The earth, that is sufficient,

I don’t want the constellations any nearer….

—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Introduction1

Indeed, things in this world coexist in an inexplicable, mystical way. Have you ever experienced a situation when you meditate on an idea for some time and, surprisingly, acquire confirmations from various sides? When haphazardly you come across books which reveal the thoughts, confirming your most timid assumptions, or recollect the fragments of your life that bring supportive facts? If such miracle happens, you begin to realize that all these disconcerted ideas and feelings are something more than pure coincidence.

It is exactly how I came up with the idea of lost tactility, and the need to regain it through poetry and magic. The revival of tactility, or balanced “interplay of senses” (Marshall McLuhan), I have come to believe, will help us restore true perception, which has been distorted by an overdose of visual and abstract technologies. This, in turn, will re-establish the harmony between the inner nature of humans and the nature of the whole universe.

Tactility Lost

I remember father buying our first TV in the early 50’s. It had a 12×12 cm screen, and in order to see something we had to put a magnifying glass filled with water. All our family would gather in front of a tiny screen, while I had other intentions: to go playing football with my mates instead of sitting still and gazing into a gray little box. Thus I experienced my first enmity to television. Today, while the quality of TV has dramatically increased, I still don’t feel myself attached to it, probably owing to an unperceived antidote received in childhood. But I see how the present allure of TV and other video technics (DVD-players) easily capture the unsteady minds of children (and adults), taking them away from reality. The problem of the addictive television has been discussed widely, and I won’t go into details (they are too complicated, too obvious, and the reader may consult special studies, e.g. [1]); I only want to reiterate: the visualization has won over the audio-tactile perception that existed in human history, long before the invention of a glossy screen.

On the contrary, I have always admired radio. Our family had a 1948 lamp radio, with a full range of short waves, beginning from 11 metres.2 I remember its magic green eye, and a host of voices coming from within, in all languages. Enchanted, I would sit for hours trying to perceive the meaning of the strange words, or simply enjoying the foreign sounds. Music would fill the room with the jazz melodies not known in this part of the world. Later, radio has become my primal source of information and entertainment. I used to listen to the BBC music programs, and gradually was able to understand political commentators. Even now, after more than 40 years, I remain an active listener of the short wave radio. I guess, the explanation is simple. Radio stimulates your imagination, it does not interfere with your vision, you remain on your own, and your perception is full. We may say, that radio has an audio- tactile modality.

Similar metamorphosis can be traced in the musical record business. The records of the 50s – 70’s, that you could not only listen but lovingly caress and put on a turntable, had had a much more profound effect on our perception (at least, for my generation) than the sleazy compact discs that, practically, have no tactile effect.

The printed book had had even more agreeable effect on perception. It would leave the field for thoughts and emotions, stimulate the imagination; besides, you could stop reading and sink into your own ideas provoked by the author’s views, and resume whenever appropriate, and that’s the wonder of the book. You cannot duplicate this experience with video, or TV, or even radio. You have to follow the imposed images passively, without personal attachment, almost unconsciously. In other words, your consciousness is paralyzed by the imposed images, while your perception is distorted. Shall I add to this the charm of an intimate tactile contact with the book, especially if the latter is a masterpiece in itself?

Computers take us even further down the road of alienation from ourselves. My dislike of computers has been spurred, probably,  by numerical methods of calculations (specifically, finite elements method in electromagnetics) as contrasted to analytical methods that I was involved with in the 70’s and 80′s as a researcher, and the subsequent invasion of  PCs in the 90′s. (Or was it vice versa? I mean, were the numerical methods spurred by the computers? I guess, it was a mutual amplification). Let me explain. In analytical method you are the major actor in finding the solution; in numerical, you delegate this function to a computer, and passively accept, or do not accept, the result.3 I mean, from now on, computers stood between the man and the world, and the humans were doomed to understand the world through the “thinking machines.” As a consequence, I felt enmity to science, and it has lost any attractiveness for me ever since. I understood that humans have yielded to machines their most revered, ultimate faculty, i.e., an ability to perceive the world first hand.

At that moment (1995),  I adventitiously ran into a book by Stephen Talbott called “The Future Does not Compute”,4 and immediately felt that I was not alone in my fears towards the plausible dominance of computers.  Talbott formulates many ideas that were brooding in me for years, and gives a thorough description of our phobias hidden in computers. Here is one citation from his book (p.356):

The computer gains a certain autonomy – runs by itself – on the strength  of  its  embedded reflection of human intelligence. We are  thus confronted from the world by the active powers of our own,  most mechanistic  mental functioning.

Thus we had to obey to the powers of the computers that usurped our intelligence, and had to sacrifice all our highest abilities, such as love, intuition, insight, compassion, etc., to the “ghost of the machine,” sitting inside us.

Thanks to Talbott, I was acquainted with the method of Waldorf education – a perfect antidote to turning us into bio-robots. The method has a strong tactile component in educating the child. Founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1919, Waldorf schools now constitute the fastest growing non-sectarian movement in the world. As Talbott writes: “The teacher’s bearing (his grace and his art, his reverence for nature, his deeply won authority); the materials of the classroom (natural objects such as wooden branches, seashells, flowers, rocks, fabrics, as well as the room itself); and above all the child himself – his volition and feeling fully as much as his intellect – all these things are consciously considered.”

However, the majority of school are still based on a belief that facts are building blocks of knowledge, and information has to be memorized. According to Ed Clark, a Mitchell prize laureate,5 “this educational methodology is clearly inappropriate, if not impossible in a culture, where the amount of available information doubles every few years.” He argues that the education has to be re-build on a principle that “humans seek meaning, not just facts and skills, as an intrinsic aspect of their full and healthy development.”6

So what was the first technology that began to alter our inherently balanced perception? According to Marshall McLuhan, it was a common printed book, or even a phonetic alphabet. In his ground-breaking book, The Gutenberg Galaxy [2], written in the 50′s, but, echoing with a 1995 Talbott’s book, McLuhan tracks down a long historical way on which humans have lost their inherent audio-tactility of language, mainly due to the print, introduced by Gutenberg in the 15th century.  McLuhan calls the phonetic language the “first technology” that abstracted men from the world, with even more abstraction followed through print. It has triggered linear perspective, visual thinking, and markets, which finally, brought us to machines, and, their later hypostasis, computers. McLuhan sees this artificial human predicament, but, paradoxically, relies on the electronic world (“global village”) as a possible retreat into tribalism, which, presumably, regains  the lost tactility.   I say “paradoxically”,  because, as S.Talbott has shown, this is not the case: the monster of abstraction becomes even more shrewd and destructive.

