Strange Stats....."Caterpillars and Black Butterflies'

"The caterpillar spins or weaves the cocoon, and in that cocoon, what the caterpillar is creating is his own tomb. We don’t know if he knows that or not. And he crawls into it, and his body liquefies. Complete disintegration of caterpillar. But in that caterpillar soup are these cells that have been in the caterpillar’s body all along, called imaginal cells. Isn’t that a fabulous word? Imaginal cells. It’s called imaginal by botanists because the adult form of that creature, the butterfly, is called imago. So these are imaginal cells, but to me those cells are ‘imagining’ flight. And these imaginal cells know how to take the soup and reconfigure  that into a butterfly, an adult. I believe nature has designed us humans to go through a similar experience."

Imagine your Imago - Liberating the Imaginal Cells of the Human Psyche
Bill Plotkin

When I began this blog in 2007 to document my project "Spider Woman's Hands" as an Alden Dow Creativity Fellow I never really expected anyone to read my journal.  I've been delighted ever since to meet many kindred and inspiring souls through Blogger - thank you!

"la Mariposa"

I've also sometimes wondered at the statistics Google presents me on its stat page.  What is surprising are the posts that month after month attract the most attention.  Number one is always one I wrote about purple Jacaronda trees, and after that, consistently, a post about a "Green Caterpillar Synchronicity"(2010),  "Black Butterflies"(2011), and several posts about "The Butterfly Man".

I noticed these were at the top of the list today, which is especially funny, since I'm currently doing paintings about butterflies. 

I think often of sychronicities as spirit contact, affirmation, and sometimes as "living metaphors", as dreams made visible and hence open to interpretation on a multitude of levels.  Dreams and sychroncities are personal.....but they also reflect what is collective and archetypal. So I've pulled up again these two posts out of sheer curiosity,  this strange clustering of butterflies that is going on in my life these days, and apparently, in the life of the internet as well. Which, come to think of it, is one of Spider Woman's latest appearances.

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Saturday, September 18, 2010

Green Caterpillar Synchronicity

(it looked kind of like this)

This morning I went to my mother's house to prepare her breakfast, and beside the door, on a "cat rug", was a strange looking fat green thing, curled into a little spiral. At first I thought it was a bit of plastic the cat had dragged home, but then it moved! Keep in mind that I live in Southern Arizona, where it is currently about 102 degrees, and there are very few leafy trees. I've never seen a caterpillar like this here, although obviously they are around.

I put it on a potted plant, the only thing I could find it might like to eat, although, sadly, the poor thing looks none too well for its encounter with a cat. Can't get over the fact that just yesterday I was writing about, and reading about, Phillip Slater's book  "The Chrysalis Effect"** in my previous post!


I think caterpillars represent, to me, what we are as a global humanity, adolescent, trying to mature, to transform. We're presently, like a caterpillar on a leaf, mindlessly gobbling up our world, eating up everything in sight. The hopeful thought is that there is an impulse, a greater force, within our collective instinct that will lead us into, and eventually through, the Chrysalis, the "imaginal" stage. So that we might become, at last, "winged, whole". Pollinators.......

"Butterfly Man" Netherlands, August 2009

 

**The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture

by Philip Elliot Slater

"The Chrysalis Effect shows that the chaos and conflict experienced worldwide today are the result of a global cultural metamorphosis, one which has accelerated so rapidly in recent decades as to provoke fierce resistance. Many of the changes that have taken place in the last fifty years - the feminist movement, the rapid spread of democracy, the global economy, quantum physics, minority movements, the peace movement, the sexual revolution - are part of this cultural transformation. Contrary to accepted opinion, the conflict it engenders is not a struggle between Left and Right, or between the West and Islam, but one taking place within the Left, within the Right, within the West, within Islam, within everyone and every institution." "Currently, the world is in the middle of an adaptive process, moving toward a cultural ethos more appropriate to a species living in a shrinking world and in danger of destroying its habitat - a world that increasingly demands for its survival integrative thinking, unlimited communication, and global cooperation." Today our world is caught in the middle of this disturbing transformative process - a process that creates confusion over values, loss of ethical certainty, and a bewildering lack of consensus about almost everything. The Chrysalis Effect provides an answer to the question: Why is the world in such a mess?"

