Samantha at graduation (front row, far right)

Environmental Studies alumni Kelly Johnson just posted a marvelous interview she did with Samantha Hutchinson, a new Environmental Studies graduate whose thesis centered on place and community in the Ozarks. Samatha’s bioregional website for the Ozarks, Catawba Bean, focused on community, family and environment in the Ozarks. Kelly Johnson’s website also highlights on her thesis project, the writing and publication of Wings, Worms and Wonder: A Guide for Creatively Integrating Gardening and Outdoor Learning Into Children’s Lives. Kelly now spends her days giving presentations and workshops on the book, and consulting with schools and centers.

In the interview, Kelly writes that Samantha “….provides a voice for the Ozarks in the global online community, using her 5th generation knowledge, through social media as a venue to ‘reengage with indigenous information…presented in a palatable way’ that she hopes will encourage the reader (Ozark resident or not) to connect with their environment.” Read the whole interview here.

At the February 2013 residency, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Karen Campbell led a renga party, a chance to come together, experience Japanese treats and traditions, particularly the tradition of the renga. This ancient Japanese poetic form brings people together to write communal poems, each person adding more lines. Here is our renga on the theme of place, culture, home and endings:

Snow dims the trees

that sheltered our autumn conversations.

Moonlit halo of bone-cold radiance

memories forgotten, remembered

if only for an instant

This song is stuck in our heads

Its persistent melody in the collective bloodstream

Pulsing haunting beat

promises a rushing dawn

inspiration flight

and as we pull on our boots

we turn for one last glance

at the burning embers of the fire.

Yellow sparks flare, fad, drop, then grayed ash.

Memories on top of ashed memories.

Deep and penetrating into the night.

Sleep is not present

all that is here are memories

wrapped around the firs and pines

like snow, as snow, carrying

the ending to come out of this season

and as the ending comes,

we look forward to new beginnings

At the February 2013 residency, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Karen Campbell led a renga party, a chance to come together, experience Japanese treats and traditions, particularly the tradition of the renga. This ancient Japanese poetic form brings people together to write communal poems, each person adding more lines. Here is our renga on the theme of place, culture, home and beginnings:

We enter, shake the winter

from our feet, the warmth

of the fire melts

There are chocolate puddles in the

scraped wooden slats dirt snow warmth winter

Early morning, pink sky, cold, very cold

Warmth fills the house as the wood burns

across from windows filled with snowy

branches, a criss-crossed world

lit from the sky, the land.

The chickadees forge within the white

surviving, thriving in the thrill of the fight.

It brings them closer, and together, we watch.

Our breath on the window blurring the lines

of frost-work on the panes, blending

our musings with morning’s clarity.

Steam rising, tangled spirals aloft,

hands cupped tight, ceramic vessel, sweet warmth.

This is where it all started

brilliantly simple in its beauty and truth.

Icicles perfect, forms crack

upon the warming earth

where a bud sprouts.

Caryn’s talk on the place panel from the February residency

Wind, trees, fields, horizons, light retracting or returning: I’ve always felt most alive in relation to place, whether the front stoop in front of a Brooklyn triplex 45 years ago, or being pulled by the big dog through Kansas tallgrass prairie last week. We talk about epistemology a lot at Goddard – how we know what we know. For me, the ground is the real ground. Place isn’t just something informing my studies, writing, self- or culturally-ascribed identities, marriage or motherhood, community or solitude. Place is not just below but within: the core from which I create and struggle with most of what I do, and much of how I understand myself, contextualize culture, also the ground from which to connect with what’s beyond being part of a specific culture, a specific time.

So it’s no wonder that when I was 21, I found bioregionalism, and “Something ignited in my soul,” Pablo Neruda as writes. Bioreginalism is a comprehensive philosophy, calling for our return to our life-places, where we actually live, as the ground from which to build community, sustainable economics, local culture, place-based education and healthcare, and sense of self. Peter Berg writes,

“If the life-destructive path of technological society is to diverted into life-sustaining directions, the land must be reinhabited. Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated it involved becoming fully alive in and with a place.”

Bioregionalism is also a meditation on where we are: breathing in what’s right here, and from the recognition of ourselves as part of a specific ecosystem, and not at the center of it, deeply consider in all our words and deeds how to live. Another way to say it: making the visible visible.

