Luminous-ground

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.

 

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.

Rice Paddies: Places for Art

I’ll never boil rice again without thinking I’m destroying a work of art!

A friend recently sent me these pictures and I subsequently scoped out other “paddy art” and thought perhaps you’d enjoy them as well.

Imagine planting teeny rice seeds (with the help of a computer in many cases) and then waiting a whole growing season for a mural to appear. Volunteers and villagers from the small village called Inakadate, 600 miles north of Tokyo, started planting four different varieties of rice in late May to form this  Sengoku warrior on horseback.

Villagers have been creating this form of crop art, including this portrait of Napoleon which can be seen from space, since 1993. They started out  as small village projects, but in 2005 agreements between landowners and artists launched art across 15,000 square miles of paddy fields.

Like Crop Circles and ancient earth effigy mounds, these massive intricate works of art can only seen from above…a wonderful metaphor for taking the long view. The high view. The cooperative view.

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.

Architectural Science Grounded in Ancient India: Vastu Shastra

How do you make sure your home, your office, and even your town offers the best energy for living? Some people study and implement “Feng Shui” to help figure it out. But there’s an even older tradition—500 years older in fact. It's based on earlier oral traditions later written in the Rig Veda and has for 5,000 years made the answer clear: Vastu.

Vastu is a Sanskrit word packed with meaning: house of dwelling that renders happiness, prosperity and protection in life and even after death.  It is the perfect perception of geography, direction, topography, physics, the environment, and cosmology itself. Vustu means the unmanifest;  Vastu: the manifest. By combining ayurvedic science and astrology, Vastu Shastra makes visible deeply held beliefs as it connects humans to nature’s energies.

       The Vastu College of Archtecture

A “Garden of the Authentic Lineage” Transforms Space and Buddhist Practices

Jetsunma (a title which means Venerable Master in Tibetan Buddhism) Tenzin Palmo is the second westerner to become an ordained Buddhist nun. In 2000 she established, with the blessing of her male superiors, including the Dalai Lama, a nunnery called Dongyu Gatsal Ling (Garden of the Authentic Lineage) in the mountains of northern India. 

What makes this place unique is the fact women are finally being trained here just as men have traditionally been trained in Buddhist traditions, but in an open space ideal for women to flourish.  

      

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.

Resurgence

When Kevin, from "The Office" announced to all that someone had stolen his surge protector, his voice broke. It was the worst day of his career. Poor Kevin puddled into deeper incompetence than usual.

I was thinking of Kevin when I wandered onto the British magazine , Resurgence, the other day. It's a magazine that acts a bit like a surge protector for our planet. The March/April, 2009 issue of what may be the longest running ecological magazine in the UK is all about the Economics of Place. The focus is on our current economic woes and offers workable, sustainable and eqitable solutions.
 
"We cannot save the planet and destroy the place," says Satish Kumar who has been the editor of the magazine since 1973.

Kumar, a former Jain wandering brother, once walked an 8,000 mile peace pilgrimage from India to America. He knows and loves places on our planet from first hand, close up experience.

When he turned 50 he walked (again with no money as is the Ghandian custom) 2,000 miles around Britain visiting many holy places: Glastonbury, Canterbury, Lindesfarne, Iona. Kumar continues to teach and write about reverential ecology, holistic education and voluntary simplicity.

Of special interest to Our Lumious Ground readers would be a section of the magazine called "A Sense of Place" where writers are invited to describe the places they love most.

There are harmful surges taking place and poised to take place around our globe and each of us, as Kumar has shown, is responsible for protecting the places we love.