Photo by Brock Dolman

Nature & Eros: Resiliency in a Time of Pandemic

“Online & Onland”

With Kerry Brady, Brian Swimme and guest faculty Brock Dolman

We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but ‘inscendence,’ not the brain but the gene.

—Thomas Berry, the Dream of the Earth

We are in a moment of great upheaval; our foundations are being rocked and our securities are being shattered. The Great Unravelling is underway, and the call to create a new culture—a culture that embraces our innate wholeness, addresses injustice, is founded on connection and meaning, and nourishes the whole Earth Community—is loud and clear.

As Gregory Bateson once said, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”. If we are to create the world we know is possible—in which all beings have the freedom to co-exist peacefully in balance with a thriving Earth—we cannot rely on the cultural codings that have been handed down to us. Instead, we are being called in, to the very essence of the mystery that swirls at our core and to the recognition that we are an inherent part of the unfurling cosmos, the progressing wavefront of a 14 billion year creative process that unfolded over time to bring forth the Himalayas and the hummingbird as well as each one of us.

This invitation may sound lofty and extraneous in the face of all that is pressing and immediate in our world. Yet, our ability to respond to this moment is directly connected to our foundations and our orientation. If we are primarily connected to the despair of a collapsing worldview, we are more likely to react from that place. If, on the other hand, we are connected to the innate resilience, intelligence and imagination of our 14 billion year inheritance, we move from feeling exhausted and disconnected to being renewed and restored. We are able to respond in a way that is life-affirming for the whole.

Nature and Eros: Resiliency in a Time of Pandemic includes engagement with themed readings and videos, community time via zoom and solo time in the places where we reside. After an initial framing that offers context for our time, we will move between once a week online meetings, which will include talks, dialogues and council practice, and solo time engaging in perception-enhancing practices that support active engagement with Nature, inside and out.

Our three main tasks will be:

• Embodying a cosmology rooted in the wonder of a living universe and ecological systems thinking

• Cultivating resilience, including learning tools to navigate our inner terrain

• Connecting with our home bioregions

A core opportunity in this time of pandemic is for each of us to deeply dwell in our own bioregion, recognizing the original people of our land, engaging directly with the larger ecosystem we inhabit and deepening our connection with our local kin. During this course, we will consciously explore the mysterious and fertile meeting ground between our own creativity and the larger unfolding—between the personal and the cosmological—in order to re-discover and re-member who we are as Earthlings.

Some questions we will dance with include:

• How do we reconnect with the wisdom at our center so that it may guide us into the unknown future and serve life?

• How do we hone our capacity to participate in the vast symphony of communing subjects?

• How do we stay awake and oriented in the face of danger, despair, and darkness?

We are made for these times, but we must remember a different and deeper way of being in the world. The invitation is to trust our bodies and the truths that reside therein, to encounter the world as a pulsing ecology of intelligent subjects, to learn what it is to live enfolded in an unfolding cosmos imbued with immense creative powers.

Learning Objectives:

• To recognize our deepest identity as a mode of the universe, forever in flux and intricately woven into the web of life

• To explore what it is to be fully human at this moment in the evolution of the Earth and Universe

• To honor the personal and collective impact of these times

• To deepen students' experiences of being engaged, co-active participants in this unfolding journey

• To apprentice to the other-than-human world to increase our ability to think and act like an ecosystem—in relationship and in process with life

• To learn a set of somatic resiliency skills that strengthen our ability to navigate change and build our capacity to stay present and available

• To shift from feeling overwhelmed and isolated to being renewed, restored and reconnected

Dates and Components:

Our online & on-land format includes:

• Multimedia preparatory materials

• Zoom sessions, including didactic time with core and guest instructors around evolutionary science, deep ecology and living systems theory, somatic psychology, neurobiology, and non-dual wisdom as well as group discussion, and council practice

• Individual work, including perception enhancing practices, connection with one's own bioregion, resiliency practices and reflections/journaling

• Regular engagement with a “tracking partner”

• Online forums