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In PermaCulture We Trust

Compassion,
rooted in economic capacity and political experience
within a co-empathic nutritional environment;
like before you came out of Mom.

Nutrition,
rooted in deep listening, learning, and, giving-and-taking,
absorbing and investing
consuming and producing,
competing and cooperating
double-negatives as positive double-bind dipolar
regenerating dissonant complexity
with decompositional maturity,
empathic ripeness of seasonal belief-feeling balance of time,
permacultural development
toward increasing understanding,
comprehension of stronger integrity and resilience within learning ourselves
and others,
more inclusively rich nutritional political relationships,
economic transactions of true health as beauty-wealth values.

CoEmpathic Communication,
enthymematically positive=notnot dialectical dipolar
0-sum EgoAbsence
rooted in Basic EmpathicTrust-Attendance,
where Empathy flows from positive feeling
as Trust functions following positive belief,
and viceversa

Lack of Communication,
rooted in cognitive-affective dissonance
between LeftTrust and RightEmpathic temporal-neural
dipolar co-confusing noisy bipolarity
with pathological trends toward negative climatic-critical events,
sometimes rhetorical,
sometimes operatic,
sometimes terror,
always mutual-immunity
LoseLose Gaming irresolution,
Not(Not Polynomial)
notnot dissonating yinyin,
where +1 does not equal (-)0
in a binomial-binary unfolding/folding Open EcoSystemic
4-prime-spacetime-dimensioned
fractal-regenerative RNA/DNA enculturating Organic Universe
as Absence of CoEmpathic Creation//Decomposition Story;
noise, chronic stress, sleep disorder, depression, body anxiety, etc.

ReGenerative Systems Design and Development,
bilaterally rooted in
mutual yin-concave bilateral subsidiary stricture
with yang-convex fractal-holonic
polypathic complementary relational structures.

Recognizing these binomial roots toward healthy regenerativity,
permaculturally labeled as Yang with Yin balance of Tao as 4D SpaceTime,
we deep-learn through communication system development.

What is now,
appositions what is notpast-notfuture, notyet and notgone = now.
What is notnot
I Am
AND
We NotNot Are
becoming
further evolution of I Am ego/ecoconsciousness,
bicameral YangLeft with YinRight equivalence of poli-economic power-with
co-empathy together.

Here,
NOW,
where Yang respect for interdependent ownership
and intrinsic indigenously cooperative resources
results in learning from dissonance and stress-marginalization.

Here,
NOW,
when YinSquared = c-squared = Prime Eulerian metric regenerate (0)-soul function e-squared,
YinPrime Bilateral Commons DeCompositional Relationship
of co-empathic stricture: U-Ego = Commons NotNot C-Me
solidarity could notnot evolve as lacking.

We need healthy dipolar balance
to expand our understanding of potential alliances
within currently stressed political
and economic health systems,
to improve Universal Subsidiarity/Complementarity Balance,
a global citizenry,
mutually respectful
appropriately voting with our bodies of lives past, present, and future hope
and/or dying together
as Earth’s former CoOperatively Evolving Tribes.

In nutrient-value economies,
where fertile embryonic compost
acts like cash-paid-it-forward investment value,
PermaCultural Landscape Design Nutritional ReGenerators
as are we all, at least on better days,
optimize political polycultural nutrient abundance
by minimizing economic monoculturally dominating losses,
devolutions/degradations of ecosystemic nutritional complementarity.

DiPolar Balance,
rooted in complementary yet mutually subsidiary empathic trust,
self-replicating subsystems nested within a holistic cooperative
well-being network
Open BiNomial EquiValent 4D Universal WinWin EcoSystem,
inclusive of BioSystems,
all lives within Earth’s Tribes,
meeting in this present potential integrity of Time.

Our healthier well-being economic development constitutions
and declarations of interdependence,
rooted in intrinsic nutrient-values of our shared Commons:
Earth,
water,
air,
atmosphere,
taste and feeling,
health and energy,
beauty as goodness,
wisdom as Commons Knowledge,
integrity harmonizing balanced freedoms to and from,
responsibility facing self-empathy and trust refining/redefining authorities.

Mutually held Rights of Earth
and all Her Sacred Tribes,
cannot be bought,
sold,
enslaved,
repressed,
depreciated,
hoarded,
deposited for later self-aggrandizement.
Or,
so it would be
in my PermaCultural Beloved Community.

The moral of my story
to value what and who I am,
as part of this co-evolving ecoconscious evolution
through this incarnation
within EcoNesting EarthRights CoOperative Tribe,
to incubate my ecosystemically integrative communicating niche,
to repurpose each day and relationship
within each Earth-eternal cycle of night and days in co-empathic gratitude
for whom I, as holonic identity within We,
have become so far together.

And, at least as importantly,
for further ecological optimization of life-sustaining health,
also value what I and We are not yet together,
ways we have misplaced our (0)-sum total
true political belief-faith
and beautiful economic co-invested trust
in mindbody nutritional co-empathic feeling.

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Twelve Steps

Twelve step therapeutic environments
are probably as old as light and color,
measured in octaves,
and double-bound fractal half-octaves,
learning to listen deeply and well,
speaking after listening with integrating honesty,
compelling transparency, vulnerability,
open attendance.

Integrity includes accuracy and responsive gratefulness.
Because these are all optimal communication values,
PowerOver distancing strategies during gatherings
become diffuse
as this is a culture discovering shared success
through not trying to persuade others to do anything.

This is a therapeutic discernment program
to mutually support each other
in not behaving addictively,
out of anger and fear attractions and aversions.

Mutual noticing,
accepting,
understanding empathic trust
celebrates this mutual right-now well-being,
the only goal of each therapeutic environment,
each meeting,
each morning,
each day,
each life and death together;
which is why 12-steps are often experienced as therapeutic,
for those who are vulnerable and wise enough
to embrace this simplicity of being.

Becoming accepted and accepting as who we are right now,
with all our scabs showing,
is therapeutic.
Wise evangelists,
therapists of both egos and ecosystemic environments,
used car salesmen,
used lives relationship marketers,
we all know this from some experience,
I hope,
as intrinsic to building a path from becoming known
to becoming intimately loved.

