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Cooking Up Stories

Why would I care enough

to open your story?

Why don’t I care enough

to fill you in to mine?

 

I love your wild willingness,

can’t say the same for our willfulness

to exchange our belonging

for side-by-side longing.

for being karma’s relentless becoming

when we could more peacefully

become simple incarnate beings.

 

Prime being together

feeds my soul to yours,

organic compost

sublime breakfast

wild beings

with stir-flying nice.

 

Natural nutrients grow strong values

folding our stories with care.

 

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Uncategorized

Being (sh)”It”

It was there

right there

on woodland’s playground

when I first knew

something stirs very wrong.

 

I was blind to balls

hurled at me,

being It is not why I grow my mind and body,

or is it?

 

I am “It!”

or at least half It.

 

It and I play best alone.

He slows down

to notice ocean surf

waving back and forth

an ocean sighing Hi, then low,

creeping in and sucking out.

It both hugs and climbs trees

to the very top

on windy ways

to wave back.

 

Why is It so shy?

Or, am I hiding her-him,

I’m not sure,

some of both

but too androgynous Him

fears no one else notices

surf rolls in and reverses out.

 

It knows bi-natured law

prehensile full-bodied grasp

of organic life’s humorous ambiguity

creative ambivalence

righteous equivalent functions and flows

of yang with yin within,

as without,

below,

as above,

before,

as to come,

long,

as to belong now,

together.

 

It’s so hard to not love

not share

bare

expose cooperatively unbalancing It.

S/he is soo… much fun!

laughs with everyone

generous enough to return this fine favor.

It’s polypathic polyculturing

binomial binary buddha brain

saturates flowering rain

dissects words to heal disharmonic logos

through permacultured alchemy linguistics,

a language It fears to ultimately find

merely eisegetical,

 

It chooses Red Rover

over soccer,

plays teacher with girls

over driving trucks and trains,

thinks compulsively about this problem of evil

while watching Leave it to Beaver,

where Father Knows Best,

over pitching stones and driving tractor.

 

It feels older and wiser than Him

but they are born twins

or so it seems

but It mysteriously explores incarnating cycles,

watching double-funneling raincloud whirlwinds

wind wending Elder ways

etching whorlwaters in our sea of shared identity,

or is whipping wind following whirling water,

but certainly both?

It abhors stability,

but adores regenerating solidarity.

 

It mentors ecotherapy with trees and me,

shows me boundary issues and branch

functions and frequencies

between August’s Yangish fire

and winter’s quenching white snow and ice,

between autumn’s wind falling regenetic harvest

and spring’s diastolic succulent soil

decomposing nutrients

growing new perennial rings in this life’s tree,

new leaves of grass-fed hope

new polyculture basic, simple-rich compost

new incarnating multisystemic

ecotherapeutic grace,

responsive

resolving

resonant within evil’s missing

non-polynomial dislogical pace,

new flowers and fruit

for Eden’s farm.

 

Did I just call It a fruit

out loud?

Shit happens inside our playground,

while planning more polyculturally redemptive lives.

 

 

 

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Uncategorized

Buddha’s Permaculturing Brain

Can we EarthTribally intuit

confluent therapeutic information frequencies of harmony

averse only toward

Empiric deductive-dissonant Win?-Lose

divinely not-so-inspired economies

of confused and suffering ecologic?

 

Surely declaring nature as not kind

is not equivalent to experiencing nature as intrinsically unkind,

much less unloving or stupid,

a bully,

just as wrestling with God

is not necessarily wrestling against God?

 

Each incarnating investment string with which and whom

I gratefully greet and resonate,

mutually karmating our cooperative

solarsynthetic-fueled subsidiarity,

potentially, our regenerative synergy together,

belongs with, by, for, if me

on this our last day of becoming

and our first day of being

this perennially resolving,

harmoniously evolving,

while dissonantly revolving,

Tao true-balancing (0)-centric EarthDay.

 

Our millennium for Empirical Self-Bullying

now made bidextrously obsolete

with ambidextrous PermaTeleological

redemptively regenerative MentorShamans,

polyculturing our cooperative eco-normic,

positively deviant,

way true belonging lives.

 

Longing wrestles equivalent eternal encultured belonging,

as Yin advents Yang,

as -(-) predicts + form and lambent flowing-function.

 

 

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Uncategorized

Great-Horned Owl

I remember that walk

with my Great Horned Owl

lying on wilting green bed of grass

next to her severed left wing,

her eyes so Open Sesame

in a cardboard box

my arms were graced to carry

to her grave.

