By Gretchen Sleicher

This song came on the descent from snowy Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains on 02/02/2020, when, unbeknownst to me, COVID was about to unfurl itself across the globe. It is a song for singing together during the Great Unraveling the world is now experiencing. It reminds us that the descent can be full of beauty, coming together in rough weather. It invokes deep time through the image of mountains slowly eroding over vast stretches of years, and the immediacy of crumbling glaciers, the rapid changes we are living now. It encourages us to take the long view, and to embrace both life and death. And it also asks us to sing out for life, and live with the presence of the future ones in our hearts and minds. We can’t know what awaits on the other side of these times, but we can take actions and live in ways that open up the possibility that there will be people to sing our songs, and that they will be sung on the other side.

The slideshow accompanying the song is especially poignant for me because many of the beautiful images in it were taken by my father, Charles Sleicher, who died on January 23, 2024, at 99½ years old. Maybe he’s smiling from the other side, knowing that his images are combining with my lyrics in hearts spread far and wide.

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Gretchen Sleicher is a singer, songwriter and songleader who lives at the Port Townsend EcoVillage. Her original songs are largely inspired by wild nature in her Cascadia homeland. She’s worked extensively with Joanna Macy, and delights in weaving group singing and harmony-making into facilitation of the interactive group processes of the Work That Reconnects. She curates the website songsforthegreatturning.net, a collection of songs for group singing that help us experience in the body our connection to each other and the planet, summon our collective courage, enliven us and inspire us to face the great unraveling and reach toward a great turning. The website includes recordings of some of her originals

Excerpted (by Kevin Lay) from Jo delAmor’s interview of Bayo Akomolafe 

 What is ‘marronage’?

Bayo mused, “…my mind is immediately taken to the escapades, the agency, the history of slaves … and how they suffered not just in the United States, in Brazil and other places across the Caribbean, but how they often performed escape, how they removed their bodies from the labor of the plantation. This act of doing that, of refusing the terms of captivity, is called marronage.”  

Time-marronage, Bayo explained, is “All the ways that we don’t fit within clock time.  Not reducible to intentions, not a project of activists, but all the ways that we are molecularly called away from Universal Time. For instance, the American Psychological Association in its 2022 publication basically says that healthy grief happens within one year.  So, grief becomes a product:  grief is tethered to a notion of time which is already in service to capitalist relations or to patriarchal relations. It’s that if you want grief, you know, yeah – grieve within this time, but beyond this time, then there’s something wrong with you somewhere. Then we need to lean in and pay attention to what’s happening. I think we’re grieving today collectively in ways that cannot be set to clock time. Right?” 

Jo responded.  “Yes, actually, that leads into how this concept of time or this structuring of time, this force of linear boxed-in-time, is a product of this larger project I’ve heard you talk about, as like a project of modernity. I was listening to a podcast you did with Ayana Young in For The Wild, where you were talking about the posture that this project of modernity requires of us, a kind of upright forward moving rectilinear posture. Can you explore that a little bit, about what you mean by posture?”

  “Since we’re still dancing with themes from plantations and ideas of marronage in slavery and slave ships, I mean to say that one never leaves the plantation with his head held high.  That’s not the posture of marronage.  The posture of marronage is scurrying by, is hiding, is squeezing oneself through cracks, is of becoming animal. The posture in this [shows an opened hand, chopping left to right], that’s the posture of arrival of the gentleman, of the elitist, right? of the citizen. But the posture of the fugitive is, is bent, and, you know what I mean, is animalistic.  It’s animist, it’s vitalist.  It’s more in keeping with the elements.   You want to hide and to render yourself as invisible as possible.

“Indeed. You could say that that uprightness is funded and subsidized by Universal clock time. If you we stand upright, it’s a function of our intrinsic worth, our divinity divorced from ecology.  We stand upright to ennoble the city, the nation state, right?  We stand upright, almost, it seems, like it’s a corporal gesture for the transcendent.   Like, the more we straighten our backs, the more we are in tune with something that is beyond the natural, that disses or kisses at the mundane, the poverty of the mundane, the ordinary.  It’s almost like we are holding our titles or badges of being strangers to the material world by keeping that posture. 