At a bioregional congress

When I found bioregionalism, I resonated with what I had known since I was a baby sitting on a Coney Island beach in the wind, before I had words. That was over three decades years ago, and I still feel like I’m at the beginning of bioregionalism, a study, practice and calling that keeps deepening. I’ve been one of the founders of the continental bioregional movement, but even more part of my day-to-day life is our local group, the Kansas Area Watershed (KAW — Konza/kanza) Council, a 31-year-old bioregional pack I run and live with. We made a vow to develop KAW as a 100+ year-old organization, grow old together, and continually explore what it means to come together in council. We’re doing particularly well on growing old together.

A week ago, we sat at a big wooden table at Danny and Kat’s house, nine of us planning the annual spring gathering, which this year is called “Thinking Like a Prairie,” adapting Joanna Macy’s work. We will come together for a kind of residency on the prairie, including time to feel, make art and conversation about, and grapple with our collective pain connected to drastic and extreme climate change right here, right now. Skyler, a young man, who recently joined us, said, “I can’t have the conversations about what hurts me the most anywhere else than here.” We nodded, passed the clementines, and told stories about a bluebird in the fields, fracking in the nearby high plains, and how hard it is to hold it all. That pain is visceral, a part not just of our psyches but bodies, which reminds me of just how local place is.

It took years of writing poetry, getting cancer, and practicing yoga, and starting to really see the millions of ways each breath is physical to illuminate how much my most local address is my body, a portable place where I live. The wind blows. I shiver. The darkness falls. My eyes adjust. The prairies around me suffer from deep erosion. I’ve had parts of me cut off and out also. We go on.

As I age and change, I continually look toward place for guidance and consolation. Reflecting on the beauty of the hardened bark, leaning stand of cedars, wind-swept switchgrass gives me another and continually-renewing definition of beauty and health. Place shows me alternative and much more real views of death and letting go than popular culture. The more I pay attention to the great without, as Linda Hogan calls it, the more I glimpse the constant within. “I’m just a container for time, like a river,” I once wrote, which brings me to one final aspect to discuss: place and the poetic power of language.

Dylan Thomas once said, “These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusionsare written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.” I feel the same way about everything I write, but for me, God is place: the living earth, the life force, the sky and ground, the big or small wind. My poetry, memoir, essays, songs are not just carrying images of place but born of place.

What is place? That question entwines with another question for me, How to live? Opening my heart, my work, my body, my life to place. Taking my cue from the weather, the deer in the back and the turkey in the front of the field, the big and little bluestem that, just 10 days ago, we burned so more forb and flower seeds could be drilled into the ground. Place guides me at my best, and calls me back at my worst.

I’d like to speak about participatory epistemology and place, ways of knowing the place we’re in, whatever place we’re in.

Like many of the stories I have been hearing of your childhood experiences of place, when I was a child, I built huts of pine boughs, played fox and rabbit in the brush, and wandered winding forest paths. I learned about making home, finding safety, venturing into the unknown, to return again and again to home. And I knew, without needing to learn it, without even knowing its name, that earth was my home.

On my first awareness of social injustice, hearing of a child my age bitten by a rat in her home, I sought solace beneath a maple tree as I questioned and sobbed. And I learned the poignant power of listening presence, the tree’s presence to me and mine to the tree.

Such lush pleasures as mud squishing between my toes as I gathered chestnuts, with their prickly shells and silken inner surface, kept awake my sensory delight.

Thunder crashing and water roaring down hillsides taught me humility and the vulnerability and vitality of living at an edge.

Losing myself in intricate frost patterns and falling into starlit night skies, I learned the wonderment of flights onto imaginal landscapes.

And one day, I, and the world around me, dissolved into golden streams of light. We shimmered in its warm splendor, and I learned, or was reminded, of union.

And then I turned five…. I went to school and learned to write my name, to place myself in penciled symbols on a page. I learned to name things, play kickball with friends, and to care who jumped highest and got better grades in more inked symbols on a page.

I was moving away from home in the wild encompassing world, to navigate the terrain of human culture. And, to varying degrees, I carried what I had loved and learned along with me. as a quiet ember, pulsing through the rhythms of my days. …And, much later, when I found I had a say in what I learned and how, it guided my studies.

As with many emergent theories you are exploring, I see the world, this place we are in, and knowledge about it, as participant in a burgeoning, intricate web of life unfolding, responding, co-creating, dying and being born in each moment. And while I find theories endlessly compelling, …for me, it’s the experience of them that breathes a vital air upon those embers, allowing entry into what cognition cannot, on its own, hold.