 

I remember billowing ribbons of vapored breath

sweeping out toward yellow brown hay stubble fields,

our red barn and fake-brick farmhouse,

carrying messianic wonder and hope,

worry and fear and unworthy sobs

for this Earth,

so richly endowed with ionic wisdom,

to choose us for her

Permaculturing Opera.

 

But, I was eight

with much to unlearn,

and this may be why Sage Owl

had come to vaccinate me,

to show me through her dying

that Permaculture Tribe

mentors me to ask for water

cupped in my young right hand,

open to her infinite swelling eyes

leaking thirsty freedom justice,

tipping sea salty balance

toward all Earth’s shamanic polycultured Tribes.

 

I buried her for far too long,

apparently justice flies with older wisdom.

We are each ecologically programmed shamans

blindly dodging barbed wire fences.

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Uncategorized

Christ-Massors

I am thinking there may be an important difference between a pro-peace activist and an anti-violence protester. In a way, their relationship reminds me of that between a prophetic biosystem, like John the Baptist, and a messianic system, like Jesus of Nazareth.

Too many prophets and not enough messiahs makes for a sadly brow-beaten culture, with a beat-down Left-hemispheric dominant temporal trajectory. We emerge into Yin’s time to dance her balanced-harmonics, singing folk-ballads with intuitive ecological choreography.

Anyway, I spend way too much time protesting my violent cultures, environments, ecosystems with overheated climates. It is simply too easy to be against violence, because no one is pro-violence, no one wants to overheat our atmosphere, our political and economic and sociopathological climates. There isn’t a Republican or Democratic, capitalist or communist or libertarian or sectarian platform that advocates violence for the sake of how great violence is in and of itself. So, protesting our own already-disvalued violence doesn’t appear to be a really strong platform for the would-be Prophet of Peace.

So, this seems to bring us into the reverse frame, our cultural values and disvalues around growing and maintaining a more peaceful ecology and economy. Here is where we start losing potential allies, primarily through neglect, because we are so,… I don’t know,… ACTIVE protesting against those who believe their self-interests might be compromised by cultural and financial shifts toward cooperatively systemic peaceful, inclusive, diversely sustainable value functions and flow frequencies. If I pay my mortgage quite nicely building submarine parts and information technologies, or research that might be useful for strengthening our self-defense systems, in some eco-dislogical way, then I am going to experience some cognitive dissonance about this. It will be very risky for short-term goals, goals that are now lifetime bucket lists, to hear prophets against people like me who are somewhat less pro-peace than self-appointed as “I’m better baptized in ecological value Orthodoxy than you are!” Messengers.

Again, for the second time, we sub-optimize our messianic intent by using too-unprophetically ineffective messages. Enough with the negative campaigning already! Let’s keep growing this newer messianism for peace and inclusive equity and sustainability through clearly articulate mentoring, confining our teaching tendencies to something that feels more like story-telling or show-and-tell. And maybe even some stand-up comedy, on occasion. Laotse said he intended his Wisdom to invite laughter in response, from those who most deeply understood his poetry.

Perhaps we could demonstrate how useful submarine technology might become for researching how schools of fish need not learn how to move and surge and ebb synchronously, peacefully, equitably, because they appear to be wired to the same functional frequencies, regardless of spatial separation, and is this somehow related to those appositionally displaced quanta or QBits, or whatever they are calling them these days? This is a big issue for me! Seriously!  I would like to know if that’s just a coincidence or do both of these freaky flow adjustments point to some deeply-rooted Pro-Peace Sustainability Awareness of ecological and permacultural stability strategies. Do plasmatic neurons somehow enthymematically intuit abundantly cooperative temporal-flow systems and network dynamics, perhaps by largely neglecting to get their more egocentric systemic surroundings all riled up, and once more further over-heated?

Messiahs and Shambhala Warriors and the Salvation Army are actively pro-peace and justice  confluent, cooperative, developmental, regenerative producers and mentors and absorbent, positive-teleological nurturers, feeding smooth-structured systems and networks that present lowest long-term ecological and economic risk for global investment. This could be why our shared messiah vocation is ideally responsive to polypathic, positively deviant, ecosystemically logical, economically-efficient mentors.

Now see, that’s where Jesus messed up. He gave control of his economy to the one guy who was willing to compromise on keeping peace in the family of disciples, and not at all inclined to derive investment plans holonically, much less by mutually grateful consensus. Optimal messianic mentors understand, feel, the skill of dynamically facilitating positive teleological trends within themselves, their families, communities, species, cultures, economies, ecosystems, ecotherapies, and Earth.