However, there is an attempt to authorize the development of machines from the side of philosophers which see the “naturalness” in increasing complexity of the artificial world. According to those scientists, we, humans, are  bound to develop our faculties through ever more sophisticated machines (nanotechnology, genetic engineering, etc) , in order  to fight against the natural disasters, decease, imperfect genomes, possible asteroids, depletion of resources, etc, and, eventually, I reckon, reach the state of immortality. But note: complexity refers largely to technologies, no one is talking about raising the abilities of humans as such. The more complex are the machines, the more vulnerable are humans.

The protesting voices are weak or are made so. Non-the-less, some are brave enough to get through the mass-media (as the case with Stephen Talbott shows), they receive both indignation and praise.7

Poetic paradigm

Having become disenchanted in science, I swiftly turned to poetry, with some rapture and gratitude. I saw within it the only powers that could oppose the Machine.

Basically, poets sensed that something was wrong much earlier than philosophers. One who studies the history of human thought inevitably runs across two main lines of philosophical knowledge, viz. science, a rational approach to the world phenomena, and poetry, a direct insight into the world.8 The gap between them has not decayed over the years, on the contrary, it is only growing, and now is entering its critical, existential phase.

In Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan had attempted to give an account of this poetic sensitivity. He is concerned with the lost “interplay of senses,” and hence the impoverishing of perception due to visual, rationalist bias. He formulates his conclusions convincingly, calling Pope, Dante, Shakespeare, Rablais, Blake and others for witnesses. Who are the accused, then? Descartes, Newton, Bacon, Gutenberg, as well as their followers, obsessed by “visualization of knowledge”; rationalists, verifying the world with their logic; specialists, dissecting the world into segments. «This world is too round, it has to be flattened a bit” – was King Lear’s response to a remark about the “priceless interplay of senses.”9

It is often acknowledged, that science has greatly contributed to the technical development of civilization, but failed to satisfy our higher aspirations. The rational paradigm, in many cases, has become irrational as it provoked multifaceted crisis in human perception and habitat. Poetry, on the other hand, while always being regarded as “mystic, irrational,” now happens to be in more coherence with the ancient wisdom and the physics of the subatomic world.10

I will try to elaborate a little on this. The meaning of life cannot be understood merely intellectually, one needs to use the methods of poetry to merge with Creation and thus directly perceive its beauty and true meaning. There are special “techniques” that assist in seeing the world poetically. Such techniques were elaborated both in the East and West,11 and, of course, constitute the essence of art.

This intuitive knowledge of harmony has been fostered in previous centuries but is forgotten now in view of the prevailing scientific mindset.  The universal laws of harmony are both present in science and poetry, though. Poetry can help portray the scientific truths in more holistic, unraveling way, describing the connections between phenomena metaphorically; on the other hand, science provides limitless material for poetic aspiration and fantasy.12

Unfortunately, scientists too often are consumed by their own interests, and ignore the laws of nature (e.g., environmental ethics) which lead to a specialist view of the world with all lamentable consequences. I know how a scientist can be entranced by his work. A hunter is awakened in him. He is carried away by theories and hypotheses, and dwells in the forest of formulas, often forgetful of the mundane world. He feels good, though the world may suffer.

But such committed scientists are few and far between. As a rule, scientists operate in a team that has regulations and specific “ethics,” reminding of a medieval order. Today, many scientists experience remorse while working for large corporations or behemoth institutions, but unable to stop their research. To my mind, the role of scientists and engineers has to be drastically changed to acquire a truly ecological attitude. This rehabilitation of scientists should be conducted by poets and environmentalists. Fortunately, we see an increasing number of “proselyte” scientists refusing to develop harmful technologies and joining the environmentalist camp.

Poetry, as contrasted to science, has never caused harm to nature. It is born out of enchantment, and can be compared to religion, but unlike the latter, has a creative vector. Poetry must be viewed in a broader context than is usually thought. It incorporates arts, music, literature, craftwork, philosophy, and meditation. It can be expanded on every human activity provided that the latter happens spontaneously, and in tune with the universal laws of nature.

Poetry speaks deeper language than science, it operates through metaphors rather than facts, it uses another kind of imagination.13 In genuine eco-poetry, thoughts and feelings cannot be separated. Science, on the contrary, is using an ever increasing abstraction as a method of probing the world. It is concerned with facts, rather than beauty. Computers and other instruments have formed an environment through which men were forced to obtain knowledge of the world, but which, paradoxically, increasingly moves away them from the goal. For the goal is not the burden of knowledge, but the blessing of joy.

Tactility Regained

The only powers that is able to fight this “scientific spiritualism” is regained tactility. This can be achieved by fostering humans’ inherent creativity, which can by-pass the application of machines and regain human dignity.

We are always yearning to be among others, to touch them and to love them. This is our in-born tactility, so well documented in the following lines:

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing,
 Laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arms ever
So lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this
 Then?
There is something in staying close to men and women and
 Looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that
 Pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

—Walt Whitman, Sing The Body Electric

We need to feel this world with our own senses, these priceless qualities that cannot be matched even by most elaborate machines.

What we begin to lack is the special character of our hand. The Friedrich Engels’ “The hand made us, humans” still remains valid. Painting, music, sculpture and other arts are being created by human hands. Any intermediary agent destroys the magic of art, alienates the creator from his/her creations. In manual work, the more complex manual operations, the closer is man to his destination, the nobler he, or she, is (writing, drawing, playing musical instruments, weaving, sculpture, any manual work).

We love through hands, we express our deepest feelings through hands, such as holding, shaking, touching. We can gesticulate, using hands to highlight our emotions. Fortunetellers can see our fate through hands. Taoists have developed an elaborate science of hand symbols that can influence our life…

According to Tolstoy, “A man avoiding manual work, may be intelligent, but not wise.” The benefits of manual work for human emancipation are many and have been stressed by such thinkers as Thoreau and Gandhi. Have you noticed that during manual work our brain becomes clarified? Thoughts come and go in a more consistent way, turbulent senses retreat and calm down? Have you ever noticed that after a day of physical work, the sleep comes easily and you fall almost at once into profound, relieving, child-like sleep?