As David Abram has expressed it, “Our intelligence struggles to think its way out of the mirrored labyrinth, (while) the exit is to be found …(in) dropping the spell of inner speech to listen into the wordless silence. …By frequenting that depth, again and again, …our ears begin to remember the many voices that inhabit that silence, the swooping songs and purring rhythms, and antler-smooth movements.” “What is perception ,” he writes, “if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things.”

Practices familiar to many of you–including movement, dance, artistic expression, contemplative practice, yoga, ceremony, and sensory awareness–enable us to frequent that depth and so to embody the patterns, gestures, and dynamic movements of a living earth.

Holotropic breathwork opens thresholds into the experience of becoming other species and life forms, or at least a perception of that becoming.

Goethe, in the early 19^th century, developed scientific method he called delicate empiricism, a phenomenological approach to knowing the living nature of a being, in the progressive articulation of leaves on a stem and vertebrae of a spine and the stages of a blossom’s unfolding. …giving rise to an echo of that motion within oneself and, in some precious moments, to an encounter of it in wholeness.

With renewed connections to place, Western assumptions about what consciousness may be, where it is located, who or what has consciousness, and in what ways, have been breaking open. Stanislov Grof refers to consciousness as “a primary attribute of existence.” Scholars, including David Abram, Theodore Roszak, and Linda Hogan, speak of a terrestrial intelligence, an ecological unconscious, a human psyche immersed in the psyche of the earth that gave us birth. And like the moment before the Big Bang and what lies waiting in a seed, some see consciousness as both evolving and something that was always there.

Thomas Berry suggests that humans may be building the capacity of consciousness to perceive the dynamic nature and history of anything in the moment we attend to it. Such awareness could help bridge a perceptual gap in our relationship to time that has kept us from taking urgent action on behalf of an ailing earth.

Restoring that intimate bond between humans and earth has been a central concern of ecopsychologists, who suggest that, as we expand the boundaries of our sense of identity into ever widening circles, we will increasingly long to care for the collective wellbeing, as we do our own and that of our beloveds, because we will know earth and its inhabitants as ourselves.

Cultivating honoring presence, they suggest, can allay the impact of the hierarchies, antipathies, numbing, and utilitarian ethical codes that have had too much power to define us. And as we more fully sense the responsiveness of the world around us, we will feel more alive, and we will know, from whatever place we are in, that we are not alone.

I’ve been drawn to storytelling for its non-adversarial accessibility in reweaving our stories back into those of the landscape. And my stories have been informed by the work of deep ecologists like Joanna Macy and John Seed who offer stories for reawakening our genetic memory of our evolutionary history, a history which flows through us now. As Brian Swimme has said it, “Hydrogen gas transformed itself into mountains, butterflies, the music of Bach, and you and me………every being has 14 billion years of radiance within.”

We humans, and not only humans, have been telling our stories in a feast of voices and expressions. Just as a landscape thrives in diversity and speaks a unique vision from each place, we need the particular vision each of you brings to understanding our place and discovering more life-sustaining ways of living into it.

We have wandered far from home, by some combination of necessity, error, and design. The life and work of each of you is helping us find our way back.

Sonja Swift’s talk on place she gave as part of the Place panel at the February residency:

In speaking of place it feels appropriate, if not essential, to introduce myself within the context of the place I am from: my original place, my place of origin.

This leads me to think about how in today’s world many of us are descendants of immigrants or refugees so place or territory doesn’t overlap with heritage or ancestry in the way it used to. So our original place tends to get left out of introductions, sidelined. We name the cities or towns in which we dwell, the states or nation states, instead.

I think there is something very powerful and worthy in taking the time to more explicitly introduce oneself in terms of place based origin. I think it is a really human way of introducing oneself.

I am a child of North America with European bloodlines. To my American side, I am half Danish. To my Danish side, I am a yank. I consider myself first and foremost a child of this continent and more specifically from a landscape on its western edge.

I grew up amidst oak groves and sagebrush in the California foothills on the central coast. South of Big Sur. North of Point Conception. I fell asleep each night to the howls of coyotes. Red tailed hawks keep a close eye over the valley and the Pacific Ocean is visible from the ridgelines. There were cougars and rattlers to keep eye for. We raised Texas longhorn and subtropical fruit. It was a lonesome paradise. In many ways it was the land the raised me, the land that gave me sanctuary.

