Dear People,
This year's ten-day training intensive in the Work That Reconnects took place once again at Land of Medicine Buddha, southeast of Santa Cruz, California. Earlier this month, amidst redwoods and prayer-wheels, thirty-nine of us from five continents moved through the spiral of the work. It was like entering the heart of the world, and finding it in the depths of our own being. That stemmed, I believe, from the exquisite, almost excruciating tension between our awareness of unbearable suffering and a dawning sense of unbelievable promise. Truth-telling bred such trust and respect between us, I imagined our heart-minds as interlinked as neurons in a neural net.
As usual my co-teachers were Fran Macy and our veteran intensive coordinator Doug Mosel. Doug, in his commitment to local food sustainability, has become a full-time farmer and organizer. His offering to our group's altar this year was freshly harvested grain, including the first wheat to be re-introduced to Mendocino County.
As usual the goals of the intensive were clear from the start. Since they have guided us well, I'll list them for you here:
1. To sharpen our perceptions of both the unraveling of the industrial growth society and the emergence of a life-sustaining society.
2. To understand cognitively and to integrate psychologically and spiritually the Work that Reconnects. This includes: a) conceptual learning (e.g. living systems theory, deep ecology); b) spiritual practices from several traditions, especially Buddhist; and c) interactive processes (including despair work, deep ecology and deep time exercises, rituals, and collaborative small group work.
3. To build strong, lasting connections with sister and brothers warriors for life on Earth, that can provide mutual support under conditions of political repression, economic breakdown, and ecological collapse.
4. To review our lives, reflect on our gifts, and clarify our intentions for taking part in the Great Turning.
Except for our mid-intensive solo in nature, each day together begins in the same fashion. The collective quiet, or Noble Silence, that begins the night before at 10:30 and continues through breakfast, is not broken until we start the morning's plenary at nine with the Elm Dance. It is like a spontaneous prayer in motion, the way places and beings we want healing for are called out into the music as we dance. Then, after anchoring those prayers by deep bows to Earth, we receive an offering by one of the participants, in the form of song or poetry or movement. Next comes a five-minute newscast by our own radio-journalist, who rose early to listen to the BBC. Fran likes to balance the day's headlines by weaving in an item or two reflecting the Great Turning. This "News from Earth" is an important ingredient, bringing the outside world into focus and keeping our experience together from becoming a self-referential bubble--especially since our intensive is cell phone and laptop-free.
The morning session that follows blends oral teachings and experiential practices. The rich mix is like being in a combination of monastery, think-tank, and psychological laboratory. We begin with meditation practice: basics of and variations on anapanasati or mindfulness of breathing in and breathing out. Merging mind with body, it unites the group in a quiet, rapt attention to the present moment. It is excellent for heightening our sense of belonging to Earth, as we experience ourselves being breathed by life. Opening to the newness of each breath, we attune to our nature as flow, learn to befriend uncertainty and lessen fears of our own impermanence.
Ah, the knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.
Rilke's Sonnet to Orpheus, Part 2, 27.
Toward the end of one morning session, Doug led a new version of the Wheel of the Great Turning. After a very sobering presentation and discussion on the food crisis, from genetically engineered seeds to the effects of oil scarcity and climate change, he had us assemble in circles of 13 or so. In the middle of each large circle he placed three objects. First, a roll of gauze bandaging or other first-aid material, to represent holding actions. Then a little jar of his fresh grain (in the classic version of this exercise it's usually a green vine or leafy stalk), to symbolize systems change and new ways of doing things. And thirdly a crystal for the third dimension of the Great Turning, the shift in consciousness. In each circle we took turns randomly to reach out and take the appropriate object in our hand and speak of something we are doing or taking part in doing for the health and security of food. After each sharing, we all repeated "So it is with the Great Turning!" We were still going strong when Doug called a halt after twenty or thirty minutes, to wrap up the morning session. At our closing circle on the last day, a participant from New Zealand singled out that particular experience as having given her the most hope for the future.
The summer began with a gathering that was equally rewarding, though half as long and five times as big. In June in Germany a mega-workshop took place, called Konferenz des Lebens: dem Wandel Kraft geben (Conference of Life: Giving Power to the Turning). Mornings were my time to guide, in fresh ways, two hundred of us through the spiral of the Work that Reconnects; then afternoons and evenings some dozen assistant facilitators took over, taking charge of seven or eight different "home groups" and drawing on their own special skills and experience. It was a joy to be with them and see them work, for we've been on the path together for a long time. I've been walking with some of them since the mid-80's, and my life and work have been hugely enriched by them. They have developed an impressive model for developing and disseminating the Work that Reconnects: called "Holon-training," it takes place over a year of bimonthly residential sessions, one of which is expanded into a vision quest in wild nature. For information about it, you can write
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and in english,too.
