Of course!
But OF COURSE!
It struck me like lightning as I read “The Earth Path” by Starhawk.
I’m reading words like “the energy embodied in systems, also stored, held available for future use … the solar budget” and I can feel in my bones that something is amiss.
Yes, something indeed is amiss.
Language is important.
Not just in the words we use and how we want to be perceived or received by others, but because it reveals way we see the world.
You see, our language is literally built upon our cultural paradigm.
Want to see experience your own cultural conditioning?
Travel to a country that’s shaped by an entirely different paradigm from the one you grew up in.
Want to actually understand your own cultural conditioning?
Move to that country, and learn to speak the language, and speak the way the local people speak.
Learning a language forces us to think differently. We learn to think in the paradigm of a different social and cultural structure, for words and ideas are shaped by the people, history, and cultural paradigm that shapes them.
In the West, we live in an individualistic, capitalist, and materialistic paradigm that is largely shaped by US ideology and the so-called “American Dream”. Growing up in Canada, even though I was immersed in my own unique paradigm, the massive influence of the US paradigm is inherently interwoven into the subconscious paradigm of the Western world, and Canada is no exception.
Why is this important?
Because many of “problems” we are trying to solve as a society are rooted in the very paradigm, the lens, in which we see the world.
Paradigms are funny things.
Funny in that we are aware that we have them, yet we are completely unaware that we have them.
We conceptually understand on an intellectual level that we have a bias, and yet, our mind automatically assumes that everyone else obviously thinks the way we do. This is the paradox of our own cultural paradigms. It’s why we often have to leave our own and immerse ourselves in a contrasting one in order to see that indeed, there is something there. We cannot see the very thing in front of us because of our automatic assumption that it’s just the “way it is”.
So why does this all matter?
Earth stewardship, ecology, feminism, climate change.
The issue isn’t that these are big “problems” that are too massive to “solve”; it’s paradigm.
For a bit of background, I studied what in British Columbia, Canada where I grew up, is known as “resource management”.
Studying the forest ecology, plants, wildlife, and fish species through basically a guise of “protecting nature through proper management”, however was really just a measure of how far can we go in extraction without collapse.
“Forestry” in British Columbia is little more than clearing the conscious of capitalists to keep the wood products moving. It’s essentially tree farming in the wild, with little or no regard to the massive bio-diverse complexity of what constitutes a forest, and what a healthy, diverse, living forest actually provides (other than the resource extraction fo trees).
What is sold to young students as “helping in environmental sustainability” is really just a co-opting of idealistic, environmentalist children into the “real world” where “jobs are needed”, and “the economy must go on”, and we learn to help enable the practices of feeding the capitalist monster – the very system we are trying to change in “management”.
So imagine my troubled heart as I read Starhawk’s book, and in her attempts to reveal to the reader an earth in which everything is connected and interdependent and alive from a framework of “resource management”.
With no disrespect to the author, the point of illumination for me were the parallels in my own co-optive “resource management” training and the language used in the book.
We can change the words to make seem more “eco-friendly” or more palatable, but underneath, there is a kind of greenwashing that most of the Western world isn’t even aware of – because remember: paradigm blindness.
The problem is that we are still using the same outdated and dysfunctional paradigm to describe a “new” way of seeing things, that is not in fact a new way of seeing things!
We can talk about how the sun’s energy gives life to plants, deer eat the plants, we eat the deer, the wolves cull the herd, and how the energy transfers from one shape or form to another. Yes, while that’s inherently true, it’s not the whole story.
Yes, it shows that things are connected, but that’s not the whole.
And recently to me it’s concerning because language matters.
The sun. The forest. The wolves. Humans.
We are not just energy that transfers from one form to the next.
We are not just “resources” with stored energy to be “used up” at some later time.
Language matters!
Energy is only “used” or “used up” when we look at it through the Western individualistic, reductive, capitalistic lens – the very lens this book claims to shed light upon, yet, unintentionally actually reinforces!
For energy to be “used”, it must be “stored” or “made”.
But what if it just is?
What if it doesn’t have to come from anywhere?
What if it is self creating?
One way I have been seeing the world lately is through what I suppose you could call an “Animist” lens.
It’s the way I saw the world when I was a little girl who had imaginary friends and talked to animals – and they answered back.
Back when I would walk into the forest and talk to the trees and they would tell me things and show me the way they saw the world.
I never really lost this way of seeing, but after over 12 years of working in the “science and ecology” paradigm, I realized I was out of practice. When I shifted careers into somatics and intuitive consulting, I started to get quiet and listen again.