The spaciousness of where I grew up gave me room enough to endure a dysfunctional family reality. It also meant that I’d later have to learn how to find that same spaciousness, the spaciousness of rolling hills and open ridgelines, within. It is a process I am still amidst.

So that is where I’m from. It is as much a part of me as the color of my eyes.

The only other place I’ve found a similar sense of place is in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I think, in part, this is because the landscape is familiar in an uncanny way. The perennial grasses are more intact than in California, where overgrazing after the Spaniards arrived took a heavy toll. There are ponderosa instead of live oak, and the vista glimpsed from the ridges isn’t the ocean, it is the wide-open of the Great Plains. But there is that similar endlessness, and similar rolling, grassy, ruggedly beautiful terrain.

I think we are molded by landscape. We embody the places we are from and carry them with us wherever we go. This can be a very powerful thing, especially for people who are exiled from the places they love. I am thinking of a friend of mine, a Tibetan nun, who in all likelihood will never return to her homeland.

I also think that if given the opportunity to connect to the earth at a young age then we can feel at home anywhere. I think this elemental connection is essential to our survival.

There are a lot of people today who don’t seem to feel at home on the earth and I say that because they are doing a fine job wrecking it.

Ultimately though, I think the topic of place opens up a conversation about re-indigenizing ourselves as bodies born of this Earth.

When I think about what I value in indigenous cultures I think of coherent self-awareness rooted in terrain. I think of language being in touch with non-language, sophisticated and intact sensory somatic intelligence, a fearlessness about death, interspecies communication, innate attentiveness to synchronistic events, and a very basic, unquestioned knowing of oneness with all of life.

These qualities are not limited to un-contacted tribes in the heart of the Amazon or the Plains Indians pre genocide. These are universally human characteristics of human in contact with place, characteristics that have been fragmented and forgotten in a myriad of ways.

The real question is how are people today NOT aware of the whole planet as a living organism??

How are people NOT connected to place, to earth, to our shared existence?

I think it has a lot to do with trauma. The recklessness we are dealing with today has to do with the opposite of place: displacement, by way of colonialism primarily, and the trauma that came with it.

So I think the value of discussing place within the context of our times is to remember that we are only as intelligent as we are in contact with the intelligence around us.

We are intelligent in relationship to place.

Asterile, devoid landscape, a bombed and desiccated city, creates a parallel kind of mind. To destroy this animate earth is to wreck our opportunities to learn from and receive intelligence beyond us, but part of us, at once.

We can easily get overly intellectual about this topic but at the end of it all I think it has everything to do with the pure love of being alive.

Embodiment Colloquium, with faculty members Ellie Epp and Lise Weil. The embodiment colloquium is an informal gathering held every residency to investigate and promote the new field of embodiment studies. Come with tales about your semester’s adventures in embodiment.

Ensemble as Life Practice: Deepening our practice of intuition, creativity, play, spontaneity and connection through the body’s knowing, with faculty member Lori Wynters. What are the ways we support each other and allow ourselves to be supported by one another? How do we practice ensemble? How do we practice active giving and active receiving, exploring the movement potential of our bodies and the creative potential of our minds? What are the perceived boundaries of where we begin and end and where the mythical other begins and ends? How do we experience the creative transformation that happens in community? Drawing from the principles, elements and practices of Aikido, Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement, voice exploration, modern dance, Playback Theatre, J.L. Moreno’s sociometry from Psychodrama, Contact Improvisation and contemplative body-centered practices we’ll explore intuitive impulse, connection and the practice of recalibration. Exercises will include but are not limited to sociometric activities, voice/body improvisational practices, energy awareness practices, shifting and transfer of weight (all levels of experience welcome!) and our whole self as instrument of knowing, trust, imagination, creation and joy.

Linear Thinking, Part 1: Research Methods, with faculty member Karen Campbell and returning student Wendy Weissner. This 1 ½ hour workshop is intended for new and returning students, and will be most helpful for those with a research question in mind who are looking for more information on which research methods(s) to utilize in answering their unique questions. The intention of the workshop is provide students with (1) a brief introduction to research methods (qualitative and quantitative), (2) an example PowerPoint presentation that illustrates a research project – from conception to implementation to dissemination of results; and (3) time to work in small groups to brainstorm and collaborate on individual research questions. Additional resources (texts, people) will also be provided.

