Easily Amazed

[christy]

I attended the Bioneers ("Revolution From the Heart of Nature") conference last weekend with over 3000 other people, as well as with the 10,000 folks who participated in locations around the country by watching the keynote presentations via satellite feed and participating in afternoon workshops at their local venue.

It was an inspiring, invigorating, amazing confluence of social justice activists, little kids, environmental activists, artists, farmers, students, parents, famous authors, doctors, business people, spiritual teachers, lawyers, and probably every other sort of identification that I'm not thinking of.

I took some rough notes and I'm going to post them here in this thread rather than on my own webl, since I think they will be easier to organize here and to find later on if I want them.

mp3's of all the plenary sessions and breakout sessions can be downloaded for $1.99 each from the Bioneers store.

[christy]

All of the plenary sessions were excellent--pretty amazing in itself! But Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons have been producing this conference for 17 years and choose their presenters very thoughtfully (and heartfully)

Paul Hawken was the closing plenary speaker on the last day, and he was brilliant. Soft-spoken and full of gratitude, his address was much deeper and more explicitly spiritual than I expected.

He is the author of Natural Capitalism, The Ecology of Commerce, and Growing a Business, among other books, and has a book coming out next spring called Blessed Unrest which traces the roots and branches of what he perceives as the biggest social movement of all time, the coming together of the environmental and human rights movements.

Here are my very rough notes from his almost-hour-long talk. I ran into my friends Victor and Roberta Bremson at the conference and we decided to split the cost of a DVD set of the plenary sessions, so when we receive that we'll have some gatherings to show our favorite parts.

Bioneers 2006
Notes on Paul Hawken’s plenary address

From Kenny Ausubel’s introduction:
“Sustainability” is the dynamic midpoint between destruction and restoration (and restoration is what we want to accomplish)

Paul Hawken:
“Salmon Nation” (see notes from Spencer Beebe’s talk, forthcoming) is the first Biological Nation ever proposed—based on biological integrity, regaining our commons.
“Creating the conditions conducive to life” quoting Janine Benyus (author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature)—(shows slide of flag he designed, with a salmon leaping in the center, and Benyus’ phrase in Latin)
…we can no longer "import our lives" in the form of food, fuel, fundamentalism.

The technology already exists to address all of the problems we can list: (gives a list of how that is so)—so, what’s missing? (why hasn’t all our hard work created the conditions we desire—a common theme during the conference)
It’s been said that we are on the cusp of a religious/spiritual awakening…
What if that’s already happening? (references Karen Armstrong’s book on the Axial Age and her suggestion that we’re in the midst of a new Axial Age) The people who lived through the first Axial Age did not know that’s what was happening. Creating a society based on compassion and kindness and humility, based on spiritual practice not theory. Based on the Golden Rule which emerged during that first awakening time: do not do anything to anyone else you wouldn’t want done to you.

The intersection of environmentalism and socioeconomic justice movements is a manifestion of this new Axial Age, without the “massive failing” of the first one, of denying the the sacred feminine…the permeation of the underlying intent, the core principles, always based on the Golden Rule: that all life is sacred.

Restoration is impossible until we reconcile with our past (referring particularly to human oppression and cruelty to one another).

The energy from healing is just as important as the wind and solar energy.

“The environmental movement always seems to have the upper leg because ‘the house is burning down’, and so it says to the human rights and social justice activists ‘come on over to our bus’—but I think that’s upside down and backwards” “…global warming is a type of colonialism, a type of social injustice. Environmentalists need to get on the social justice bus.”

Our bodies contain a quadrillion cells…and 900 trillion of those are not human cells…one septillion events are happening within the body in any moment…can you feel it?

You can—it’s called “life”

And-- who’s in charge?

“Life is an infinite game”—which means anyone can change the rules anytime the game threatens to end. The point is not to win, it’s to play.

“We” means all of us.

This movement is about addressing the suffering in the world, and those that bear the suffering.

This movement—the immune system of life.

[thomas]

Christy,

It sounds like the conference was an amazing experience. I can't wait to hear what Hillman had to say. Thanks for sharing your discoveries.

Thomas

[christy]

You are welcome, Thomas!

Even if all of the other presentation had been just OK instead of great, it still would have been worth attending the conference to get to hear James Hillman.

As with my notes from Paul Hawken's talk, what I've written really don't do more than give a glimpse..the whole talk is available at the Bioneers store.

James Hillman:

New book: A Terrible Love of War

Our problem is a “thinking problem”: We all know so much about what’s wrong…do we know that knowing what’s wrong…is part of what’s wrong?
The mind separated from action…
Our attention is riveted on the rear view.

Why are we the “blue” ones (states)? (talked about the associations with blue…depression, etc)

We are paralyzed by the negative.

The wrong grows in dimension as we focus on it
Everything divides into opposition: positivism—“the mind game of opposites”
Leading to what Aristotle called the law of the excluded middle and the split between what’s sacred, and what the world is.

Let’s not be caught in the literalism of conclusions and the leap to the opposite. Seek the conealed Yin within the overblown Yang. Follow its lead in curing itself…a new way other than opposition.