This Christian Messianic Inspired Event reminds me to pursue EarthTribal Peace with more dancing in reiteratively emergent diapraxis  story-circles, less violent driving and marching and shopping in over-heated public squares.

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Man/Sha Legends

Professor Swan’s EcoTherapeutic Home

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 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 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 duality, emergence of binomial—analogic and digital, bipolar, and dual-nature polarities, 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.

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, force this particular Other, in this particular moment might be able to recognize as confluently responsive.

When my non-verbal son, Yin, 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 Yin 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 Yang 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.

Yang’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. Yang 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 design and development 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 values and 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 stasis.

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.

Prime mindfulness emerges from a formative infolding/outflowing intuition: just as Self identity grows through successfully individuating Not Eco-Other, so Not Eco-Other reveals our universal prime replicating teleological and ecological fractal relationship, with 50% Yang Self-Body ego-identity boundary covering [positive correlates with geometrically convex, when you learn to speak Fullerian, or Buckminstermess] our 50% interior eco-Yin chi-soul embryonic mind [negative correlates with concave], together self-perpetuating interdependent individuation, lived in balance on the cusp of each interdependently eco-self-consciously eternal temporal moment, our  mutually symbiotic event of shared consciousness.

We need not deeply comprehend primal layers of Basic Attendance to understand  Fuller’s prime relationship of 4-based geometric dynamic physics, and the process of in-formating, and 6-based metaphysical prime stage-flow functions, like color and sound round octaves shaped by Pythagorean iconic codes of value, or 2-based prime temporal-ergetic polarity, +radiant Eulerian primal horizontal cross fractal-functional perspective OVER (-)ergetically gathering, synergizing, concaved frequency temporal trend, the dark bottom view of a tornado spinning away from you, temporal spin assumption of clockwise [temporal natural flow patterns “from below” would be the dark understory view of a tornado spinning a spiraling temporal-flow string of memory back in time traveling away from you] = Right hemisphere toward Left hemisphere across elliptical space, Left toward Right across polar-linear time sequence and appositional staging seasons.

Somehow it all feels like it is 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 overall regenerative  Hilbert-space strategic development trend-normative story lines. This generates a permacultured nutrient rich and sustained well-being frequency, full-octave, with a sometimes alarmingly, and often surprising, bipolar temporal intent, and autonomic intuition of frequency polarities.

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
  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 hope of confluence researched,
  3. through faith therein reported, 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 cognitive intent through Basic Attendance  described as our mutually enculturing, empathic, and intuitively enthymematic 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 (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, 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 you invest our wealth for yourself, your 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

confluenct 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.

A.(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

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;

and I am not either just a straight white Western male old fart!

Gerald O. Dillenbeck

 

[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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Regenerating Tao

What does our Elder suggest

for regenerative incarnation,

for socioeconomic

ecological

economic

change of values,

growth toward inclusive diversity,

away from exclusive monopoly,

toward resilience,

buoyant sustenance,

rich nutrients,

permacultured polycultures?

I began learning from extended families

as a fetal cocoon,

receiving positive nutritional values

through Yin-Mother’s milky secretions

absorbed and transforming

this new EarthTribe creation.

Mother’s milk followed an extended plasma pilgrimage,

double-parabolic enfolding and unfolding,

covering and discovering,

longing and belonging,

intergeneration back to her original nuclear

non-self-acidic abundant confluence intent,

shared cellular mutually subsidiary default,

to recognize Self as living,

organic,

transformating cocoon

potential and fulfilled,

echoing memories of Self as time continued,

only capable of willing to continue within this Boundary Self

teleological, existential, phenomenological, analogical,

permanently eco-logical universe.

I grow Not-Other environmental awareness,

shedding dissonant immunity paradigms and frequencies,

re-prehending primal physical and gravitational

mutually positive flow

weaving together temporal flow with digital in-formation,

analogically spacetime positive functional trend.

Only free to choose this life fulfilling at this time,

free to choose to continue choosing

memory or not, or both together,

a choice of freedom already optimized

in each just-now-possible eternal moment.

More recently, our scent of extended family

grows exponentially across species,

traversing Earth,

extending back to Elder trees,

hierarchically binomial neural organisms,

temporally and ergetically,

and stardust plasma flowing

gravitationally waving linear embracing structures,

and forward swelling into future generations

already born as seeds in advent’s uncracked wombs,

Yang forced urgent critical need,

diastolic then diastatic,

folding in and opening out,

regenesis.

