I have had a highly redundant,
one might even choose polypathic,
graduate studies experience
spanning my adult life to date.

This began with a semester of Philosophy.
Just enough to learn I wanted something more experiential,
a more communitarian environment of Applied Metaphysics, perhaps.

So then I began, and soon completed, studies for the Master of Divinity degree,
which has an arcane ring to it,
but basically the title implies just the opposite of what degree candidates most hope for,
to be Mastered by Divine Love,
to economically and politically operate as an icon of all-inclusive ecological love.

Those receiving the M.Div.
hoped to apply their ecopolitical science of empathic trust,
our mutual Basic Attendance,
to life as liturgical theology
or at least teleologically benign song and dance;
to be the love today we proclaim for tomorrow,
rooted in our humane-divine nondual nature-spirit compost
of ecopolitical peace-integrity with justice-truth becoming;
pilgrimage,
The Ways of Divinity,
co-mastering together.

Fortunately,
when I landed in a rural Colorado parish,
the beat-down aging poor mutually-marginalizing Mexican and Anglo faith community
invited me to reconsider further investment in administering sacraments
disconnected from ecopolitically healthy outcomes of empathic trust.
To continue as individuals,
families,
and as a multiculturally rich community
of mutually holonic,
respected,
cooperative,
trusting co-empathic faith,
we needed more of a Total Makeover,
a gut rehab,
an economic design to fuel our continuing collective political incarnation
into this Beloved Therapeutic EcoPolitical Community
we each long to belong within,
as integrity without.

Responding to apparent hope for stronger organizing
and planning
and budgeting
and ecopolitical design and implementation,
and evaluation and socioeconomic change skills,
I accepted an invitation into a double Master of Public Administration and Community [Economic] Development degree program,
primarily taught by PhDs in Political Science;
my first among too many loves as an undergraduate at Michigan.

Here I learned, once again, that politically correct administration of empathic trusting,
sometimes mistrusting,
and even actively distrusting totalitarian political relationships
historically and culturally thrive
when “follow economic wealth”
also means “responsibly invite multicultural political as personal health”
internally economic as externally political,
nondual internal-external co-arising ecological landscapes of nutrition.

Humane ecopolitical landscapes are ruled by active hope
and cooperative potential within
as divinely landscaped multicultural ecology without,
polypathic faith in love’s synergetic trust
and discovery
and curious regenerativity of enlightening imagination.

The U.S. Declaration of interdependent Independence and Constitution were born of Enlightenment CoOperative EcoPolitics.

Applied ecopolitical science looked a great deal like applied theology,
or at least teleology, healthy purpose, therapeutic cultural meaning.
Democracy develops fragrant discernment through co-empathic multicultural trust,
moving toward inclusive resonant resolutions of complexly interdependent ecopolitical issues,
risks,
opportunities,
social investments and historical-cultural divestments,
intending improved climate health
and less climates of pathology,
whether too hyperactively warm
or too near to flat-line fading into freezing despair.

My issues with effectively developing ecopolitical health,
by suppressing dis-ecological pathologies,
past failures of achieving a truly multiculturally abundant history of sustainable healthy climates,
soon led to confusion about a great cultural divide
between two vocational labels:
1. Political Scientist, and
2. Permacultural Designer.

This great cultural divide appeared front and center
more recently when I became certified as a Permaculture Designer.
It helped me to look more carefully at the functional intent of “political”
as compared to “permacultural” outcome goals and use-of-power objectives.
As I thought more about how our normal day-to-day scientific investment in learning about power includes learning primal differences between multicultural designs
and monocultural monopolies of totalitarian mistrust leaning toward distrust chaos,
dissonance,
then polypathic confluence of design and pattern correlations emerge as the compost,
the food,
the fodder of our ecological as ecopolitical learning enterprise.

“Permaculture” was chosen to distinguish perennially designed
and democratically self-governing landscapes
from more traditional annual economies of “Agriculture” business,
with more of a replant, spray, and harvest of chemically treated quasi-edibles,
nutritionally malignant regarding fertile health of Earth’s soil,
leading to well-established suboptimal health-trends of ecopolitical Business As Usual.

Permaculture designs are for and on and about and composed of information rooted in past positive polyculturally balanced community landscape outcomes.
These polyculturing ecopolitical landscapes began as maps of nurturing health plans for exteriors only,
like gardens and farms and river banks.
But, this organic economic and political view of power-with ecological balancing climates
has moved from exterior to increasingly interior ecopolitical health landscapes,
like bicameral full-octave nature-spirit nondual deep learning healthy multicultural mindbody landscapes, dialogues, stories, evolutions.

A political power relationship of healthy nutritional economic/ecologic design
pulls together the implied normativity of Political Sciences comparing unhealthy totalitarian powers producing outcomes of mayhem and terror
to democracies intended to nurture co-empathic cooperative trust.
If designers using permacultural ecopolitical principles and procedures for healthier polycultural climates,
then we are also scientists exploring transactional-relational nutrient-power principles
and investment/divestment procedures for sustaining multicultural health designs and sustaining power-with development,
co-investment in planning,
and harvesting health outcomes rooted in (0)-sum Earth-centric climates
of polypathic ecopolitical health.

Permaculture Design Certification more or less brings me back full circle,
where graceful articulation of applied metaphysics
invites active,
relentless pursuit of ecopolitical deep learning
mutually cooperative faith communities
within bicameral heart and lungs and brain and guts and limbs and genetic roots
as cooperative Beloved Communities incarnating together without.

People of radically cooperative faith,
profound empathic ecopolitical trust,
ask what and whom you believe WITH,
while those of a more fundamentalist-exclusive faith,
including active mistrusts of alien faith systems as more or less idolatrous,
ask what and whom you believe IN.

If you believe in evolutionary cosmological processes
that you do not believe also believe in you,
cooperatively together,
then you are less likely to achieve healthy nutritional ecopolitically sustainable outcomes,
while you are waiting for SomeOne Other
to grace you with His Transcendent truth-beauty presence.

If you believe with processes of ecosystemic health,
then you have joined the evolutionary permacultural partisans of healthy regenesis,
wherein lies all evidence of creation,
rather than nihilistic monocultural nothing.
Then again, you might conceivably believe in both,
which is a highly polypathic wu wei pilgrimage–
a razor’s edge teleology of enculturing history.