Posts tagged ecopsychology

For Mother’s Day

a desperation of our species:

does childlessness

imply

motherlessness?

without children, what will propel us

toward motherishness?

Cura—the original mother

(toward a vocation of care

in the sense of devotion)

you have seen me

my silhouette cutout

screams MOTHER against the stars.

o black against the sky

(another ode to the void)

pointilles of light shine the outskirts

twinkle holy and point to the area of

nothing there.

the absence tells

of an archetype divided:

in one hand Mommy holds

the miracle of new life,

an egg bigger than a speck of dust

(but not by much)

unfolding itself into a five and a half foot tall woman,

holding her own symbols en sphere

but o inescapable, this new spark

a frown on her face, a tear in her eye,

now looks toward the other hand and

Mommy? has morphed into Kali

terrifying, multihanded, and in each

a multiverse burning in flame,

dissolving in poison, a tiny mushroom-headed –POOF-

coming from, well,

nowhere now.

this daughter, not daring a glance at

what she holds in her own hands,

is now undeniably linked to

death.

created into the world,

our bodies now take on the job of composition and decomposition,

a fancy dance

on grass, on pavement, in trees,

on broken glass with leather shoes,

on fire.

in birth, death.

and in death, rebirth.

Mother is our link between worlds,

the person we know

who gets us in the door to this

bizarre party

so far beyond our fantasy

we spend our time in amazement and shock

at the wonders that surround us.

as children of the planet Earth,

we wander about, dazed and

mouths agape at

the tremendous creative

and destructive prowess

exhibited by our collective Mama

Gaia.

Our human understanding

can only go so far,

our metaphors locked up in our bodies

and in their relative positions to

everything else

determine our abilities to comprehend

just where it is we are.

An appropriately human, and motherly, metaphor is this:

we are protein-bits of her genetic code.

Our mother Gaia is still only an egg herself.

Fire-tailed meteors

(looking, eek, oh-so-spermy)\

on a collision course now billions of years past

exploded previously unknown elements onto

Earth-egg and she

continues to gestate,

each new combinatorial compound

provides x^∞ possibilities of

strange new life on the surface.

In some traditions and in some dreams

time exists as a dragon of fire

eating its own tail.

it struggles against itself to consume itself

at a rate faster than the

burning need in its gullet.

Is this what our universe is

incubating in Earth-as-egg?

I feel tender, motherly toward her, and

wonder what she will become

beyond my limited human scope.

What will burst forth from her?

What will she be when she grows up?

What kind of new ideas and new creatures

are seeping ever-outward,

like mystical smoke?

Mother-daughter-egg-mystery.

Creator, Destroyer, birthplace and

composter of us all, all ideas.

The future is vast beyond belief

we cannot fathom it.

We are bound by our idea of time.

Just accepted to the Naropa University MA program for TRANSPERSONAL ECOPSYCHOLOGY, and into another vector of my spherical education. 

Where are our dreams going?

xoc

I am interested in radical change.  As individuals and as a species we need to understand Ecopsychology.  Everything is combined, everything is connected, how can it not be?  We are in a web, we are a web— our Earth. We are our Earth, we are a part of Her. I believe we can save/salvage our planet through science, but we can only save ourselves as a species through compassion.  I am interested in people, compassion, and relationships as part of the solution to our unhappiness, unhealthiness, and fear on this planet.  I am ready for change, and I am looking for preparation.

Recently, things feel like they have been picking up speed.  My knowledge base is expanding in many directions, and my past experiences are combining together to be useful in a way that I don’t quite understand yet.  Undergraduate Chemical Engineering studies in high math, physics, chemistry, and industrial practices required a new way of learning for me that opened up what I understand now to be neural pathways essential for learning how to learn.

I left chemical engineering because I wanted to be with people, and I wasn’t getting a broad enough range of knowledge. Psychology was my choice as a science and also a language, as a background, and something every human should know- an operations manual for the body, really or a chemistry/geography textbook.  I was curious though, in my undergraduate, about the seeming lack of spirit in psychology.  It’s so obvious, I think.  There is more going on than there is going on with the body, beautiful chemistry and all.

In 2005, I began working as an international humanitarian clown with Gesundheit! Institute (under the guidance of Patch Adams and Johnny Glick). This is where I first learned to explore deeply, with strangers, the levels of communication between people without language.  How to communicate my care, my love? Strange as it sounds, as clowns we provide support in many emotionally difficult settings.  Frequently I meet people in hospitals who, with a small caress or heartfelt smile, accept relief and fall into my arms. Practice with eyes and touch allow suddenly for strangers to share something else, something necessary—a desire to divulge the truth, the hardship, the heartache, the sadness in lonely human situations.

Several years ago, while in Iquitos, Peru with Gesundheit!, I had a visionary experience that was surprising and frightening, where I was afraid and in the void and was looked upon nonchalantly by a passing child.  Because of the presence of my mentor Johnny and his belief in my process, I learned to explore my strange state, and to accept this vision as a part of who I am.  Exploration of this vision brought my compassion and belief systems to a higher level.  It has helped me to understand my responsibility of being on the planet.

I do not know yet what routes I will pursue professionally.  I want to be able to ease transitions on personal and global levels.  I am interested in psychotherapy, I am interested in the ministry of love, I am interested in biomass char, but I am most interested in the combination of knowledge to save us as a species and a planet.  I communicate and use my knowledge to help people every day, and I will always continue to do so.

My goal in education is to continue to pursue the changing perceived edge of knowledge available to humans, and to keep pushing the edge of exploration.  In only fifty years we have jumped from black and white television to compiled images of the Hubble space telescope.  Can I imagine what will happen in the next fifty?

With this program, I hope to find mentorship.  I would like to have some really intelligent guidance and questioning.  I need the education for a high skill level in my future.  When I am done I hope to have learned the tools to assist my community of relationships locally and globally to understand the changes happening around them.  We are in a crisis here on Earth, as individuals seeking advancement in knowledge of communities and technology, as a species doing the same, and as a planet being mistreated and misused.  The question What are we doing here? exists in many realms.

Naropa is the most interesting/appealing school to me because I think that everyone there has a high quality of mind and is practicing mindfulness.  When I attended just a week of the SWP in 2006 (with Jack Collum), I was immediately immersed in a pool of creative thinking, staff and student alike.  My experience there was very freeing, and provided an opening for many, many conceptual seeds to be planted.  I loved being able to sit with and talk to great and beautiful minds like Anne Waldman, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka.  How thrilling to be engaged in information exchange with brilliant radicals!

I am also drawn to the holistic approach to learning that other schools do not offer.  I think that contemplation is a guiding hand to all learning.  There will always be questions, and thought on those questions, as long as there is time.  A contemplative education is a natural one.  And for experience, what are we humans, if not that?  To be human is to perceive experience. I feel like my intentions for study in Transpersonal Ecopsychology are aligned with the mission of Naropa as a center for experiential and contemplative learning.