A high point of the Konferenz des Lebens was an evening devoted to a Markt den Moeglichkeiten (marketplace of possibilities), which turned the final Going Forth stage of the spiral into a kind of festival. With only one hour free to prepare the space, and with zero coordination from the leadership team, the participants turned the huge hall into richly decorated fairground, where paths wound through several dozen stands displaying the ventures and activities they are undertaking for the Great Turning. Music, art, and dancing enlivened the scene. As I wandered about with this old friend and then the next, I thought to myself, "this is what heaven is like."
Fran and I are winding up a week's holiday. It was originally planned for the high Sierras, then canceled because we thought the altitude might be too much of a challenge for my lungs, which had been affected this summer by the smoke of California's wildfires. We decided to take a holiday anyway: right here at this lovely B&B on Cherry Street. A neighbor of ours called it a "staycation." We weren't sure how we'd steer clear of our computers, phones, and usual piles of overdue work, but; we did!
We read in the garden--my nose deep in an engrossing new biography of Albert Einstein by Walter Isaacson, and Fran's in Bill Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul. We walked around Oakland's Lake Merritt, hiked in the hills of Tilden Park, and swam in its Lake Anza. We went to the movies (don't miss Edge of Heaven) and a brilliant out-door matinee of Tchekhov's Uncle Vanya by Cal Shakes. And we became tourists in San Francisco, taking the BART into the city to soak up paintings by Frida Kahlo and a quartet of Women Impressionists including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt--and even showed up one night at Beach Blanket Babylon, the raunchy, goofy musical still going strong after forty years.
On Friday, picking up son Jack at the Department of Environment where he works, we walked with him up the street and into United Nations Plaza, now entirely given over to the displays and celebrations of Slow Food Nation, the first such event in the country. Stalls of fruits and veggies thrummed with life, color, and young people. The whole lawn in front of San Francisco's City Hall was transformed into raised-bed gardens bursting with native flowers and food plants from tasseled corn to juicy tomatoes, chard, melons. The avenues of plane trees on either side sheltered stands of good things to eat and straw bales to sit on while you ate --slowly, of course.
The rewards of staying home were described to me in a letter last winter from a woman in western Canada. After explaining why she and her husband were not coming to an intensive despite their great interest in the Work that Reconnects--no passports, for one thing--she went on to say:
. . . We have given up the ownership of a vehicle. Life without the car gives us a wonderful intimacy with our surrounding world. We are immersed in the selfsame finite landscape that Fran speaks about on the Workshop DVD. It is our daily life and it grows into our full beingness. In sacrificing our 'wings' we have found an entirely new way to fly and we are infused with an extraordinary sense of liberation. In saying No to the commands of the Industrial Dogma we are saying Yes to the Great Turning. . ."
One of the things I most love about the Work that Reconnects is the way it can give voice to the spiritual teacher within each person. We become each others' guides, bestowing learnings, steadiness, and inspiration. So let me share with you some nourishing words from students and colleagues.
"I'm starkly aware of planetary suffering these days. I can't ignore it even if I wanted to. Sometimes it feels like a mounting tension pulsing beneath the surface of everything. I've been having disturbing dreams. . . I've found it helpful to move the fear and grief from my throat down into my lower body--it feels more spacious, more connected and grounded, less personal from that place. And I've also been calling upon future beings and ancestors, and feeling their presence also helps me widen my perspective and sense of self." Young teacher of environmental studies.
"The Great Turning is rooted within the planet herself. And it begins within each of us. It is our planet (be)coming through us." Student at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).
"Just as a near-death experience can result in the expansion of normal awareness, so too can this [planetary crisis] precipitate the emergence of a new relationship between humans and the natural world." Andrew Beath.
A former student of mine also speaks to the relevance and significance of the death experience. Nate writes:
"Faced with the reality of our present condition and holding even the vaguest sense of how enraptured and embedded in our modern industrial way of being in the world we humans truly are, one comes to the same conclusion as French philosopher Edgar Morin: the situation is 'logically hopeless.'
"The situation is logically hopeless, not because we lack the innate creativity to remedy our ills, but because we refuse to enter the depths of our own sickness. . .
"We believe the world is ours to save, that because we are the direct and tangible cause of its destruction, we must also be its savior and rescuer. We believe, in our modern hubris, that human ingenuity is the primary essence of Earth's expression and the ultimate product of its evolution. . . In this delusion we have come to believe ourselves as the grand redeemers, destined to save the world from its demise. . .
