Indigenous Mind

No matter how much I long for an imagined future for myself and the planet or drag myself back to a perceived idyllic past I am still breathing into the “right now”.  Longing, worry, agitation and frustration can’t change the fact that this moment is the one before me.  It is the one I can experience and transform. This moment I can choose to be right where I am in the fullest possible sense.  I can choose to be aware of the wonder, grace, problems, emotion, connections, conflicts, joys, and pain of it.  And I can breathe to open my senses so that I can feel myself as a small part of the moment in preparation for the depth of possibility it holds.  I can choose to feel my breath linked to a breathing planet through trees and plants.  I can expand my listening to hear the sounds of the other beings who are sharing the moment with me so that my mind does not fill all the space.

 

This awareness is not a state of achievement.  It is like walking.  I take a step and as one leg lifts off the ground I am close to falling. As I set my foot down again in the movement forward I find stability.   My stability is measured by my orientation. With each breath I am on my way to falling into the whirlwind of human created stimuli- messages, information, emotions, obligations.  I can miss out on the moment with an amnesia that highlights my emotional response and obscures the wonder of the moment.   I can also choose to breathe and create space to look beyond myself to my North Star and reorient myself to my aspiration- relationship and connection.  Or I can choose to tentatively open my senses and my body.  I can expand my moment to the landscape of which I am a detail and find inspiration in the trees, plants, and minerals, bodies of water and creatures of land, air, and water around me.  I can be reminded by nature and become aware of my breath in the moment with my indigenous mind.

 

My nature binds me to the earth as tightly as I am bound to tree and plant producing oxygen, not only for physical survival but for the awareness of myself as part of the planet and her changes- not as cause or solution, but as an intimate and dynamic detail of her process. I can fall prey to the rhetoric and drama of issues, events and emotions or I can breathe into the tiny moments of choice that allow me to collaborate and participate in my own unique way as a partner with the earth throughout the web of relationships with all other species.

 

I can continue to ask “how do I live my life right now” or I can take a breath and remember – to listen as well as talk to nature, to receive the breath of the Earth through plants and trees, to feel the smallest vibration of relationship in our actions – to redeem my indigenous mind and move from human centered thinking to earth centered perception.  We have the power to live our lives right now with a new orientation - to listen to the layers of species on the planet for their deeper messages; to be inspired by familiarity and intimacy with our neighboring species; and to open our powers of perception for the possibility for revealing a common future. 

Excerpt from “Indigenous Mind” from the Living Now Anthology to be published  September 2010 by North Atlantic Books

Current and Upcoming Activities

 

June 2nd                       "Nature's Lucid Dreaming" installation

Opening of Tasting Cultures Exhibition, Avery Center for African American Culture and History - Charleston, SC

till September 2009

 

July 11-15                     Donella Meadows Fellows Leadership Program - Sustainability Institute, Hartland VT

 

28-31                             Whole Funding Workshop

Center for Whole Communities -  Knoll Farm, VT

 

September 23-26        Breaking the Color Barrier in the Great Outdoors - Atlanta Hilton, Atlanta, GA

 

October  3-7                 Donella Meadows Fellows Leadership Program - Sustainability Institute