Our larger political and economic climatic challenges,
environmental threats,
highlight therapeutic urgency of building on this 12-step base
by learning how and why each of us is part of this family,
this vocational team,
this meeting,
this community
this moment,
this day,
this transaction,
this global socioeconomic network.

What is our optimally shared and inclusively valued vocation?
to fulfill who we truly are becoming,
with our scars
acknowledging our shared hypnotic addictions
to anthrocentrically dominant enculturation.

My 12-step daily moment-by-moment active hope
is for a family and community
where we are mutually invested in loving each other
for who and what we are already,
doing the best we can,
and for whom we are becoming together,
and loving how we are already evolving
politically and economically healthy ecosystemic networks
of cooperatively nested information,
invested in meeting space memories of time.

Co-empathic,
co-mentored trusting love
is our prime sustained confluent sweet spot
for sustaining cooperative relationships
of mutual self-definition,
interpersonal refinement of wisdom,
but also transpecies evolutionary definition and refinement of balance,
and transgenerational co-presence, DNA/RNA past informing
present incarnations, already carrying seeds of future regenerators,
reweaving and/or unraveling
our mutual poli-economic 12-step lives.

We are a 12-step Tribe of EgoCentric EcoTherapists,
cooperatively researching,
designing,
and developing
our Public Cooperative,
a WinWin ReGenerating System
toward our mutually defined,
much beloved,
Lake Woes-Be-Gone.

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Terror v Trust

Tears of loss remembered,
sad shadow of terror’s anguish in loss
new-found.

Supremacist dominators,
terror instigators,
domestic peace violators
sociopathological neglectors
of SelfAsOther nurturing care,
might become a sad legend of premillennial history,
replaced by the diastatic trembling courage
of leaves welcoming opportunities
to regenerate clean air
of co-empathic communication,
political and economic balancing logic
sharing today with future EarthTribe generations.

Fears of gain reconnecting cooperative defaults,
glad shadows of synergetic love refound,
former child
in glad solidarity with future healthy Embryonic EarthTribes.

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Political Artists

Brilliant writers
have recommended to younger students,
to only write if they cannot live without doing so.

Elder successful icons of artistic expression,
dance,
voice,
drama,
sculptors
have similarly advised apprentices,
do not do as I have done
unless you could do naught else.

But what about parenting?
speaking of artistically nutritional communication,
visually and sensually rich therapies
for growing eyes and minds
ears and tastes and bodies.

Does successful and beautiful communication
in the public eye
place leadership demands on empathic consciousness,
benign commitment to prophetic integrity,
any less rigorous than organizing private daily 24/7 healthy incarnation liturgies?
co-mentoring creation and recreation performance rituals,
expressions of grace,
both empathically healthy and innocently, yet climatically, pathological..

Wondrously skillful parenting
requires more mindful consciousness commitment,
focus,
cooperative economic skills,
than does an artist’s Great Literature wheelhouse.

Parents cringe too often reminded,
not by our truth as beauty artists,
but by the occasional eruptive child
becoming who they are and would not be
because of your prior commitment to self-regeneration,
not theirs,
preferably within a somewhat healthy functional relationship.
Being a parent is a vocation,
but being a child could be play as vocation-filled learning.

If you do not believe your children would become good parents yet,
then these are those moments and places
where you were born to master eco-artistic regenerating leadership,
expression
perhaps even a letter or a poem,
a story,
parable,
analogy,
metaphor,
animate your diagrams,
resort to song and dance,
born to choose family-appropriate humor
over dramatic terrorist and operatic plots.

Avoid monopolistic singing in minor keys,
and don’t race your synergetic waltz
into a tornado of enslaving ego- and anthro-centric supremacy,
as this would demonstrate an embarrassing lack of commitment
to their truth as beauty futures,
the artistic leadership of co-mentoring
empathic political and economic Master Parent Certification,
unfortunately, perhaps, rather a lifetime process.

Here again,
we uncover a problem with our arts in education model.
Skilled ecotherapeutic educators and leaders,
such as WinWin strategically creative parents,
are those who most deserve,
and want to become,
Doctors of Loving Wisdom—PhiloSophia,
Medicine Women and Men,
shamanic co-mentors of Earth’s nutritional and pathological powers
through nutritional familial communication.

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Blue Bloods of LovePower

You.
Reading this.
Right now.
Proof you have descended
from an unbroken powerful line
of politically and economically successful
Elders.

If we define “powerful Elder”
as those who have had political and economic authority over another,
responsibility for at least one or more dependents.

So, with this definition,
parents become political and economic leaders
with mentoring authority and requisite responsibilities
to listen for our healthiest-available nutrients,
to derive our loveliest “doing the best s/he can,
bless her heart” summary revues,
leaving the devils in the details unjudged,
respected as life happens,
especially when you bother to show up,
politically and economically nurturing
those who are to follow your co-mentoring path.

Whether you have had these leadership powers
of economic authority with political responsibility
for healthy socio-economic outcomes,
not just do what I say,
but do as I do,
do as we do, together,
that kind of committed listening love
and authority
and responsibility,
in this incarnation, or not,

you,
reading this
and all others who have read
and will read it,
and this one writing these thoughts with fertile intent,
we all come from a mutually-held unbroken heritage
of political and economic PowerElders.

We each had a birthmother who had a mother
with nurturing embryonic authority
at least during her time of DNA-scripted biosystemic development,
speaking exegetically through natural systemic co-arising dialects,
primally etched in eco-political PowerElders past,
dipolar balanced lineage,
transregenerational power authorities,
transgenderal love responders, absorbers, consumers
transmutational agapic synergists,
transcultural evolutionaries,
co-incarnators of Earth’s SpaceTime Origin Story.

As children and peers and/or parents of ecopolitical leaders,
what do we plan to do,
to co-mentor,
to plan not to do
between this now and when we could theoretically die out,
for lack of willing leaders co-learning shared intelligence.