Our intellect surpasses any computer since we know beforehand the goal of mental work, and this goal overrides the mere result of computations. According to Howard Gardner,14 in addition to the commonly accepted verbal and mathematical modes, there are “musical, spacial, kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal intelligences.” In other words, we can think “bodily,” incorporating all of our senses, not only brain. Each of us has a special bent for at least one of these intelligences, each of us is a genius in its kind.

Our imagination can be displayed in any of our activities, and it is directed towards creativity (conscious or unconscious). This is the most complex and mystical quality of humans. All that was created by human culture is the sorcery of imagination. Paradoxically, technologies while being the product of imagination, in the end, are prone to kill it. Television, more than anything, is paralyzing imagination and deprives us of our main asset – the ability of fantasy. A computer goes even further: it bereaves us of self-conscious thinking.

Human faculties, such as manual skills, intellectual thinking and fantasy (poetic thinking) are in close relation; by eliminating one of these faculties, others become withered and underdeveloped. Computers in this respect are destroying all three faculties.

Our creativity must not be hostile to nature. As contrasted to “hype creativity” of mass-media, or aggressive technological development, it is through the loving tactile contact with nature that humans are becoming nobler and more exquisite creatures.

We, humans, possess many qualities that go beyond reasoning, or logic. There’s much wisdom accumulated in ancient times (such as tantra in the East, or alchemy in the West). But it is also important that we develop our own cultural context. We need to be ourselves, above all, and develop a strong “sense of the place.” This will strengthen cultural diversity and beauty in the world. I see the potentialities primarily in art, craftwork, music and magic.

Humans need to develop their inherent faculties to overcome the limits imposed by materialism, or, by the words of Tagore, “the everyday monstrosities.” And what’s more: these faculties do not require huge investments, complex scientific experiments, or “resources” of the Earth; instead, they feed upon our unfathomed spirituality.

In this respect, we may point at the faculties that our ancestors had known long before we were lost on the  way.  In Tantra, for example, we find exercises to develop extra psychic powers and awareness. They include clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairtactition, clairfaction and clairsentience.15 Any one of these modes of awareness may be dominant in a person, similarly to the above mentioned set of intelligences. I tend to think that modern sciences cannot explain many things, and we have to be much more diligent to graduate to a higher level of understanding.

The Earth, that is sufficient…

Tactility means intimate connection to earth and people. We cannot live being separated from both. But modern civilization is tearing us from the earth, and its citizens, it has led us nowhere. Capitalism separated us by furtively expousing the idea of competition. Communism took our souls in exchange for social wealth. Religion withdrew us from this tangible blessed Earth.

Fortunately, there always were visionaries in history who tried to enlighten the “unwise man-child.” Such were Rousseau, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Tagore, Gandhi. Their voices are heard among the new generations of environmentalists. Many new voices are being added to this growing choir, coming from activists, poets, scientists, and ordinary people.

All people tend to lean to each other, they lean to nature, for this is their inborn tactility. This life-strong anarchistic movement is breaking barriers, seen and unseen, that have been constructed by politicians and priests for so long. New paradigms appear. New economy. New ethics. I think there are many common ideals that unite, for example, Tolstoy communities, Buddhist sanghas, and self-sustained organic farmers. William Orphus in an article Notes for a Buddhist Politics16 cites five general principles that may refer to all such communities, viz., respectful tolerance, secular and spiritual equality, emphasis on duties, simplicity, and nonviolence.

But opposition to such politics from the wealthy class is relentless. The tension in the world is growing daily, or, maybe, even hourly. The world that was built on individualism and materialism for the last several centuries agonizes, but is tough on giving way to a new perception of humans – as collective, spiritual creatures, and the Earth – as a goddess. All our institutions based on the pursuit of “progress,” consumption, industrialism, suddenly appear obsolete and poorly conceived, despite all its high-praised rationality. The wars that we witness today are the convulsions that the new world engenders. Or rather, it is the same old world that is struggling to throw away the chagrin skin of imposed rationality and reconsider its genuine, tactile, relations to earth.

I have a copy of Breughel’s painting at home, The Fall of Icarus, depicting the sunrise over our magnificent Earth. At the forefront, we see a plot of land with a busy ploughman; at the background – a small figure, floundering in the sea waters. This is Icarus who ignored his father’s advice not to rise too high in the sky. Too fast he flew, too high ascended in the sky, for the scorching sun soon melted the wax and scattered feathers in the air. In desperation crushes Icarus from a dreadful height. Yet the ploughman does not make note of the figure, he has to plough the earth.

Isn’t is so with us, who, having been torn off the ground, sooner, or later will crush from the heights of abstraction and self- esteem?

About the author

Viktor Ivanovitch Postnikov is a Russian-born independent scientist (DSc.) who lives in Kiev, Ukraine. A prolific poetry translator, he has also translated books on both eastern philosophies and deep ecology, and written many essays on Russian anarchism and eco-poetry for journals and other publications.

References:

[1] Mander, Jerry., Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television New York: William Morrow/Quill, 1977
[2] McLuhan, M.H., Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto University Press, 1992)
[3] Talbott, S.L. The Future Does Not Compute (O’Railley & Associates, 1995)
[4] F.Capra et al, Guide to Ecoliteracy (A publication of the Elmwood Institute, 1993)
[5] Joy, Bill, Why The Future Does Not need Us? (Wired, 2000)
[6] Owen Barfield. Poetic Diction, A Study in Meaning.= (Wesleyan University Press, 1973)
[7] Capra, F., The Tao of Physics (Bantam books, 1980)
[8] Postnikov, V. , Eco-poetry The Trumpeter, Vol. 17-1. 2001
[8] Tagore. R. , Our Universe Trans by Indu Dutt. (Jaico Books, 1980 )
[9] Tagore’s Testament, Trans. by Indu Dutt (Jaico Books, 1982)
[10] Talbott, S. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst (O’Reilly & Associates, 1995
[11] Dharma Rain Ed. By Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (Shambhala, 2000)
[12] Gavin and Yvonne Frost, Tantric Yoga (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Ltd, Delhi, 1996)

Endnotes

1 This article was written in 2005 for the Trumpeter ecosophic journal.

2 In 1949, Stalin introduced jamming and banned the manufacturing of short-wave radios as a countermeasure against the launching of the US-sponsored Radio Free Europe station, broadcasting over the Soviet Union from Munich, West Germany. This had broken the fragile audio-tactile contact that was about to adjust itself between the East and the West.

