Resilience Restoration: a Paradigm for humanity

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/11/gas-company-manu-park-amazon

A leaked document tells us about illegal gas operations in Manú Park, Perú. The news tells us about a percentage of the world birds, butterflies and mammals who live there, and different Peoples too. UNESCO says that Manú is a protected area that has biodiversity that "exceeds that of any other place on Earth" : around 10% of the world's bird species (that means 1000 species), 5% of all mammals (around 250), and 15% of all butterflies (that's around 2625).

But what does that mean...

...to you?

Tell me of something near to you that's threatened.

To me, I get an overwhelming sense from having lived in different parts of the world that everywhere has something special that is threatened. I have seen and heard of ecosystems, watersheds, rivers, mountains, cultures, languages, community buildings, species, individuals, and it goes on and on. What seems to me as common is that the cause is so often, but so easily, summed up as “humanity: the evil, the virus”.

I tell you about an experience that seems so familiar to me, does it also feel familiar to you?: You read/see/hear/experience something awful, feel outrage, and then go to some degree that is between full-on action (“save the world” … “stop X,Y,Z” ... “fix the problems!”... “Do less bad”) or apathy (“well, we're screwed anyway”... “it's impossible”... “please tell me something good, instead”). It's that perspective which either tries to stave off destruction for one more hour, day or year, or at least try not to feel/notice anything while it happens.

But this only one way to react.

Paradigm is the word used for how a community sees themselves in the world. A change in paradigm is ultimately that which affects what is thought, and done. It's a pattern held collectively, and then, from it acted individually.

What is it that Humans do, as individuals and as a species? Biologists call this activity a “niche”, economists call it a “product” or “service”. Perhaps a Westerner perspective would call it “career”. For others it might be called “living life”. I want to call it ecological role.

Some say another paradigm is possible, and I am trying to find the words to express it here because I live with some big questions in my heart, and I live them everyday. When I see or read something that makes me feel so sad or angry, especially articles like this, in my heart I need to feel that there is a fundamentally different way for humans to live/be/and operate here on earth. So I look for it.

Are humans born predisposed to cause pain or destruction, or at least remain ignorant and seemingly powerless? Who knows, but this is the story we often tell ourselves and it's part of a current paradigm, and the perception of ourselves. But there is a different paradigm, too. At the moment it's seems a sometimes quiet one... but you'll hear it here and there. This is the paradigm of rule changing, system shifting, of doing not only “less bad”, but as living as a steward. It's a paradigm of moving just beyond sustainability, and toward resilience and restoration.

Could this be humanity's ecological role here on earth? And if we were to live that way, how would it look? How would it be in your life? 

(picture from frans lanting: http://franslanting.photoshelter.com/image/I0000L2wqc4XKO6Q)

Desert Ecology

In one moment of full desert stillness,

I felt the Saharan wind come.

In gusts it blew away ancient rock,

each line hand-carved by time's hands.

The Sun fulfills me here, 

and even in the safety of an ever proud fig tree,

He penetrates the shadows.

But thirst knows no one here,

for the river runs like summer snowmelt,

fed by slow seeping into the same subterranean crevasses 

that pockmark this vast moonscape.

Turtles and frogs swim in the waters,

and since food is found when you know eyes to look,

I have never met hunger here either.

In these gardens Earth's bounty drips from our sweat:

and even in the heat, She refuses to cease.

The desert is only a mirage of death,

but one that will consume you if you stay long enough.

Do not disbelieve that this river oasis is the only pulse of life here:

Sun parched, but vibrant, life here in the dry

is living amongst us in all directions.

In the corners and small places,

the life of the desert is not outrageous!

It's humble and humbling,

enough that just the ecology of the Light here 

reflecting off the gypsum at sunrise

will bring you to your knees -

Let alone the ecology of the wild relations who breathe!

 

 

Jumbo Ski Resort briefing paper

Link to the briefing project I worked on. It was related to Environmental protection and assessment

I worked on this project January to April 2009 in a senior-level Environmental Studies class.

These Old Songs

These Old Songs.aif

Old Songs

These old songs I want to remember are an ancient doorway - an entrance to life's house where melody keys are a puzzle and perfect repetition illuminates the unlocked rooms of the mind. In ritual chant, a flood of consciousness flows almost seamlessly into the darkened corridors of the forgotten and unconscious; music is the soul's keyhole to insight. Spirit deftly sings through these songs - they're the spellings of life become animated, where swirling galaxies become the soup of seas and the backbones of DNA made spines that uphold on strings the world we get to see by dreams. Here, the incense smoke of life's flame is rippled by the breath of wind from the lips of shamans living in the eyes of animals who stalk these wild moments. These liminal moments when we sit in prayer, in trance singing the elder's songs, channeling the alchemical wisdom of ages. These songs that weave the patterned fabric that covers the hearts of every human, like a quilt. You'll hear this patterned fabric if you remember - so remember, this is where we're from! The songs that grandma sings & babies cry, that dolphins make and insects create with legs on wings, that runs the symphonies of forests and makes blaring in the silence of deserts. These songs are played in rush of blood through your own ears, almost hidden, but listen! The primordial beat of something we almost forgot; these old songs, I want to remember.



photo: rock man.

Wall

Can you only know immense suffering
 after it touches personally?
Will compassion only be skin deep 
until the mortars break apart everything you´ve known?
Who builds the walls between "us" and "them"? 
A wall is a division.

On windy nights, my cheeks touched with the freezing frosts of horror,

I am left stumbling and gasping at endless hate
Still warm to life’s goodwill, though growing cold by the second, and though my own hate cools, too,

I try to catch what life remains with peace throbbing through veins.

Is it true The Wall Will Fall? Whose wall?
I wonder when will bullets echo, and finally shatter into emptiness,

ceasing, and no longer hitting human shields carried as hardened human emotions.
What crumbles in the softness of tears?

Vulnerability is a human thing.
Every pool of blood,

it laps at eyes and hands and feet,
but festers only in those who swear it isn't theirs.

Buddha said breathe it in:
every scream, and fear and pain, 

every ache and sob and shudder -
 every mortar, every dead child.
all of this is ours to breathe in and out, released beyond the borders and walls of experience.

For each of us have these walls insde.
 Each constructed by every division.
And renewed we will be, to go past these walls in ignorance laid, past the headless graves, 
where concrete turns soil. Here flowers grow again 
despite what they know -
 despite what they saw.  Between the hard places and the soft. Heart.

We don't have to try to heal the pain from these walls. The pain is too great, too deep in our viens.
But Listen! What throbs! Memory touches deep into our cells.

Life enduring through every imprisonment, every death and every ricocheted dream.

Because oh! how our hearts keep persisting. Know we could be free. If the wall falls. 

All walls are just as high. 

(image: banksy, 2005)

Poise

 

Poised between Heaven & Earth is life.
Humanity – pulsing like a heart at the hearth –
the sternum cage holding us in breath.
There is a better way than what we think we lack,
a way of being in service to that which we belong to.
Here, in the centre of all we know, of all we are.
Knowledge originates from a verb – honour & doing -


An inner explosion of Awareness to follow the journey, weaving
In & Out: a thread that joins together all frames of perception & experience.
The Compass, and a Sense of Purpose are tools from within.


Humour of sweetness; Sword of Precision; Map of Mindfulness;
and Honed practice of listening to what draws us here, 

into the enormity of Heaven on Earth,
where we stand or sit or lay.
Our Mother is holding every story
of why our compass points towards reconnection with the web 

we only thought we were no longer part of.


Never Separate - only in various states of re-membering this state; embodiment,
poised in life between Heaven and Earth.

(photo: Samborek)