"Pilgrims of Place"

Powers of Place Initiative is a remarkable (and gorgeous) website and cyber-meeting place for those who recognize that places and people have a vital, living, flexible connection with each other. One of the best features of Powers of Place is "The Field," a terrain of the website where you can sign up and be in communication with others doing interesting things to delve more intimately into the question of place... spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and artistically.

A recent article on the site by Maila T. Davenport describes three different ways to be a "pilgrim of place," in this case the Love Creek area of Santa Cruz, California, which underwent a terrible mudslide that killed a child. Davenport joins two other healers, each with a different experience, approach, and perspective. Her story shows how "we live in layers of lived experience and each one operates from a particular kind of intelligence, telling a vital part of a place's Story."

David Hume on Wounded Places

Today I came across an essay by the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume, "A Treatise on Human Nature." Turns out that in 1739, Hume was considering how what I call wounded places affect people. Here's what he wrote about the difference between places that have undergone some kind of emergency and those that are just not very attractive:

"A barren or desolate country always seems ugly and disagreeable, and commonly inspires us with contempt for the inhabitants. This deformity, however, proceeds in a great measure from a sympathy with the inhabitants, as has been already observ’d; but it is only a weak one, and reaches no farther than the immediate sensation, which is disagreeable. The view of a city in ashes conveys benevolent sentiments; because we there enter so deep into the interests of the miserable inhabitants, as to wish for their prosperity, as well as feel their adversity."

Now, we can (and should) argue that it is arrogant and insensitive to contempt for those who live in a poor, unlovely place. But what's interesting here is that three hundred years ago Hume was thinking about how nature strikes the mind and heart in different ways, depending on what has happened to it.

How can we move deeper into this question? How can we assess our own responses to a city torn apart by an earthquake... and a city falling into disrepair as a result of poverty? Where is the "environment" in each? Where is "Nature?" Where does our compassion lie in each circumstance?

James Hillman on Beauty

Here's something from that innovative and opinionated psychologist James Hillman:

"That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty. For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first, a priority that accords with pagan philosophy rather than Christian. Beauty before love also accords with the all-too-human experience of being driven to love by the allure of beauty" (from "The Practice of Beauty" in Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley, with David Shapiro).

Hillman goes on to say that what's really repressed in psychology today is not violence, not misogyny, not child abuse: it's beauty and the acceptance of how important beauty is to the well-being of people. Perhaps there wouldn't be so much absenteeism at work, he suggests, perhaps the attention span of school students would improve, if people could spend time in places that were lovely and cared for rather than sterile and ugly.

It's a great essay, worth buying the book for, although there are a lot of other interesting pieces in this collection as well.

A Brief Respite from (Electric) Power

I arrived home late Monday night after leading a workshop in Puget Sound, Washington, to discover that Hurricane Irene had knocked out the power in our rural community. Yesterday morning I was able to work on my laptop until the battery ran down, then my husband and I drove to Scranton, 35 miles away, and spent a few hours in a coffee shop, recharging our electronics and catching up on email.

We then bought some bags of ice and went home to move the food from the refrigerator into coolers. Even though practically everything on my to-do list involves the internet or the computer, I was looking forward to cooking dinner on the gas stove, then spending the evening reading by kerosene lamp. In late afternoon, however, the power came back on.

What, I wondered, would we as a culture do if the internet really went haywire? Forget the monumental problems that banks, airlines, governments would have keeping their systems running. How would we behave as individuals? I like to think that, despite the shock and initial inconvenience, we’d take some pleasure in the new reality. In the evening people might haul out old board games to play. Couples might sit in front of the fireplace holding hands and talking. Parents might tell stories to their children. Students on college campuses might once again exchange ideas in the student union instead of sitting in isolation over their smart phones. When the power was eventually restored, we would all be relieved. But perhaps we would also feel a tug of regret, as I did yesterday, that something creative, quiet, intimate, and sweet that had briefly touched our lives had now been snatched away.