Paperback, 242 pages

Published November 1st 2008 by Sussex Academic Press

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Black Butterflies

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

"The Ancient Greek word for “butterfly” is “psuché/psyché”(ψυχή, 1st.declension) which is used in the meaning of ‘butterfly’/ ‘moth’ by Aristotle and Theophrastus, though its usual meanings are :  breath, spirit, life, soul, departed spirit, ghost, living being, person."  In Ancient Greece the butterfly was a symbol of the soul, because it changes from caterpillar to a beautiful winged creature. Plus it has a shape of a double ax which was an Minoan symbol of the Great Goddess. Greek paintings often showed a 
small butterfly - "soul" - flying free from the mouth of the dead."

Yahoo Answers.com

What I'm trying to approach with my capture net of words is the magical butterfly, a black one at that, a creature that clearly exists on such an elusive multitude of dimensions and metaphors........that it's impossible to consider her mysterious flight without a "holographic" approach. Butterfly is a creature that flies right into the Dreamtime as she so chooses. So, I'll begin by slipping, momentarily and gratefully, back into mythic time and mythic place, the life-renewing, fluid land of the Fey, the imaginal.

I've spoken with many people over the years who have had mystical Butterfly stories, among them my friend Fahrusha (her name, in Arabic, actually means Butterfly), who recounts an amazing synchronicity with a black butterfly in her blog.  Out of curiousity, I looked up "Black Butterfly" on Amazon.com recently, and was stunned to find there were 27 books with that title. I think a black butterfly is about the transformation that happens when the Shadow, in Jungian terms, is also given wings, transmuted.  It is a perfect symbol of integral consciousness.

I have met many people who have told me about butterflies appearing in connection with the loss of a loved one, or at times of personal despair. I list below a site that is devoted exclusively to "miraculous butterfly experiences". **To me,  butterflies wonderfully participate in the interface between dream and waking life, flickering on the wings of synchronicity with their multi-dimensional messages, disappearing into the field of dreams just as mysteriously. A "Butterfly Experience" can be  intimate in the meanings they bear, and equally, universal and impersonal. 

Perhaps the most dramatic "butterfly experience" I had occured more than 10 years ago. Since this experience had to do with both dream and synchronicity, I don't know if I can tell it very cohesively, but I'll try.

It began with a disturbing dream. I dreamed I was on a ship, and on the deck many people sat in deck chairs, all of them playing with masks, taking them on and off. I seemed, in the dream, to be two people at once. I knew that there was, down in the lower decks of the boat, a demon. One of the women that "I" was was a kind of priestess or missionary - she was about to descend into the depths of the boat, where the demon below would torture and kill her. She thought that if she did so, offering herself as sacrificial victim, she could save the people above.

The other "me" was a cynical observer who thought she was a ridiculous martyr, and knew everyone, especially her, was doomed. I woke up as the "martyr self" began her descent.

Without going into the circumstantial and psychological meanings of this important dream, I'll skip ahead in real time. About 6 months after having this dream, I actually found myself, with a lot of actors, and a few masks, on an old decommissioned ocean liner (the "art ship"), which was anchored in the industrial harbor of Oakland. I was acting in a movie, TRAGOS, written and directed by  Antero Alli,  and he had decided to do some of  his filming in the very bottom of this 5 level boat; the old, cold, dark, dank, cargo bay.

Descending into the bottom of the boat brought my dream back vividly, and every superstitious notion of prophetic dreams I ever had came right to the fore.  I was going to die in some way! I didn't like it there!

Between shoots, the cast hung out in what must have once been the crew's cafeteria - located in a middle deck, it had round portholes, all of which were closed because it was a cold day in March. As we waited, the Director offered everyone a card from his own fascinating deck of oracular cards (with his artist wife, Sylvie Alli), and there was lively interest as each person contemplated his or her card.  I took a card from Antero with trepidation, and sure enough, damn if it wasn't the "DEATH" card.

Not five minutes later, as I stood with the card of doom in hand, a small orange butterfly landed on my shoulder.

There was absolutely no explanation for how that butterfly could have gotten into that closed room. I had lots of witnesses - and after the miracle revealed itself, several of them helped to catch the butterfly and get it upstairs where it could be released.
 

As a kind of synchronistic post-script, in 2005 I was back in the Bay Area for a two-person show (with Rye Hudak) at Turn of the Century Gallery, in Berkeley. The movie "Mirror Mask" was premiering, and I remembered how, when I opened my gallery in  Berkeley in 1998, the first thing I was inspired to do was create a mask made of a mirror.  I was also surprised that, of all the works in the show, the gallery owner chose to put on the card announcing the show  "The Butterfly Woman". 

