.

In support of this understanding, the Southern Arizona Friends of Jung and the Stevens Gallery in the Stearns Center for the Arts in Tucson, Arizona, invite artists to submit work that shares their very unique visions. The Stevens Gallery is a bright, modern space that can host an impressive and beautiful new exhibit – we look forward to seeing your work.

Submission Deadline:                  October 15, 2025. Response by  December 15, 2025.

Jury Fee:                                      none

Delivery of accepted works:        January 24, 12  to 2pm at the Gallery, 1545 East Copper Street, Tucson, AZ

Installation:                                 January 31,   9am to 3pm

The Opening Reception:            February 7,  6 to 8pm

Gallery Open & Special EventsFebruary 14,  March 7,  April 14   (12 pm to 4 pm)

Pick up of Work:                          April 20 and April 21 (3pm to 5pm)

Eligibility: Open to Tucson artists and artists from Southern Arizona. Work must be hand delivered only – we cannot accept shipments. The gallery is a bright, modern space that showcases the artwork of Salpointe Art Center  as well as invited regional artists and art affiliations. Purchases made through the Stevens Gallery benefit the artist (90%) and the Center for the Arts (10%). Sold works, whether through the Gallery Exhibition or through our Online Catalog/Exhibition must stay in  the exhibition until the show ends. Purchases of work online can be made through ArtPal.

How to Submit Work:

Accepted Mediums are  Painting, Drawing, Mixed Media, Sculpture, and Photography.  We cannot accept video or digital mediums.

Image Format:  Please provide up to five  (5) images of artwork in JPEG format with a minimum resolution of 300 DPI. Images should include the title as well as artist’s name. Please list the title, dimensions, medium and prices on the Entry Form. All entries must be original works created by the submitting artist, and if they are a series, also please let us know. Please also include a brief artist statement (max 250 words) about  your work and how it connects to the theme.

Contact Email:    safojart@gmail.com

Online Application Form:

  https://safojvisionaryarts.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-call-to-visionary-artists.html




Wednesday, June 11, 2025

For the Summer Solstice 2025

 

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

 
“Make of yourself a light,” 
said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
 

No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something 
 of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.



I woke early, on this longest day:
the light rose among
 the green conversation 
of  trees, a fading star, exultant starlings,
  two grey squirrels 
performing their morning ritual
greeting the only God 
they know,

the Sun


Tuesday, June 10, 2025

A Quote for the Time........


 
"We live in capitalism.  Its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings.  Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.  Resistance and change often begin in art, the art of words."

.....Ursula Kroeber Leguin

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Old Masks: A Ritual of "Endarkenment"

"old masks" (2020)

Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light."

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It's almost the Summer Solstice, the time of Fullness and Bright Light.  So a "Ritual of Endarkenment" seems a bit out of place.......yet this occurred to me as a good "prelude" to the Solstice.  From the Darkness we can often find the means to become much "lighter" as we discard "old masks".  Without Darkness there would be no generative Light.  From "Endarkenment" can arise "Enlightenment".  
So I remembered this Meditation I wrote, way back when.............


RITUAL OF ENDARKENMENT


Close your eyes, and see  a cord
a shining umbilical cord at your naval
that goes down,

into the dreaming Earth.

Into the darkness, the silence, follow,
that luminous cord, 
un-becoming, 
un-knowing

As you descend into the warm darkness
remove your garments 
remove, one by one
remove your masks.

One by one, take them off
feel the heavy weight of each as 
you let it fall, as you descend. 
Let each mask fall away, but
take a moment to see it before it falls
into the Earth, into the darkness.

Take off the mask of competence,
the mask of your accomplishments.
what does that mask look like?

Take  off the child's mask,  the little one
laughing with delight, the child crying helplessly in an empty room.
Take it off  with tenderness.

The masks of relationship, the masks you wear with others,
the mask of the lover, the mate, the parent,
the mask of conflict, the mask of the warrior,
the mask of affiliation, of responsibility, of duty:
take each one off, hold it in your hand, let it go,
into the darkness, see them fall, 
the question "who am I?"
falling like a feather with them.

And take off the mask of your age
the accumulated years that whisper 
I'm just a kid, I'm middle aged, I'm old, I must, I can't,
I will I should it's too late, I can't.........
take them all off, let go, feel the weight leave you.

The masks of your parents that you also learned to wear,
their fears and dreams in the shape of your face,
 remove them with respect and pity, and descend

to the last masks, the shadow masks

the masks you do not look at, but cling to,
see them in your hands -  and let them go,
into the darkness, into the dreaming Earth.