As the world shifts and changes and we become more and more nomadic, more global and more fragmented, I am suggesting that we create hope for the next generations through the evolution of the collective awareness of our natural state of relationship and learning.
Science tells us that even though we cling to ideas of sustainability that in fact. In fact we are past the point of sustainability. Many scientists and policy makers project that the future of sustainability as currently defined presents a planet inhospitable to much of the current life of the planet including humans.
The signposts of the current landscape of sustainability thinking is full of repeating patterns of fragmented living, learning and thinking; separation from nature and natural cycles and rhythms by regulating human activity with mechanical processes. Even the holistic is viewed as a fragment and cannot provide a model of wholeness while well being is relegated to the margins of visioning.
We have developed a language of sustainability with enough emotional resonance to create the illusion of congruence while co-opting the vitality of a holistic vision of the future.
What we are being asked is to expand into the miraculous possibilities of this time. What we need to meet this challenge is a new orientation.
What we need is a new orientation for the cartography of interdependence and wholeness. We need compass points to align us with the larger web of relationship, our specific place in the moment and the mechanism that corrects our course. Our hope for the future is to recalibrate human consciousness beyond ideas of sustainability towards dynamic regeneration.
“As I think about the role of nature – the patterns of nature and the patterns of individuals – I’m reminded of Tom Johnson’s definition of learning as “discovering and embodying nature's patterns.” He speaks of nature as focused primarily on patterns, which increasingly diversify through a process of interdependent self-organization. For Johnson, we need to understand, in deeper, organic, and systemic ways, the ways in which nature works. But just as importantly, we need to embody those understandings as a way of reconnecting the fragmentation of our world.” -Linda O’Toole
This reconnection is the essential of dynamic regeneration. and the pathway to relationship that recognizes the inherent learning in each of us and the web of life that connects us. We move into the vision of our future by re-energizing and responding to the regenerative power of the dynamics of each moment. There are four keys:
o Remember
o Embody
o Model
o Share
What generates hope is the experience of each moment met with a willingness to find possibility more invigorating than fear of the unknown. At each crucial moment we can listen for the subtle ley lines where miracles are nourished by our unique capacity to learn.
Living right now with the Earth as she changes with us and around us reflected in the changes in our global economic structures, social and environmental challenges, intellectual/emotional turmoil - the currents of possibility intersect with the challenges to our sense of stability and safety. This intersection can be the portal to a future that we continue to promise to ourselves and future generations as possible.

I have never before written a message like this and especially one that seems to be linked to our political system. Today I feel called to send this thought out to my friends and colleagues.

I have been watching the news and in the last few days I have been aware of a feeling that all of the love, support and enthusiasm (golden light) we showered on Obama during the campaign and inaugaration has been refocused on our own lives. Each day he seems more alone in the challenges he faces as our own challenges take more of our attention. I wanted to write to my dearest friends to remind myself and all of us who can see the extent to which his leadership can change consciousness that he needs our energy every day and now more than ever to make that shift.

If he and his work is already on your altar and in your daily practice even for a moment then I ask forgiveness for stating the obviousness and if not I hope that you will draw on the jubilation that we all shared at the inaugaration and bring that joy, support and hope to today and the days ahead in any small way that you can imagine. This is what Obama asked of us in support of the change we all know is needed and each day we can choose to respond to that call.

It is the energy of all of us standing with him even when the news shows a compromising and bleak picture that will provide the momentum for change as it did in the election.

Standing at the Crossroads: Human Responses to Our Planet's Changes

We are standing at the crossroads of multidimensional change. This is not a new situation. Change is a constant in our world and if we observe the natural world through our bodies and our senses we can see that we are designed to respond to change and grow. What overwhelms us at this particular crossroads is the fact that our modern world through media, internet, travel, education makes us aware of many of the changes taking place on the planet among humans, other species and the planet Herself. We inhabit a complex world while trying to understand the nature of complexity and experiencing emotional responses to change that is beyond our current sense of process.

We can stand at this crossroads and try to find ways to get back to “the way things were”

or we can stand still enough to listen to the voices of the other beings sharing that intersection with us and open ourselves to working with them to discover what can be created together rather than for them which highlights our sense of isolation.

I have chosen climate change as a starting point for the conversation highlighted in one of the last sentences of Al Gore’s Live Earth pledge:

All of the actions we take from here on out to solve the climate crisis will be based on a simple premise: our home, Earth, is in danger. We don’t risk destroying the planet, but instead risk making it inhospitable for human beings.