Art-informed Inquiry: A Conversation About the Arts in, and as, Research, with faculty member S.B. Sowbel. Are you a photographer, dancer, musician, sculptor, poet, videographer, zine fiend, actor, gardener, bricoleur, (someone who makes use of whatever is near at hand to create whatever comes to mind)?  Can these practices contribute to academic inquiries outside of arts programs? Do you need to be an “artist” to use the arts in your studies? Do you need to know anything about the history and practice of your art tohave a solid inquiry? Are there resources that discuss and guide the thinking and use of the arts  in academic inquiries? How does the academic world think about the use of the arts as a form of “data” collection or research methodology? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges when using the arts in academic inquiries? Come consider how the art

s work as method, methodology and product. (Feel free to doodle, hum, knit, compose and stretch during this session.)

Meet the stars, with faculty member Ellie Epp and Bobby Farlice-Rubio. With an armada of telescopes and a host of other interpretive media, Fairbanks Museum Science Educator Bobby Farlice-Rubio will lead a dazzling session of stargazing underneath the brilliant February sky. Our focus will be drawn to the luminous Planet Jupiter, currently in the face of Taurus, and the incomparable constellation of Orion, the Hunter. Orion, perhaps the most recognizable winter constellation, is also home to the Great Orion Nebula: a stellar nursery currently forming hundreds of planetary systems around newborn stars. With these targets and others in our sights, and with answers to your questions about the history, science, and folklore inspired by the sky, Bobby aims to provide you with an illuminating and inspiring experience.

Needle in the Bone: How a Holocaust Survivor & Polish Resistance Fighter Beat the Odds and Found Each Other – A Slide Show, Short Reading, and Discussion on Autoethnographic Approaches to Your Work, with faculty member Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. How can you bring together original research, historical or cultural context, and your own story, biases, questions and experiences in writing about a subject? In Caryn’s new book, she combines extensive oral histories (with Lou Frydman, a Holocaust survivor and Jarek Piekalkiewicz, a Polish resistance fighter); abundant research on Polish history, World War II, the Holocaust, and contemporary America; and her own experience as friends of her subjects. She’ll share a slide show on the lives and stories of the two men, read an excerpt from the book (published by Potomac Books, a publisher of history and cultural books), and discuss why and how she used autoethnography as her methodology. She’ll also discuss why found found an autoethnographic approach the best way to explore the four themes of the book: 1) What does it mean to survive trauma on the scale of genocide?; 2) The myth and reality of Polish anti-Semitism; 3) How such a calculated and mechanized genocide could happen; and 4) How could or should we stand in relation to the history of the Holocaust (and other genocides). The second half of the workshop will be devoted to what you’re exploring or thinking about exploring, and how and why you might blend various ways of ways — oral histories, books and articles, cultural context, storytelling, interviews, etc. Please come with you questions about writing critical essays and/or thesis projects that bridge stories you’re living with research you’re doing

Katt Lissard (upper right) on her Fulbright in Lesotho

Scholarships, Fellowships and Fulbrights,with faculty member Katt Lissard.  As a graduate student there are grants, awards and fellowships you can apply for, either as part of your Masters work or as a post-graduate option.  A fellowship can be an exciting, hands-on opportunity to put what you’ve been studying into practice – to test-drive the feasibility and/or “right livelihood” aspects of your work and enhance your ability to do what you want to do with your degree.  In this short workshop (presented as part of the Skills & Practitioner Fair, in a drop-in/revovling format), we’ll look at what’s out there, review some key steps to creating strong applications, and focus in on the Fulbright U.S. Student Program – the largest exchange program, offering opportunities (1,800 grants annually, to 155 countries) for students to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and project implementation. Despite the lousy economy, there are still Scholarships, Fellowships and Fulbrights available – come strategize ways to get one!  Hand outs, video. (Katt is a two time Fulbright Scholar, faculty award grantee).

The Body’s Insistence on Meaning – hermeneutics and poesis and the technologies of healing, with faculty member sarah van hoy. In this three part workshop, we will be looking at meaning making at the intersection of bodies, illness experience and medical systems.  In the first part, we’ll look at the haptic technology of pulse diagnosis and at interpretations that can be made about the functioning of Heart – broadly defined. We’ll look at some case studies, linking pulse findings to acupuncture treatments, and exploring the imagery and meaning of acupuncture points.  In the second part, we’ll look at plants and the poetics of herbal formulas. We’ll smell, touch and taste some classical, alchemical formulas made with Chinese herbs and get a basic understanding of how that part of the medicine works.  In the third section, we’ll look through anthropological lenses and ask many juicy and critical questions about “the body’s insistence on meaning”.