"To live through this moment we must fully enter our own death. . . Only by embracing the uncertainty of our moment and stepping fully into our unknown future, in an ultimate gesture of surrender, will we ever live to be reborn. . .
"Surely Earth is in need of our dying. . . The journey into our dying is the surrender to our becoming the fullest expression of ourselves."
In a CIIS course on the Great Turning, I shared experiential work in deep time. Graduate student Sean Ellsworth gives me permission to quote from his paper. I do so here at considerable length because deep time work is becoming more and more important in the Work that Reconnects, more and more generative of insight.
About the practice called "Harvesting the Gifts of the Ancestors," Sean wrote:
"As I wound my way back through time. . . back to the African forest we all came from, I was overwhelmed with the power, struggle and love embedded in all the acts of the ancient ones. As I stood looking across the savanna into the deep future, I was glad to know that the feelings in me would be able to find deeper expression in art, language and society, and was able to forgive the damage and pain that I also saw in the future, knowing that pain and suffering would natrually arise along the path towards balanced expressions of loving relationship. . .
"Retracing the journey of the ancients out through the ages, I noticed so many different kinds of personalities. . . the timid and cautious as well as the rash and dominating. I was surprised that I felt gratitude, not judgment, for all these ancient ones, whose interactions brought us here today. I do not like domination and the oppression that goes with it, but this exercise gave me a sense of how all these ways of groping into being were involved. . . Thoughts and impressions such as this were coming up as I neared my body again, and wave after wave of gratitude surfaced.
"It wasn't until I stepped back into myself that fear, anger and hatred again emerged. It was quite surprising how distinctly they emerged, like slipping into old shoes that fit well. I now reflect that part of my practice. . . must be to try holding the fear, anger and hatred that I experience in this body in respectful gratitude. This steppping back from the "me-ness" of negative emotions, I feel, is a part of our emerging Gaian consciousness, one that looks at all life processes from a greater perspective that can hold them and allow space for healing. . ."
Reflecting on the Seventh Generation exercise, called the Double Circle in my book Coming Back to Life, Sean notes that he was assigned the role of a future human, and writes:
"I was surprised to see how I could receive the responses from each of the humans of the Great Turning more compassionately from the future. I received messages of pain, confusion and hope. When I was asked to give a message back through time I was surprised that the answer came easily, if heavily. . . I saw the pain and love in each of their hearts as the seeds of the future, the intuitions of what could or should be. It was in this experience that I most profoundly felt the pain and suffering in my own life. . . The feeling that we each can be grateful for our struggles in the knowledge that they are part of the creation of the future, its karmic roots perhaps, is one I am trying to carry with me."
Reflecting on the re-organization of self that the Great Turning invites and requires, Sean writes:
"The process of remembering who we are and where we are. . . promises to be a painful one. The image of psychic birthing comes to mind. The exercise we learned of 'Breathing Through' the pain and suffering of our time resonated with me as a form of Lamaze for human consciousness's birth into Gaian consciousness (my emphasis). It is a way for us to hold onto ourselves and not get lost in the pain and suffering around us. And more than that, it is a way that we can use that suffering to let us stand in the chaos of life, thereby facing suffering and respecting it.
"This remembering who we are, and whose voice is trying to speak through us, does not in any way diminish our personal struggles. . . (or) the societal and biological burdens. . . But I feel this remembering is necessary to make our burdens lighter, to make our daily lives more livable, because we can have hope that there is a voice in us that can speak in the power of wisdom, and a voice that can speak in wise action."
* * *
Alert to all lovers and doers of the Work that Reconnects: a network of facilitators in North America to be posted on this web site is in process of creation, thanks to Barbara Ford of Portland, Oregon. For explanation and application see the menu on Work That Reconnects page of this web site.
Yours in solidarity and gratitude for Earth,
Joanna
Dear People,
Another big storm is predicted, with likely slides, floods, and outages, but right now the sun is making a surprise appearance. It catches in the drops and drips from last night's rain. The soggy grass I squish across on my way to my cottage is strewn with glitter. The leaves of my winter kale display fat, transparent pearls that, when I lean over and look, reflect the world.
This new year feels like that. Beauty and radiance amidst all the dangers and dire predictions. Even the numbers, 0 and 8, have a comfortable, promising look, round like the shiny globules on the kale. "8 sym-bolizes good fortune in China ," says a travel ad for flights to Beijing . Zero is excellent, too. It's the empty hole in the hub that allows a wheel to turn.