Rest, and  wait.
Ask  for the dreams
the unborn ones

that wait to be born in you
empty and held in the womb of the Earth
invite them to come, in time to come, 
the guidance and inspiration that will infuse your new year.

Make that prayer  into the darkness,
feel it like a pulse among roots, that deep umbilical
holding you safe.  Rest, and  know you are loved,
held, a seed, a child, a hope, a potential.

Begin to ascend at last.
As you rise, see the masks you've discarded -
one by one, take them in your hands.
Perhaps some you no longer need;
some you will examine more closely in the future.
Perhaps some you will discard, and
some you will wear more lightly.  Feel their weight.

And as you emerge from the earth
into the sunlit world, feel that unbroken cord, shining,
unseen, holding  you to your origin.
 And always, always generous.

(1998)

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

David Abram and the "Storied World"

 

"For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world." 
In March I presented my paper on NUMINA: Communion With Spirit of Place at the ASWM Conference here in Tucson.  In the course of researching for it, I re-discovered this important article by David Abram,  which I published, with the kind permission of the author, on my blog back in 2009.  It more than deserves to be shared again, and I urge others to learn about Dr. Abram's work by visiting his Website.  


David Abram – cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist – is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage), for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.  Dr. David Abram is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World .  David’s work has helped catalyze the emergence of new disciplines, including the field of ecopsychology. David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo in Norway.  In 2022 Dr. Abram was the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. 

His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. David Abram  coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind (and all our cultural productions), yet always necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up as part of the lingua franca of the broad movement for ecological sanity.  An early version of this essay was published in Resurgence, issue 222, and another in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum, 2005


In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom from kindergarten on up through college. With the new technology, it is hoped, children will learn to read much more efficiently, and will exercise their intelligence in rich new ways. Interacting with the wealth of information available on-line, children's minds will be able to develop and explore much more vigorously than was possible in earlier eras -- and so, it is hoped, they will be well prepared for the technological future. 

How can any child resist such a glad initiative? Indeed, few adults can resist the dazzle of the digital screen, with its instantaneous access to everywhere, its treasure-trove of virtual amusements, and its swift capacity to locate any piece of knowledge we desire. And why should we resist? Digital technology is transforming every field of human endeavor, and it promises to broaden the capabilities of the human intellect far beyond its current reach. Small wonder that we wish to open and extend this powerful dream to all our children!

It is possible, however, that we are making a grave mistake in our rush to wire every classroom, and to bring our children online as soon as possible. Our excitement about the internet should not blind us to the fact that the astonishing linguistic and intellectual capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer! Nor, of course, did it evolve in relation to the written word. Rather it evolved in relation to orally told stories. Indeed, we humans were telling each other stories for many, many millennia before we ever began writing our words down -- whether on the page or on the screen.

Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and -- more generally -- how to live well in this land without destroying the land's wild vitality.

Such practical intelligence, intimately related to a particular place, is the hallmark of any oral culture. Continually tested in interaction with the living land, altering in tandem with subtle changes in the local earth, even today such living knowledge resists the fixity and permanence of the printed page. Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert -- or coastal estuary, or mountain valley -- this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain. 

Such place-specific savvy, which deepens its value when honed and tempered over the course of several generations, forfeits much of its power when uprooted from the soil of its home and carried -- via the printed page or the glowing screen – to other places. Such intelligence, properly speaking, is an attribute of the living land itself; it thrives only in the direct, face-to-face exchange between those who dwell and work in this place.

So much earthly savvy was carried in the old tales! And since, for our indigenous ancestors, there was no written medium in which to record and preserve the stories -- since there were no written books -- the surrounding landscape, itself, functioned as the primary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for preserving the oral tales. To this end, diverse animals common to the local earth figured as prominent characters within the oral stories -- whether as teachers or tricksters, as buffoons or as bearers of wisdom. Hence, a chance encounter with a particular creature as a tribesperson went about his daily business (an encounter with a coyote, perhaps, or a magpie) would likely stir the memory of one or another story in which that animal played a decisive role. Moreover, crucial events in the stories were commonly associated with particular sites in the local terrain where those events were assumed to have happened, and whenever one noticed that place in the course of one’s daily wanderings -- when one came upon that particular cluster of boulders, or that sharp bend in the river -- the encounter would spark the memory of the storied events that had unfolded there.

Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Traveling through the terrain, one felt teachings and secrets sprouting from every nook and knoll, lurking under the rocks and waiting to swoop down from the trees. The wooden planks of one's old house would laugh and whine, now and then, when the wind leaned hard against them, and whispered wishes would pour from the windswept grasses. To the members of a traditionally oral culture, all things had the power of speech. . .

