Luminous-ground

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.

Disappearing Places

One of the the best books I picked up recently (so good it appears a couple of times in my own forthcoming The Green Devotional: Active Prayers for a Healthy Planet) is by Alex Steffen.  World Changing: A Users’s Guide for the 21st Century. It contains much material that has appeared on their website.

Steffen writes on page 259 about what makes a great place and one of the criteria, he says, is a place where people socialize locally.  We might also then ask: What makes a planet great? A planet where people act as if it’s all “theirs”? All precious? If it’s truly “ours” then it seems we’d all work much harder to make sure places don’t disappear. 

Carissa Bluestone, a Seattle freelance writer, wrote (August 27, 2009) about places that are disappearing. Vanishing almost before our very eyes.  She points to Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen’s book: Disappearing Destinations and 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them. And Frommer’s has come up with a book about 500 places in peril.

So, we should go, quick, and take pictures?  Cruise ships bump into the Galapagos at an astounding rate and airplanes fly over contaminating pristine air.  I admit I was one of the traveling culprits last September on Alaska’s inside passage. Our ship went up the Tracy Arm, and we watched glaciers fall into the fjord.  Witnessing first hand,  our disrupted ecosystem calls to travelers like some perverted voyeurism—the way you can’t NOT look at a crash on the highway. Or the Great Barrier Reed turning grey.

People have written about how when tourists leave, gorillas and other endangered species disappear even faster. Watching might help. So will watching endangered places keep them from eroding, burning, flooding, melting?  Where are the officers enforcing bio-security? Oh, sure, you can get a copy of “Global Code of Ethics for Tourism.”  And I’m sure there are also copies floating around on ethics in banking but who reads them?

Bluestone introduced me to a new word: solastigia: the great sense of loss we feel by the realization that our environment is indeed changing. And not for the better. Places ARE disappearing. And I for one, am suffering from solastigia.

Set Your "sites" on Place

Several websites have caught my recent attention. One of the best blogs I've run across is, appropriately enough, called Importance of Place. It invites people to share their thoughts about why "an exploration of PLACE is so vital to human well being and how to create PLACE in a time when sprawl and rampant commercialism are removing the texture and vitality from America."                                                                                      

    A slide show called "Images of Place and No-Place" mesmerized     me for longer than I care to admit.                 

                                                      

Here's a quote worth passing along from that site:

“Americas are woefully ignorant of geography and of place—ignorant, that is, of the natural and humanly constructed worlds that have nurtured us, inspired us, and, sad to say, too often frustrated us. It is hard to imagine concretely how we can envisage the good life (the humane life) ad plan for the future unless we have some clear idea as to the sort of places that we wish to exist.”
                 Yi-Fu Tuan, Founding Board Member, Center for American Places

                                      

Every year one in six people change their address. Like many people, I am fascinated at what draws people to certain places to live. Check out this one: ePodunk and explore 46,000 places--vibrant places you've probably never heard of. This blog explores places with literary events, local events, notable personalities and history--and you can send historic post cards! 

Another site you may wish to explore is Thomas Woods' called "Making Sense of Place"

He says:

“People develop a "sense of place" through experience and knowledge of a particular area. A sense of place emerges through knowledge of the history, geography and geology of an area, its flora and fauna, the legends of a place, and a growing sense of the land and its history after living there for a time.

The feel of the sun on your face or the rain on your back, the rough and smooth textures of the land, the color of the sky at morning and sunset, the fragrance of the plants blooming in season, the songs and antics of birds and the cautious ramblings of mammals are environmental influences that help to define a place. Memories of personal and cultural experiences over time make a place special, favorite objects that shape to your hand or body with use, songs or dances that emerge from the people of a place, special skills you develop to enjoy your area--these too help to define a place and anchor you in it.”

Besides planning and research, Woods gives environmental educational events to help young people better appreciate "place." And, he creates wonderful interpretive signs for tail walks and environmental venues.  

    

   

A Soul Place

What’s a soul place?

Larry Richardson, a wonderful Vermont photographer graciously gave Our Luminous Ground permission to publish this photo called “A Soul Place.”  He and the poet Charles Butterfield recently published a new book called  Another Light.

“Light is the theme of this collection. The photographs are products of light, many of the poems employ images of light, and we are reaching you through the miracle of the eye. But it is another light we celebrate here, that light by which we all can imagine the world.”
(from their website)

Soul places, then, according to these artists, are places where the miracle of our eyes and the wonder of light enable us to imagine the world.

High Places

Living in a state defined by its Green Mountains--Ver  Mont--we Vermonters rub shoulders with the rounded Adirondacks to the west and the jagged White Mountains on the east.

If you travel farther north and east you come upon Maine’s massive granite Mt. Katahdin guarded by what the Penobscots call Pomola, a weather spirit, a creature with the body of a man, the wings of an eagle and the head of a bull moose.

The Shimmering Peace of a Place

This morning the overlapping rows of our low Vermont mountains to the south of us, are covered with layers and overlayers of mist. It’s a Chinese painting.

Mist is a beautiful natural power, according to the ecopsychologist and expert in all things Celtic, Frank MacEowen. Not water, and not air, mist dances between the two elements and calls us to cross over a magical threshold. MacEown claims that over time “we can become so profoundly merged with a place and identified with its energy that we become part of its spirit, its voice.”

In The Mist-Filled Path, MacEowen calls places where we merge with the "otherworld," spiritscapes.

Using “mist” as a guiding metaphor for understanding a place, remember misty places you’ve quietly observed. Thin places. Threshold places. Potential doorways to a sacred world.  Places where, as this Celtic writer claims, you can rediscover the shape of your soul. Places where you enter your spiritscape. Did you sense a shimmering peace?

Familiar Miracles

“Life is a miracle and therefore infinitely of interest everywhere.”

    Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

With tongue in cheek, my husband once told our young sons: “If something is worth doing once, it’s worth doing twice. And if it’s worth doing twice, it’s worth doing four times.”

Familiarity need not breed contempt. Wendell Berry states in Life is a Miracle, “There is no reason that familiarity cannot be a goal just as worthy, demanding and exciting as innovation…or more so.”

After ten years of living on our Vermont acreage, I find every place on our property to be quite familiar. Yet every spot changes and proves worthy of study one more time. Two more times. Four more times.  The light moves. The vegetation transforms daily.

“One knows one’s place only within limits, and the limits are in one’s mind, not in the place.”  This, Berry says is a description of our place in this world. It is inexhaustible. “It cannot be altogether known, seen, understood or appreciated.”

Monet painted the same haystacks, over and over again. Cezanne returned to paint Mont Saint-Victoire many times. Impressed by Walden, Thoreau wrote page after page. And the biologist E. O. Wilson wrote in Biophilia, “It is possible to spend a lifetime in a magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.”  Life is a miracle.  Unlimited. Filled with familiar enchantment.

Ecotones

Over the years, Michael Jones’ piano CDs have provided me with many hours of meditative reflections and ever since reading Creating an Imaginative Life, Karen says she's been refreshed by this Canadian musician’s creative insights. One of his chapters is called “Everywhere We Are is Called Home.” What could be more provocative than that?

Jones has, indeed, found and shared a unique musical intelligence with his readers.  But it’s his insights about place that invite Michael into this Luminous Ground arena.

In the context of a recent meeting of Canada’s Community Index for Wellbeing, he describes his experiences regarding the significance of place on The World Café blog.

All place is meeting, Jones points out.