And there it was – all of nature, in her glory, and chatty as ever.
I remember about 5 years ago, going to look at a property in the mountains near where I live here in Mexico. It was a property a friend of mine was thinking of purchasing and she gathered us up – her healer friends – to have a look.
There was this most spectacular tree amongst the old, overgrown banana grove, that drew me to her. I stood there just in awe, getting quiet and listening. Suddenly, I felt this powerful presence of her spirit and an image came to my mind of her massive, sprawling root system. The feeling of it, overwhelmed my senses, and a tender and precious sense came over my heart. I felt privileged for having been show this intimate sense of her essence. I silently thanked her, touched her trunk, as we left the property.
Later on, I was chatting with a dear friend and fellow healer that was also there and I asked him what he thought of the land. He said, “Wow that tree – she was something wasn’t she? She showed me her roots.” Chills and goosebumps. The tree clearly wanted to show us her essence, her spirit.
She is a being, with spirit, who not only lives in harmony and symbiosis with the ecology of the forest, but she is a being. She can speak. She has conciousness – and I believe, that this perspective is just as valid as the reductionistic paradigm of the Western world.
In this paradigm, we are all alive and capable of communion with one another. The sunset is not just the earth moving around the sun, but it’s own song. If you’ve ever watched the sun set in the same place time and time again, you’ll know that each sunset is unique – each has it’s own song.
Take a phrase like “embodied energy in systems”.
It’s just a fancy way of describing physics – energy can only be created, not destroyed.
It reduces a complex village of elders, babies, passionate artists, writers, mothers, uncles, hunters, builders, healers, and spirit speakers to a machine with parts.
Machines are systems.
Nature is not a system.
Nor is nature made up of systems.
Nature is a dynamic, living, breathing, bio-morphic experience.
Nature is happening.
Systems are machines. They have parts and those parts rely on other parts, and each part is replaceable.
Systems in themselves are replaceable.
They are also replicable.
Nature is none of these things.
The only parts that exist are the ones contrived by our own way of thinking.
In other words, quoting an anatomy mentor of mine, Gil Hedley, the only differentiator of parts in the human body is the scalpel.
We cut where we think we should cut. It is our perception that is the real distinguisher of parts and pieces in a whole organism.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad to attempt to reduce in order to differentiate.
What I’m saying is that we need to wake up to the fact that it’s not The Truth.
It’s a paradigm.
It’s a perspective.
What’s important is to see it for what it is so that we can work with that perspective when it’s helpful, and open ourselves to different and equally valid perspectives to go deeper into our perceived understanding of “how things are”.
I will leave you with this.
How would our world look like, if we adopted and equally valued the perspective that the world around us is alive and spirit?
How would we interact with our surroundings if we saw forests as our kin, old grown trees as our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers? What would our relationships look like if they included conversations with rivers?
What would feel like to sincerely apologize to the spirit of the land you live on for any trespass or offence you may have caused, knowingly or unknowingly and ask for forgiveness? What would happen if you waited for the land spirits to answer?
My sense that if we truly adopted a different paradigm – or perhaps several different parallel paradigms – that much of how we spend our time and energy in the West would look very very different.
Things that seem vital would likely be reevaluated, on both the individual and collective levels.
Something else that Starkhawk wrote also caught my attention.
It was a message she received from a tree and although she interprets the meaning differently in her book, I saw something else.
She writes:
One morning I was sitting on my back deck, meditating on the question of how to make change in the world. The forest was all around me and I was asking the question “Can you change a system from within? Or from without?”
“Systems don’t change from within,” I heard the forest say. “Systems try to maintain themselves.”
Our cultural paradigm is one such system.
It relies on our maintaining it for fear that if it changes, everything that we know will collapse, and indeed change.
We are in fact co-opting against the very change we wish for, because in our hearts, we see a better world.
However, in our traumas, our biology, and our intelligent makeup of survival, we also need homeostasis.
What have yet to connect, is that we can have both – change and stability.
But we have to look to a model – a paradigm – in where that’s possible.
A model that’s right under our noses.
Nature.
Nature is that model of both and.
Nature shows us that although nothing can be replicated exactly, our very life is evidence of homeostasis and movement embodied.
If we are looking at the lens of mechanics, which is how we were all raised and educated to see the world in the West, we miss the most obvious thing in front of our very eyes.
Nature is not “survival of the fittest” as we’ve been told at all.
Quite the opposite.
Nature is whole.
Complete.
Co-operative.
Self-generative.
Self-sustaining.
Alive.
Magical.
And …
We.
Are.
Nature.