Wiser questions,

healthier and more humane:

Who do I most want

each other to become

right now

in this sustainably optimizing relationship

of becoming Tao?

What do I expect of Self and Other,

not just one or the other,

what responsibility, shared authority,

mutually gratuitous subsidiarity,

cooperative economy,

rooted in balanced peace and justice,

systematic religioning ecologos,

but mostly love?

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EcoTherapy Farmhouse

I find my home

a rural agrarian kinda place

warmly displays across my eyes

and face,

peopled incarnation of shared dreams

from permacultural paradise.

 

All her places and spaces feel good,

smell perfectly like we

are meant to come together.

Home reveals her spousal face,

mutually active nurturing place

to grow secure plans

and plays,

designs and positive dialogues,

liturgies and reality off-screenplays

with peaceful justice love themes

scored for lyrical fractals

and (0)-sum cooperative economies,

well networked nest of compassionate intent

weaving mind-filling informational practice.

 

Our farm evolves herself as loving incubator

planting springs and strings and roots of hope

for regenerative farmers growing selves

with others solidarity,

composting mutual subsidiarity

to synergize love’s Earth Intelligence

for sustaining life

in permacultured bliss.

 

Summer’s weeds strain when pulled and plucked

to analyze which might mulch our flowering produce

of positive healthy affect, effect,

absorbing rich yeast nutrients

through open system skin and minds

bent toward cooperative confluence,

shunning cognitive dissonance,

both Yang’s triumphal passion

for Yin’s shy dexterity

and lightning speed of intuition

swimming swirls of morning fog

hugging Earth’s low slow places,

morning kiss warms sky and still-reclining Earth

goodbye til dusk falls once again

enclosing our permaculturing bed.

 

Ecologic falls like rain

saturating nature’s grounds for time-flow planning.

Harvest positive deviant seeds

through bicameral information systems

prehending nature’s dynamic revolutions

from inside polar balanced,

from outside revolving rooted trees,

both emerging up and down

embracing Earth’s core gravitas

our thermodynamically balanced compost

for incubating permacultured farmers

and other synergetic polycultural ingredients,

for creating this time and place

where spacetime spins in balance.

 

My permacultured farmhouse becomes me.

We either ride together

or walk separately,

remembering why we can’t go home again,

religioning how we might come home

where every farmhouse

evolves with ecotherapy.

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Golden Natural Logos

Right meaning of mindful love in, for, of the past

grows Left purposed active co-passionate peace for now,

and of predicating future,

birthing mutually together,

ego-eco centric balanced,

a (0)-sum Common Relationship

Original Intent and Omega Point,

cooperatively held and mutually balanced challenges

to learn this permaculturating history.

 

Surprisingly diverse human egos,

adventurously Common tempered eco-nature,

symbiotically evolve this understory of positive teleology,

meaningful intentions and pointed practice.

 

Each morning,

my list of gratitudes and intentions grows

karmic roots

and graced branches

twigs

leaves,

seasonally, a flower,

pushing out pollinating seeds.

Each gratitude covers implicated tension,

just as each intention hides shy gratitude

for opportunity to sustain

integrity’s potential moment,

self-perpetuating regenerative definition,

evolving articulation.

 

Surprising appositioned humor

embraces oppositional pathologies.

Medicine, therapy, reversing power for

disease, disorder, dissonant decay trends,

more likely as ego perceives humor

eco-inclusively pointed at us,

our straggling relationships,

even with our former selves,

our dysfunctioning age and other untimely stressors,

avoiding ridiculive weapons

commodifying identity boundaries

held too myopically close,

justifying misuse of pathogens on aliens,

exploding reactive toxins.

 

Assign others responsibility for values

I willingly receive from my own practice,

and sometimes even confluent intent.

Give others freedom, responsibility, integrity rights

I wish others would share with me.

Integrate freedom with right response

balancing symbiotic justice with responsive self-authority.

Regenerate eco-logical subsidiary solidarity within

organic Earth’s natural spacetime informating Logos systems.

Redefining SelfEgo,

eco-self perpetuation,

endosymbiotic evolution

metamorphic threshold nest

enthymematic,

enculturating,

equilibrating,

revolving,

reiterating,

double-bound self-immune death cells

yielding autonomic frequency functions

to fractal generated diastatic well-being cells,

four equi-dimensional spacetime universes

(0)-sum total thermomagnetic harmony,

Self-inside and Other-out,

Positive Polynomial meets Not-So-Positive Non-Polynomial undergrounding

nutrient roots,

EarthTribe’s bicamerally balanced reality tree,

regenerating incarnation.

