ecopsychology.......
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To help us develop the wisdom of the heart, the wisdom of peace, we must turn to Mother Earth. "You know Grandson, the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, has given all people wisdom," my grandfather told me. "To every living thing he has given something special. Some people receive their knowledge and understanding through books. In your life, Grandson, you too must read and study books, but remember to take with you on your journey only those things that bring more unity within yourself and others, that bring goodness and understanding and help us to serve one another in better ways."
from innerself.com article Developing the Wisdom of the Heart by Phil Lane Jr. [left]
excerpted from book Architects of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images by Michael Collopy
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 ....Irene
Hardwicke Olivieri : Paintings fifty color plates, forward by David Pagel two of her paintings: right:Tail for a blanket and pillow left: Still a tadpole, already a frog copied from her site |
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Heron Stillness, Adirondack Sunrise |
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Those people who I most admire are those who have turned away from the cluttered materialism and returned to the beauty of the natural world and objects made by human hands, the texture of wood, the woven basket, the mixing of compost into soil in the back garden, a good soup cooking on the stove, an evening around the table with family and friends. Rediscovering this kind of beauty involves a slowing down, doesn't it? And it certainly involves listening to the priorities of the heart.
JoAnna Macy, Writer, from Heron Dance Interview
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art by Daniel Ost
site: danielost.be~ ~ ~ ~
 .. .. These deserts are not only environmental, such as the destruction of the planet's dwindling rainforests and marshlands; there are also existential deserts -- deserts of the spirit, of the soul, and of the mind. Deserts of meaning. It is precisely this aspect of the global crisis that calls out for a rigorous and inspired philosophy of mind. We begin the twenty-first century living in a technological society based on science, and we live with a science based on a materialistic paradigm. |
 .. .. What is needed now, perhaps more than ever, is to find a way to restore a sense of the sacred to science and to the world -- to embody mind and to "enmind" matter. excerpt from author site: Deep Spirit from
book: Radical
Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter --
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My work is a vehicle of exploration. A tool I use for locating, and connecting. I create temporary forms through interacting with nature, time, place and self, using materials found in nature or common manmade substances such as survey tape, twine, chalk, rope, or flour. These mutable forms are activated by the elemental forces of Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Space, Light and/or Time. I photograph process and results for later reflection and further work. ... I am interested in facilitating experience that provides entrance into deeper relationship with the world and self.
from Artist Statement by Gloria Lamson
artwork: Survey Tape Crossing Tide Pool, WA, ©2000 / text and photo from greenmuseum artist page
I consider nature's facts -- its beautiful and grotesque forms and events -- in terms of the import to thought and their impetus to the spirit. In nature I find grace tangled in a rapture with violence; I find an intricate landscape whose forms are fringed in death; I find mystery, newness, and a kind of exuberant, spendthrift energy. Annie Dillard
from article EarthSaint: Annie Dillard, EarthLight, Winter 1997
~ ~The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.
Annie Dillard
We want to.. take in fully the beauty, the wonder, the mystery of things just as they are. Seeing in all this the reflection of some transcendent creator-figure with a humanlike mind seems to miss the point, to pass by the reality that's right in front of our noses. Paul Harrison
> image from book: North America the Beautiful
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Since political edifices are purporting to dictate to me, whether I can or cannot have an abortion, what drugs I can or cannot ingest, where on this earth I can and cannot go, and who on this earth I can love (just to name a few things), then it seems obvious to me that the personal is political. This has always seemed obvious to me. Conversely, once you understand yourself to be connected to all other living things, and the earth beneath your feet, you respond to the oppression of people and the destruction of the environment by governments by taking it personally.
It is the latter half of this equation that I am developing as I journey into adulthood and therefore into a position of responsibility and/or accountability to human society. It is an equation that always adds up to one, however. The personal and the political are of one realm; to separate them is artificial.
ani difranco - from interview about her album Evolve - quotes and photo from her site Righteous Babe Records
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 .. .. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit -- to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. The
result is that we are eroding and destroying our environment, spreading
Los Angelization instead of civilization. But people have an obscure sense of what is good for them -- call it "unconscious self-healing," "survival instinct," "positive growth potential," or what you will. |
 .. .. I have
come to believe that the whole "hip" subculture, however misguided in
some
of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young
people
to correct the self-destroying course of industrial civilization.
Alan
Watts
- in his article:
Psychedelics and Religious Experience, books by Alan Watts photo above from novel Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle |
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 .. .. Ecopsychology seeks to heal the more fundamental alienation between the recently created urban psyche and the age-old natural environment. ... Ecopsychology seeks to recover the child's innately animistic quality of experience in functionally "sane" adults. |
 .. .. from article: Introducing Ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak artwork by Evelyn Lauder and Anna Gaskell [see photography: page 3]
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| In
the volumes that have been written about The Sopranos, there's hardly a
word about how its natural backdrop, the duck's world, or what remains
of it today, is such a mess.