And the way white modernity subsidizes or resources the individual is with time, is with the idea that we are marching forward, we’re going forward. That this project of white modernity, and again, whiteness is not white people, I believe, white people were captured right into the machine. White people were captured. The black people were captured. Brown people were captured.   It is the clearing that is whiteness.  It’s the enforcement of a neuro-typicality that is whiteness. It’s the racialization of bodies and situating power at the top of this pyramidal scheme, and the idealization of a default type of body, that is whiteness.  To reduce that to white people would be to reinforce the morality of this whiteness in its production of particular kinds of worlds, to the exclusion of other kinds of worlds. I feel this whiteness is white modernity, this whiteness that is jiving and vibing with modernity, the flattening of worlds, and it’s vibing with capitalist relations, and is vibing with apartheid, and is vibing with neurotypicality.  

“You know, there isn’t a call to wade in the water that presumes walking upright is the way to do it.  To wade in the water is to become water, is to take on those attributes as much as you can. That’s what I mean by adopting new postures. The ways we’re trained to think, the ways we’re trained to understand the world is being disrupted–it is being syncopated. This is what I call white syncopation. And, and in a sense, we are being forced to dance. Syncopation is connected with rhythm and DanceAbility. If there is no syncopation, there is no DanceAbility, is just boom-boom-boom-boom and that becomes boring over time. But if you boom-boom [with accents on some beats], then you have syncopating rhythm and the groove, and now DanceAbility comes in. And when you dance, you are given to forces at large.  I like to say DanceAbility is disability: it’s kind of losing yourself. It’s giving your body to forces beyond you, to the excess around you. That’s what it means to dance. So, in a sense, postures change when we dance; we’re not standing strict. You go into the ground, you’re moving, you’re expressing yourself in ways that are open ended, and yet to come. So, we are being forced to dance now, sister.  The straight and narrow have to dance now, because excess is coming in, is expressing itself, is teasing the borders, is inviting us to slow down and to take on new shapes.

“We are all in this colonial space together. What that does is cuts us off from other postures, from other ways of seeing, other ways of being. It’s a form of captivity really. I’ve been thinking about the spin-off of this idea of clock time, that is called emergency.  You probably would think of emergency in terms of climate emergency, the idea that time is scarce. We don’t have enough of it now and we must act to save ourselves. That’s the trope now, the topos.  That’s where we are.  It’s like, ‘we’re in trouble, folks, you know, there isn’t time, there isn’t enough time to do anything’. 

Jo asked.  “But how do you find that posture that relates to this climate emergency sense of we need to do something … Many of us coming to this work and who are listening to this call are concerned about the world.  What might you invite us into in relation to shifting our posture to time and moment?”

  Bayo thought a moment and replied. “The problem with a paradigm or with a framework of emergency, is that it collapses agency into pre-constituted options. Right? It doesn’t really allow for creative manner of ability.  It kind of collapses everything, it squeezes the richness, the multi dimensionality, the expressive ability, the fluidity, the indeterminacy of the world, to a set of functions that have already been predetermined. The world becomes some kind of button system. You press this, or you press that, that’s all there is. I’m thinking of Gaza right now. And the situation there, and how that has been described in terms of an emergency. Right? And basically, our ethical response to it has been button like, almost app like.  You press this and you stand for Palestine; you press this, and you stand for Israelis. And that lends itself to repeatability. It kind of preserves the conditions of war. 

“Rectilinearity, the gait of a proper citizen, the propriety of goodness, the uprightness of the individuated or individual self, the final Imperial magisterial subject, citizen subject that rectilinearity is, is a practice that has been impervious to flows, right?  It’s almost like the eye that refuses to see that it is movement. And the ‘I’ that refuses to notice how it is already imbricated and entangled with things that are out of time and out of whack and will not be resolved within the airtight measurements of the clock. 

And thinking about trauma, there is a sense in which trauma marks the boundaries of the proper subject. It’s political, the way we name trauma, it’s a civilization or a civilizing ethic, this naming of trauma. Our bodies are doing things that we don’t intend for them to do, our bodies cannot be fully contained within the labor camps of the modern, right? We try to contain the outbreak, we try to define it beforehand, to reduce the impact on the labor that we’re doing. And it is labor. 