The lightness I feel must have some connection to the primaries. It's like old times, the notion that we might have a real choice, limited as it is. The refrain I sing in my talks and workshops, after all, is the power of intention, the privilege of being choice-makers and channels for change. But I'd about given up on seeing that in electoral politics. When Fran and I were courting fifty-five years ago, we took the NY Times along with our picnic basket and read Adlai Stevenson's campaign speeches aloud to each other. We never tired of his eloquence, wisdom, and wit. Now, watching Obama's speeches, we feel the same excitement. It's all the greater now, because that kind of honesty and intelligence has grown so rare as to be almost extinct, and because I'd thought the American people had gone to sleep. Also, I am deeply stirred by Obama's courage--running for president in a violent and racist nation. Courage is contagious; so every day his campaign continues we'll be braver for it.
The year was bright from the beginning, as I think of our weeks in Vermont last month. I love working at Cobb Hill with its Sustainability Institute and co-housing community founded by Donella Meadows, whose systems teachings I have prized over the years. This time Fran came with me, and we went in January, when the farmers can take more time for our workshops. I grimly braced for wintry weather, forgetting how different dry cold is from the dank cold of the northern California coast. But sunny skies favored us, shining over snowy fields and hamlets, and the air so bracing, each breath is a tonic. Morning, noon, and moonlit night, every chance I got, I strode out into it, filling my lungs and studying the colors of the snow.
While we were there, Beth Sawin of the Sustainability Institute and Jay Meade, who like Beth is a resident of Cobb Hill, tried out their new, double-feature presentation on climate change. Beth, a scientist, is founder of an innovative educational project called Our Climate Ourselves (http://sustainer.org/oco). Jay is a painter and installation artist, whose street dramas, stage sets, and giant puppets enlist all ages to enliven the Great Turning. Their teamwork grows out of the realization that the challenges of climate change are so vast, and still so remote from our daily lives, they are hard to contemplate. And it expresses their conviction that the scientific data must be accompanied by art in order to engage our imagination and our will. Their double feature consists of a slide show by Beth presenting up-to-the minute information on the crisis, followed by a shadow-puppet drama that looks back from the future on arduous but eventually effective human responses.
The combined show was presented twice, and I noted quite a contrast in the way it was received. The first time, at our Cobb Hill-centered workshop, the shadow puppet show followed directly after the slide presentation with its sobering graphs and timelines. And we all thought the program quite effective. The second performance was scheduled to take place on the Friday evening of a large public weekend. Since it was the overture to a workshop where people came with expectations of experiential work, we decided to interpose an interactive process between the two parts of the show.
Over a hundred were present in the old Sumner Mansion as the lights dimmed for Beth's slide show. She'd brought in some new material. The serial photos of progressive Arctic ice melt and graphs of CO-2 acceleration struck me as even more alarming than before. For the first time I felt physically the grip of fear in my gut, a chill through my body. So I was glad that we had decided to insert an Open Sentence exercise, to help people just be with the information and the feelings it provoked.
Everyone in the audience turned to one other person to work in pairs, and the three Open Sentences were these: (1) Of the facts I just heard about climate change, what strikes me most is… (2) The feelings that come up in me as I hear this information are… (3) What I appreciate about having this information is… That third one made people laugh--which was a nice release; but it was good to take seriously too, and realize that after all we do want to know.
After 15 or so minutes of that process, the shadow puppet show erupted with Jay's antic silhouettes, jazz and marching band music, and a script both earnest and fanciful. It evoked cheers, tears and laughter as it echoed the message of Beth's report--and helped us digest it within a framework allowing for hope in human ingenuity and perseverance. I was struck by how much livelier and more appreciative the response was than at the first performance, when it followed straight after the science. The whole evening was pretty strong medicine, and set the tone for two days of wonderfully determined and high-spirited work.
As I write, Kalli Rose Halvorson stops by for tea. She tells me how auspicious is the year of the Earth Rat, which we are now entering. In San Francisco tomorrow the parades will roll through Chinatown , storms notwithstanding. An astrologer and student of Taoism, Kalli sketches out for me some of the qualities Earth Rat brings forth.
The mantra for an Earth Rat year, she says, is "Break It Down." Break down old habits and obstacles. Break down problems into discrete pieces and tasks. The image: a family of glossy-pelted rats are looking at a large warehouse packed with rice. They know they can take the huge structure down. Each will focus on her own immediate job, her bit of the wood to chew. This is not a time for multi-tasking, Kalli emphasizes, but just working away sequentially, consistently, in the most ordinary fashion--for real change. Politically, she says, entrenched incumbents can forget it. Their defenses crumble; familiar biases get deconstructed; this is the time for a fresh start.
I just discovered a new saint, and the kind of strength he evokes is similar to Earth Rat's. I have been reading about New Orleans as I prepare to leave for a retreat with sixty of its community leaders, and one of the books acquaints me with Saint Expedeet (also called Espidee). I immediately want him in my pantheon and in my life. Finding my daughter Peggy at work in her kitchen, putting final stitches on a stuffed cat, I ask her to make me a little doll of this saint to put on my altar.