Where Art Confronts Anxiety

An article in the Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times discusses Andrew Moore's photographs of the crumbling grandeur of Detroit: the abandoned Beaux-Arts railroad station (above), the hollow steel skeletons of former assembly rooms in the Ford plant, a moldy carpet in what was once Henry Ford's office. Although some people, particularly residents of Detroit, have criticized Moore's work as "ruin porn" that presents only a negative view of the city, Moore obviously finds a strange beauty in what he sees. He describes Detroit and his photos of it as the place "where art confronts anxiety."

The emergence of art from waste and the grand visions of former times also suffuses the work of photographer Emmet Gowin, who took aerial black-and-white photos of the Hanford Nuclear plant, mining operations in Montana, and the battlefields of Kuwait.

What the work of both these photographers has in common with the philosophy of Radical Joy for Hard Times is a willingness to pause and look more closely at what would seem, on the surface, to be so ugly and obsolete that it requires nothing more than to be ignored. A quick look at the old Detroit train station evokes sadness; one at the Hanford Plant a sense of awe and fear. But Moore and Gowin show that the willingness to simply witness without judgment reveals new beauties.

In the work of Moore and Gowin, however, the human is absent, and the message is that in these places there is no threshold whatsoever over which humans can cross. It is as if all the people who built these places, worked in them, lived in them are as extinct as the activities that went on there. With Radical Joy for Hard Times, one actually enters those deserted places and spends time there. The resulting photographs would zoom out to show not just the place but the people contemplating the place, the people telling their stories about what the place meant and still means to them. Finally they would show the people making an act of beauty from found objects, so that deserted, desolate place acquires, quite simply, new meaning, new purpose, new beauty.

Solastalgia: The Pain People Feel When the Place They Love Is Under Assault

"Is There an Ecological Unconscious," by Daniel B. Smith was published in the New York Times Magazine more than a year ago, but it's such an important piece that it's worth recirculating. Smith explores the science and psychology in the relationship between humans and nature.

Smith opens the article with the story of Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosophy professor who coined the term "solastalgia," meaning “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” Albrecht came up with the term after getting calls from people suffering from anxiety, stress, and depression as a result of the massive open-pit coal mining taking place around their homes in Hunter Valley, a formerly lush and beautiful place known as the "Tuscany of the South."

Albrecht has continued to study the effects of ecological damage on people's psyches. This link will take you to his blog, where he pursues the subject from many different angles.

That's Glenn Albrecht in the photo above. It was taken on June 19, 2010, as he and his wife participated in the first annual Radical Joy for Hard Times Global Earth Exchange. He writes: "The location was chosen as it has a commanding view of the desolation of the Hunter Valley by open cut coal mining. My wife Jill and I selected white stones in the immediate area to build an Earth Dove [Radical Joy for Hard Times bird]. The Earth Dove had an olive branch placed in its beak as a peace offering to the earth. The olive branch was taken from the garden of a person in the Hunter Valley whose life has been badly affected by open-cut coal mining. She has had to move from her ancestral home to a new location to avoid mining, but now it too is under threat from an expanding coal mine."

Mockery as Art & Rebellion

Nicholas Kristof, whose work is always brave and inspiring, wrote in his column in The New York Times on Sunday, April 17 about the creative use of mockery as a tool for rebellion. He described the Serbian youth movement, Otpor (resistance), which started with just a few members and eventually mobilized enough support to spearhead the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic.

Besides practicing non-violence, the young rebels rallied people to their cause by making fun of the despot who was universally feared and hated. One stunt was to put Milosevic's picture on a barrel and roll it down the street, inviting people to hit it with sticks.

After Otpor helped bring about the overthrow of Milosevic, they began holding seminars for other oppressed peoples, including several Egyptians, who went to Serbia to get ideas for their own recent revolution.

The use of humor as an antidote to fear, of wild creativity to fight rigid oppression, of singing and talking in public places to fight the rule of silence—these are important tactics, not just for overthrowing tyrants but for dealing with other regimes (corporate, industrial, political) in which we feel powerless, humiliated, and helpless.

Radical Joy for Hard Times confronts environmental assaults with beauty. This is not elite beauty, beauty made only by the recognizably talented, but beauty re-imagined by ordinary people. Expressing sorrow and compassion for a place in the moment, we use materials found at the wounded place to transform our relationship with the place. It's democratic, empowering, and creative.

I'm very interested in exploring how other Otpor tactics might work for the environment.