A Framework

I, Luc Viatour, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

Today marks the third anniversary of The Dendroica Project. Last year I wrote this:

This month marks the second anniversary of The Dendroica Project, and it feels to me that this series is reaching a conclusion of sorts. I have started the process of assembling the essays and poems into a book, in which this October musing will be the last chapter. I am not sure what will happen in this space next, but for the moment at least I intend to keep sharing something monthly.

I had no idea at the time that I would soon experience a profound personal/spiritual shift that felt like a re-birthing, and that I would have no shortage of inspiration for additional writings while the book idea faded into the background.

After publishing The End of Separation earlier this month, it occurred to me that the collection of masculine and feminine couplets created a framework, and that nearly all of my Dendroica writings so far fit into that framework. Today’s post is a stream-of-consciousness exploration of that framework and a “table of contents” of Dendroica writings within it. Consider it my own process made public as I again explore the possibility of crafting a book.

Will is an unbounded choice, an inspiration or decision that comes from a desire within the self. Discernment is a situated or contained choice, that weaves together strands of wisdom and necessity and love to plot a course. I am not sure if I will stick with conscious creation as the balance, but it feels mostly resonant.

Structure is in some ways the realized form of will, and flow is the realized form of discernment. Flowing water will always discern a path, ever changing following the structure of mountains and trees and whatever guides or barriers we erect. Together, structures and flows form the pattern of existence, and on some level structures flow - “mountains walk” as Eihei Dogen writes - and flows contain structure so “both-and” is doubly true. I have collapsed ritual and spontaneity into this couplet. Ritual is a means of creating structure without ongoing will - by repeating an earlier choice - and spontaneity is a means of creating flow without discernment - where there are multiple or infinite possibilities and yet a choice must be made. Spontaneity is reflected in the branching paths of lightning, the “popcorn” appearance of scattered showers, the never-repeating patterns of snowflakes, the expressive movements of ecstatic dance. Chapels of Nature is an exploration of how rituals - of returning to specific places at specific times - have been integral to my own ecological spirituality.

Logic and intuition together constitute our means of knowing. They complement each other and still leave room for mystery, that which cannot be known.

Thought and feeling are, in a sense, the verb forms of logic and intuition. Perception is a verb form of knowing.

Mind and body together form our whole self, or I might say our awareness. Many would say mind, body, and spirit, but I find that mind and body are distinct and complementary whereas I cannot readily distinguish spirit from either. Originally I had transcendence and embodiment as a couplet, but I came to feel that the spirit-matter axis is distinct from the masculine-feminine or yang-yin axis, even though there is a tendency for the masculine to transcend and for the feminine to embody. I have condensed identity and experience into this couplet. Identity is the mind’s concept of self. Experience is the body’s sensate and emotional reality. Releasing the Mind describes my own experience of embodiment, of letting go of a mind-identity and opening to emotion and intuition.

Doing and being collectively constitute our experience of living. In our current paradigm we insist on doing-doing-doing with minimal time and support for just being present.

Participation is a dance of control and surrender, as we discern where to make choices or pull weeds or build walls or implement actions and where to allow the existing flows and structures to guide the outcome. On Control and Participation is an impassioned plea to release our need to control - even in support of conservation or restoration. A Letter from Earth is an invitation to view ourselves as participants rather than as controllers on a grander scale, and Blessed Rain poetically opens our eyes to the reality that the power of our technology still pales in comparison to that of living systems and processes.

Individuation refers to a focus on our identity as individuals but also to our need to classify, categorize, diagnose, compare, and distinguish - to reduce complex systems to their constituent parts. Wholeness refers to a dissolving of the boundaries of self - feeling a sense of interbeing with other humans and with all of life - and also to an alternative approach to seeing and understanding our world that includes a focus on whole-body and whole-ecosystem health. I have not found a “both-and” word or phrase yet - I’m open to suggestions.

Leadership is community guidance based on will and charisma and granting of power to individuals. Wisdom is community guidance based on discernment and experience and held collectively. What I would call empowerment or perhaps simply wise leadership is the use of will and charisma to create a structure in which collective wisdom can flourish, in which each person can honor their own internal truth and contribute their own expertise. This is of course in contrast to the current paradigm where those in leadership positions readily exercise power and will and control over others - where this is seen to be a perk of leadership.

