Turtle Island Children

20/10/2024

Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) toward and among other persons.
Graham Harvey

This is Graham Harvey’s definiton of New Animism, which you can find in his wonderful book “Animism: Respecting the Living World”. As we can read in the definition, it focuses on personhood of and relationship with a diversity of people, the great majority of whom are not human. This idea might sound strange to many in modern society, but it is actually second nature to those part of Earth-honouring traditions all around the world. Re-learning how to respectfully interact with other-than-human beings through place-based rituals and etiquette is a big part of being a practising animist.

Bioregional animists make use of animistic core values to deepen their relationship with their own bioregion - their Life-Place.

25/04/2024

How hard does thinking have to get before it is as hard as survival in the wild? At what point do you need to be as smart to survive inside civilization as outside of it? At what point do the distinctions among civilized, barbarian, and savage begin to blur?

I think we’re already there, and have been for a decade. It’s what I’ve been calling the cyberpaleo condition.

I like the concept of the Anthropocene. It finesses or postpones at least some of the conflict around the idea of climate change, broadens the conversation to include all human impact on the enviro…

27/03/2024

Our modern presumption is that these people would have been stupefied by their backbreaking labour that permitted no time for ‘cultural’ activities and abstract thought. Like so many of our beliefs about the past, the opposite was true. These people were renowned for the subtlety and power of their music and language, and for their range of knowledge. Scholars from Norway, Britain, and Dublin journeyed to the Great Blasket Island to learn their rich ancient tongue. One of these, the esteemed Greek scholar George Thomson, recalled that ‘the conversation of those ragged peasants …electrified me. It was as though Homer had come alive. Its vitality was inexhaustible.’2

The books the islanders wrote about their lives, at the prompting of the scholars, are still in print today. These people, who cooked their food over an open fire – food they wrested with their hands and wits from land and sea – could not have known that the era of the ready-made meal and tumble dryer was bearing down on them. That their stories and seasons, hardships and scarcities would soon be swept away by the cataclysm we now know as the Global Market Economy. Just as it bears down on us today with its tidings of singularity and the reign of robots.

Maeve Reilly explores how work done by hand can help resist the mechanisation of our humanity. Introduced by Hattie Pierce.

01/09/2022

I need this fabric!

18/07/2022

Jeff Brown wrote all the words in this post. He says, "Patriarchal Spirituality" consists of ungrounded & inhumane "spiritual" models fostered by emotionally armored, self-avoidant men. They share some or all of the following beliefs:

* the ego is the enemy of a spiritual life

* the "monkey mind" is the cause of suffering

* your feelings are an illusion

* your personal identifications and stories are necessarily false

* witnessing your pain transforms it

* your body is a spiritually bankrupt toxic quagmire

* the only real consciousness is an "absolute" and "transcendent" one

* stillness and silence are THE path

* isolation is the best way to access "higher states"

* there is no "self"

* meditation is THE royal road to enlightenment

* enlightenment actually exists

* formlessness over form

* the ultimate path is upward and vertical

* real spirituality exists independent of our humanness

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In fact, most of the above is a blatant lie.

Here are more accurate hypotheses about the nature of human life:

* A healthy ego is beautifully essential to healthy functioning

* The monkey mind is fed by the monkey heart (the unresolved emotional body)

* Many of our identities and stories are fundamental to who we are, where we have been, why we are here

* Healing your pain transforms it; watching it is only a preliminary step

* Our bodies are our spiritual temples

* The only "real" consciousness is one that integrates all that we are and all that this is

* Stillness and silence are only one path; many people prefer movement and sound

* There is no "higher" state (we aren’t birds). But connection may be the best way to access deepened states

* There is a magnificent self; the work is to align it with your sacred purpose, not to deny it altogether

* Meditation is not THE royal road; it’s one road, and it is not any more effective than embodied movement and emotional release as a clarification and transformation tool

* Enlightenment does not exist; enrealment does. (Be real now.) And it’s a relative experience, changing form as we and this changes form

* We are form, and we are here to in-form our humanness

* If there is an "ultimate path," it's downward (rooted) and horizontal

* There is no distinction between our spirituality and our humanness

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The wool has been pulled over our eyes. Men who were too unhealthily egoically to admit that they couldn’t deal with their humanness, their feelings, their trauma, had to find a system that smokescreened their avoidance. They found it. It’s called "Enlightenment." It’s also called "Spiritual Mastery."

And it usually involves leaving the world, in one form or another. This way, they can convince themselves and others that they have mastered the one true path.

In fact, Enlightenment is just a construct that is intended to avoid the multi-aspected nature of reality.

In fact, they are mastering nothing. They are merely fleeing their fragmentation, their confusion, and the fact that they don't know how to find their center in the heart of the world.

Don't be fooled. They know less about reality than day to day people. They know less about reality than those who live from their hearts.

What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self. Those models may invite us to detach in an effort to see ourselves through a different lens, but they will not leave us out there, floating into the eternal emptiness and calling that a life.

Detachment is a tool; it’s NOT a life.

The models we need will then invite us back into our bodies, back into our hearts, and back into relatedness with each other. (No more "enlightened" masters sitting in caves while the women of the village bring them food. If you can’t find your transformation in the village, you haven’t found s**t).

They will invite us to integrate what we find "out there" with who we are "in here." They will invite us to embody the now, rather than to pretend we have found it in the heart of our dissociation.

It’s time to co-create spiritual models that begin, and end, within our wondrous humanness.

It’s not "out there," dear friends. It’s right here, inside these aging body temples.

~ Jeff Brown