To tell you his story, I'll just quote from the book, which is Voodoo Queen by Martha Ward. "As beloved in the city as St. Anthony, St. Roch, the Virgin Mary (and others)…, this saint, however, does not belong to the Catholic church…. It seems that a statue of a Roman foot soldier intended to be part of a crucifixion tableau became separated from its companions. When the missing piece turned up on the levee of the Mississippi in a box marked EXPEDITE, things began to happen quickly. Word spread of a recently arrived saint who could bring things to a rapid conclusion. In New Orleans speedy results are the true miracles…
"St. Expedeet wears the garb of a Roman soldier and crushes a raven beneath his foot. The bird manages to croak Cras! Cras!--Tomorrow, tomorrow--wait, procrastinate, do it later, mañana. Espidee, however, points firmly to a sundial inscribed HODIE. Today. Do it now." There are some fine stories of how the saint, when you call upon him, immediately helps you get things done. I am also glad to know the Latin word for tomorrow and the etymology of procrastinate.
What fine spirit for this year! May Earth Rat's and St. Espidee's blessings abound in your life and mine.
Cheers,
Joanna
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Dear People,
Back home from much travel this spring, Fran and I celebrate by having the grandchildren overnight--Jack and Charlotte 's two girls coming over from their Fulton Street house six blocks away, and Peggy and Gregoire's son migrating up from the downstairs flat. Julien and Eliza (both 10) and Lydia (7) are still so harmonious and high-spirited together, ready for anything, that these times with them seem ever more precious. Despite Dharma teachings of impermanence, I yearn for these moments to go on forever. One of our games last night was "Mystery Tray." In teams you find and arrange a dozen or so assorted objects on a tray, cover them with a cloth which you then whip off to let the others view the display for 20 seconds max. The next time you do it, you have removed one of the objects. The aim, of course, is to see how fast the others can detect what's missing. What I most detected was the large gap in powers of speedy observation between ages of seven and seventy-nine.
So we take joy in our families while across the world other families, by scores of thousands, are buried by mammoth earthquakes, drowned in cyclones, lost to each other in floods and rubble, crying for food in makeshift camps. Their suffering is beyond my capacity to conceive; but maybe I can try to breathe with them. We are linked to each other like cells in the living body of Earth. I can almost feel that connection, like an ache in the heart. It reminds it is for them, as much as for our own children and grandchildren, that Fran and I keep taking our work out into the world.
Climate change and peak oil were the focus of this year's weeklong Easter conference at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland . Fran and I felt privileged to take part, and harvested knowledge and inspiration from the lively participants as well as co-presenters, such as Richard Heinberg (Peak Everything is his latest), Rob Hopkins (founder of Transition Towns movement), Megan Quinn (outreach director of Community Solutions), and Richard Olivier (who drew us into Shakespeare's As You Like It to discern qualities of green leadership).
On the web site www.Findhorn.org/events you'll find a pretty full description of the conference, which included the 2-day, 5-session workshop we conducted at the outset. The descriptions were posted nightly without opportunity for presenters to check their accuracy, but they do convey the flow and the fare as we followed the spiral of the Work That Reconnects. With 250 people participating, we were challenged to invent new forms, especially for the part that's most intense: Honoring Our Pain for theWorld. That session began with poetry and spoken reflections on the power, liberation, and solidarity that comes with owning our collective grief. Then people clustered in foursomes to tell of their experience of the "great unraveling." After that they sang together, over and over like a chant, words of Adrienne Rich put to music by Carolyn McDade.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who,
age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
The second half of that session is omitted on the Findhorn web site, so let me tell you what we did. With lights lowered, images of suffering and breakdown in our world were projected on a large screen, while a wordless, choral lament (from the same "My Heart is Moved" CD by Carolyn McDade) played over and over. On the hall's large, central floor space were set three glass bowls half-filled with water. The ritual consisted of people slowly, randomly, coming down from their seats around the hall to kneel by a bowl, and let its water trickle from their hands and their tears for the world be spoken ("My tears are for…"). As their forms moved about in the semi-darkness, resting here and there on the floor, or returning to their seats, we all seemed to be held by the music, the murmuring around the bowls, the splash of water. Then, when movement had stilled, we slowly processed out of the hall, carrying the Bowls of Tears. Into a garden pond outside the entrance we formally poured them out, reminding ourselves that the pain we feel for the world is no private pathology; it connects us with Earth and each other. "Let us remember: our tears for the world are the tears of Gaia."