3 In many applications, the solutions can be obtained only through the so-called numerical modeling. Usually, this envisages the writing of the system of fundamental equations that cannot be resolved analytically and transforming it into a very large number of simple approximate relations (finite elements) that are being calculated by computer. The outcome of such solution, generally speaking, cannot be known beforehand. An interesting reflection on this phenomenon we find in McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy.

4 Stephen L.Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute (O’Railley & Associates, 1995), p. 356.

5 In “Guide to Ecoliteracy,” F.Capra et al, (A publication of the Elmwood Institute, 1993)

6 Ibid.

7 For example, see an amazing confession of Bill Joy, a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems in an article called “Why The Future Does Not need Us?” in a Wired magazine, Spring, 2000.

8 Here, poetry is not to be confused with religion, although there is an intimate connection between the two. This interesting and vast topic is outside the scope of the article.

9 Shakespeare, King Lear.

10 Capra, F., The Tao of Physics (Bantam books, 1980)

11 Postnikov, V. 2001. “Eco-poetry.” The Trumpeter: Vol. 17-1

12 Tagore. R. 1980. Our Universe. (Indu Dutt trans). Jaico Books.

13 Owen Barfield. Poetic diction. A Study in Meaning. (Wesleyan University Press, 1973)..

14 In the “Guide to Ecoliteracy,” F.Capra et al, (A publication of the Elmwood Institute, 1993)

15 Gavin and Yvonne Frost, Tantric Yoga (Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Ltd, Delhi, 1996)

16 In a book “Dharma Rain” (Ed. By Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, Shambhala Publications, 2000)

By Viktor Postnikov

Demon sitting, Mikhail Vrubel, 1890

The small volume before me is a treasured book that I inherited from my father’s library. It is a posthumous collection of verses by Alexander Blok (1880–1921), one of the greatest Russian lyricist of the 20th century, if not the greatest. The book was prepared by the author and published by the Petrograd publishing house in 1924, three years after his death. This small book became a constant source of inspiration for me, especially during the 1990s when Russia itself seemed to be fading away. It was then that I felt an urge to preserve Russian poetry, which seemed most precious to me. Among the many beloved Blok’s poems, I unexpectedly came across a series of poems called The Bubbles of the Earth, written between 1905 and 1906. An epigraph from Macbeth, which prefaced the series, read:

“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are ones of them”

It intrigued me. After reading several poems, I had no doubt that those were pagan inspirations. The very first poem amazed me with its clear ecological motif:

the marsh priestling

On a spring-thawed patch,
Little Priestling of Marsh
Is staying
And saying his prayer.

His ragged black frock
Like a barely seen rock
Over tussock
And in tranquility of the reddish light
Little devils are out of sight;
And the evening grace
Has entwined him with delicate lace…
And the charms of the twilight,
And the rustling of space…

Quietly he prays,
And he smiles as he stays,
Bowing his head to the bog.
And with medicinal herbs
He would heal every hurt,
Every sickened and dying frog.

Then he would bless it and say,
“Now you’re free on your way,
You can go to your native log;
My heart is pleased
With every beast
And every creeper that exists”.

He resumes his quiet praying,
For the weed
That is swaying,
For a sickened beast’s hope,
For the Roman Pope…

Have no fear to be drown in a bog -
You’ll be saved by his blackened frock.

(17 April 1905, Easter)

Reactionary symbolist

We haven’t heard much about “green” Blok. Moreover, he does not fit into any literary genre. In the Soviet times, Blok was portrayed as a ‘reactionary symbolist’ who finally ‘accepted’ the revolution. On the contrary, his friends—symbolists and the religiously-minded intelligentsia—turned away from him when he descended on the ‘sinful earth’ and put Christ at the forefront of the revolution in his controversial poem Twelve.

In his youth, Blok was captivated by the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, one of those ‘mad’ prophets that had always been characteristic of Russia. The following lines of Solovyov’s Eternal Feminine fascinated him:

Eternal Feminine in flesh
Now treads the earthly quarters,
New Goddess prophesies light
Where heavens mixed with waters.

During his life, Blok would stay loyal to the theme of the Eternal Feminine. Any fashionable religious or political theories that infested Russia could not change him. In the brilliant essays written shortly before death, Blok discovers the essence of his poetry and his life purpose as the service to Earthly Beauty, which is manifested in Eternal Feminine, and only that.

The world has long been fed up with violence and brutality. Arguably, this brutality conforms to the masculine ethos sanctioned by Judeo-Christianity. This brutality strangely comforms with the ‘otherness’ of the next world, with a dream of after-life. Indeed, why care of the earthly beauty if much more beauty is awaiting us in heaven?

Blok turns his gaze away from heavens to the ‘sinful’ earth – it is here, on earth, where he seeks his Beautiful Lady. He anticipates Her arrival, yet fears that he’s not going to live up to Her coming:

You retreat to the fields without doubt,
Let Your Name be forever praised!
The spears of sunset will touch on my brow,
The reddish light will spill on to my face.

In the dark days I’ll press to your flute,
To your sweet golden flute I’ll succumb,
And if prayers are silenced and mute,
I will sleep, long-oppressed, in the tomb.

You will come in your deep purple gown
To enlighten yet another abode.
Let me breathe in this half-drowsy crowd,
Let me kiss the curved edge of your road…

(1905)

Extravagant paganist

The world is ruled by a feminine archetype, and Blok perceives this archetype not only in women he loves, but, above all, in Nature. Blok sees Eternity not in any fictitious, or speculative ‘heaven’, but in the living, intimate, and tangible earth:

Love Eternity reigning in mires,
Their powers never deplete.
Grassy lands never yield to the fires,
Smallest thickets will stand up the sleet.

Rusty tussocks and stumps get to know
Your reposeful captivity age;
They are staying unchanged in the flow –
You are full of perennial change.

Love the destiny’s solitude glowing,
Inconceivable sacred Unknown.
It is just the Eternity flight
That has silenced the lips of our own.

(1905)

It is not accidental that Blok was infatuated with the paintings of Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910), an original Russian artist, his contemporary. Vrubel is the same ‘enlightened pagan’ as Blok. One may even say, that Vrubel was “Blok in painting”, or Blok was “Vrubel in verse.” Both definitions are equally valid. This paganism of both geniuses was not to the liking of keepers of Christian purity, and it is still frowned upon by them.

It must be said that at the dawn of the 20th century, Russia witnessed a new healthy—and in essence, ecological—direction in art and philosophy, which was suppressed on one hand by rising Marxism (strictly a political movement), and on the other hand by those intelligentsia who had gone to mysticism and religion.