Wonder has been at the core of a number of my writings. It arises from both understanding and mystery. Knowing that hummingbirds hatch from eggs, and fly thousands of miles at high altitudes, and are able to find their home territory each year, and coevolved with flowers over millions of years, adds to a sense of wonder. Understanding the marvelous mechanism of photosynthesis adds to a sense of wonder. At the same time, making the assumption that everything has a material explanation - that hummingbirds are just little meat-robots executing their predetermined instructions between birth and death - diminishes wonder. We must also embrace and explore the mystery that lies outside the realm of science: how did these wee beings come into existence? how do they experience life, experience us? how does the pattern weave such exquisite beauty and diversity and living presence from the same water and air and elements? Within the realm of understanding-mystery-wonder is my longest poem, April Showers, that covers everything from evaporation and photosynthesis to flowers and seeds and pollinators and comparisons of living and mechanical systems. Wondrous Warblers ponders the extraordinary migratory feats and diversity of these tree-dwellers. Lifeblood is a re-enchantment of the hydrologic cycle. Maple Honey asks us to open our eyes to how wondrous it is that bees can collect and concentrate the nectar of millions of flowers, something we could never achieve, and encourages us to see the same wonder in everything that we have “commodified.”

Speaking and listening together comprise conversation, but this couplet/triplet can also be interpreted more broadly as expressivity and receptivity - all of the ways we express ourselves and receive the words and transmissions of others, and the broader conversation that forms as a result.

Progress is the most resonant word I have found to describe the perception of time in the dominant paradigm - the idea that the past was bad and the future will be better and we move forward incrementally - but the more generalized masculine perception of time is linear, often with some morality attached to past, present, and future. The inverse perception - that the past was great and the future will be terrible, is still a creation of the same paradigm. The feminine perception of time is cyclical, acknowledging and experiencing seasons, moon cycles, and the waxing and waning of our own lives. Combining them creates a spiral or a helix, cycling and yet never returning exactly to the same place. A Cycle in Eight Parts describes my experience of the year and its natural inflection points, and A Planetary Dance explores our Moon and her cycles. Three more writings attempt to capture the energy and feeling of a particular season: The Upswing in springtime, Turning (from the time of growth to that of senescence) in midsummer, and Mushroom Season in autumn. Perhaps I still need to write one exploring the stillness of deep winter and the first stirrings of awakening for the next year.

Justice is often assigned a female persona in statues and illustrations, but as it assumes a fundamental separation between victim and perpetrator and seeks a transactional rather than a relational outcome - fair punishment or reparation as acknowledged by the victim rather than sincere apology and forgiveness - it lands in the masculine column here. The feminine aspect is reconciliation, which prioritizes restoring relationship and community even if this requires overlooking or ignoring past harms without full resolution. Together, in balance, they can allow harmony or liberation, which includes both reparations or restitution and a restoration of relationship. Restorative justice is a similar concept. Toward Reconciliation explores what this might look like on personal, regional, and global scales.

The masculine current favors exchange - barter or trade or purchase to acquire what is needed - while the feminine current favors relationship - personal connections with others and a gift economy that avoids assigning value to goods and services sometimes at the cost of devaluing self or giving too much. Combining and balancing these yields reciprocity - exchange that provides fair compensation and that also establishes a deeper relationship and appreciation. (I had reciprocity in the feminine column in The End of Separation - I’ve changed a few things and these couplets/triplets will probably continue to evolve.) Establishing reciprocity requires de-commodifying everything, since a commodity is by definition decoupled from any connection or relationship to its source. I explore decommodifying energy in Solar Power and Clotheslines, Skylights, and Root Cellars. I explore building relationship and reciprocity with the land we inhabit in A Sense of Place. Musings on the Ever Given is a poetic pondering on the flows of goods and energy through our economy, asking us to awaken to the reality of the humans and living flows that are contributing to every step. Relational Reverence, my next larger posting coming out in November, will explore decommodification in more practical detail and the ways I am seeking to build and maintain reciprocity through my own work.