 Indeed, when we consult indigenous, oral peoples from around the world, we commonly discover that for them there is no phenomenon -- no stone, no mountain, no human artifact -- that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own spontaneity, its own interior animation, its own life!

 Rivers feel the presence of the fish that swim within them. A large boulder, its surface spreading with crinkly red and gray lichens, is able to influence the events around it, and even to influence the thoughts of those persons who lean against it -- lending their reflections a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom. Particular fish, as well, are bearers of wisdom, gifting their insights to those who catch them. Everything is alive -- even the stories themselves are animate beings! Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. 

That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation...There is something about this storied way of speaking -- this acknowledgement of a world all alive, awake, and aware -- that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, that grab our focus or capture our gaze. Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory perception is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein every phenomenon has its own active agency and power.

When we speak of the earthly things around us as quantifiable objects or passive "natural resources," we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a sea of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we begin to tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again. 

Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us, and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous. We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit, along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden, and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter. Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos -- the round dance of the seasons, the sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening, the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world. However much we may obscure this ancestral affinity, we cannot erase it, and the persistence of the old stories is the continuance of a way of speaking that blesses the sentience of things, binding our thoughts back into the depths of an imagination much vaster than our own. 

To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.

Today, economic globalization is rapidly undermining rural economies and tearing apart rural communities. The spreading monoculture degrades both cultural diversity and biotic diversity, forcing the depletion of soils and the wreckage of innumerable ecosystems. As the civilization of total commerce muscles its way into every corner of the planet, countless species tumble helter skelter over the brink of extinction, while the biosphere itself shivers into a bone-rattling fever.

For like any living being, earth’s metabolism depends upon the integrated functioning of many different organs, or ecosystems. Just as the human body could not possibly maintain its health if the lungs were forced to behave like the stomach, or if the kidneys were forced to act like the ears or the soles of the feet, so the planetary metabolism is thrown into disarray when each region is compelled to behave like every other region – when diverse places and cultures are forced to operate according to a single, mechanical logic, as interchangeable parts of an undifferentiated, homogenous sphere.


In the face of the expanding monoculture and its technological imperatives, more and more people are coming each day to recognize the critical importance of revitalizing local, face-to-face community. They recognize their common embedment within the life of this breathing planet, yet they know that such unity arises only from a vital and thriving multiplicity. A reciprocal respect and interdependence between richly different cultures -- each a dynamic expression of the unique earthly place, or bioregion, that supports it – is far more sustainable than a homogenous, planetary civilization.

Many of us have already worked for several decades on ecological and bioregional initiatives aimed at renewing local economies and the conviviality of place-based communities. Yet far too little progress was made by the movements for local self-sufficiency and sustainability. To be sure, our efforts were hindered by the steady growth of an industrial economy powered by the profligate burning of fossil fuel. Yet our efficacy was also weakened by our inability to recognize the immense influence of everyday language. Our work was weakened, that is, by our inability to discern that the spreading technologization of everyday life in the modern world (including the growing ubiquity of automobiles and telephones, of televisions and, most recently, personal computers) had been accompanied by a steady transformation in language -- by an increasing abstractness and generality in daily discourse. Local vernaculars had fallen into disuse; local stories had been forgotten; the oral forms and traditions by which place-specific knowledge had once been preserved and disseminated were no longer operative.

We in the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) now recognize that a rejuvenation of real, face-to-face community – and the sensorial attunement to the local earth that ensures the vitality and sustenance of such community – simply cannot happen without a rejuvenation of the layer of language that goes hand in hand with such attunement. It cannot happen without renewing that primary layer of language, and culture, that underlies all our more abstract and technological forms of discourse. A renewal of place-based community cannot happen without a renewal of oral culture.

But does such a revitalization of oral, storytelling culture entail that we must renounce reading and writing? Not at all! It entails only that we leave space in our days for an interchange with one another and with the earth that is not mediated by technology – neither by the television, nor the computer, nor even the printed page.

Among writers, for instance, it entails that we allow that there are certain stories that one might come upon that should not be written down -- stories that we instead begin to tell, with our own tongue, in the particular places where those stories live.
It entails that as parents we set aside, now and then, the storybooks that we read to our children in order to actually tell our children a story with the whole of our gesturing body – or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise a tale about the wild wind that’s now blustering its way through these city streets, plucking the hats off people’s heads…

And among educators, it entails that we begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in the context of the living landscape where our lessons happen. For too long we have incarcerated the potent magic of linguistic meaning within an exclusively human space of signs. Hence the land itself has fallen mute; it now seems little more than a passive backdrop for human affairs, or a storehouse of resources waiting to be mined for purely human purposes. Can we return to the local land an implicit sense of its own inherent meaningfulness, its own many-voiced eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and the sensuous art of storytelling. Can we help our students to translate the quantified abstractions of science into the language of direct experience, so that those abstract insights begin to come alive in our felt encounters with the animate earth around us?