The depth and beauty I experienced in the conference as a whole is conveyed in an interview with Rob Hopkins, which is on his web site (www.transitionculture.org/2008/04/21/). It starts: Rob: "What has been special for you about this conference?" Joanna: "You. And the people who are here. The beauty of Universal Hall. The coloured lights in the ceiling. The earnestness and the intention of the people stir me greatly. The willingness, the sense of unpanicked urgency. The deep goodwill. The dancing. The humour. That these folks are all doing it for the love of it without seeing the results of their own actions. That they are freed from continually computing our chances of success."
Let me signal Rob Hopkins' engaging new book, which you can order from his web site. Its title: the Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience. Sharing stories and lessons from his work in Ireland and Devon , he shows how the oil crisis can lead to the rebirth of local communities, which will grow more of their own food, generate their own power, and build their own houses with local materials.
The events I took part in after Findhorn--in southern England and the American northwest--brought me together with folks who are themselves facilitators and guides of the Work That Reconnects. Since the group work has been a "give away" from the start, without institutional support, control, or even coordination, it's heartening to get a glimpse of how it is spreading. Also I learned how helpful the DVD (Joanna Macy: The Work That Reconnects) has been for people in building confidence and providing tools.
An April "consultation" weekend near Bristol gathered thirty such facilitators, including veterans like Pat Fleming and Alex Wildwood, who first joined me back in 1983 when we called it "despair and empowerment work," and educator Jane Reed, who joined us in 1987 when we called it "deep ecology work," and then founded the Institute for Deep Ecology Education. Thanks to such a history and to Chris Johnstone's Great Turning Times e-newsletter, not to mention keen participation of folks in the Network of Engaged Buddhists and Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, Great Britain is a hot bed of workshops and trainings--and thirty more facilitators and would-be facilitators would have come if there had been room.
In Seattle as well, two weeks ago, I got a grateful sense of how the work is spreading. And I do mean grateful, because, when my chest cold kicked up and I couldn't complete the weekend workshop, seasoned colleagues took over for me. Randy Morris and Lois Canright, along with organizer Vic Bremson, led the 70 participants through "deep time" and "going forth" practices as well as a good round of networking. Randy, professor at Antioch University Seattle, draws on myth, culture, nature and Jungian psychology to teach a fantastic course called "Foundations for the Great Turning," (I hope to post the syllabus soon on my Great Turning page). He and Lois are members of Great Turning Northwest, a facilitators self-training group including Margo Adair, Bill Aal, Hillery Crocker, Dana Illo and others who've worked with me and even stood in for me over the years.
The Seattle weekend was organized by For the Grandchildren (www.forthegrandchildren.org), a network animated by its "commitment to unleash the power and joy of generational responsibility." The kick-off event Friday night featured David Korten and me in dialogue. Dave's work has been so important to my own perceptions and understanding over the years, I felt both honored and humbled to appear with him. Our dialogue can be heard on-line at http://ourmedia.org/node/399129. His website www.davidkorten.org contains some powerful delineations of the Great Turning, which he sees as an "epic passage" and "defining moment" in our journey on Earth.
After staying on in the Seattle area for some restful days and lively evenings, including a public dialogue with Bill Plotkin on Whidbey Island and sharing Dharmic views of the Great Turning at the Puget Sound Zen Center on Vashon Island, we flew to Boise , Idaho . I say "we" because my wonderful assistant Anne Symens-Bucher accompanied me as keeper and general wizard.
In Boise my 79th birthday was celebrated at numerous occasions, including public lecture, interfaith breakfast at mosque, amethyst bio-mat healing session in a magical store, Thai dinner, and a large, very vibrant weekend workshop. I attribute the vibrancy of the workshop, as well as its high numbers and depth of engagement, to familiarity with the work. A major role was played by Dan Walters, who, after a number of trainings with me in other places, was determined to ground the Work That Reconnects in his own city. So he enlisted a dozen or so colleagues from Earth Institute circles and Business Alliance for Local Living Economy, who joined him for a series of ten meetings using the DVD; then this group in turn spawned two others.
The work is spreading on-line as well. In addition to the internet goodies noted above, let me tell you about an engaging, illustrated course based on my book Coming Back to Life. Created by Stuart Carduner for a Buddhist-oriented web site, it uses arresting visuals as well as clips from my DVD to illustrate the book's key teachings. The course is called Reconnecting to Life and you'll enjoy taking a look at it on www.ashokaedu.net/coursesM/34/1.html, and telling friends who may not be into books (or even those who are).