“This is how I want to conclude, sister: it is labor. Even the idea of safety is a form of labor, that might even be conceived in Marxist terms, that to be safe is to labor within certain preconditions, or pre-conceived tendencies. There were ships that suffered the losses of slaves jumping overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. They would just jump – and that was loss economically. So, what some of those captains did was to put nets on the sides of the ships to catch the slaves, to keep them safe. Right?  Think about the insidiousness of safety then.  They might have [painted] on the walls of the slave ship, ‘We care about your safety’ because they needed them to be productive within the plantations.  I’m thinking about the ways that dynamic of safety is labor.  And we are laboring in resourcing our separability – that’s what we’re laboring in. We’re laboring in plantations, all of us today. We’re not producing cotton, we’re producing individuals.

And we are kept within that safety bubble. We’re told that to prevent hegemonic relationships and Imperial relationships, we need to be safe. We need to reduce risk as much as possible and predefine social realities and social spaces before we enter those social spaces. But the stickiness of that is that we find that those relationships we want to avoid repeat themselves because in predetermining how I meet you, prior to meeting you, I might, at my meeting you, become a method, instead of emergence.  I might become a voting pushing notion, or investigation or, or a search for conformity instead of an invitation to the open ended-ness of love in its becoming.” 

Jo enjoined, “Yeah. Thank you. It feels like an invitation to really just be with what is and be curious about what’s emerging.”

  Bayo continued.  “I would say let’s be radically hospitable to the fugitives and cracks. I want to invite people to notice that we are not as well put together as we think. We are late already. And if punctuality is stabilization within clock time, then there is a sense in which we’re all late and that is, ironically salvific emancipatory. I invite people to lean into the cracks of that. 

“We’re confused, we’re not exactly sure where to go, where we spill over without grief.  And there is a sense in which all of these things: the cloud, the confusion, the grief, the not knowing, the uncertainty, all of those ways that white modernity cannot resource the individual any longer. Those are the cracks. A psychologist comes and says ‘One year has passed’. Such are the places where becoming monstrous and monstrous time is the invitation to other kinds of time.  

  “There are places we can gather and create artistic enterprises of listening and falling together. There isn’t something to do that is a project of the human. But there are spaces of doings that open up when we find ourselves in those cracks and openings. Those things that sprout are invitational.  And that is my invitation to people. By what I mean when I say the times are urgent, let us slow down.”

 

“Thank you Bayo.”

“Thank you, sister. Thank you.”

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This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Gaian Gathering of the Work That Reconnects Network in November 2023.  A video of the full talk is available on the WTR Network website here.

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Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California.  See www.bayoakomolafe.net  and www.emergencenetwork.org.

By Adrián Villaseñor Gallarza

For cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and systemic change to take place, there needs to be energy available. To facilitate such a shift in consciousness, the third dimension of the Great Turning, we depend on the availability of psychic energy. This energy, however, is primarily perceived as pertaining exclusively to human endeavors. How may we mobilize inner resources in service to Life? How do we liberate such energy into its eco-psychic expressions?

Visionaries such as Thomas Berry  and Joseph Campbell suggest that it is not a matter of fixating upon the newest, “greenest” technology, but on connecting with the skillful means to psychically dethrone the industrial paradigm and magnetically connect with a life-affirming story. We know that psychic energy is nourished by myths, stories, symbols, and archetypes. In the case of the Work That Reconnects, there are a few guiding stories that take preference, one of which is the Shambhala Prophecy. As wonderful and necessary this story might be to ignite our inner landscapes, we need a variety of myths that speak to a broad eco-cultural spectrum. 

Given my cultural background, one of such essential stories is beautifully exemplified by the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor, which speaks of the unification and harmonious integration of the three Americas. Other Original stories from the continent include the Mexica myth of the Fifth Sun or the Hopi Creation Myth, in which various cycles of creation and destruction oversee humanity’s evolution. These stories speak of the intimate connection of the human family with an animate, cyclic world. The popular Mayan myth of the end of the “long count” conveys a message of fresh potentiality at the onset of a new cycle. I’ve shared elsewhere about the relevance of the Mexica teaching of the “Flower Warriors” (in xochitl in cuicatl) to cultivate intimacy with creation and harness inner resilience.[1] The various legends of El Dorado and particularly the myth of the lost city of Paititi are valuable stories that may further assist us in conjuring the energies to partake in the Great Turning, not without a necessary journey into the underworld. 