For example: if “youth is the problem with our culture”—repeat the symptom.
How about reclassifying math as a “foreign language” since that is what leads to the majority of school failures and dropping out of society…

“Capitalism”—“capital” is from “caput” which means “head”—without a “corpus”. Corporations can’t be killed under current law—just cannibalized.
Capitalism has stoped motivation. Desire and urge are gone. Free capital from its “-ism”.

“Reasonable tax”—contribution to the public good. Taxes could be to suport independent, local permits, with supervision being just word of mouth, reputation, local nosiness—not federal supervision.

Politics/national affairs—what virtue might there be in political passivity? “Why be better informed of what we know is disinformation?” Maybe our true task is governing the government. Follow the disenchantment, cynicism—go to the school board meeting, the shareholders mtg, etc. Above all, “to speak up in my foolishness”, take back nosiness from the CIA.

Education: instead of education, how about having “teaching and learning”? Education is an instrument of capitalism, with an aim of long-term job placement. Teachers and learners alike forever struggling against it—no fun, no love. 90% of the Ritalin in the world is made and consumed in the US.

Importance of language.
“State”—from “stand”. “country” used to mean diversity, locality, land and its contours. Trial and error = trial and catstrophe for nation states.
Take back small talk, country talk, the real. Attitude and preference fro slowness (Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower). Distrust of slickness.

Cities, not the Feds, are the great incubator for innovations. “A post-national consciousness emerging” “guarantor of values”

The “vice of passivity” a virtue—dropping out, not showing up. The way out is devious. The posture emerges from the negative.

(our country has) new “F-words” like Family

We are in the hands of Mercury, Hermes, Coyote, the Trickster.

[christy]

Amy has written up some beautiful notes at the Beauty Dialogues, too.

David Abram is the author of one of my favorite books, The Spell of the Sensuous, and is the director of AWE: Alliance for Wild Ethics.

Bioneers 2006 Notes on Susan Griffin and David Abrams

Changing the Language of the Environmentalist movement

Susan Griffin:
Building community by weaving a web of words

“Materialism” has been used in a pejorative way by the environmental movement: time to reclaim this word since disparaging “material” undermines the whole Earth movement.
and also feeds into social injustice:
towards women (“mater” = “material”)
racism: concept of people of color as being closer to the earth, association of the feared “other” with the material realm (opposed to the spiritual realm).

The drift of language today is towards abstraction (e.g. military language). Intent is very important—time to pull the language back to the felt world.

Repression of the relational and the emotional worlds—our words need to bridge and form relationships.

Language is a type of “trance state”

Paradoxes in our culture that need to be addressed:
Freedom = “The Lone Ranger”—and even he had a sidekick). We never do anything alone. We only exist in a field of reciprocity

David Abram:
Has started called “global warming” by the name “planetary fever” which included the sense of oscillation, heat and then shivering chills, and brings us back to our bodies.

Words are magic—have the power to change the world, are transformative, metaphorical… ways of speaking can enhance or frustrate/stifle the reciprocity between human and the more-than-human world.
For example: “Gravity”:
Can be defined as “a mutual attraction between bodies, often at a distance”.
What better description of “Eros”? The force of attraction between our bodies, and the earth’s desire for our bodies. Our desire for the earth. What would it be like if our every step on the earth was an expression of that desire and attraction?

The rejuvenation of oral culture is “an ecological imperative”, as a layer of the intimacy between people and the earth.
Oral culture is local culture.
Literary culture is cosmopolitan, makes possible the mixing of cultures.
Internet culture is even more abstract, is inherently global.

SG:
A most powerful Bioneers experience for her has been some of the panel presentations—the telling of many stories, with presence and emotion even more than words.

DA:
More on “material”: … poles…between pure good vs pure evil—seems to be destroying the world. Evil is associated with everything dense (material).
According to my body, the sun goes below the horizon at night, and comes up from the other horizon in the morning. The sun lives under that ground at night—“the sun grips the earth at the core”
When we fall back to the earth, we are falling to the sun.

SG:
And seeds contain the sun.

Fundamentalism: very abstract, but also very allegorical. They steal images.
The difference between good and bad poetry: bad poetry steals images, it’s wooden. Good poetry writes itself, through you, pushing itself past you.

DA:
We all have to be poets.
Speaking as “creatures luring people back into their bodies and making their skin wake up”

SG:
Redefine truth (origin: straight trunk of a tree)
Alignment with that, speaking form the root, the core.

We need language that holds the grief of this moment—
Take back “right to life”/”right to live”

DA:
Language that’s infectious, that can spread like a contagion through the population.

The Air is The Mystery for every oral culture, where the meaning is, where the voices of the ancestors still hang out.
Sometimes he spells out “E A I R T H” because the air is a part of the earth, not separate from it.

Importance of playfulness and mischievousness—of words as metaphors. Use words in ways they’ve never been used before.

What if mind/awareness is not just ours? But is the earth’s, and we’re in it?

Every language’s word for mind/spirit traces back to breath/air/wind.

The Holy Wind (Dine people)—little winds everywhere talking to you—we call those “thoughts”

The weird mystery of the atmosphere, going through its weird changes.
(He then finished, with pressure all around to finish up as the panel had run over time: a description/story/hypnotic demonstration of the Hebrew 4-letter name of god that can’t be spoken—no vowels—but is the sound of breathing, slowly—in and out)

[fiz]