Flash to all Elm-Dancers and Nuclear Activists! New reports on the situation in Novozybkov (due East of Chernobyl) come in from biologist Ludmila Zhirina, who has been distributing radiation monitors on our behalf through her organization Viola. Since 2003 teachers, families, and farmers have received these hand-held Geiger counters, as well as training in their use. They have learned to check food stuffs and gardens for radioactivity, and to measure changing patterns of contamination in school yards and farm fields. They appreciate having these tools that help them feel more in charge of their lives. With our help (including contributions often collected when we do the Elm Dance), Ludmila and her team have written, printed and distributed a first-of-its-kind Russian-language book on "Living With Radiation."
Now Ludmila reports a recent discovery made public by medical researchers. In the western part of the Bryansk region, in and around Novozybkov, studies of soil and water reveal an abnormal and serious lack of iodine, fluoride, and selenium. These elements normally protect tissues from radiation; their absence makes people yet more susceptible to thyroid and bone cancers, mental disabilities, and early mortality.
To Ludmila and her Viola team these findings help explain the morbidity they continue to see in and around Novozybkov. In response they are undertaking bold, new plans for 2008. The have decided to establish an educational center on ecological medicine in Novozybkov. Here programs and teaching materials will alert the population to the problems caused by lack of iodine, fluoride and selenium, and undertake remedial projects. These include seminars with medical doctors, exhibits of iodine-treated staples (salt, bread, milk, water, a porridge) as well as products naturally high in iodine (seafood, kelp, certain plants), and a wide array of posters and maps showing sources of these depleted elements. To extend the center's outreach, a mobile van will carry these exhibits into neighborhoods. Last month on April 26th, anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the Viola team inaugurated this program by organizing an Ecological Day of Health for the people of Novozybkov.
I'm building a new web page for Viola's work in and around Novozybkov, click on Nuclear Project in the side column. Take a look at the photos of their trip to Chernobyl last autumn. I hope you'll be moved to accept our invitation to support them, and send a cash contribution payable to Living Earth.
With gratitude for your life in this time of Great Turning,
Joanna
Dear People,
Last week of 2007: time to think of the gifts this year has brought. I'll drop my preoccupation with calamities--the endless war-making, the betrayal of the poor, the evisceration of Earth. The litany of shame should not surprise: in the death-throes of the industrial growth society, the Great Unraveling accelerates. But that's not all that is under way. As I've seen and said a thousand times, the Great Turning is happening, too. Time to reflect on what that invisible revolution has meant to me this year.
It is most immediate to me in the people who've come into my life, bringing priceless companionship and revealing fresh forms of creativity and courage. From scores of workshops, retreats, and gatherings this year, their faces appear to my mind's eye. Weaving through our shared experiences come insights to inform my heart and mind--and I want to remember them now, as 2007's gifts to my soul.
The gift of uncertainty. This came with fresh clarity during the last two months: in a course on the Great Turning at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and in a workshop-cum-intensive organized in Louisville , Kentucky . In both of these journeys, there was a rare and undefended sensing of both the peril and the promise of our time. And that simultaneity--the concurrence of the Great Unraveling and the Great Turning--became a source of revelation. No way to know how the story will unfold. We'd prefer to be assured of a happy ending. Many want that assurance so much they'll do anything for it, even close their eyes. But when we let go of that wish, something wonderful can happen. Eyes and hearts open. The world comes into focus. As we know from emergencies, danger itself can liberate us into fuller presence.
To quote from Edgar Morin, whose book Homeland Earth was part of our CIIS course: "Yet if the situation is logically hopeless, this indicates that we have arrived at a logical threshold at which the need for change and the thrust toward complexification can allow for the transformations that could bring metasystems into being. It is when a situation is logically impossible that novelty and creativity, which always transcend logic, can arise. Thus, it is when the chemical organization of groups of millions of molecules became impossible that a living auto-eco-organization first appeared."
The gift of intention. Uncertainty, when accepted, sheds a bright light on the power of intention. That is what you can count on--not the outcome, but the motivation you bring, the vision you hold, the compass setting you choose to follow. Hence the essential importance and beauty of bodhicitta, the motivation of the bodhisattva. In the Buddha Dharma it is also called adhitthana, which connotes resolve and steadfastness in choice, and also the physical foundation of a building. As we explored together how intention can work in our lives, other images arose: we saw it as a rudder by which we can steer, as a vehicle we can ride, as refuge, the one thing we can be sure about.