Honoring the Underworld

I want to invite you to envision the American continent divided into three broad areas: upper (North), middle (Central), and lower (South America) as representatives of a three-world cosmology found in many pre-industrial cultures throughout the world. We’re called to dive into “lower America,” the underworld, geographically, somatically, and metaphorically. At the body level, we ought to go beneath the neck, to learn from the intelligences of the heart and the gut, our intuition and so on. Geographically, we find communities and ways of living with scarce economic resources, which paradoxically are closest to the Earth. The historical repression of the “South,” of that which is “beneath,” has translated into massive amounts of pent-up psychic energy.

To honor our pain for the world, we journey into the underworld and touch with compassion the previously unavailable energy so that it may liberate and reorganize itself. This is tantamount to a shamanic journey or an initiatory ordeal that most industrial citizens are not willing or are able to embark on. Yet, in many respects, we are trained to undertake such an endeavor via the Work That Reconnects. Visiting the underworld is, of course, a metaphor that helps us honor our pain for the world in which a process of positive disintegration would unleash the freer expressions of our pain.   

Years back, I remember inviting Joanna to come to Mexico to offer an intensive WTR training. She looked back to me and just laughed. She said, “No, that’s up to you.” I took her word for it, and ever since we’ve been offering the Work in various Latin American contexts. Often, the awakenings that take place amid the various WTR participants are informed by the vibrant source of ancestral wisdom of their inheritance.

Interestingly, the underworld and its association to “death” and the “dead” is related to the realm of the ancestors. Knowing this, many of the stories and symbols incorporated in our offerings aim to honor and connect us with this deep, ancestral mind, in turn informed by the experiential revelations of participants—a virtuous cycle of reconnection.    

Ancestral Deep Ecology

The reconnective experiences of the mostly mestizo participants in these Latin American workshops can be seen as a reclamation of eco-cultural heritage and ancestral continuity. For the late psychologist Manuel Aceves, the unconscious dimension that shapes Mexican identity is intimately connected to an ancestral, pre-Hispanic mind, whereas the egoic personality is associated to the European influence [2]. This polarity is not exclusive of the Mexican identity, but it’s shared in the hybrid identities of Latin America and other regions with a considerable degree of cultural mixture. When the often repressed, but potently alive, ancestral mind finds a way to break through, it helps restore a sense of participation with the living roots of life while hinting at the possibility of psychic wholeness. In a WTR context, we may refer to this self-organizing intelligence as an expression of the deep ecology at the core of life’s web. 

As is known, Arne Naess is credited for coining the concept of ‘deep ecology’ in a 1973 article where he advances a long, deep, and relational perspective to the ecological challenges of our time [3]. Joanna’s work initially developed without an awareness of deep ecology and its core tenets, including its critique around anthropocentrism, or notions like the ‘ecological self’ or ‘ecosophy’. Soon after, a deep resonance ensued, to the point where the work of ‘despair and empowerment’—one of the earlier names of the WTR—came to be known as ‘deep ecology work’, which has endured in some communities until this day. Less known is Panikkar’s and Guattari’s work on the shared notion of ‘ecosophy’ that can enrich our understanding of deep ecology and its applications. 

 For Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010), intercultural theologist and philosopher, ecosophy has to do with listening to the Earth, perceiving Her as a living entity, and as an ultimate reference for human endeavors. One of the chief inspirations for Panikkar’s ecosophy is the Vedic concept of bhumijnana or spiritual Earth wisdom. In addition, ecosophy implies an opening to the experience of a living Earth as the harmonious participation of three dimensions: cosmos, human, and the sacred.

On his part, philosopher and psychiatrist Felix Guattari (1930-1992) developed an understanding of ecosophy as the fruit of the interactions between the environmental, social, and mental ecologies proposed earlier by Gregory Bateson. Guattari’s ecosophy would render an ethical, political, and aesthetic undertaking. This rhizomatic understanding of ecosophy is greatly enriched, largely preceded, and made presently available by the wakeful experiences of mestizo WTR participants of belonging to a living Earth.

‘Pachasophia’ or ‘wisdom of the Mother Totality’, Josef Eatermann has proposed, entails an awakening to a lived sense of relationality, correspondence, complementarity, reciprocity, and cyclicity amongst humans and creation.[4] Pachasophia, I suggest, is but an expression of ancestral deep ecology, or a participatory worldview and practice of eco-cultural belonging to the living Earth and its cosmic context (Pacha). This earthly realization of cosmic import, of homecoming, discloses a set of refined, ancestral understandings about the role and purpose of the human family amidst creation.