What is being examined is not whether or not this is true but whether the possibility of it creates an emotional response – and so gives a starting point for examination. Related to that possibility, we have internal and external reactions [to global change]. We have emotional and intellectual responses, and responses that prompt us to act, act, act. I believe it is helpful for us to focus our attention on response rather than on action and f begin with orientation. How are we oriented in terms of possibility? What is our orientation to the possibility that the Earth might shake us off?”

In the book “You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination” by Katherine Harmon there is a quote by Stephen S, Hall on mapping and orienteering:

“To orientate is to hop back and forth between landscape and time, geography and emotion, knowledge and behavior. Orientating begins with geography , but it reflects a need of the conscious self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit in this landscape? Where have I been? Where shall I go, and what values will I pack for the trip? What culture of knowledge allows me to know what I know, which is often another way of knowing where I am? And what pattern, what grid of wisdom, can I impose on my accumulated, idiosyncratic geographies? The coordinates marking this territory are unique to each individual and lend themselves to a very private kind of cartography.” (italic inserted by TT)

This highlights three clear points of orientation for this overwhelming complexity. We are conscious, self-aware organisms capable of understanding our own dynamic nature and processes and are continually learning and adapting. That leads us to transcendent orientation where our awareness can help us expand our sense of isolated self. This transcendence reminds us of the infinite Web of Relationship that sustains us. From this orientation we can access a grid of wisdom that helps us consider, reflect upon and contemplate responses to each moment from a powerful grid of Relationship.

One of the possibilities that Al Gore’s pledge places before us is the possibility of human extinction and the overwhelming sense of grief that calls forth whether it is a fact or not.

The possibility that there might no longer be a home for us, that humans would be the endangered species, is a powerful possibility, and it’s terrifying. The sense of loss around that is very powerful. So powerful that it becomes the emotional lens through which we consider action. We engage intellectually in the pursuit of solution based activity.

The trinity of intellectual inquiry: what? how? why? works well when it has a clear “what” in front of it to determine the how and why. When everything comes through an emotional lens filled with uncertainty, grief and loss there’s a fuzzy “what”. We want clarity and a solution for the consuming feelings so we aim straight at “how” and “why” and spend little time reflecting on and clarifying “what”.

What am I angry about/overwhelmed by?

What emotion is storming in me?

Am I clear about what’s on the table for me? (For me, not for all of us.)

Can I ask if we’re going to work on this together: what’s on the table for you, what’s the emotional lens filtering your thoughts now?

Can we spend time clarifying the “what” so that perhaps a new “how?” can be revealed out of that?

In considering our response to the changes on our planet from the perspective of human grief I found an important starting point in the ways that people circumvent the feelings. One of those ways is over-functioning. Get busy on the how and on explaining. Get busy on working, making a list, what am I going to do, and put a lot of work into that. That busyness is actually one of the things that they say can extend the period of grief. Self-medication, over functioning; these are ways of suppressing my emotion. I’m not trying to intimate that there isn’t a lot to do. There is a lot to do and we want to do it in a way that actually creates a new possibility for us – which means orientating ourselves from a new place. To find that new place requires mapping the terrain from grief all the way through those stages to some kind of acceptance in order to be able to step forward.

Our emotional response also reduces our contemplation of the intersections – how the Earth is for us as humans. The conversation starts to contract. If I’m terrified that I’m going to lose my habitat, and my emotional lens is focused on that loss then I’m not going to say, “This is a good time for me to think about consciousness.” Because if I am really upset, and I have the possibility to articulate that I’m upset, not for anyone to fix it, but for that to be spoken and witnessed, there’s something in me that is no longer isolated and contracted. I can observe that I am part of something and by creating that space around emotion by naming it we can center ourselves in the interconnected Web of Life. We might even see ourselves as details of the landscape and look at the Earth not in terms of the way that the Earth services humans, or even in terms of her survival, but see that her changes are part of our emotional landscape. Perhaps we might even stretch to the point where we can see that these changes are important – and what might help us become aware of the Earth’s expanding consciousness.