CoOperator’s Contractual Vows of Loving Synergy,
echoing through premillennial weddings:

I will continue loving to learn about you,
and from you.

I will continue creating our unique mutual regard for each other.

I will continue developing, emerging, with you.

I will always want to grow and die with you;
but I will avoid pushing agendas to grow and die for you,
but not for me too.

I will always stretch my comfort zone half way
toward your equally outstretching comfort zone.

I will do my very best
to always be aware
we are in and of this together,
and we are doing the best we can
with whom we are right now.

I will continue to communicate as truthfully,
nutritionally,
gracefully,
richly and deeply,
clearly and wisely,
mindfully yet with good humor—
absence of malignant bad faith,
as possible
in the words I choose
in the way I deliver them
in the way I live
and in the way I deliver my life
into your life.

I am grateful that my Elders are your Elders,
and yours ours;
for this most-treasured hope of mutually regenerative memories
and language,
paid forward, co-redeeming, gifts of health enriching culture.

All our generations of evolving species wait within each humane heart and mind,
lurking shadows within feelings and language,
music and narrative,
hunting and gathering multicultural communication,
nutrition,
formation,
vocation as self-perpetuating poli-economic value functions
of healthy Earth evolution,
root systemic for community building,
development,
maturation,
regenerative balance listening for social eco-communications
inviting health,
divesting of Win to Lose next generation pathology
by investing as Win to Win PowerElders
mentoring Young regenerational ecologists,
poet warriors of peaceful love
absorbing angry pasts
predicting future ancient fears,
all engaging together here as PowerElder now
deep learning our diversely similar Creation Stories.

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EarthTribe Sanctuary

Bird chatter echoes mutual greetings
psalms reciting Other’s praising morning light
promising their co-enrapture of return
before light fades to dusk this night.

Birds echo cathedrals of tree majestic chatter,
underflight of bees and insect buzz growing conjoined refrain
evening’s glad sung massive eulogy
consecrates this flying day’s compline,
grace delight.

Liturgy of Earth flight song
echoes through shattering light,
entering as exiting each shared dark mythic night.

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As We Speak

When wandering through a clinical studies program,
I began a practice of writing verbatims,
capturing the essence of conversations
messages
for their therapeutic integrity.

In this frame of mind and heart,
several years ago
I wrote this verbatim
on behalf of my daughter
with oppositional defiant disorder
and cerebral palsy.

Rereading it just now,
I wonder how different
really
are her imagined thoughts than mine
or ours,
in diverse senses
speaking with each other
across our less than confluent divides:

You asked me to ask when I need help,
and to add a please and thank you,
if at all possible.

I have done that often.

You ask me to ask to hold your hand
when you can’t otherwise hear me ask for help.

I am doing that right now.

I am not like you.
I wish I could be,
but I cannot.

I need you to appreciate me for who I am
more than attack me for who I am not,
and probably will never become.

My mind and body work similarly to yours,
but do not produce feelings and faith,
language and love
as effectively as does your incarnation.

I worry.
You and life often make me anxious,
stressed,
confronted by possibiities that I am not fully human
in your eyes and mind,
perceived as not only different but inferior.

I tend to panic.
Frequently your world overwhelms me.
I lose self-control when bombarded by too much stimulation.
I want time and Earth and life and you and us
to slow down.

In these anxious situations,
if you want to help me,
then please stop,
slow down with me,
look at me,
wait until I am ready to look back.
Just give me a moment
or two
or three
or a lifetime
to catch up.

If I can trust you to do this,
I and we will be OK.
I will learn to trust that I could be OK,
and I will feel grateful,
occasionally
to live with you,
to share my life with you
as you share yours with me.

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Echoes of Mom’s Great EarthDay

A transitional skill
my Mom taught me,
good to use when I start to feel at-risk,
somehow and anyhow,
whether in my relationship with her,
or with Earth’s more kosmic garden of naturally wild and domestic spirits.
Remember to ask permission to ask questions,
even before you may be sure of how She will probably answer
this question
especially when you may not yet fully know what
or how or when to ask.

“May I ask you a question?”
can be felt as a stab in hearts
for lovers who thought you were their question-space,
their primal source of both mystery
and childlike endless curiosity
inviting multi-reiterated “Why and How this Curiosity”
soaking deeper into your most richly composting soul of language.

If, when you ask this of your Mom,
Earth,
Lover,
Child,
Colleague,
Political and Economic Leaders,
fellow pilgrims along our nutritionally cooperative way,
if they seem to not respond at all,
your best translation of this absence might be
“Apparently not right now.
Please try again later.
I will probably be back campaigning your way again soon.”

If, when you ask
along your poli-economic trans-relational path,
you hear something like,
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
your best translation could be
“Please repeat.
No, I was not available for your question,
but now I might be.
However, beware,
my mind is in transition-mode right now,
and I might not seem to care
as compared to another
better appointed time.

Here it could be helpful
to memorize a script:
“May I share fifteen minutes later today?”
or variations on this quarter-turn of cooperative communication,
meeting each other halfway between
your hope to gain my full attention at all your ego’s most convenient times
and everywheres
and your negatively correlated parallel hope
to receive each of Earth’s relational invitations
as co-operatively intended gift-it-forward response
to whatever it was that Ego had been investing in
just before you asked for this transactional nutrition
to become invested right your way,
“Why can’t I have your attention
in this co-ego-focused way,
right now?”
kinda’ pushy, but may be worth a try.

If, when you ask for attention,
co-investments,
intentions of co-relationship,
such as “May I ask you a question,”
If Earth responds with
“I have always thought you were my most curious source
of life’s richest, deepest, most important and yet intimate questions.”
And then goes on and on resonantly, redundantly,
Especially about wise relationship choices and love as life’s pilgrimage,
co-mentoring how to both truly and beautifully plant our network of organic gardens,
My most fierce Advocate for Golden correlational landscape design,
and my designer of (0)ego-zone nutrient flow charts,
NatureMystic Quester of Earth-embedded hopes as WinWin ego outcomes
despite timeless death and decay
great and small transitional incarnational climate trends.

If you hear anything along those considerable lines,
please don’t worry so much
about forgetting what your LeftBrain competing-for-attention question was,
or might become
with further regenerate development.
Rather, refocus
on why did you think you needed to speak this question right now?
Why not just ask your originally intended question,
or is this your primal question implied within each question?
Wondering why we are always open within Earth’s source of childlike questions,
why do we call this mental and physical and economic and politically ecological health?

May I ask you a question?
“I most certainly hope you are.”
“Namaste, for such mutually-assured curiosity.”
Mythic Mystery,
active hope for Earth’s communicating love
and sometimes not quite so balanced yet,
ADH autistic bipolar paranoia,
egocentric terrorism,
anthrocentric addictions and aversion to competing LeftBrain evolutionary supremacist dialects,
cognitive-affective dissonance on an epic operatic scale of non-cooperation,
competitive research complexities, lapsing toward chaos,
waiting to become more fully networked as cooperative opportunities
to reiteratively ask “Why?”
receiving WinWin kosmic and RightNow answers,
to communicate our intelligently designed polyculturing curiosity.

In this more cooperative communication way,
every Earth Day is also Mother’s Day,
May we ask you a question?
Why?
Because I would not know how to ask
in our time now past
or ask in future Time
before this Why right now.
Why?…
reiterating
regenerating
(0)Riginating Evolutionary Intent.

Every day Mother’s Day
dipolar MidWay
thru Earth’s embryonic nutrition,
inter-regenerating healthy ego language,
eco-writing memories of Moms with futures
who might have been why.

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Finals

If I had one last hour with you
would I be able and willing to speak?

What could we say or sing again?
Or perhaps something hidden from view until now,
our final hour,
otherwise left unsaid.

Would words get in our way?
We might compose a final anthem,
torch song,
jazz impovisation
dispelling my decomposition story.

Could you put me down
like a cherished family dog?
On my side
you behind
my head on your shoulder
listening to us breathe our goodbye,
drifting into a more timeless embrace.

What final words might I wish to hear
or might words feel too distracting
for this sacred task,
to fill one final hour,
squeeze out all unfinished agendas
before this final curtain.

I fear I would have no more clue
of what to say and do
my last hour
than I did not my first.
A final wail
to bookend my first noisy gasp for breath.

It seems less surprising now
that I so often feel a loss of words
when relationships become compressed by time,
or even imagined as our time’s last hurrah.
Why would this last hour differ
from first and all self constraining hours between?

Final words and lives despise predestined mortality,
knowing Trees of Life predict Death Root Systems,
sitting and standing
and even lying down
bowing in to end
what we wondrously begin again.

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Positive Psychology Greets Basic PermaCultural Attendance

Although a post-millennial Taoist, I avoid pretending any authority within cultural, evolutionary, or ecological histories, or most any kind of history, except perhaps my personal story, with which, sadly perhaps, I do so hope this treatise will not overly concern itself. I am other things as well, including a gay white, rather grandfatherly adoptive parent of four African-American teenagers, ranging 13 to 19, and the youngest, my only girl child, Yang, radiant with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and Oppositional Temporal-Sequential Disorder (OD) when even at a moderate level of anxiety, which was, until the last few weeks, most of the time.

All that said, in my run-on sort of way, I have come back to the work of Laotse, and commentators, with some academic baggage including psychology, communication theory, philosophy, especially epistemology, holistic and panentheistic teleology (faith systems evincing meaning and purpose within the evolution of culture and information), systems theory, and then public administration, community and economic development, and, most recently, certification in Permaculture Design; which, at this point in our evolution might be more aptly re-labeled as Ecological Regenerative Development and Design because, while perhaps something may be permanent, it most certainly would not be culture, by definition a slow mutually-symbiotic radiant absorption of nutrients within an increasingly diastatic system, about to give birth to a transformed generation of reformulated function. Sounds like yeast to me.

My husband, and my second son, in their highly diverse ways, express concern about my memory and imagination juggling complex paradigmatic and temporal analogies, Alice in Wonderland conversations between mind and body, space and time, longing and belonging, physics and metaphysics, night and day, summer and winter, spring and fall, Yang and Yin.

 

I see Laotse as an Ecological Regenerative Designer-Shaman, writing an ecotherapy mentor manual to his intellectual and chi-optimizing organic progeny. Laotse feels informed by the flow and force functions of Earth’s natural systems, health and wellbeing, nutrition and values within not only moral/ethical frames of reference, but also metric, especially biometrically organized value-group systems and trends, like societies, and sages, and root systems, and rivers.

Pre-millennial astronomers were similarly fascinated by astrological patterns and rhythms. Perhaps my post-millennial perspective on ecological development and design derives from this same Original Natural Systemic Intent of Teleology, an intuitive responsiveness to icons of natural rhythmic change patterns and flow trends, development, and structure, regardless of paradigm, inclusive of psychotherapy, socioeconomic and cultural regenesis, economic and environmental therapy, but mainly about how to develop and maintain a safe and sane home with the capacity to grow organic wellness through incorporating global diversity.

 

I have been reading across multiple paradigms again. Apparently this is a bad habit that drives my husband nuts, or at least contributes to his dismay about my apparent lack of an appropriately prioritized, not to mention better organized, mind. Reading books about cosmology and psychotherapy and permaculture design, and economic policy simultaneously to see how they may inform each other, and the occasional Yes! or Scientific American magazine simulcasting, it’s hard to say exactly where this research project began. I might trace it back to slurping Mother’s nutrient stream of plasma, but something about reading Laotse, Julian Jaynes, Buckminster Fuller, and David Bohm together has shifted my perspective on my own retirement, and the apparent retirement from rationality of a too white Western wealthy male-dominant culture.

 

I  recall, about a year ago, discovering Positive Psychology. I first noticed the studies of identical twins, living with each other on a daily basis. They tend to look more alike than twins disassociated at birth, or even after reaching adulthood. More recently I saw pictures of long-time happily married couples, a whole lot of high school sweethearts who stayed sweet on each other for the duration. They tended to resemble each other, even facially sometimes, in ways that are more pronounced as elders than when they were young in their relationships. Not until a year ago did I notice that people who generally have positive, can-do, yet realistic attitudes (so mono-maniacal types are excluded), who tend to feel grateful within their relationships, for whom resentment and envy are anomalous feelings, anticipate their long-term prospects for contentment and success and joy, and continuing gratitude throughout their lifetime(s). These are generally happy, loving, kind people, often swimming in some nurturing form of learning/reflective culture, especially as they move into middle-age and beyond. These are the people with whom everybody wants to live. Or at least I do.

Perhaps significant, though, I find no evidence of white Western wealthier male dominance here. Although there are many with these Positive traits, these are far more deviantly shared with people who have had a more challenging time.

So, why do Positive people meeting this description, sidestepping viral irony, tend to live longer and healthier lives than the rest of us comparatively manic depressive and cynical “realists”? I read Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking when I was about ten, but I don’t remember anything that would predict why my tall handsome African-American husband would start looking and sounding more and more like me, and I, a not-so-tall and not so handsome white guy, would start looking and sounding more and more like him, and liking it less and less. This was not our plan twenty three years ago. We actually prefer our differences more than our similarities, I think. Or at least I do, or did, and I thought that was an illustration of my somewhat positive psychological health—attraction toward diversity.

Evolutionary psychologists explain why positive psychology is so positive, why happiness is healthier than ambivalence, at least in more chronic forms. They say positive is positive because we have better outcomes so this develops positive feedback loops that lead to more and better sex and progeny over more average years.

OK, so maybe I’m not as positive as I had positively hoped.

While this evolutionary ethology sounds right to me, it also feels like this alone would predict a run-away positive feedback loop. So happy kids would almost inevitably grow up to be successful, happy, contented, and grateful adults, and old people, and they would, by now, be in complete global control of our situation, and I could take a nap, without worrying about my grandkids’ future prospects. Maybe we have some systemic constraints on the density of positiveness that any one community or ecosystem, or white straight financially-comfortable Western male can realistically contain at this time. This evolutionary frame may predict survival benefits more humbly than actual flourishing outcomes.

Doesn’t Positive Psychology also at least imply that human nature is ecologically evolutionary, that underlying our individual ego-self identities lies our mutually subsidiary network of synergetic (0) sum eco-soul chi? Mutual confluence and gratitude resonates; while mutual immunity, tension, stress, dissonance creates considerable noise, decay, destitution, death. Is a positively balanced ego-consciousness a still-emergent formation foreshadowing our understory, an eco-network of well-rooted, positive/negative balanced, thermodynamically harmonious gravity flow and synergy? Are we body-ego-identified individuals exploring our positively intended evolution as mind-eco-cellular individuating (0)-sum chi soulfood for each Other, within our own bodies and merging minds, and environments, relationships, communities, language development, nutrient economies, our own homes and families? This sounds Positive, but also Permacultured, to me.

 

I suspect there may be some implicit Negative Psychology mixed in with our explicated Positive Psychology; a recognition of the therapeutic value of grief, of care-giving and care-receiving, of nurturance and heartbreak as a response to pain and loss, and extinguishment, or purgation, in some contexts, as a response to dissonance and turbulence; like when my teenage sons pop their ear buds back in and turn their backs—Cognitive Dissonance Theory at work.

If only the positive, happy, more enlightening, emotions and affect could lead to improved, more abundant happiness, then I would presume that those of us who tend to sometimes be at least a tad more dull, and blind to our own gratitude for belonging with each Other, would have long ago died out, probably before dinosaurs. Glee, success, happiness, brilliance, beauty, goodness do not fully explain personal and social and economic evolution, or we would all be a whole lot more positive by now.

A response may emerge by looking at why Positive Psychology bears the name “Positive” rather than other possibilities like “Therapeutic” or “Good” or even “Correct” or “True.” Or “Perfect,” why not Perfection Psychology or even Paradise Psychology?

According to Wikipedia.com, our mutual textbook in the clouds, “Positive Psychology…uses scientific understanding and effective intervention to aid in the advancement of a satisfactory life, rather than merely treating mental illness.” What distinguishes between an unsatisfactory life and mental illness? Why wouldn’t treating an unsatisfactory life also treat mental illness? Positive Psychology implicitly, or liminally, somehow, seems to respond to Negative Psychology, our cultural fascination with pathology as unsatisfactory.

The Positive branch complements, with no intention to replace or ignore, the traditional pathological foci of psychology. Those other, Negative psychologists, with remedial intentions, have their place inside our somewhat shared asylum. Those ready for, and actively seeking, the good life will learn about “using your signature strengths everyday to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.” (Martin Seligman, 2002). Presumably, if you want to learn to use your signature weaknesses everyday to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification, then you need to move over to that other Negative branch, which, unfortunately, is so embedded in its Anger Management pathological silo that the two branches are too often not even on speaking terms within the hearts and minds of psychologists.

Kirk Schneider points “to a body of research showing high positivity correlates with positive illusion, which effectively distorts reality.” High positivity, or “flourishing,” can generate a positive feedback loop rendering some self-delighted sap “incapable of psychological growth, unable to self-reflect, and tend to hold racial biases. By contrast, negativity, sometimes evidenced in mild to moderate depression, is correlated with less distortion of reality.” (wikipedia.com, Positive Psychology, Schneider, 2011, Toward a Humanistic Positive Psychology). This reminds me of how psychoanalyst mentor Harold F. Searles responded to Edward Podvoll when he was unclear about what more he could learn, ”Your problem is that you’re not paranoid enough.”

 

Depression, to take a sometimes personal example, may be a correcting, or TrimTab, tipping point away from run-away positively manic delusion, just as flourishing affect and feelings associated with ego-identity and relationships can be therapeutic for all that sad poetry I write during the winter that no one wants to read, including myself, when I’m feeling Positive, “flourishing.”

TrimTabs, from B. Fuller, are small deviant adjustment dynamics that reiterate positive and negative feedback functions between Positive Psychology and Negative Therapy, showing up in the amazing outcomes of the Positive Deviance Initiative (www.positivedeviance.org).