Blok had no need to invent mysticism or seek otherworldliness: all nature was to him mysterious, enigmatic, and marvellous. This infatuation with Nature had not been shared by many of his colleagues, which earned him the label of extravagance.

marsh sprites

I have whipped you out of sight
Through the midday soot;
To await the evening light
Of quiet solitude.

Now – we’re sitting on a moss
In the heart of fen;
Crescent with a crooked mouth
Is our only friend.

I’m like you – a nature geek,
With a spooky face;
Quiet and shy like forest creek
In a hidden place.

Loosely hangs a parting bell
On my foolish cap.
Rivers weaving through a spell
Of a nature’s lap.

And we’re sitting, little fools –
Greenish caps on heads;
Peeping from the low-land pools
Into wider meads.

Dream deliriums of water,
Rusty run-off wave…
We’re forgotten echoings
Of a someone’s rave…

(1905)

Accepted the Bolshevik revolution

To the horror of his friends, Blok was one of the few who accepted the Bolshevik revolution, not because he shared its ideals (although he probably did at the outset), but because he saw in it the manifestation of Nature’s elements. The time for humanism of the individual was gone (this was proclaimed by Nietzsche), and was replaced by a new era of mass homogeneity and Anti-Christ (‘a leader’). Having the intuition of an artist, Blok spoke in a masterly way of this period in his 1919 essay The Collapse of Humanism. In the face of the current ecological apocalypse, the poems of Blok seem prophetic. What is the artist’s role in new circumstances? Blok gives the answer in this definitive poem: to continue to be yourself, and to get back to the ‘ancient work’:

requital – a prologue

No end in life’s unfolding space,
We live commensurate with chances,
We either face the gloomy sentence
Or see the brilliance of Face.
But you, the artist, keep your credence
In laws unshaken. Be resolved
To tell the scoria from gold.
You’re bestowed with impassive edge
To measure all that you envisage.
Your mind – let it be firm and cute
Erase the accidental visage –
And you will see: the world is good.

Now, view the light – the dark is lit,
Permit all things unhurried flow,
All which is sacred, which is low,
Through heat of soul, through cold of wit.

“To erase the accidental visage…”, and “to permit all things’ unhurried flow”… Blok appeals to the myth of Ziegfried, in search of a needed courage:

Thus Ziegfried tempers sword o’er furnace:
Now enters into the red-hot ambers,
Now dips into the water deep –
And the magic sword receives its firmness.

But, having sensed the impending world war, the poet doubts his ability to withstand the challenge:

Who forges sword? – The fearless knight,
While I am helpless in my rave,
As you, as all – just a clever slave,
Created from the dust and blight.
This world seems terrible to me …
The hero is deprived of stand –
His hand is in the peoples’ hand,
A conflagration broke the land.
And every heart, and mind, and thought –
Has its own despotism and law…
And the thirsty dragon opens jaw
To gorge the Europe in glee.
Who shall defeat the dragon plight?
Don’t know: our side, obscure in sight,
As in the past, its future’s dim,
And smells of ashes in the night.

But the tune forever stays, instead:
There’s always someone there to sing
Amid the crowd. Lo! His head
A beauty offers to a king.
There, on a scaffold, singer stands
And looks into the butcher’s eyes;
Here, for his poems and his stance
The crowd gets him stigmatized.
And I will sing… You won’t succeed
In stifling my inflaméd creed.
Let church is empty and obscure,
Let pastor sleeps; before the mass,
I‘ll tread into a dewy pass,
And turn the rusty door-lock key
To sneak into eternity,
And in the scarlet dawn will serve
My own mass.

The Beauty that moves minds

“My own mass…” In the end, the only refuge for an artist is his or her religious ideals that are beyond the control of the masses, or their pastors. These ideals, or ‘vows of the ancient past’, have been nurtured for many generations, and were handed from father to son; from poet to poet. This is the Beauty that moves minds and inflames hearts.

Thou breathed this dawn, now, bless my tales!
May I expose you some details
of secret life? Of what is thriving,
Of how the wrath consumes the striving,
How freedom and the youth are one,
How spirit reigns in everyone,
How father to his son imparts
The vows of the ancient past ?
Some two-three links of generation
And carbon went a transformation;
Under a kick of stubborn strain
It turned into a precious grain.
So blow, without a restful sleep,
Let living vein is running deep,
The diamond glistens from afar –
My angry iambus, crush the stones!

(1911)

Blok continues a lineage that starts from Pushkin and Lermontov. It is hard to name another lyricist that has had such a deep understanding of the artist’s role in the turbulent times. He himself however, could not survive the revolution and civil war, dying at the age of 41. But after all, no great Russian poet lived any longer. It is highly symbolic that Blok entitled his last autobiography (which he didn’t finish) The Confession of a Pagan. His entire life can be viewed as a poet’s desperate attempt to serve and perpetuate Earth’s beauty, despite all hardship and human follies. It was indeed, a demonic attempt.

O, I would madly, madly live,
Perpetuateall the existent,
Ennoble all the petty instant,
and realize all the conceived !

Let hardship suffocate with sorrow,
Let heavy dreams preclude my way,
The cheerful fellow of the morrow
Will say of me, some other day,

We must forgive his gloomy features,
He’s got a jolly inner mind,
A bright and effervescent creature,
A freedom’s celebrated kind!

(Note : All translation from Russian by the author of this article)

About the author

Viktor Ivanovitch Postnikov is a Russian-born independent scientist (DSc.) who lives in Kiev, Ukraine. A prolific poetry translator, he has also translated books on both eastern philosophies and deep ecology, and written many essays on Russian anarchism and eco-poetry for journals and other publications.

By Suzanne Duarte
May 15, 2009

“You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.”—Gurdjieff

Dearest Ones of Future Generations,

I thought you might find it interesting to hear what I’m observing of those people I know about who are just waking up to the actual state of the planet. Last week was Earth Day, an international day of observance for the Earth. For nearly 40 years, it has been a day when environmentalists have had a chance to provide a reckoning of the damage that industrial civilization has been inflicting on the natural world. It is usually a time when print media make some obligatory gesture of recognition that humans live on a planet that we depend upon and that needs our attention. This year the statements were a little more urgent than usual, especially about climate change, which is increasingly referred to as ‘climate emergency.’