Nevertheless, a case can be made that our troubled relationship with nature is one of the show's ongoing themes. Creator David Chase and his colleagues usually touch on the subject in a fleeting and witty way, with a character's offhand remark or the camera's deadpan stare at some ugly urban artifact; but it's often there, and has been from the start. That all of us seem to look right past it says a lot about how conditioned we are to take the degraded state of the natural world for granted. ... Over the last decade, ecopsychology has emerged as an alternative view of mental health that's been shaped by influences as far afield as Darwinian biology, Gaia theory, Buddhism, and the work of various philosophers. An ecopsychologist might say that Dr. Melfi will never understand the true nature of Tony's disease without factoring in the diseased state of nature. |
 .. .. Ecopsychology today is less a formal discipline than an ethic of lament shared by people in many fields. If it has a core belief, it's that our broken ties to the nonhuman world are the cause of both the modern ecological crisis and a related epidemic of alienation and distress. from
The Greening of Tony Soprano - Even mobsters feel
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 .. .. Using a formidable writing style that conjures up a rapturous kind of sensory splendor, Abrams seduces the reader into "re-approaching" the very elements that constitute our living Universe. |
In
the process, he reinvigorates our understanding of what it is to be not
merely "human", but also an intricate part of a much broader existence.
Once this is understood, one can be "informed" by the whisperings of the wind, the implicate energy of a tree, or the painfully beautiful colours of an autumn sky. ... "Going within", in the mystical sense, cannot be accomplished in the absence of "going out". Perhaps, in the end, the two are in fact one. It is a known fact that the iron in our bodies originates from the cosmic furnace of suns - that what we are, in the deepest physical sense, is part of an overarching, stellar dance of utterly universal proportions. [from Amazon.com review by Elan Levitan]
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| "These places
are real.
They are not a dream or a figment of the imagination. What is not
important
is that I stood, or sat, or kneeled before them. What is important is
what
they reveal... they speak of endless transformation.
"Eons of construction and demolition. Independence and total dependency. Reproduction and unique formation. Power beyond cognition, scale and spectrum. And they speak of us and to us." |
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| I
have walked out of order and certainty and into the margins of a land
still
shadowed by the Arctic.
Finzel Swamp is a relict community, formed thousands of years ago when the icy tongues of glaciers pushed Canadian flora and fauna south for hundreds of miles. When the glaciers receded some ten thousand years ago, most of the boreal plants and animals migrated slowly back with them. But not here. Here they stayed, the tamaracks and black calla, in a poorly drained bowl perched high in the Maryland Appalachians, protected by the even higher ridges on either side. Here in this frozen valley, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, there is no asphalt, no stop sign, no sidewalk, just the wide, white space, pathless, interrupted only by the frozen etchings of alder and black spruce, the scribbled, heart-shaped tracks of deer, the marginalia of some creator who mused for a while on the edge of the page, then dropped the pen and headed north, leaving us to decipher the notations.
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As
a child, instinctively, like most children, I felt more alive, free and
happier in a natural area than indoors. More intelligent, too. With my
friends, I grew up and was educated in the indoor box world of
contemporary
society. It detached our psyche from genuine contact with its
biological
origins in nature's joy, wisdom and balance. ...
We are to nature as our leg is to our body. Society tears us out of this relationship. It rewards us for excelling at subduing nature... The heart of our dilemmas is that we have learned to conquer and hurt life/nature and we are part of it. Michael J. Cohen - from site : Project NatureConnect
image from book Holy Nature: A Celebration of Naturism in Today's Russia by Mikhail Rusinov |
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While I'm not pretending that what I'm doing is anything but being made by the hand of a person, the intention is to draw from nature itself and to understand it. Inevitably, the division between what I make and what is already there is not so clear. And that's the great thing. It draws the place out into my hands.
Andy Goldsworthy
more images and quotes on: visual arts
Whatever contributes to small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourishes the ecological ego. Whatever strives for large-scale domination and the suppression of personhood undermines the ecological ego. Ecopsychology therefore deeply questions the essential sanity of our gargantuan urban-industrial culture, whether capitalistic or collectivistic in its organization. But it does so without necessarily rejecting the technological genius of our species... Ecopsychology is postindustrial not anti-industrial in its social orientation.
from article: Introducing Ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak
image of rainforest reserve - from site of Guayakí Sustainable Rainforest Products
paintings by Thomas Locker
from his books
Home: A Journey through America
and Where the River Begins
...articles:
Introducing Ecopsychology by Theodore Roszak
Living in the Earth: Ecopsychology, Health and Psychotherapy by Sarah A. Conn, Ph.D
An ecopsychological perspective on health invites us to move beyond the cultural tendency to associate personal pain with individual or family pathology without attention to the larger context. When we consider the human psyche within the web of life, we can begin to view personal pain as both unique to the person and as a signal from the larger context...
The Ecopsychology Institute
"The driving premise of the Ecopsychology Institute is that the Earth is a unified, related community of beings in a living universe. The Institute’s mission is to explore the human psyche’s part in this community. Recognizing that human health and the health of the Earth are inseparable, the Institute develops theories and practices that engender ecological consciousness and sustainable human-earth relationships."Pantheism: the World Pantheist Movement
"We revere and celebrate the Universe as the totality of being, past, present and future. It is self-organizing, ever-evolving and inexhaustibly diverse. Its overwhelming power, beauty and fundamental mystery compel the deepest human reverence and wonder.
All matter, energy, and life are an interconnected unity of which we are an inseparable part. We rejoice in our existence and seek to participate ever more deeply in this unity through knowledge, celebration, meditation, empathy, love, ethical action and art."
.....books:
