Phila Back

My garden is a plenum – a spatially continuous living community which includes me, its caretaker – and I intuitively experience it as such while simultaneously perceiving a visual panorama, an audible space filled with the music of cicadas, crickets and birds as well as an expanse of floral perfume.

Our prize, the goal of our actions and our lives is to achieve the ecological civilization in which, as far as possible, humans interact with each other and nonhuman natural things for maximum mutual benefit.

With his 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn launched the concept of paradigm shift which could be applied to a variety of historical cultural changes as well as desired future ones. 

Fully living is not only what we by nature desire, it is also what we are fundamentally driven to do – at once maximizing our selves and the rest of life, while it in turn does the same for us.  Failing to do this mimimizes our selves and all else, so live!

I discovered a new under the radar movement of otherwise inactive people talking to each other.  These were citizens freely acting on their own initiative to link up with others as citizens with the aim of  making real the promise of democracy.

Like the profuse blooms of the brown-eyed susan, a multitude of people must come forth to fully pursue, serve and save life.