 Can we begin to affirm our own co-evolved, carnal embedment within this blooming, buzzing proliferation of life, stirring within us a new humility in the face of a world that we did not create – in the face of a world that created us? Most importantly, can we begin with our students to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without re-storying the local earth. For our senses have become exceedingly estranged from the earthly sensuous. The age-old reciprocity between the human animal and the animate earth has long been short-circuited by our increasing involvement with our own creations, our own human-made technologies. And yet a simple tale, well-told, can shatter the spell – whether for an hour, or a day, or even a lifetime. We cannot restore the land without restorying the land. 

There is no need to give up reading, nor to discard our computers, as long as we recall that such mediated and technological forms of interchange inevitably remain rooted in the more primary world of direct experience. As long as we remember, that is, that our involvement with the printed page and the digital screen draws its basic sustenance from our more immediate, face-to-face encounter with the flesh of the real.

Each medium of communication organizes our awareness in a particular way, each engaging us in a particular form of community. Without here analyzing all the diverse media that exert their claims upon our attention, we can acknowledge some very general traits:

~ Literacy and literate discourse (the ways of speaking and thinking implicitly informed by books, newspapers, magazines, and other printed media) is inherently cosmopolitan, mingling insights drawn from diverse traditions and places. Reading is a wonderful form of experience, but it is necessarily abstract relative to our direct sensory encounters in the immediacy of our locale.

 Computer literacy, and our engagement with the internet, brings us almost instantaneous information from around the world, empowering virtual interactions with people from vastly different cultures. Yet such digital engagements are even more disembodied and placeless than our involvement with printed books and magazines. Indeed cyberspace seems to have no location at all, unless the “place” that we encounter through the internet is, well, the planet itself, transmuted into a weightless field of information. In truth, our increasing participation with email, e-commerce, and electronic information involves us in a discourse that is inherently global and globalizing. (It is this computerized form of communication, of course, that has enabled the rapid globalization of the free-market economy).

~ Oral culture (the culture of face to face storytelling) is inherently local. Far more concrete than those other modes of discourse, genuinely oral culture binds us not only to our immediate human community, but to the more-than-human community – the particular ecology of animals, plants and earthly elements in which we materially participate. In contrast to more abstract forms of media, the primary medium of oral communication is the atmosphere itself. In other words the unseen air, which is subtly different in each terrain, and which binds our own breathing bodies to the metabolism of oak trees and hawks and the storm clouds gathering above the city, is the implicit intermediary in all oral communication. As the most ancient and longstanding form of human discourse, oral culture provides the necessary soil and support for those more abstract styles of communication and reflection.

The Alliance for Wild Ethics holds that the globalizing culture of the internet, and the cosmopolitan culture of books, are both dependent, for their integrity, upon the place-based, vernacular culture of face-to-face storytelling.

When oral culture degrades, then the literate mind loses its bearings, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth. When stories are no longer being told in the woods or along the banks of rivers -- when the land is no longer being honored, ALOUD!, as an animate, expressive power – then the human senses lose their attunement to the surrounding terrain. 

We no longer feel the particular pulse of our place – we no longer hear, or respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of the land. Increasingly blind and deaf, increasingly impervious to the sensuous world, the technological mind begins to lay waste to the earth.

We can be ardent readers (and even writers) of books, and enthusiastic participants in the world wide web and the internet, while recognizing that these abstract and almost exclusively human layers of culture will never be sufficient unto themselves. Without rejecting these rich forms of communication, we can nonetheless discern, today, that the rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative.

 










I am reminded here of the Australian Aboriginal ideas of the "Songlines", tracks in the land that bear the "stories of the land" and the ancestral beings.

Like Spider Woman (Keresan, "Tse Che Nako") as the Earth Mother/Creatrix, stories are spun into the world, and become the conversant world, from a kind of universal, ensouled, non-local imagination, a participatory kind of creative consciousness that includes, but is not exclusive to, us.

 "Story" includes the Numina, the participation of the intelligences of Place, and in this respect, the author is saying that an oral tradition is a much richer tapestry of direct experience that includes body movement, sound, the environment, and the various psychic energy exchanges that go on in the presence of such.

4 Visuals are my own work, or photographs I have aquired of petroglyphs in Arizona and New Mexico.