Resolve can save us from getting lost in grief. In Kentucky I came to know activists against Mountain Top Removal. I learned what is happening to the landscape and culture of Appalachia : how coal companies use dynamite to pulverize everything above the underground seams of coal; how bulldozers and dragline machines 20-stories high push the "overburden" of woodlands and top soil into the valleys, filling the valleys. Two thousand miles of streams have been buried, they say, and 450 mountains already gone. Cut open a fish, they say, or a deer that had still been walking, and the insides are black--like the water coming out of kitchen faucets. (for a slideshow go to http://www.alternet.org/environment/70475/)
And I saw how the activists are held steady by sheer intention. Though the nation seems oblivious of this tragedy, though state and federal governments look the other way, and major environmental organizations give no priority to the issue, these men and women persist in the vision that Appalachia can somehow be saved. They hold to their resolve that future generations may know slopes of sweetgum, sassafras, magnolia, the stirrings of bobcat and coon, and, in the hollows, the music of fiddle and fresh flowing streams.
The gift of devotion. Intention is nourished and illumined by love. Last week in our home, on Winter Solstice, a ritual took place, which I'll not soon forget. Nine of us gathered to honor the power of the goddess Kali as experienced by a devotee engaged in what she calls the "dance of cancer." A good thirty years younger than I, my friend is suffering an aggressive lung cancer, and coping with intense chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Through lore, chanting, and scholarship, she shared with us the liberation she finds in the presence of Kali Maa, Mother of All That Is.
Through my friend's words and vitality, I saw how uncertainty, when fully accepted, can deliver us into the only real time we have to live: the present moment. Here, in the priceless Now, my friend is sustained by her devotion to Kali, sees her as encompassing everything--the cancer itself and the chemo drip into her veins and her body's will to heal. I want my own love for life to be as strong as that. I want my devotion to Gaia to be that joyous and sufficient. I think it is, if I put my mind to it.
And, finally, this year has been graced with the gift of books. Of the four I would note, these first two are mine.
World as Lover, World as Self came out this fall in a lovely and leaner form than the original 1991 edition. For six intense weeks last winter I rewrote, reorganized, added new sections and chapters, culled others. To keep from drowning I hired my young colleague Aryeh Shell, who had just returned from a year in El Salvador . "Be my boss," I said, "There are so many pieces here, I need you to see the whole and not let me get lost in details." We had a great time together. I've also enjoyed the public readings that Parallax Press has scheduled in the Bay area. My favorite so far was at Berkeley's First Congregational when Jennifer Berezan joined me to offer, interspersed with my readings, songs of hers that I cherish, such as "Praises for the World" and "She Carries Me." It was so happy an occasion for us both that Jennifer will join me again in March to enrich a talk I'll be giving on the Great Turning at the Sophia Center in Oakland .
For almost two decades, Norbert Gahbler, a trainer in the Work That Reconnects and translator of several of my books, has served as interpreter for my workshops in German-speaking Europe . He is so familiar with my thinking, and so deft in conveying it, that I sometimes imagine a bridge of neurons interlinking our two brains. For some time now he has been seized by the conviction that stories are uniquely effective in opening people's understanding, and that some of the personal stories I tell while teaching should be offered to the public in their own little book. Norbert already knew which ones he wanted. Having interested a German publisher (Junferman), he and another close colleague of mine flew to the States in February for ten days of talking and taping. Our subsequent, long-distance work together flowed easily, and now the book is in press, due out in 2008, well in time for a June conference in northern Germany on the Work That Reconnects and the Great Turning. It's a slim book, can almost fit in your pocket. Its title: Fünf Geschichte die die Welt verändern kann, Five Stories that can Change the World--though actually a sixth tale slyly enters before the book closes. Going over the final copy, I was moved to tears by Norbert's ample and eloquent framing of each story, and by the stories themselves. Maybe, sometime, an English translation will appear.
Given the work I've been doing to open up our experience of time and expand the temporal context of our lives, I delight in the new book by Buddhist scholar Taigen Leighton. His Visions of Awakening Space and Time ( Oxford , 2007) brings out the deep ecological implications of Mahayana teachings. He focuses on the great 13th century Japanese Zen master Dogen, and especially Dogen's commentaries on a remarkable passage in the Lotus Sutra, where bodhisattvas are portrayed as emerging, not from a transcendental dimension, but from the very body of Earth. Here physical reality itself is recognized as a dynamic agent of awareness and healing. And our capacity to awaken into wisdom and compassion appears not as some noble, personal achievement, but as a function of our self-organizing universe.
The last week has brought into my hands a remarkable work by depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin. In Nature and the Human Soul (New World Library 2008) he offers a groundbreaking, ecopsychological matrix in which each successive stage of maturation is presented in terms of challenges offered by both the natural world and the Great Turning to a life-sustaining culture. Plotkin's work bids fair to transform the way we see our lives. It has done that already for me, especially since it draws illustrative material from interviews with me and from my memoir Widening Circles.
At this gateway to a new year, alive with uncertainty and adventure, please receive my warmest and most companionable greetings.
Joanna
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