The reason that we are in a climate emergency—in fact, a biological holocaust, as it was identified over 20 years ago—is that the dominant Western, globalized culture has been in a ‘cultural trance,’ drunk on oil, living in a delusional bubble for about 60 years. Now, the question is, is it unkind or rude or unskillful to try to wake people up from their cultural trance and point out that we are endangering the future of our species, and many others, to remain asleep? Is it ‘mean’ to wake somebody up to tell them that their house is on fire? A lot of people seem to think so. I’ve lost friends by trying to wake them up. Waking up at this time of the Great Turning from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining way of life is painful. Many people still don’t want to know, don’t want to think, because it would entail facing painful truths and making hard choices. They can stand to think about it only briefly on one day out of the year. This is the reason I write letters to the future.

I feel that beings of the future need and deserve an explanation for the destruction caused by my generation. And I can be more straightforward with you than with my contemporaries, for the aforementioned reasons. In the last resort, perhaps I am writing only to my future incarnations to remind them of what this lifetime was like, remind them of the dismay, frustration and pain of not being able to wake people up so that the future might be more liveable.

Difficult stage of waking up

In any case, this missive is about what I observe to be the difficult stages of waking up at this time of crisis and danger. There is complex inner terrain to traverse before we can identify the opportunities and the adventure that await us if we have the courage to wake up and make the Great Turning. The challenge is that the Great Turning requires a psychological transformation from childlike dependence on external authorities and their outworn belief systems, to a mature, individuated, authentic sense of responsibility for oneself and one’s effects on the world. This is a major transformation, much more than is normally implied when we, at this time, speak of ‘growing up,’ which in my culture means becoming a neat cog in the industrial machine.

It seems that the hardest part of waking up at this time is facing the fact that it is too late to avoid the pain, suffering and loss that could have been forestalled, had humans collectively heeded the warnings. The warnings were and are rational and scientifically based. The denial of the warnings was and is irrational, based on false beliefs. Pointing out that the denial was collective and irrational causes some people to point the ‘shame and blame’ finger at those who make this point. Instead of allowing themselves to evaluate the truth of the statement, they whine, “You’re shaming and blaming us. That’s not healing. You’re being negative and apocalyptic. We don’t want to hear it, and it’s your fault for not giving us the message of hope that we need.” This is a common shoot-the-messenger response, in which people who don’t like the message blame, or ‘shoot,’ the messenger.

The message of ‘hope’ that is demanded by these people is actually the hope that we don’t have to take responsibility for ourselves and our world by changing how we live, and with what we preoccupy ourselves. The hope that many people want is very conditional. They can only take hope if they are reassured that things will continue as they have been during this very extraordinary last few decades.

Cultural trance

This prevalent cultural trance prevents people from recognizing that the reality of living on Earth is unconditional. Our survival depends upon facing the reality of the larger living system upon which we depend, and that larger living system doesn’t make deals. We can’t bargain with it. We live within its jurisdiction. The Earth has been very patient. It has put up with a lot of abuse, but the biological life of living systems is quite fragile. The web of life is vulnerable to damage by machines. Living systems have limits and tipping points beyond which breakdown and/or evolution can occur. The limits to which we can push living systems have been in view for decades, as Richard Heinberg has helpfully summarized in Timing. Because the limits were ignored, we are now seeing and experiencing the tipping point stage, and systemic chaos can therefore be expected.

The reality is that, not only do we have to change the way we live, but we also need to recognize our part in creating this necessity. In order to survive we need to own this responsibility and grow up, so that we don’t repeat our mistakes again. That this message is taken as an insult is an ego-based default response that is irrational and childish. This is the crux of the reason that citizens of empire need to grow up. Growing up resets these immature default settings. Growing up means accepting responsibility, taking the blame upon oneself, acknowledging one’s blind spots, and one’s dysfunctional social conditioning. Growing up means getting honest and feeling remorse for the consequences of one’s childishness and self-deception. It is a humbling process.

This is where we are collectively right now. The vision of the Cassandra minority is turning out to be correct. But that is small comfort since they/we are still facing the wrath—and the consequences—of the majority, those who rejected foresight, and want to blame somebody, scapegoat somebody. The stages of grief have to be worked through in the process of waking up: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. Coming out of denial, the next reaction for most people is anger.

Sympathy and compassion

But I hope you of future generations can have some sympathy and compassion for those who are just waking up, because the discrepancy between the dream they are coming out of and the reality they must face is quite enormous. Some people talk about how “we need a new story,” a new cosmology, and this is true as far as it goes. But there are two facts that belie the simplicity of that statement. One is that the new story is still in gestation and isn’t yet a ‘live birth.’ The other is that the gap between the cultural trance of the old story and the unfolding reality of the world has never—in the history of our species—been so wide as it has become in Western civilization. The American Dream in particular has been so disconnected from the reality of the Earth that waking up from it is truly a ‘rude awakening’ that can seem traumatic. Although waking up may be most difficult for Americans, that dream has also entranced much of the rest of the world.

However, since I am an American, I can identify with the difficulty of waking up from the American Dream. I know from experience that it entails working through layers and layers of collective delusion: the sense of entitlement and security of being a citizen within the “greatest country the world has ever known”; the sense that ‘we’ (Americans) are the ‘best people’ and that living in the United States is an unsurpassable privilege and blessing for which we should be grateful; the sense that our country is superior and can do no wrong, and that it is ‘exceptional’ and will not collapse like other civilizations and empires; the sense that America is entitled to take what it wants from the rest of the world—by force if necessary; and the sense that loyalty to our country demands that we turn a blind eye to its wrongdoings and faults. These are the delusions of the citizens of empire, still living by the patterns of ancient tribalism.

Just to wake up to the injustices, lies, and crimes of our empire, and to realize that our arrogant assumptions of entitlement and superiority are baseless, takes a lot of courage; for to face these things means we must step out of the herd. Leaving the herd mentality of the majority behind is a necessary part of growing up.

The Empire is disintegrating

But once we’ve woken up to the injustices of our empire, the next step in growing up and facing reality is the realization that our empire is faltering and failing; in fact, it is disintegrating. As Heinberg says in A Beguiling Veneer Of Normalcy: “While surface appearances could lead one to think that not much has changed from the status quo ante, in fact the beams, rafters, and studs that hold up the façade of normal everyday existence in modern industrial society are rotting and crumbling. In essence, we are witnessing the shift from a century of unprecedented growth to a century of contraction.”