When I arrived in Berkeley to hang the show, I went to nearby Cafe Trieste for a cup of coffee. Two stacks of cards were on the table there, side by side.  One was the card for my show with the image above. 

The flyer next to it was an announcement of the premiere of a new movie by Antero Alli called "The Greater Circulation" (inspired by the life of poet Rainier Maria Rilke). The image on his announcement was a face encased in a skull - a Death's Head.

  

More Carnage in America - Bill Moyers on Gun Culture

Gabrielle Giffords vigil, 2011

"Now at least 12 are dead in Aurora, Colorado, gunned down by a mad man at a showing of the new Batman movie filled with make-believe violence. One of the guns the shooter used was an AK-47-type assault weapon that was banned in 1994. The National Rifle Association saw to it that the ban expired in 2004. The NRA is the best friend a killer's instinct ever had."
 

Jared Loughner

I grew up with it, just as I grew up with television.  Guns, guns, guns.  Westerns and gangsters, toy guns my brothers received for Christmas, on and on.  The romance of the gun.  Today, not even a month since Colorado, yet another young man (and it's always a young man) has taken his lethal arsenal and destroyed the lives of many in Wisconsin.  I felt like copying Bill Moyers' recent article about gun culture as I feel, once again, great sadness that nothing is ever going to be done about it, except that the President will have to rush around the country regularly making speeches to decimated communities.  I also have to refer to an early article I wrote on this blog about violence and gender imbalance, the "elephant in the room" that virtually everyone, including Bill Moyers, ignores when speaking of the continuing carnage.  "We" does not, overwhelmingly statistically, include women, children, or men over 50.

James Holmes

 

The NRA fights, and pays handsomely, for the right for any vicious psychopath to easily buy a weapon of mass destruction in the neighborhood store - so how come the rest of us, like sheep, just passively accept the carnage, year after year, hoping that it won't happen in our town, that it won't be our wives, children, grandfather.........


The NRA's Dark Gun Culture
By Bill Moyers
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, July 23, 2012

The United States has emerged to become the most violent nation on earth where millions are equipped with lethal weapons to massacre brutally as many people as they wish. In spite of its military might, the US government cannot do anything about it since it functions under the ruthless thumb of the National Rifle Association (NRA) whose sole objective is to boost by all means the business of the weapons’ industry.


You might think Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of and spokesman for the mighty American gun lobby, The National Rifle Association, has an almost cosmic sense of timing. In 2007, at the NRA’s annual convention in St. Louis, he warned the crowd that, "Today, there is not one firearm owner whose freedom is secure."Two days later, a young man opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing 32 students, staff and teachers. Just last week LaPierre showed up at the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty here in New York and spoke out against what he called "Anti-freedom policies that disregard American citizens' right to self-defense." Now at least 12 are dead in Aurora, Colorado, gunned down by a mad man at a showing of the new Batman movie filled with make-believe violence. One of the guns the shooter used was an AK-47-type assault weapon that was banned in 1994. The National Rifle Association saw to it that the ban expired in 2004. The NRA is the best friend a killer's instinct ever had.

Obviously, LaPierre's timing isn’t cosmic, just coincidental; as Shakespeare famously wrote, "The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves." In other words, people. People with guns. There are an estimated 300 million guns in the United States, one in four adult Americans owns at least one and most of them are men. The British newspaper The Guardian, reminds us that over the last 30 years, "The number of states with a law that automatically approves licenses to carry concealed weapons provided an applicant clears a criminal background check has risen from eight to 38."
Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S. Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year.

Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns. So why do we always act so surprised? Violence is alter ego, wired into our Stone Age brains, so intrinsic its toxic eruptions no longer shock, except momentarily when we hear of a mass shooting like this latest in Colorado. But this, too, will pass and the nation of the short attention span quickly finds the next thing to divert us from the hard realities of America in 2012.

Reliance on Arms Leads to Self-Annihilation
 
We are after all a country which began with the forced subjugation into slavery of millions of Africans and the reliance on arms against Native Americans for its Westward expansion. In truth, more settlers traveling the Oregon Trail died from accidental, self-inflicted gunshots wounds than Indian attacks - we were not only bloodthirsty but also inept.