Ancestral deep ecology helps deepen a de-centered, rhizomatic understanding of deep ecology and the WTR. This approach celebrates the contemporary import of ancestral worldviews of the Americas, while valuing multicultural understandings and experiences in service of a more beautiful world. The flowering forth of Pachasophia allows for a potential integration between the European-informed conscious personality and the Earthly, unconscious mind. 

The Great, Golden Turning

It’s said that Paititi is the residence and temple of Viracocha, the Incan creator god. The lost city deep within the jungle is replete with gold, great wisdom, and technological advancement characteristic of the Inca peoples. The great riches of Paititi have been feeding greedy dreams of material wealth for the last five hundred years, and many unsuccessful expeditions have taken place by the colonizers ever since. Safely guarded by various trials and powerful guardians, the lost city symbolizes much more than material wealth—it is the haven of Inkarri or “Inca King,” who shall return to reinstate peace and justice in the world and inaugurate the next, golden era of humanity. Popular beliefs suggest that “Everyone’s life depends on them,” referring to Inkarri and the rest of the awakened Inca of Paititi, “because they are the ones that govern everyone’s destinies.”[5]

From the ancestral deep ecology of the Americas emerges this mythical figure, Inkarri, representative of spiritual gold, the “Earthly Sun,” and the ancestral wisdom to restore peace in the heart and harmony with the cosmos. Akin to the lost kingdom of Shambhala and its warriors, illustrative of the compassionate figure of the bodhisattva, the spirit of Inkarri is found deep within the human heart. In freeing psychic energies from their repressed, trauma-laden, industrial-driven expressions, the quest for Paititi serves as a guiding, life-affirming story, connecting us to the liberated energies of the world—the Great, Golden Turning.
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1. Villaseñor Galarza, Adrián. “Eagle, Condor & Quetzal.” A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time, edited by Stephanie Kaza, Shambhala, Boulder, CO, 2020. pp. 322-327.
2. Aceves, Manuel. Alquimia y Mito Del Mexicano: Aproximaciones desde La Psicología de C.G. Jung. Grijalbo, 2000.
3. Naess, Arne. “The shallow and the deep, long‐range ecology movement. A summary.” Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 1–4, Jan. 1973, pp. 95–100.
4. Estermann, Josef. Filosofía Andina: Sabiduría Indígena para un Mundo Nuevo. ISEAT, 2009; Estermann, Josef. Filosofía Andina: Estudio Intercultural de la Sabiduría Autóctona Andina. AbyaYala, 2015; Villaseñor Galarza, Adrián. “Ancestral Deep Ecology of the Americas.” Deep Times Journal, 2022. https://journal.workthatreconnects.org/2022/09/08/ecologia-profunda-ancestral-en-las-americas/ 
5. Urbano, Henrique. “Las tres edades del mundo. La idea de utopía y de historia en los Andes.” Mito y simbolismo en los Andes: La figura y la palabra, edited by Henrique Urbano, CBC, Cusco, 1993. p. 294.

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This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Gaian Gathering of the Work That Reconnects Network in November 2023.  A video of the full talk is available on the WTR Network website here.

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Adrián Villaseñor Galarza, PhD, is passionate about human transformation in service of the living Earth. Adrián is an integral ecopsychologist, international facilitator, contemplative teacher, author, and ritualist whose work weaves the psycho-spiritual study of the Earth-human relation, animist principles, and contemplative wisdom. He’s Core Faculty in the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Adjunct Faculty at Naropa University, and founder of the Bioalchemy Institute and Work That Reconnects Latin America. Visit: living-flames.com for more information.

By John Seed

Edited from a transcripted presentation by Martha O’Hehir
Note: In this talk, “we” and “our” often refers to people in the globally dominant socioeconomic system, not all humans.

Deep Ecology is a philosophy of nature. The term was first coined by the late Arne Naess who was a Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University. According to him, all the symptoms underlying the environmental crisis lie in the illusion of separation between humans and the rest of the natural world. All we need to do to understand exactly what he meant is to hold our breath for five minutes while we think about it. And then we realize that however we conceptualize ourselves, we are inextricably embedded in this world. There can be no separation. The world is constantly cycling through us and we through it.