One of the things that has been a great teaching in my own practice is about seed coats. I have always believed that layers of consciousness behave like seed coats: a lot of agitation is necessary for the seed coat to open up: fire or drowning or digestion. I have made my way through many tension filled transitions and lessons by reminding myself of how a seed coat is broken open to germinate. Tension can be the best indicator of a natural generative force such as germination or learning. We are in a time of tension now and discovering what can be generative in this tension rather than trying to smooth it away too quickly to find harmony or comfort might be how we miss the moments of greatest potential.

One of the questions I’d like to put on the table as a starting point is less, “What to do?” but more, “What to be?” How do we experience ourselves differently from how we have experienced ourselves up to now? Many spiritual practices point to emotions as a gift of the human state. That’s fabulous. Do we want them to drive the vision of the future? Given that we have both this enormous possibility looming before us and our individual and collective emotional reactions to it how can orient ourselves for this multidimensional crossroads? Can we include and clarify emotional responses in our conversations explicitly so we can move into another consciousness to inform our action?

Our spiritual traditions give us the means to deepen our self awareness and our relationship with our planet and universe. The Christian mystics, Buddhist dharma, Hindu and Muslim teachings, indigenous earth wisdom, all of these point in some way to a spiritual orientation that is the bedrock of perception and action in our physical reality. In this age where so many have found a faith base that is spiritually centered around a crossroads of beliefs that allows them to respond to the complex world, it is truly the time to test the strength of our beliefs through our actions so that our internal and external responses are aligned with our larger relationship with the Earth and an expanding consciousness.

How do we begin? Breathe and become aware – become aware of sharing breath with the planet and open ourselves to being breathed by Her. Breathing is an automatic function that is the gateway to the Web of Life. Our breath opens us to the consciousness of all of life so that we can participate in relationship rather than isolated as the center of our own tiny universe.

Breathing is a spiritual practice even when we are not aware that it is. Spiritual practice then is not separated from our everyday lives but is the underlying automatic function of our day. We may give over a portion of our day to expand and deepen our capabilities as self aware organisms in relationship with all of life and the living. Our ability to utilize this awareness in the midst of an emotional reaction to the news or a conversation or catastrophic information is the heart of transcendent orientation and the crossroads of consciousness.

Can we begin to support each other in this attempt to expand consciousness and our ability to act from that expansion in the same way that we support each other around problems and issues?

Collaborate or Die

Many years ago I read an article in Forbes magazine entitled “Collaborate or Die” which talked about the need for businesses to learn the art of building relationship internally and across the perceived boundaries. Since then there has been a both a hunger and an action oriented movement toward community building and collaboration. It was so pervasive that the terms have lost much of their power but the hunger and longing is still there. What is also still present is the need to be able to live in healthy relationship with the human and non human world in order to survive.

At the time of the article I was struck by the question of whether or not we had the capacity for collaboration or whether it pointed to a period of learning and growth that built our capacity for relational thinking which is the foundation of collaboration. I believe that the cultural norm prizes activity over learning and therefore what sprang forth from the call to collaborate or die was a flurry of activity and movements, many of which offered valuable insights into the possibilities for collaboration but may not have built a learning process for relational thinking. The result is clear when we look at the environment, health care, political unrest and individual search for meaning through self help.

Each day that I read the news headlines I am struck by the web of relationships and the separatist nature of our current thinking. Some unexpected coalitions are occurring and they are occurring because of similar goals around issues. This creates some new energy for problem solving and falls far short of creating the most creative possibility thinking. Solutions to our problems as the focal point of relationship definitely keeps consciousness focused on problems and solutions rather than the creation of a great new story that is the vision of the future.

The wealth of our current world is that through awareness, technology and a desire for learning or even simple curiosity we are able to intersect with other people, environments, cultures and ideas. How we use this resource is up to each of us and requires us to examine our vision to see whether it is a story built on the problems of the past which we wish to unmake; or whether it is a story of possibility that can only be completed by reaching out into the grid of relationship so that it’s making is a relational effort pointing to more than the sum of what exists at present.