At this stage one peeks over the edge of the cloud or the cliff and begins to comprehend how far it is to the ground—how far we have to fall. This is where we truly begin to realize that we are living in a former empire at the end of the industrial age, and that ‘progress’ as we’ve known it is over. Then we begin to comprehend that the glories of the way of life we’ve taken for granted—the glamour, ease and convenience of the industrial age—can never, ever be repeated, because our civilization has stripped the Earth of the resources that are accessible through the use of fossil fuels, and fossil fuels are going away. As Heinberg has detailed for us, we have reached “Peak Everything” and after the peak, the only way is down.

This “Long Descent” or “Long Emergency”—as John Michael Greer and James Howard Kunstler, respectively, have described it in books by those titles—is the future that the majority of citizens of former empires have not yet been able to face. I don’t mean just Americans. I live in another former empire, the Netherlands. The sidebar below is an account of what I recently observed of the behaviour of ‘ordinary’ Dutch citizens in this overcrowded country where herd mentality is still very popular.

Waking up to gravitas

Waking up to living in a former empire at the end of the industrial age brings gravitas to one’s outlook, as Kurt Cobb suggests in Does understanding complexity beget a tragic view of life? One does not and cannot celebrate as the Dutch were celebrating outside my window. That kind of frivolous abandon is no longer possible once one has worked through the cultural trance, come down to Earth, and accepted responsibility. Then celebration takes on a decidedly more sober, mindful, even reverential tone.

But, dear ones of the future, few people in this former empire, Holland, or in America (which will soon be recognized globally as a former empire) have acquired the gravitas—the groundedness in reality—to prepare for the end of cheap oil, or any of the other circumstances that will radically change our supposedly ‘non-negotiable’ way of life.

So, if you can, try to see the wastefulness and triviality that are so prevalent at this time as the desperation of an immature culture that is resisting the necessity of a rite of passage, which only those capable of growing up are likely to survive. The ones who do survive will probably to be your ancestors. They will be the ones who woke up in time and prepared themselves for the end of the industrial age and climate change. They are the ones who will give birth to the new story.

With love and compassion for all beings,
Suzanne

Queens Day, April 30, 2009

Amsterdam, Netherlands

With the sun shining and temperatures in the low 60s, boats and barges full of people wearing bright orange, often standing shoulder-to-shoulder, float by on the canal, blaring loud music. The Dutch make a lot of noise celebrating their Dutchness on this national holiday, celebrating the chance to take a day off in the sunshine after a long, dark winter.

This is the way the Dutch have ‘fun’: they crowd together in the streets and on barges and boats, and make a lot of noise. They wear their national color, orange, to show their nationalistic solidarity. They play popular music at high volume and wave their arms in the air to express themselves. They get drunk and do crazy things. Today a driver drove his car into a crowd of people, and four people died. My Dutch husband said it was simply ‘mania,’ a mania he reported seeing on the streets yesterday as people prepared to ‘celebrate.’ The Dutch are prone to do crazy things when they have an excuse to relax their habitual stiffness.

I catch myself looking at these people unkindly. I am not only detached, but arrogantly so. Yet I immediately recognize that my arrogance is a cover for the sadness I feel, knowing that the loud display of color and sound is a cover for a psychological condition, of which the Dutch are in stubborn denial. I think about all the petroleum that is being wasted to power these people around and around the canals of the city, trying so hard to have a good time. What is behind this frivolity? Why do people waste time, energy and resources on such frivolity, if it isn’t an avoidance mechanism—an avoidance of the truth? Do they know at some level that they live in a former empire at the end of the industrial age? Is this the subconscious awareness, the anxiety that is fueling their manic ‘fun’?

I am reminded of the drunken parties of the Nazi elites, portrayed in many films, just before the fall of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide, which marked the end of World War II. This kind of frivolous abandon—also evoked by the image of the mad emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned—seems to be a compensatory measure of resistance to facing a reality that cannot be faced. The drunken parties precede suicide.

Not far from the Dutch, geographically or politically, is another former empire, Britain. Both the UK and the Netherlands have supported the American empire in its military adventures to control the supply of oil. But the Brits seem to be expressing their anxiety somewhat less frivolously—by attacking each other for policies that are meant to maintain the status quo and the illusion that economic recovery is possible. (The British are much better at publicly arguing with each other than the Dutch are.) However, things seem to be in a more advanced stage of economic and social breakdown in the UK than in Holland, and grassroots movements—notably Transition initiatives—are far more robust in the UK than in Holland. In fact, they started there.

I attribute the Transition movement’s birth in the UK to the deeper spiritual connection with the natural world that is traditional in the British Isles, and also a deeper understanding of the dark side of industrialism. After all, the industrial revolution started in England, which provoked several opposition movements—the Romantic poets, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Luddite protests against machines, not to mention many novels. It’s almost as though something in the British cultural psyche has been waiting and preparing for the end of the industrial age since it began.

Suzanne

About the Author

Suzanne Duarte has been teaching Buddhadharma, Deep Ecology, and Ecopsychology for over 30 years, and Peak Oil since 2005. Later this year she will launch the web site and blog Dharmagaians.org.

By Viktor Postnikov

Windmill generators at Findhorn Bay in Scotland

My first spiritual breakthrough came at the Schumacher College (UK) in 2004. Initially, my secret hope was to meet Fritjof Capra, whom I had known since the late 1970s by his Tao of Physics and his later books, especially The Turning Point and The Uncommon Wisdom. The course I was admitted to (special thanks to Jan Slakov and Patrick Curry) was called Earth, Spirit and Action. It was absolutely fantastic. Course leaders John Seed, Ruth Rosenhek, Starhawk, Alastair McIntosh and Verene Nicolas, each provided a “signpost” that unambiguously spoke to my deepest aspirations.

Undoubtedly, I had received many signposts before in my life, but I was blind to them, never paying attention to their significance. Verene Nicolas first stirred a conscious interest in my inner life patterns when she asked each of us to draw a design that could reflect our life journey. I drew the spiral with the “signposts” that I thought were important for me. I was amazed by the consistency of these signposts. Since then my life has become far more meaningful, and my direction soon was set once and forever.

I found poetry in John and Alastair, courage and magic in Starhawk, grace and profoundness in Verene. Although I did not meet Fritjof Capra, Stephan Harding gave a brilliant introduction to holistic science and Gaia theory. Satish Kumar, a spiritual teacher at the College, told about his personal pilgrimage and Hindu spirituality, which was especially appealing to me as I translated several books by Swami Sivananda and was generally hooked on yoga.