Naess said that the illusion of this separation is a result of  “Anthropocentrism,” or human-centeredness–the idea that humans are the center of everything.   We are “the crown of creation,” “the measure of all things.” We are the only thing that has intrinsic value. Everything else may have instrumental value, as a resource for us, but nothing else has intrinsic value, including the Earth itself. It’s just dirt until we transform it using our intelligence or our labor.

This arrogant mistake is deeply embedded in us and stretches back at least to the Old Testament where we learn that humans are to subdue and dominate nature and nature is to be in fear and trembling of us. Naess said we won’t be able to think our way out of the mess. Every institution of our society and every strand in the fabric of our soul is corrupted by this anthropocentrism. Ecological ideas won’t be enough to save us. What we need is an ecological identity, or ecological self. 

And, in order to nourish our ecological identity, what is needed are community therapies to heal our relations with the rest of the natural world, the more-than-human world.

(Here, Seed describes how he worked with others as an activist and had a great deal of success in the 1980’s protecting rainforests in Australia. In spite of these successes, there were thousands of forests that had been lost.)

I learned we cannot protect the planet, one forest at a time. Unless we could clearly address the underlying psychological or spiritual disease that allows modern humans to imagine that we can profit from the destruction of our own life support systems, these actions were going to be of no particular significance so far as the future of the world was concerned.

When I met Joanna Macy in 1986, the next step in the unfolding of the community therapies that Naess had been calling for was able to proceed. I went to one of Joanna’s workshops which was then called Despair and Empowerment, and at that time, I learned from her the importance of feelings in this whole picture. She taught us how we live in a society where there is profound denial of a huge part of our humanity, that is, what we call “the bad feelings” such as rage, terror, anguish and despair. We are taught to fear these feelings, we’re taught to suppress these feelings.  We don’t understand the consequences of doing this. It turns out that these feelings are a hugely important part of our intelligence. When we look back upon our pre-human evolutionary history, we have to recognize that there is an extraordinary pedigree of success that every single generation, for four billion years, every single one of our ancestors was intelligent enough to reach the age of reproducing itself before it was consumed. 

All of this was done without the benefit of thinking. This intelligence consisted of what we now call “feelings.” We can call it instinct, or intuition, but whatever we call it, what we call feelings inside ourselves now is what remains in us of this ancient intelligence that preceded thinking.  And, in spite of tremendous challenges and dangers that faced our ancestors in every single generation, the accuracy of these feelings to lead us out of danger, towards safety, was tested. 

So, we suppress these feelings at our peril.

Although thinking is also very beautiful, it turns out that without the passion of feelings to support it, thinking is kind of sterile. Although we may know what it is that is happening, without that passion we are not really in a position to do anything about it.  Thus we are confronted with a world of tremendous precariousness as we watch nature disappearing around us and many of us feel utterly paralyzed and unable to respond. I suggest this is because the passion necessary to rise up and to take a stand is missing.

What I learned from Joanna is the extraordinary importance of these feelings. Because they are being pushed up by instinctual forces, an equal and opposite life force is necessary  to suppress them, and therefore a huge part of our life force is squandered by this futile struggle between instinct and social conditioning.  Then we are left feeling helpless and hopeless; “what can one person do, anyway?”

When we learn how to create a safe container that invites and honors these feelings and       allows us to metabolize and integrate them, a tremendous amount of energy that we experience as empowerment ensues. I was influenced by Joanna, and she was equally influenced by the philosophy of deep ecology. Within a week of meeting at her workshop, we were walking together through the rainforest in NSW as we constructed the Council of All Beings. This was the first of the experiential deep ecology workshops of the Work That Reconnects, which brought together the philosophy of Deep Ecology and the profound engine of personal change which she represented in the despair work that she taught. Both of us have gone on to work with this ever since.

Because the facilitator, after introducing the activity, becomes a part of the circle, this is my spiritual practice now. This is where the empowerment comes from, which I can place at the service of my continuing work in the conservation of nature.

(At this time, Freida Nixdorf, the host, asked John, “How can we access this idea of ecological identity, of deep ecology?”)