This kind of effort requires a rigorous use of our intellect in the terms of Cornel West which is the marriage of spiritual awareness and critical inquiry. It calls us to nourish our bodies, minds and spirits so that we can remember that we live in relationship and our lives are enriched and expanded by relationship. Solving problems becomes the by-product of continuing to illuminate and create activity from the insights gained through the illumination of our place in the grid of relationship and the search for the health of the whole.

What more can we do for ourselves and each other to build our capacity to think, feel and act more fully into this grid of relationship in a healthy and vital way?

Talking Circle

The Talking Circle has been assimilated from indigenous culture into common usage in the last decade and it is important to note the shift in context and meaning with this cultural shift. The emphasis in much of its current usage is on the talking while less attention is focused on listening and non human voices. The thoughts here are meant to expand the meaning of Talking Circle and connect it to its energetic roots.

The Circle is form for discourse and sharing because it gathers the people around sacred energy (the elements or intention) and acknowledges The Circle of Life and the Living. Each person comes to the circle to listen and witness - the talking is meant to be listening out loud. It is a way to express deeper listening and remember to listen for the voices that could not be present. The talking stick/rock/pouch is not a microphone to be passed around but rather a reminder to each person in the circle that humans are not the only presence in the circle. Humans are in the circle with the stone people, the tree nation, the oceans and rivers and so on. Each person speaking who holds the stick/pouch/stone is called to listen to their own hearts and listen for the voices of all our relations ( all life on the planet). So the conversation that reveals itself in the talking circle is accretive, a growing chorus of the voices of the people, the landscape, and the Mystery.

Gentrification and Homelessness

This is a response to an op-ed concerning the displacement of droves of homeless people in Skid Row LA for a street cleaning (both literal and figurative). (see link below)

It seems to me that social and economic issues require a spiritual infusion in order for us to see the issues in compassionate ways that serve a whole and healthy society. Thre are many issues embedded in what we see as gentrification and homelessness that have less to do with economics and more to do with consumerism - the idea that you "have" things/people/ideas when they are attractive and desirable and throw away things when they no longer function properly or are no longer attractive. We don't think of the homeless as part of our human ecosystem or community. They are disposable. The spirit or soul of the person that remains a responsibility of the interdependent whole becomes invisible.

As a culture we continue to look at isolated problems trying to find solutions that fix people, places, circumstances and these are getting larger and more complex (homelessness, catastrophes, conflict). It is as if we can't find the courage individually and collectively to open our hearts to the problems to see how they are connected and linked to a greater consciousness. There is something about supporting the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" beliefs that hardens our hearts to suffering and helps maintain the upper layers of wealth. Yet there is no clamoring to end the war so that our resources could care for our people and our environment. There is no uproar about creating more services for the mentally ill who are increasing in number. There is no outrage at the amount of people suffering in multiple ways in this country (victims of Katrina who are still homeless, people who have been victims of poverty through lack of understanding and means on reservations, in cities and in rural communities, children who become adults without sufficient parenting and fill our prisons and on and on).

I have been considering lately what my real contribution is to the community of humans and the Earth, one that I can measure daily, so that I can meet the level of need from my heart in an appropriate use of my resources.

What can we do together than is beyond the issues that drive us and is generated from our spirit rather than our minds?

I think this is really about the relationship of dependence/independence/interdependence. We are dependent on certain illusions and constructs that keep us in a continuing dialogue of helplessness as the problems grow in scope and complexity. This reminds me that I can take independent, value driven action to bring compassion and service to the fore in my life and this helps to illuminate and inform the interdependence of the life which is part of my core of integrity and can lead to more powerful action on behalf of a healthy Whole.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-slater30jul30,0,1645696.story?coll=la-opinion-center