The magic of coming to Schumacher College could be illustrated by a mysterious incident. I had brought my favourite books of poetry by Rabindranath Tagore with me, and to my astonishment, the very first day as I ascended the staircase I saw a painting by Tagore himself hanging on the wall! It was a gift of the poet, who had visited the Centre! For me, it was a magically significant sign.

Another “signpost”

I left Schumacher College inspired and enriched by the course. But I needed to go further, to create something beautiful both for myself and out of respect for the teachers. Coming home, though, I found myself once again drawn in the same exhaustive political, social and personal turmoil. Obviously, most people around me were moving in different direction. I badly needed another “signpost.”

Thanks to David Orton, it came through my acquaintance with Douglas Tompkins. I had suggested several books for translation, and without even knowing me, he agreed to finance the project. That was magic. I spent two years in translating in Russian, editing and publishing the two radical authors William R. Catton and Jerry Mander. To my delight and to the delight of many others, the books have attracted the attention of many people and their impact is growing. In 2006 I felt that I need to go on. At that time, I became seriously interested in the Ecovillage movement and eco-localism as an alternative to capitalism. Then I remembered that somebody I met at Schumacher College was from the Findhorn Foundation. The name of that village kept resonating in my head.

In 2007 I was accepted for the Experience Week in the Findhorn Foundation — definitely another signpost. The Experience Week was my coming back to humanity. We danced, played games, touched one another, and laughed and fooled around like children. I badly needed that because I was experiencing enmity towards people around home at that time. People differ widely; sometimes it seems we belong to different species. Experience Week brought me together with a group of like-minded people, and soon we felt like one great family.

The psychological games and the direct tactile contact exercises of the course created a unity among us more than dry lectures ever could. In the ordinary life we avoid tactile contact, narrowing the circle with whom such contacts are deemed desirable or acceptable. We do not allow ourselves to behave in a child-like way. On the contrary, we pretend to be learned adults. This is a major difference between Schumacher College and the Findhorn Foundation. While the former is a serious adult education establishment, the latter is definitely more of a child-like playground. Possibly, the child in me had long been waiting to awaken.

During Findhorn’s’ Experience Week I met beautiful people from around the globe, both in our group and among the teachers. We met 80-year old Dorothy Maclean, one of the three founders of the Findhorn Foundation, and Craig Gibsone, the elder of the community, who is a shaman and a visionary. The stately architecture of the Cluny Hill College where I stayed vaguely reminded me of Schumacher College. But the excursions to the eco-village The Park near Findhorn Bay, the forest and the sea, planted the seeds of hope in me that some day I would live in nature.

Return to Findhorn

The very next year I enrolled in the Exploring Community Life course with a desire to develop an in-depth knowledge of the community. I landed in a group of six wonderful women and a fantastic facilitator (also a woman), and was absolutely pleased with my life. We were having a lot of fun together, and I definitely felt that I was at the right place. The Transformation Game was the crux of the program, a psychic journey through one’s own life. I played the game with two women from our group, and the experience was awesome. It was as if our lives were correlated and intercepted.

Meeting Craig Gibsone during the Experience Week was definitely another signpost. Craig told about his life in the ’60’s, his acquaintance with aboriginal culture, his study of permaculture, and his pioneering work with the founders of the ecovillage. I began seriously thinking about his course on Ecovillage Training, and how my own affiliation with alternative energy could fit into his course and the life in the ecovillage in general. I wrote him, and my wife and I were invited to join the course. I was not sure we could afford it until the very last moment, but after receiving a bursary, I knew we had to go.

The course had to begin on February, 14th, 2008. We flew to London on Friday the 13th. (Perhaps that was the reason for the cheap tickets?) The aeroplane took off into the snowy night sky with a shudder. However, the sky over London was clear. We took the midnight London-Inverness bus, and after endless attempts to sleep in a sitting position, reached Inverness thirteen hours later. The ancient Highlands capital greeted us with spring in its surrounding mountains, beautiful and fresh. Another bus to Forres, a little snack, and we were nearly in the village.

When we finally arrived at the Ecovillage we ran immediately to the community center, where the program had already started two hours previously. Gosh! It had been a stressful journey: Would the plane arrive on time? Would we catch up the bus? How we can exchange the money? But as soon as we saw Craig’s smiling face as he rose to hug us, all our fears evaporated and we began to relax.

The room was full of people, 32 participants from 15 countries, sitting in a circle. Each was given a few minutes to speak. The number of participants, the diversity of faces was at first overwhelming. To remember all their the names seemed a hopeless endeavour. Craig had two sympathetic facilitators, Gabriella and Elizabeth. Their friendly smiles immediately won our hearts. They had both been raised at Findhorn, and despite their youth, they are experienced facilitators. Following the Findhorn practice, we draw an angel for the group, it is Abundance. Then everyone draws his or her own angel. Mine is Clarity — exactly what I needed. The whole month confirmed the relevance of these “messages from above.”

Soon we become a family or tribe, or as someone put it, “a perfect ashram,” talented passionate youth, eager to change the world for the better. For the first time, my scepticism had been shaken. We thoroughly studied the principles of permaculture, which included People Care (building effective eco-villages), Fair Share (new social economy and sustainable food), and Earth Share (eco-design, wilderness restoration) presented by Craig and other teachers. Craig built his own house and garden on permaculture principles to act as a model and laboratory for all. My respect for Craig had grown enormously, as he masterly steered the program with ease, shamanic wisdom, and a child-like openness.

The fourth week was dedicated to the projects we developed around the course material. Each of us was to bring our expertise home and to implement a project. While rambling in the dunes of the nearby seashore during this time, I found a beautiful white Turbinella pirum shell. According to Wikipedia, “the shell has considerable significance in Buddhism, representing the beautiful, deep, melodious and interpenetrating sound of the Buddhadharma, which being appropriate to different natures, predispositions and aspirations of disciples, awakens them from the deep slumber of ignorance and urges them to accomplish their own welfare and the welfare of others.”

Could I have ever found a better sign?

About the author

Viktor Ivanovitch Postnikov is a Russian-born independent scientist (DSc.) who lives in Kiev, Ukraine. A prolific poetry translator, he has also translated books on both eastern philosophies and deep ecology, and written many essays on Russian anarchism and eco-poetry for journals and other publications.

Aknowledgement

My deepest thanks to Stuart Hertzog for tidying up the text and placing it on Dandelion Times.