[The answer is best described through] a metaphor that requires background information. There is a system of regenerative nature called the “Bradley Method of Bush Regeneration.” It (the Method) requires no heroic tree planting effort, but only that you identify the native plants from the exotic [non-native, invasive] ones. Then, all you do is remove the exotics and allow for the natives to grow when their seedlings appear, without treading on the natives. Year after year, the original intelligence returns and the whole area flourishes and expands with native plants.

 We may be tempted to begin in a horribly degraded part of the environment. Yet, if we start there, the method fails. We have to start with the fullest expression of natural intelligence and vigor. We have to start with the strongest natural area and work backwards from there, to expand it… Maybe in ten years, we will reach the degraded area.

Ecology teaches us that  we are part of the earth. So, I take the biological metaphor of the Bradley Method. Until people have begun to recognize the problem, they are like the degraded area, and we berate them or harangue them or cannot do anything for them. But if we help people who are moving in this direction, then this community grows, and maybe one day we can reach into the hearts of the executives of the oil companies and the government leaders.

(Seed continues with a description of some of his conservation of nature, especially in Ecuador, and how it feeds his work with WTR. It is great to have examples of things working well.)           

Through experiencing the Work That Reconnects, we understand intellectually that we are part of the world.

Through the rituals and ceremonies and processes of WTR, we have an ever deepening experience… In the Going Forth, we have the opportunity to deliberately visualize ourselves as one cell in the body of the living earth. Depending on where we are in that body, there are many different roles that need to be played for the flourishing of the earth. Thus we put ourselves out in the universe to be directed to the role that is there for us to play, which may be very different from the role someone else is called to play.  

Just as the human body emerges from a single cell, and some cells migrate to become the brain, or others the liver, there is no “correct” answer to the question of “What is there for me to do?” Really the question is: “How do I learn to surrender in such a way that clear direction comes to me that is authentic and I can trust?” 

To me, this learning to surrender is one of the great gifts or rewards of the ceremonies of the Work That Reconnects. They help us hear those directions and allow them to actually move our life  in the direction of: “How am I to serve the earth, serve my people and future generations?”

The processes of the WTR are synchronous with, or a continuation of, the kinds of ceremonies that Indigenous peoples have practiced throughout time. Without exception, every Indigenous society which has maintained its ceremonial life, has done so through their ceremonies  which are practiced throughout the year, every year, that allow the human community to teach the children to remember and to honor the more than human world. It is only we modern humans who have forgotten this.

We all have Indigenous ancestors.  When we are drawn to this work, there is something tremendously familiar   it, and it feels like coming home because it is such an important part of our heritage, stretching back – at least hundreds of thousands of years — to our true heritage, only recently forgotten and eclipsed by modern illusions of separation.

We find ourselves both aligned with our ancestors and also inspired and obliged to protect those areas of Indigenous life that continue to exist. Nature is being pushed back, year after year, land is lost, languages are lost, societies are lost. It is as important to protect these as to protect nature.

(Seed goes on to describe some phenomenal examples of Councils of All Beings, especially with children and in a beautiful and moving video.  He describes a project to protect koalas, using a film called “On the Brink,” which is essentially a Council of four Australian animals, including the koala. The script was written over several Councils of all Beings in WTR workshops.)

We used the film in the run-up to the upcoming election, and handed out leaflets for the show, provided the film and four tables at the back of the room with stationary for letter writing for protection of the habitats of these species. About 70,000 people saw the film and wrote letters.  A few weeks before the election, the Premier of NSW announced that if he was re-elected his party would protect those forests, and a month later, they were protected. This shows the power of the Council of All Beings to do more than just create the conditions for personal change, but to be an engine of much larger social and environmental change.

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This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Gaian Gathering of the Work That Reconnects Network in November 2023.  A video of the full talk is available on the WTR Network website here.

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John Seed was involved in the creation  of experiential deep ecology/the Work That Reconnects with Joanna Macy in 1986 and has been facilitating the workshops that they designed together ever since. At present he is offering such workshops monthly around Australia as well as online. He is also a regular contributor to Work That Reconnects webinars as well as podcasts and other forums. He came into deep ecology via his work in protecting the world’s rainforests which started in 1979 and continues to this day. In 1995 he was awarded the OAM (Order of Australia Medal) by the Aussie Government for Services to conservation and the environment. He is an accomplished film-maker, bard and author (see https://www.rainforestinformationcentre.org/john_seed )