Nonetheless, we have become so gun loving, so blasé about home-grown violence that in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined. In Arizona last year, just days after the Gabby Giffords shooting, sales of the weapon used in the slaughter - a 9 millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol - doubled.

We are fooling ourselves. That the law could allow even an inflamed lunatic to easily acquire murderous weapons and not expect murderous consequences. Fooling ourselves that the second amendment’s guarantee of a "well-regulated militia" be construed as a God-given right to purchase and own just about any weapon of destruction you like. That's a license for murder and mayhem and it's a great fraud that has entered our history.

There's a video of which I'd like to remind you. You can see it on YouTube. In it, Adam Gadahn, an American born member of al Qaeda, the first U.S. citizen charged with treason since 1952, urges terrorists to carry out attacks on the United States. Right before your eyes he says: "America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms. You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"

The killer in Colorado waited only for an opportunity, and there you have it - the arsenal of democracy transformed into the arsenal of death and the NRA - the NRA is the enabler of death - paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel hoax, a cruel and deadly hoax.

Memorial for Gabrielle Giffords, Tucson, 2011

New "Butterfly" Paintings

"bright messenger of hope, vanishing

into some blue distance,

whole, winged,

always going home"

 I fixed up the shed behind my house as a studio, and this is the "inaugural" journey..............

David Abram on 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 continuing to explore the idea of Numina, the "genious loci" of place, I re-discovered this article which I published, with the permission of the author, on my blog in 2009.  I'd like to share this wonderful article by David Abram again.

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. An accomplished storyteller who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. 

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

Storytelling and Wonder: on the rejuvenation of oral culture

by David Abram, Ph.D.

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 persistance 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 restorying 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.

 

1 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.

2 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.

3  "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 prescence of such.

A Walt Whitman moment

Photo by Garaint Smith

O to speed to where there is space enough and air enough at last!

To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of nature!

To have the gag removed from ones mouth!

To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am!

To be lost if it must be so!

To feed the remainder of life

with one hour of fullness and freedom!

           Walt Whitman “Leaves of Grass”

I sing a praise today for water, which is nothing less than life in the desert lands.  A brief visit to the Rio Grande, the Big River, which is hardly a little pond by Eastern standards, set against the mighty Mississippi, or the great Hudson.  But here it is the blue ribbon of life itself, and along its meager stream is found places like the Bosque del Apache, bird refuge, and the strange little town of Truth or Consequences, where I go for a day or so when I need to be lost.  Rio, Rio. 

“All truths wait in all things,

they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

they do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon to be born

the insignificant is as big to me as any

(what is more or less than a touch?)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less

than the journey work of the stars.”

Talking with the Earth: Martin Grey on Sacred Sites

 "I experienced contact with something or someone sentient and much greater than my individual self. I had experienced contact, even momentary communion, with the "essence" of what could be called a transpersonal presence. Afterwards I was told by the local shaman or caretaker that I had met with the guardian spirit of the place.....Pilgrim Martin Gray described a (similar) unification experience he had while attending a Shinto religious festival."

Debra D. Carroll "From Huacas to Mesas"
DIALOGUES WITH THE LIVING EARTH, James and Roberta Swan (1989)

Thinking of Numinous, I need to include the writings of Martin Gray, who spent some twenty years of his life visiting sacred places around the world as a pilgrim.  I take the liberty of sharing below an article from his amazing book, SACRED EARTH.**

I myself have experienced things "paranormal" at places of power, including heightened energy, dowsing rods that go crazy, orbs, strange photographs, dreams, and other phenomena.  When I climbed the Tor last year in Glastonbury, all my photos were infused with violet light.....which is the color associated with the Lady of Avalon.  My camera hasn't taken "purple photos" before or since. For days after visiting Avebury I was "blissed out", and had the most wonderful dreams.

I remember when I was living with with my former husband in upstate New York in the 90's. Where we lived was a rural area rapidly being built up with industry. One of the mysterious places in the area, to me, was a field I used to visit. To get to that field, which bordered our property, one had to go through a kind of obstacle course - you crossed an old stone wall, immediately ran into a rusted barbed wire fence, and then tramped through a barrier of poison ivy, grape vines and small trees.

Braving all of this, a beautiful field appeared.  Bordered on all sides by trees, you could stand there in the tall grass, or the snow, and see nothing of the warehouses or homes nearby. It felt, oddly, as if it was somehow protected, as if you entered a special, quiet, mysterious place. The land had obviously once been worked, but it had been left fallow for many years, and in the center  of the field, if you looked, was a  "fairy circle". Small trees, bushes, even tall grasses formed a surprisingly visible circle. With my divining rods, I found there was a ley crossing in that exact spot - the rod "helicoptered" and whirled.