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.

The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.

This is strategized and planned positive evolution, with regenerative neighborhood and community-level effects. It is, in Podvoll’s language, finding islands of relative sanity. For example, a few parents figure out how to grow well-fed kids without any more money than anyone else in a neighborhood of largely malnourished kids.  The Positive Deviance researchers interview those families as the first step in spreading their outcomes more broadly among the population. I presume the reverse-deviant behavior or affect or feeling, or all the above, truly is positive, and not involving flourishing kids in assaulting other kids for their school lunches. Maybe these kids are flourishing because they have better choices for breakfast and carry nutritious lunches from home instead of what everybody else at school is eating.

 

This idea of not only Positive Deviance but also, by implication at least, Negative Deviance spreading to optimize a mutually-valued level of long-term sustainability comes to mind as I look for Ecological Mentoring Communities and Homes. Like the Findhorn EcoVillage, for example. Where are our best therapeutic cooperative models for sustained intentional positive communal life? How would one go about replicating these cultural development models within a more diverse and inclusive culture?

Apparently not with Positive Psychology alone, but some TrimTab balance between the Yangish excesses of positively functional outcomes and the Yin negative-reflective mutuality of interdependent nourishment, economic subsidiarity. Loss, pain, dissonance, wilting flowers and thriving weeds, climatic distempers, violent and fear-filled communications acutely erupt into our lives, and sometimes chronically emerge into our relationships, our communally accepted norms, our willingness to compromise on our definition of “home” and “paradise,” and perhaps even “sanity,” due to cognitive dissonance realities of the moment.

I am looking for models to form and maintain and self-propel positively deviant residential communities. Three psychologists stand out for me. The first is Julian Jaynes. I may get back to him a bit later. The other two are psychoanalysts, Edward Podvoll (Recovering Sanity, 2003) with a Compassionate therapeutic model, developed through the Windhorse Project, and Laura S. Brown’s Feminist Therapy (Subversive Dialogues, 1994).

Brown is passionately eloquent about the dis-positive ego-softening state of listening and speaking awareness essential to empathetically resonant, resilient, sustained therapeutic relationship. “A feminist therapy ethics takes the stance that practitioner and client are allies in the process of transforming…” (p. 207). This idea of therapist and ally, as empathic mutual mentors listening for dynamic functionality within their cognitive and communication dysfunction goes by the name of Basic Attendance in Podvoll’s psychoanalytic model.

Basic Attendance may be to non-violent communication what compassionate mindfulness is to actively engaged discursive synergy. Perhaps Basic Attendance has more of a peace intention, while compassionate mindfulness carries a more Western linguistic preference for active love. All of these are born of the same synergetic fabric found ubiquitously in religious and scientific paradigms as mutually gravitational attracting energy, motion, time frequencies, integrative function and force.

Uncovering the existence of spontaneous, innate flashes of sanity can become the building blocks of recovery…. Learning the necessary skills of this approach, especially the methods of basic attendance, allows human intimacy to become the catalyst for recovery. (Podvoll, p. 318)

Human natural intimacy is basic attendance, which might also be defined as the implicated root, or enthymematic to, compassionate mindfulness, love, or even synergy—according to Buckminster Fuller’s original coinage of this term for negative entropy—the opposite of an established relationship is something different, and more “advent”ish, more actively hopeful, than the entropic absence of relationship.

Basic Attendance includes both an intention and a practice. Intention precedes practice, “In this sense, environmental [ecological?] awareness is not only the tool to create sanity in the household, it is also the fundamental healing discipline that the patient needs.” Basic Practice of Attendance evolves out of Compassionate Therapy as a “fundamental healing discipline” ordained, perhaps quite literally, by ecological multisystemic awareness, or perhaps even a more active prehension of “Other-ness” within. “The secret of such intimacy can be learned and practiced; it is called the discipline of ‘exchange’.” (Podvoll, p.. 318) This seems to more-or-less bring us back to Brown’s feminist and holistically integral empathy.

Stretching to include human nature’s full living and often quite deviant diversity, I suppose ecological natural system awareness disciplines would include intentional breathing together, and noticing the pace of our heart rhythms, perhaps movement, exercise, artistic expression, poetry and story-telling, but also the mundanely unmystical habit of listening in full left- and right-hemispheric balanced stereo, and perceiving and feeling and absorbing and generating full sensory nutrient positive potential in full left-right hemispheric balanced stereo.

Julian Jaynes’ evolutionary theory of left-brained emergent linguistic dominance might suggest a cranial understory of reiterative, double-boundaried, Eco-Connected-SelfOtherPrimeRelationship-Mind-Right and Ego-Self-Identified-Body-Left-Languaged accessibility to and from older-brain encoded information. R.D. Laing, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller, and Robert Norton all look at diverse paradigmatic relationships between double-bind prime identification nonduality, emergence of binomial—analogic and digital, bipolar, and dual-nature dipolarities, autistic dissonant communication silos, and the ethological emergence of ego-body-self-identity awareness seminally accessible with the evolution of double stimulation capacity. (See Robert Norton’s Communication & Consequences: Laws of Interaction, p. 101) Self and Other are mutually individuated by knowing not only that when Other touches my arm I can feel this on my arm, but also when Self pinches my arm I can feel this on my arm and on my hand. Self is both subject progenitive, predicative, and object, response, outcome, in some (0)-sum balanced ego-core identity; or Not-Self-Otherness Species.

Non-violent communication analyzes the distinctly pathological problems that emerge from listening only with one ear and seeing only with one ego-centric eye. Feminist therapy reminds us that optimizing therapists choose to give fully balanced weight and credence to any functional intention of Other’s voice and movement, through empathic listening and responding with a voice or movement, music, rhythm, pace, flow, frequency this particular Other, in this particular moment might be able to recognize as confluently responsive.

When my non-verbal son screeches and shouts and pops his lips with a sequence of rhythms and pitches, creating a repeatable sequence, he listens more attentively when I repeat these sounds back to him, more or less the way they sounded to me. For my reward, he shows the dimple on the right side of his mouth. Because I frequently get to see this dimple, I recognize myself as a well-trained Ecotherapy student; but D. is, so far, the only effective verbal-pattern linguistic teacher in our mutually-therapeutic relationship.