 

 

 

 

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Graceful Turkeys

The Eagle card is the first of my numbered Medicine Cards, as Eagle’s powerful spirit is #1 in our U.S. culture.

We hold eagle feathers as the most sacred of healing tools. Shamans used these to cleanse diseased auras. Eagle medicine is achieved through good old fashioned all-American bootstrap hard work and the personal power of completed production.

The issue for eagle medicine is right use. We have opportunity to broaden our sense of self, soaring beyond the horizon of what is presently visible. Myopic egotism and hubris are too narrow for the vast vistas of Eagle medicine.

If the Eagle is our nation’s Yang spirit, then he calls us to balance with the Give-Away Eagle; Turkey medicine is our Yin spirit.

Give-Away cooperation is the reverse side of Eagle’s Take-Away power. Turkey medicine recognizes that sacrifice to the bone of need is fuel for the fat of want and take and have and own and mine. The pot-latch redemptive ceremony is counter-cultural for Eagle dominance, played with win-lose game assumptions. Give-Away culture assumes no tribe or species can win our economy game unless all needs are met. Mutual subsidiarity premises our active peace principle of solidarity. Only win-win cooperative strategies merit Turkey’s Give-Away grace.

In Turkey’s hunted hungry haunted eyes, a person with wealth deposits has fat deposits which is not only selfish but insanely dangerous. Self-centeredness is bad for our physical and mental health, and not sustainable for the entire flock of flocks. Excess wealth is a cultural embarrassment within the Turkey Tribe. Where one bulges with excess power, nutrition, medicine, fat, others fade and strain in dissonant decay.

The word poverty is always relational. I am poor as compared to, well…., almost everyone, but choose any millionaire on up through multi-billionaire who comes to mind. My 19-year-old chronically unemployable son is poor as compared to my assets and opportunities. We do not use the word poor so much when we are talking about an entire tribe or species confronting chronic lack of sufficient resources to thrive, to regenerate. We are more likely to use words like epidemic or risk of extinction.

Turkey medicine reminds us that if our culture applauds engorged Eagles as normative role-models for ourselves and our kids, then it becomes less likely that these kids and their kids will sustain and thrive. Fat turkeys end up on other species’ thanksgiving tables.

Turkey’s grace is the understory of Eagle’s incarnational equity and strength for justice and liberty.

Give-Away Grace reminds us that an eye for an eye may be metric power balance but not social justice, or rationality.

Grace reminds us that an eye for an eye leads to bicameral blindness.

Grace sees that if you have lost an eye, then so have We.

Grace reminds us that we are in this mess together so justice always responds to injustice by asking “where did we go wrong together?”

Our loss of even one eye is a teaching moment for the human flock to rally, to gather and gobble our way toward protecting our flock. We are each responsible for containing the loss and giving the medicine of mercy and forbearance and regenerative redemption in the gift of our flurry of feathered response. Grace shares the turkey’s shyness by shunning where Eagle’s Law would punish with despair.

Turkey’s grace sees the wisdom of minimizing loss by optimizing effectiveness.

Grace recalls that my loss of eye is a stimulus that would also become a response only by doubling the loss and initiating an infinite reactionary string of unraveling disarray, chaos, dismay, death, declarations of war and malignant intent. Turkey grace pauses to recall that each stimulating loss is half of an emerging justice issue that need not be constrained by the failure of the first half. Grace further recalls that each stimulating loss was also a “second-half” response to earlier events or absences of giving when sharing was needed.

Give-Away Turkey culture compassionately shares our shame that we have created such an unfair flock and environment that we would rob ourselves of mindfulness in our rabid thirst for revenge. Turkey medicine remains mindful of the suffering, longing understory within compassion, empathy, synergy, belonging.  Turkey grace knows that victimizing others is always self-victimizing as well, it is a hurtful sacrifice to be avoided.

Active peace is non-violence of thought and word and deed, but it is also the relentless invitation to co-passioning minds, which Christians call love, and philosophers have called integrity, or even synergy.

We are an Eagle iconic culture started by a flock of active peaceful Turkeys. As before, so after. May win-win strategic responses to fear and loss and hurt fall like rain; may I begin again within each moment, thought, word, and mind-enriching action.

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