Duncan and I were actively involved in Earth based spiritual practices, and he facilitated a  men's group. One night when the moon was full the group, energized by drumming, decided to visit the field. There was snow on the ground, and as the young men strode to the stone wall, something pushed two of them into the snow! Being young, they got up and  thundered forward - and something pushed both of them backwards, again. They fell on their behinds in the snow! This (I was told) was enough strangeness for everyone, and the group  turned around and went home. The next day, my ex and I took offerings to the edge of the field. I remember placing crystals and flowers on a stone, and as I did, I felt such an overwhelming sense of sorrow that tears ran down my face. I believe I was feeling the sorrow of the guardian spirit of that place.  It was a very intense feeling, and sadly, a  year later there was an oil spill in a nearby truck depot, and the wetlands that bordered "the Field" suffered tremendous ecological damage, and a big tree we associated with our "Green Man" died.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Non-corporeal Beings:  The mysterious influences of spirits, devas and angelic beings associated with sacred sites
 
Sages and seers from antiquity have repeatedly remarked that the dimension we see with our physical eyes is not the only dimension of existence. Many other realms exist and within them a variety of beings, spirits, energies and entities. Traditional peoples the world over have spoken of the existence of these presences, calling them such names as elves, gnomes, leprechauns, devas, fairies, genies and ghosts.

Since time immemorial humans have sought contact with these unseen forces. Shamanic practitioners communicate with the spirits of animals, ancestors and the plant world. Psychics, clairvoyants and mediums conduct séances to speak with entities from nonvisible realms. Religious mystics affirm the presence of angels, deities and other heavenly beings. Whatever we choose to call these entities, and however we attempt to explain them, it is certain that something mysterious is happening in dimensions other than those perceptible by our normal senses of sight, hearing, touch and smell.

These mysterious presences seem to be especially concentrated at the power places and sacred sites. In some holy places, particularly those of remote forest and desert tribes, these unseen presences are the sole focus of ritual activities. No Christian church or Buddhist temple will be found there, only a small shrine indicating the abode of some nature spirit. In the world's more celebrated pilgrimage shrines, these presences receive less acknowledgment than the primary religious deities. While the presence of the unseen forces usually long precedes the arrival of the historical religion that now maintains the pilgrimage shrine, those forces are frequently denied, dismissed, demonized or given only marginal importance. In the temples of Burma where we find great monuments to the Buddhist faith surrounded by small shrines dedicated to a host of pre-Buddhist spirits called Nats. In the Christian churches of Europe, Britain and Ireland flow springs long ago dedicated to pagan earth goddesses. And in the courtyards of enormous south Indian temples stand numerous small shrines housing various spirits called yakshas, nagas and asuras.

These unseen forces may affect pilgrims without their having any knowledge of the forces, or they may purposely be summoned to appear by the performance of ritual actions and invocations. Traditional rituals practiced at many shrines are potent, time-honored methods for invoking various spirit forces. Such methods are not the only way to summon the mysterious powers. Focused mental intention is an effective method of invocation, and prayer and meditation are the tools of spirit communication.

It is beneficial to first learn something about the nature or character of the spirit entities that inhabit a sacred site. Reading guidebooks concerning the mythology and archaeology of the site or questioning shrine administrators and priests are good approaches. The unseen forces will be described in terms such as spirits, devas or angels. These terms are simply metaphors for the actual character or personality of the forces. These terms also serve as metaphorical representations indicating how the forces will psychologically and physiologically affect human beings. Next, carefully consider the character of the unseen forces dwelling at a sacred site - this important point should not be lightly dismissed. Those forces may have either beneficial or disturbing effects on different people. Invocation of unseen forces at sacred sites is a powerful practice. It is important to exercise caution lest unwanted forces be admitted into an individual's personal energy field.