When my probably insane daughter throws her food, jumps up from the table and runs away, I have learned to stretch further to see and hear through her functional neural system. It looked rather like one of her internal voices sounded an alarm, “Oops, alien incoming! Run away!!!

The most positive response in my arsenal was to see this as time to clear up her mess and go read a good book. But, when she was ready to come back to the crime scene, she wanted to eat the food off our floor (not something for the faint-hearted to even consider) rather than clear it up with a broom and mop.

When I responded with a cease and desist!, her response ranged from angry panic, incessant wailing despair, to loud protestations to the effect, “I’m hungry! Not just hungry; but hungry for this food on this wall and floor!”

With time, and more reflection on what response might Basic Attendance invite to my daughter’s dysfunctional alarm, it came to me that the alarm itself is not dysfunctional; it is my interpretation of her alarm’s meaning that was too myopic. My challenge was to regain positive and active faith in her functional intent to take care of herself. Soon after I remembered that she will take care of herself before she will do anything else, because she is profoundly ego-identified, it occurred to me that maybe I should jump up and run with her to her bedroom sit down on the floor with her, hold her if she will let me, and ask her what happened and why were we running away from the mashed potatoes, with gravy, and butter.

While initially all I got was silence, this was already better than all that wailing and terror. Eventually we got to I don’t know. Shortly after that, to Who threw my dinner? I’m hungry! That was when I began to have restored faith that there was a positive, yet alarming, method in her madness. She began to teach me about oppositional temporal disorder, reversed memory of cause and effect when under moderate to high stress conditions, and confusion between agent and victim, Self and Other-ness.

My daughter’s reverse-synaptic affective response to her environment as a negative and toxic place for living cells probably started with her first baptism in alcohol. As she has matured and found her moments of sane nurturing relationships breaking through the insanity of her neural-hostage environment, her anxiety level has dissipated. I. continues to mature, helped along by some music and dance and game therapy, playing with cause, effect, and reciprocal, reiterative, and appositional-oppositional temporal sequencing. Reverse role playing, story-telling with peaceful and harmonious words but saying them mean and ugly, and vice versa, ritualistic absurd name calling all have become idiosyncratic to our mutually trusting, playful, often humorous, positively expressive relationship.

 

Ecological awareness is feeling and hearing and seeing Self and Other with both eyes, as interdependent holons within Earth’s positive evolutionary, explicating, incarnating order. Karmic purpose unfolds as grace’s meaning, as karma’s practice enfolds grace’s intent. Borrowing from Basic Attendance but also Permaculture Design, we can choose to optimize polycultural nutrient absorption by minimizing ego-dominating distractions, predators, and dissonant assumptions of malignant intent. Bicameral basic attendance learns that well-balanced egos prehend indigenously within self-perpetuating, self-defining eco-centric EarthTribe’s designing and developing, emerging natural flow trends, functions, information. We each evolve part of Earth’s way, truth, and life; each of these three words is used to define Tao and, by Jesus of Nazareth, to define Messiah, as a new millennial manna.

Buckminster Fuller might recognize mutually symbiotic Attendance within our multi-systemic environment as a metaphysically real true way, or Universal Intelligence.[1] Fuller presciently committed intelligent permacultured design to the core TrimTab balancing principle of Greatest Effect with Least Waste, or loss of value, or least retention of dissonant-resistant frequencies and functions. His TrimTab mechanism later was labeled as the “tipping point” within a dynamic system in process of reversing one or more energy or information flow trends. A Trimtab’s (0) Core Vector is a “digital” view of optimized confluent analogical frequency trends, and minimized dissonant frequencies; optimized energy and information. TrimTabbing predicates consciousness value-balancing within any dynamic relationship trending toward prime, primal, or seminal; a significantly harmonious threshold toward emergently confluent ways, or Tao. Tipping points are emergently diastolic balanced flow, with reduced dissonant turbulence, moving toward some new/old diastatic, mutually enculturing stage of systemic relationship, synergetically merging two interdependent but complexly diffused, and sometimes confused, entities into one organically evolving form of perpetually dynamic stasis; an ecosystem.

TrimTabs are tipping points in cultural self-designing moments and eras, increasing our collective prime comprehension, conceivability, compassionate mindfulness. They are balancing trend changes of function and form and frequency generating new moments of mutual sanity, or at least reiteratively building exchanges of values, words, thoughts, conceptual forms and structures that appear to have harmonious resonance between communicating minds and bodies wanting to head in the same balanced direction, eventually. But, for this moment, merging into dissonant frequencies invites an open-ended pilgrimage whose end we can see, but not any steps in between.

Somehow it all feels like regenerative paradigms are soaking into our global analogically saturating culture right now, this companionship between physics and math and teleology and evolution and ecopsychology and new economics and cooperative gaming theory, and then back to Bayesian trend analysis of QBits, or Qits, or whatever quixotic quarky name we have for implicately analyzed big data-set trend strings of confluent prime spacetime relationships within regenerative  natural and strategic development story lines. This generates a permacultured nutrient rich and sustained well-being frequency or stage theory.

Temporally emergent functions and stage-frequencies follow an ecological rhythm and pattern like RNA, or the four annual seasons, or the light and dark sections of a day. In Dharma and Development, Dr. Joanna Macy discusses a development fractal following this same pattern:

  1. NOTICE: metta–loving kindness as Basic Positive Teleological Attendance
  2. HOPE: karam—compassion and/or grief [I would translate as confluence and/or dissonance, within information and communication theory]
  3. FAITH: mudita—joy in the joy of others; confluence/sorrow in the confluence/sorrow of others; trust in the trust of others; informating through informating with others; incarnating through incarnating as Integral Eco-Other Positive mythos/logos, eisegetical/exegetical string species
  4. LOVE/ACTIVE PEACE WITH JUSTICE: uppekkha—equanimity/integrity optimized value balance; a great, and deep, peace Tao of balanced equity.