Respect and love are not synonyms. Respect is earned or offered based on actions or choices. Love is simply given freely, an acknowledgement of the divine spark within or of kinship or of a deep mutual resonance. We love our children when they’re small but too often in the current paradigm we demand them to earn respect as they mature by living up to expectations - perhaps because our parents did the same to us and because the dominant paradigm associates financial stability with respect and “respectability” and not at all with inherent value. Much of what we call love is actually respect coupled with purely physical attraction. True love is not so easily set aside in times of conflict or upheaval. Respect and love together are appreciation - acknowledgement of both action and inherent worth. Expressing appreciation is gratitude, which I explore in my Thanksgiving essay of the same name.

Observation is examination with our eyes and minds. Immersion is direct experience with our senses and bodies that connects with feeling rather than thought. Together and in balance they are presence: our full attention and awareness focused into the present moment. Presence has been a frequent theme of my Dendroica writings: the particular experiencing-the-journey quality of train travel in Riding the Rails, the unique emotional-memory aspect of seasonal scents in Existential Aromatherapy, observation and immersion under the night sky in Gazing Outward, connecting with flowing water in Creeking, and sharing Hannah King’s deeply immersive writings in Poetry of Belonging. On Immersion and Curiosity explores immersion and presence more thoroughly and offers suggestions to experience a stronger sense of presence in nature.

Satisfaction arises from a compliment or achievement or a job well done. Joy simply bubbles up and is always accessible. Satisfaction is somewhat fragile and requires continual effort or achievement, but joy without satisfaction feels incomplete or perhaps fleeting and mercurial. Contentment feels like the best word to describe the fusion of the two. Many other emotions have a conditional or situational (masculine, in this framework) form and an inherent or intrinsic (feminine) form. Disappointment and shame. Loss and sadness. Anticipation and excitement. Outrage and anger. In our masculine-dominant paradigm we are much more accepting of the conditional emotions than then inherent ones, and so we feel like we must have a justification for our emotions - a reason to be sad - for our emotions to be valid. Rebalancing the pattern and restoring the feminine will restore validity and acceptance to emotions that just are. This is of course a much larger can of worms than I should probably open and close in one paragraph, but since this is a stream-of-consciousness writing I’m including it…

Civilization is everything that humans create and the values that underlie this creation: cities, homes, roads, bridges, farms, schools, hospitals, lawns, dams, factories, machines, technology - or at least everything that has been created within the masculine-dominant paradigm. Wildness is everything that escapes our intense attention, that we do not or cannot shape into straight lines and predictable appearances: moss and grass in pavement cracks, trees, forests, oceans, mountains, migrating birds, weeds, weather, insects, and the flows of blood and growth of bone and fires of chemical combustion within our own bodies, the messy realities of birth and lactation and menstruation and sex and excretion and death. Though this is also a “yes-and” couplet and we experience both realities daily, I have not found a word for their fusion. There are ideas like permaculture that seek to bridge the divide, but as of yet no overarching concept that includes civilization and wildness, humans and nature, artificial and natural. We shall need to create one. Wildness is a poem, an exercise based on a personal experience, to reconnect us with our own repressed wildness, with the reality that we are physical animal embodied beings. Two Worlds is a poetic exploration of the civilization and wildness in my own life, how seamlessly I step between them, and how I would like to end the separation. Denaturing Duality is a deeper dive into the moral distinctions we make between “natural” and “artificial” and the inconsistent ways that some of us apply these distinctions - embracing natural foods while denouncing natural medicines, for example. It ends with a plea to value both: “Nature is painting. So are we. Let us see what we might create together.”

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That ended up much longer that I expected it to be, and I didn’t even have this post in mind until yesterday morning - the plan for the 21st was a review and recommendation of Luminous Darkness which is now tentatively scheduled for the New Moon.

It does feel to me like this is a useful framework within which most of my previous Dendroica Project writings have a place - the basis for a book with a tentative title of The End of Separation. Creating a book requires will and structure - neither of which are my strong suits - so I’m making my thought process public in part to see if it can become a matter of discernment and flow instead.

Do you feel like this is a book that the world needs, that people will read and that will help to bring about collective awakening in at least some small way? Each person who expresses a will that this comes to fruition creates an intention around which this can be woven; or in other words if the will exists outside of myself then creation becomes an act of discernment which makes it much more likely within my nature.

Do you know of a publisher who might be interested, an editor, an illustrator? If others can offer structure for layout and process and timeline I can provide coherent flow, but I struggle to create structure on my own.

Thanks for reading, and let me know if the overall framework resonates with you as well.