Martin Gray

"There is an earth-based energy available to human beings, concentrated at specific places all across the planet, which catalyzes and increases this eco-spiritual consciousness. These specific places are the sacred sites discussed and illustrated on this web site. Before their prehistoric human use, before their usurpation by different religions, these sites were simply places of power. They continue to radiate their powers, which anyone may access by visiting the sacred sites. No rituals are necessary, no practice of a particular religion, no belief in a certain philosophy; all that is needed is for an individual human to visit a power site and simply be present. As the flavor of herbal tea will steep into warm water, so also will the essence of these power places enter into one’s heart and mind and soul. As each of us awakens to a fuller knowing of the universality of life, we in turn further empower the global field of eco-spiritual consciousness. That is the deeper meaning and purpose of these magical holy places: they are source points of the power of spiritual illumination."

Martin Gray
 
 
** Sacred Earth is written and photographed by Martin Gray and is the culmination of twenty-five years of travel to hundreds of sacred sites in more than one hundred countries.  Gray’s stunning photographs and fascinating text provide unique insight into why these powerful holy places are the most venerated and visited sites on the entire planet. Maps adapted from the National Geographic Society show the locations of all the sites presented, and a thorough appendix includes a comprehensive list of over 500 of the world’s sacred sites.  The book can be purchased from the author on his website:  www.sacredsites.com

March in Washington to Protest Dangerous hydraulic Fracturing

I have another post  about Martin Grey and Sacred Earth, but wanted to post this first.  This is what happens when the powers that be have no sense of the sacred, when the earth is nothing more than a "resource".   How much more insanity?

Over 5,000 People March in DC to Protest Fracking

By Stefanie Spear, EcoWatch

29 July 12

More than 5,000 people from all over the nation, and various parts of the world including Australia, united today on the West lawn of the U.S. Capitol demanding Congress take immediate action to stop fracking. After the rally that began at 2 p.m., rally participants marched for more than one hour, stopping at the headquarters of the America's Natural Gas Alliance and American Petroleum Institute.

People impacted by fracking in their communities joined forces with 136 local and national organizations to call on Congress to Stop the Frack Attack and protect Americans from the dangerous impacts of fracking.

 Yes, fracking can provide massive amounts of methane gas to be used domestically; but it also produces millions of gallons of wastewater that contains elements that are known carcinogens. Despite fracking freeing up cancerous agents and releasing them into the environment, there are roughly 400,000 of these wells across America.  In addition to adding carcinogens into the atmosphere, scientists earlier this month finally linked fracking to an outbreak of earthquakes in the state of Ohio. The Youngstown, OH region saw 11 small tremors in a matter of months after a year of drilling, prompting an investigation by specialists — and the results were far from favorable.

Rally speakers included, Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org; Josh Fox, producer of Gasland; Calvin Tillman, former mayor of Dish, Texas; Allison Chin, board president of the Sierra Club, and community members from swing states affected by fracking."As the increasingly bizarre weather across the planet and melting ice on Greenland makes clear, at this point we've got no choice but to keep fossil fuels underground. Fracking to find more is the worst possible idea," said McKibben. "The amazing thing about this problem is that there's a solution… We know that we can run the world on renewable energy. We know that we can run the world on the wind. And today, we have a reminder that we can run the world on the sun," said Fox.

Today's rally was part of the first national event to stop the frack attack. The rally is the culmination of three days of training to further escalate the movement to stop abuse by the fossil fuel industry. Large groups from swing states including Ohio, Colorado, Pennsylvania and North Carolina attended the training and rally to make sure that fracking is a key part of the upcoming election.

"Just weeks ago in North Carolina, our legislature ripped up decades of groundwater protections for rural drinking water, in order to allow fracking and invite in dirty industry campaign dollars. So we add our voices to the national movement calling on Congress to protect our homes, our drinking water and our health by repealing the 2005 oil and gas exemptions," said Hope Taylor, a farmer near Durham and executive director of Clean Water for NC.

Rally participants have three key demands: an end to dirty and dangerous fracking, closure of the seven legal loopholes that let frackers in the oil and gas industry ignore the Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and full enforcement of existing laws to protect families and communities from the effects of fracking.

"It is time for us to come together as a people and let the law makers that work for us know that we are tired of being run over by the out-of-control oil and gas industry," said Tillman.

While at the headquarters of America's Natural Gas Alliance, rally organizers delivered six jugs of contaminated water in hazmat suits and then headed to the American Petroleum Institute where a 20-foot-high mock oil rig was smashed to the ground.  This event was a launching point for the movement, and will be followed by events in Albany, NY on Aug. 25, Philadelphia on Sept. 20 and Sept. 21, and subsequent events in other states and regions affected by fracking.

For further information,  http://www.marcellusprotest.org/