So, in Bloom’s Taxonomy of deep learning, we start with

  1. an enthymematically emergent noticing of potential information,
  2. through researching hope of confluence within appositionally analyzed dissonance,
  3. Through reporting heuristic faith therein, and finally
  4. comparatively analyzed and synthesized for analogous ecologies and economies with prior regenerative memory cycles and metric systems and language paradigms;

Basic Attendance metta is to hope, as faith is to love;

as LINE is to COSINE is to LTR is to Fuller’s (0) Core Vector fractal prime relationship;

as winter’s advent is to springing hope,

as summer’s faith fulfills in abundant Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Permaculture Design and Development optimized prime cooperative information and functional-synergetic value harvests;

as Uracil is to Cytosine,

so is Adanine to Guanine;

as + is to (-),

so is Polynomial Yang+ QBit

OVER

Reverse Not-Polynomial Yin(-)QBit..

This EcoTherapy is symbiotically and binomially born of  digital binary information ecosystemic theory, and from a deeply inclusive permacultured Golden Rule, expressing each person’s positive intent through Basic Attendance, described as our mutually empathic, and intuitively enthymematic dancing practice of reflecting each other’s sanity by discovering analogies within our own experience and imagination, our extant range of frequency and functional and formative awareness of natural/organic/holonic potential, events, exercises (e.g. role play, music, gaming exercises, movement, meditation, stress reduction and artistic expressive therapies). Basic Attendance is to actively peaceful, “safe” and harmonious expression what non-violent communication is to dissonant- and risk-avoidant information patterns, like the stuff of Cognitive Dissonance Research. Cognitive Dissonance is the opposite of Basic Attendance, which grows nutrient positive roots for growing more sustainable Positive Deviance trends within apparent negative environmental circumstances, especially within currently abused and neglected populations, species, neighborhoods and bioregions.

 

Anyway, getting back to my crazy oppositionally afflicted reverse-temporal synaptic daughter, she and I were both able to laugh at our dysfunctional fears when I was able to share with her that she threw that vegeburger and ran away so fast, I was sure it had teeth and had bitten her on the nose. She found that image amusing, and perhaps humoring this pathology helped her loosen her fearful grasp a bit, to hang on to our shared intentionally co-passionate and mindful moment of positive integral ecotherapy. It helped each of us to hear the other, and ourselves, laughing about that fearsome vegeburger. Laughter, perhaps literally, absorbs dissonant information, it is medicinal, as is joy, and all those attributes associated with Positive Psychology.

Perhaps what is still missing for me in Positive and (negative) remedially-oriented  ecopsychology theory is something that might help explain why an old widow and her not quite so old boxer look like cousins sometimes. Can we predict the evolution of body and mind confluence by optimizing multisystemic information and energy confluence in each of our relationships, each moment, each choice of word and song and dance and value? Is this not what we mean by Basic Attendance, and/or compassionate mindfulness?

How might we spread this rich compost of Basic Polycultural Attendance throughout our most cooperative and permacultured enterprises? Throughout the places in time and moments in space where those who are not wealthy straight Western adult males, 40-70, will have one of Laura Brown’s Subversive Dialogues about ecotherapeutic cooperative care for homes and families, businesses and vocations, learning and designing and developing regenerative systems and relationships. How will our historical-cultural understoried population invest our wealth for ourselves, our children, and our future generations of all EarthTribe?

 

REGENERATIVE WORK

Is work that reconnects?

I hope I am hearing voices from the future

not yet here.

But, I have a message from our past

that might reflect a positive intention

for continuing our epic journey

of regenerative pilgrimage.

 

Do we intend effective regenerative therapy

for straight white upper middle class

family value issues,

choosing segregated safety

over a more active adventure of integrative living

as a quasi-gendered Other of non-color

within a neighborhood

and school

and training workshops

led by straight white wealthier

family value issuers,

reformers,

ecotherapists?

 

Industrial Age Myth delivers

global value confusion

into an otherwise formerly sustained,

deeply green encultured,

Agrarian EarthTribal Age Myth.

Logosing across economic,

ecological,

cultural,

linguistic analogies,

emerges a slow-evolving hypothesis:

family economic and ecological silent silos of abuse

and neglect reveal abundantly informative

confluent Tao patterns and

permaculturally functional rhythms.

 

BUSINESS AS USUAL

  1. Industrial Age Myth of Global Progress

Leads to

  1. White wealthier Western

straight male-dominant

cultural and ecological

and economic pathologies.

 

AND

 

REGENERATIVE THERAPY DEVELOPMENT AND DESIGN:

tipping turning vortex

Positive Deviance Therapy

confluently hearing

Positive peace-filling kind-kin logos orthodoxy.

(1) Profoundly inclusive diversity

(2) reweaving diastolic evolution toward

(3)diastatic fullness,

also known as

(1) Basic Grateful Attendance

(2) to Self, Other, Earth,

three faces of SelfIdentity balancing EarthTribal Co-Prehension,

(3) democratizes compassionate mindfulness,

also known as

(1) Eastern Yin-executively flexible

and reverse-hierarchically inclusive

polycultural information skills

(2) emerges ecological economic

and global-learning therapies.

(3) Leads To

  1. Sustaining Well-Being Optimized BiCameral Networks

Agrarian

Residential

and Trade Guild Cooperatives

Communities and Nations

planets and universes

with Therapeutic Ecological Econormial Values

 

These feed my permacultured Taoist soul story

that we are sticking with it

to fly together,

and not apart.

 

[1] In Synergetics 2 (1979), #987.075, p. 322, Fuller appears to conclude that Universal Intelligence is DNA/RNA design programming, the “cosmic-coordinate system to be embraced and accommodated by the epistemography of synergetics.” If so, then he may have been casting the role of uracil as “Yang”, +1 Eulerian QBit function, Bohm’s Explicate Order, and Polynomial spacetime information set, and cytosine as “Yin,” +/-(0) Core Prime Fractal-Holonic Relationship, Vertex/Vortex binomial, Not-Polynomial-dominant, reverse-temporal “dark/dense” string memory codex.

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