Luminous-ground

Our Luminous Journey

Inspired by the architect Christopher Alexander and his eloquence regarding timeless, living space where people can come alive, we four women from Belgium, California, Massachusetts and Vermont joined in an ongoing exploration of our own wisdom around powerful place and  deepening space. We view inner space (our soul-selves), physical space (gatherings in physical settings) conversational space (where voices and hearts join in authentic dialogue) and on-line space (virtual intentional space) as equal doorways for our inquiry.

Join us. We value your insights and welcome your comments.

Ria Baeck
Sheryl Erickson
Amy Lenzo
Karen Speerstra

The Ground's Become a Whole Lot More Luminous

After several years of intense work a group of us calling ourselves stewards now invite folks to visit and become a part of a dynamic experience called The Powers of Place. Besides finding conversation groups you'll feel an affinity with, a "field" in which to play, you'll discover all kind of resources about "place."

  Photo by Alan Briskin

One is a bibliography of resources I put together and learned a great deal from. For instance, "ecopsychology"--the link between mind and nature-- was not in my vocabulary until I realized the term's been around long enough now to be deemed a growing discipline (albeit not "science" enough for some.)

Check out the Jan. 27, 2010 New York Times article, "Is There an Ecological Consciousness?" by Daniel Smith to learn more.

350 For the World

On 24 October, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet's history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.

For one glorious day the entire earth united, beginning on a mountain top in New Zealand where elders gathered at dawn by a wind turbine to pray over the event.  From the oceans to the mountain peaks, from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar, north to south and all points in between, people gathered with one voice. WE NEED TO ACT NOW! The message was loud and clear.

 

Of the 19,000 or so images now posted (take a look) this one from a beach in Australia really gets our attention. There is no Planet B.

Why 350? That's the number of CO2 parts per million our atmosphere can tolerate without going into a "fevered stroke." Right now it stands at 390 so we have a lot of work to do. Bill McKibben, who started the 350 movement, sees this number as an understandable peg upon which to hang our climate change concerns. Our world leaders will be meeting in Copenhagen in December. Who can they ignore their people's cry? Our Luminous Ground joins the plea.

Our planet home deserves no less. We have no Planet B.

 

 

 

Our thanks to the photographers around the world who posted these images on the 350.org site.

 

Collective Wisdom

No spoiler alert needed. I won’t be giving anything away to tell you Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol ends with a couple of pages that will most likely never make it into the movie, nor will they cross Tom Hanks’ lips.

Here’s a portion:

“Our physical bodies have evolved over the ages, but it was our minds that were created in the image of God…as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it…And (Kathryn says) if we as humans can honestly grasp this one simple truth…the world will change overnight…the power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.”

 Kathryn’s character is based, at least in part, on Lynne McTaggart, the author of The Field and The Intention Experiment.

After reading The Intention Experiment, I was again reminded that, indeed, we ARE all connected and we are now called to really pay attention to our thoughts, our intentions and our actions.

But there is another book I'd like to call your attention to. The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly. I admit I'm partial. It's written by some friends of mine:

Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, John  Ott and Tom Callanan.

 As the title implies, it's more about group wisdom than about our individual attempts at being and acting intelligent. They quote Albert Einstein in their chapter called "Inhabiting a Different Worldview."

“A  human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself [she experiences herself] as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusions of his [her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” [The brackets are mine.]

Now that Carl Jung’s heretofore unpublished Red Book (NYTimes Magazine today,  Sunday 20 September 2009) is about to be published, it’s interesting to read about Jung’s final days on page 83 and 84 of The Power of Collective Wisdom.  The authors tell us that Jung believed ideas lie outside the individual mind but can be discovered and rediscovered from different disciplines and different cultural backgrounds.  They say: “To inhabit a world view of such shared collective knowing, we need to be able to hold in our mind a larger canvas on which to see the cumulative accomplishments of consciousness. We need to understand ourselves as a human species evolving together.”

Together.  Not separately.

At the end, they quote Christopher Alexander: “People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.”  It is indeed time we come together. That’s their last line.

It IS time we come together. We're wasting precious time being fractured and fractious. Miserable and misery-makers. Angry and anxious. We’re soooo much better than that.

Place-Shifting: A Rural Renaissance

Ever since the 1920’s  people began to move from farms to cities and right now 80% of Americans are urban dwellers. But there’s a reversal afoot, at least for baby boomers and other retirees. When my husband and I moved to the country ten years ago, I didn’t realize we were part of a rural renaissance movement.  We left a city thoroughfare with its car alarms, it’s bright street lights, fire engines and ambulances for a house at the end of a country lane about the width of a prostrate refrigerator lit at night only by the moon.

 

It was so quiet I could hear chickadees chewing.

Bill Bishop writes about this place-shifting in America. He quotes a recent report from the Economic Research Services (part of the Dept. of Agriculture). Apparently over the next decade or so people nearing retirement will be leaving larger cities, as we did, for the "chickadee chewing" parts of our country. If you like graphs, you might be interested in reading the whole   report. The rate of rural population growth has tripled in the last decade and the numbers continue to rise.

I’m not sure how I feel about being labeled “an older migrant” but in fact, that’s exactly what we are. We are, in Vermontese, “flatlanders, from away.” While my  husband and I are a few years older than baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) we fit the pattern. We knew after retirement, we couldn’t afford to continue to live in our expensive Cambridge, MA townhouse so we headed north. To Vermont. And so have numerous others in search of what the Economic Research people call “High amenities”:’mountains, lakes, sunshine and rivers. The map above shows those counties with the most scenic amenities (in green) and those with the fewest (in brown). That little green spot in the middle of Vermont is where we live. Mountains, lakes and rivers—and sunshine…but not all the time. I confess, I have counted Vermont “sky -greys” ranging from pinkish, violet greys to the blacker varieties.

 

But having grown up in Wisconsin (have you been to Door County? Do have any idea how beautiful it is?) I find this map terribly skewed. Granted, the Midwest has no mountains but the bluffs along the Mississippi River are spectacular. I know. I lived on them for over a decade. And the Midwest certainly has lakes, (Great Ones and Minnesota's ten thousand), rivers and sunshine. AND water, although water tables in the Midwest have become polluted from farming practices over the years.

 

I believe places with plenty of  drinkable water will be what the next “where to move” maps will be pointing out. And there are other amenities to map--amenities we have discovered in Vermont:

 

Good neighbors

Small town governance

Nearby farmers markets

Great cooperative food stores

Specialty local cheeses

Local breweries

Maple syrup 

Excellent universities and technical schools

Covered bridges

Skiing

Hiking and biking trails

Broadband access

Theater and opera

Pottery and glassblowing

Town bands

Wonderful choral groups

Small churches

Good libraries

Great independent bookstores

Equidistant from Montreal and Boston.  

If these were the amenities charted, Vermont would certainly live up to its name: Ver-mont: Green Mountains, and be very greenest of greens on any amenities map.