Angel – Mosaic by Tammy Vitale (outdoors or in) $450

This morning, on the 3rd ER trip between me and my husband since 7/25, I had time to do  a lot of reading in my Ecopsychology:  Restoring the Earth Healing the Mind book [Theodore Roszak].  Making notes, I realized I am following a theme in my thinking right now, which is reflecting in my blogs.

[At 4a.m.  Hubby woke bleeding heavily from the mouth.  It is called “posterier nosebleed” – now we know.  CAT scan showed nothing.  Can happen again. Can be very serious.  Following up.  This time we’re okay –  for now.  No pain just lots of blood.  If that’s too much information, sorry!]

My last blog here was Step Into Your Power.  I have written on that before.

After reading a piece by David Abram, The Ecology of Magic, in the above-named book, I realized that I need to be more clear on my use of the word “power” since as Jeannette Armstrong says (same book, different article), “[Words as] symbols, [become]seen as compact surrogates of things, seem to take on a concreteness in and of themselves that supplants reality.  Words in that sense define the reality rather than letting the reality define itself.”

In our culture, “power”  is most often defined as that of someone who “has” power over others and things, often because of money or station – someone who is “other” and “above” and “not us” and, especially, “not female.”  That is not the power of which I speak.  THAT particular power has brought us to a point where we are killing ourselves by destroying our environment because we think we need more (basically because we live in a society built on consumption – if we don’t consume, the society falters. Thus we get the message often and everywhere that not consuming is bad for everyone.  Very.Bad.Model).

What does “power with” look like?

It is a connectedness to all things. 

Why? 

Because that is how human beings evolved – in concert with everything else that is here on the planet with us (as well as all those things that are no longer with us).  In this I include male and female – and intend to step away from a definition of power which is male-oriented or female-oriented to a power that is not even human-oriented but All-oriented.  That is a power that recognizes connection and thus cooperation – and a power that will then recognize dis-ease as dis-connectedness, illness as symptoms showing us, and our communities, that we have gone too far with the mechanization concept of the whole, seeing things as parts in a large machine instead of wholistic systems which view parts at their own peril.  We need to see the whole if we are going to heal ourselves and our world from the modern scourges of wars (“otherness”), hate and fear (“otherness” again in the form of “they” will take something that “I” have – seperateness) and ecological degradation (everything not human is “other” and therefore exploitable).

What would it be like to take into consideration that we live in a world where the breath we breathe in and out was first breathed in and out by things born of the stars in the early mists of life organization, or even by our own ancesters (should we be living in place) or by the ancestors of those we now consider “other.”  How can they be “other” when we share the life force of breath?  How can we not see our connection with “inanimates” like the trees when their very breathing out is what sustains our breathing in?

Sadly, our culture’s relation to the animate Earth can in no way be considered a reciprocal or balanced one…..we can hardly be surprised by the amount of epidemic illness in our culture, from increasingly severe immune dysfunctions and cancers, to widespread psychological distress, depression, and ever-more-frequent suicides, to the growing number of murders committed for no apparent reason by otherwise coherent individuals.

…the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the violence uselessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to hear the forms.  This may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, yet it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved.  Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate Earth… [emphasis mine].