Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A craft that is rooted in its materials inevitably places you within the natural world rather than being simply an observer of nature. You develop a personal relationship with the landscape and the lives of animals, insects, birds and plants within it.
How can a civilization last, when its governing force is something so fleeting and artificial as money?
The truth is that in a more-than-human world, nothing exists in isolation. Humans may share this world with non-humans, but by the same token, stones share it with non-stones, trees with non-trees and mountains with non-mountains.
Many of us have forgotten that our cultural heritage as Black people includes ecological humility, the idea that humans are kin to, not masters of, nature.
On December 15th I had one of the most enjoyable conversations of this year with de delightfully polymathic Jeremy Lent about his path towards becoming one of the most elegant voices of humanity’s search for new and at the same time very ancient meaning.
The two central tasks of every conscious individual are the rescue of spirituality and (re)connecting with respect for nature. Three sectors are playing a strategic role in this: environmentalists, women, and indigenous peoples.
Today’s mainstream political and economic discourses are increasingly sterile and unfit in large part because they are based on incorrect assumptions about the nature of being.
I am here to convince you that you may have never fully seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or been touched by a tree. In particular, I humbly submit that you and I have yet to fully fathom what a tree can be . . . or at least, what a mesquite tree can be to us.
Almost all of us, in England and many other nations, are born on the wrong side of the law. The disproportionate weight that the law gives to property rights makes nearly everyone a second-class citizen before they draw their first breath, fenced out of the good life we could lead.
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
But a college that finds spiritual expression in service to the others with whom we live (human or other-than-human) and to the land beneath our feet, that scrutinises and decolonises itself without fragility, that privileges listening before speaking, and that acts mindfully and soulfully in the world, would be a college that meets the needs of the time.
That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.
