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AgapeMind and ErosBody

It is my intimate physicality,
genderality,
sexual identity,
homonality,
juiciality of love,
Yang-fused Eros rather than a less intensely elational Yin-Agape,
troubling me,
remaining dissonantly articulating
through aging bones of mind and body,
Theorem and Proof,
this despairing of time and place
for expanding mutual reincarnating future loves.

Love as integrity of touch and addictive hypnosis
co-arising Ego’s synergetic nurture,
feeding and fueling nature’s beloved Other,
within PrimalPair frames,
Coupling communicators and regenerators,
mutually fusing Eros,
exploring our integrally intimate co-incarnating Agape.

My youngest son has cerebral palsy
which has limited his mind’s capacity to understand and form abstractions,
such as language,
yet he well understands nurturing v. pathological relationships.

I wonder what distinctions between Yang’s Eros and Yin’s Agape
lie within this my love’s perfection Son?
His responses to life’s variables and constants
remain both uninformed by,
and therefore unrestricted by,
love’s metaphysical abstractions
about what our relationship could look and feel and smell and taste like tomorrow
that would distinguish imagined differences
from how we feel together today.

This perpetual youth of love’s human incarnation
cannot age and learn and develop into diffusion
and dissonance of his body’s response to Eros-Yang
and his mind’s resonance with Agape-Yin Self with Yin-Other
primal WinWin love relationship.

My nondually both kind and unkind Taoist Master Son,
icon of coarising Eros/Agape,
is LeftBrain nonlanguaged, non-dominant,
enculturing love of yet more synergetic organic healthy love,
as best he can recover this Golden Fleece of internal/external climate balance.

If his body feels good and healthy
his mind feels this truth as richly contenting beauty,
fertile synergetic whole (0)sum-ness,
cognitive symmetry as affective integrity.

He dreams in Eros
as he wakes to Agape v. Pathology
within his Beloved EarthTribes
communicating through networks of fertile resonance,
and occasional wilting, dissonant climatic issues,
internal seizures,
and sometimes blaring loud angry frightened mouths
he has no desire to comprehend
as anything other than cause for further laughter,
where Eros and Agape practice divine comedy co-creation stories
to unfold later.

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Political Variations on a HealthTheme

Children are Fundamentalists

Children are literalists,
fundamentalists.

When they hear
“You’re filthy and you stink!”
the younger they are,
the less likely to hear as a mature adult might,
“You have a sour smell on you.
Please go bathe,
and use some soap and shampoo,
and you might want to think about some conditioner
and body lotion
while you’re in there
taking care of your lovely and beloved self.”

Early language and experiential learners,
younger students of what this culture,
and this particular relationship,
is about right now,
interpreters of newer lines of eisegetical experience,
newer exegetes of communication’s more recent transactions,
begin with fundamental heuristics,
and expand out more ecologically and analogically from that root.

So,
should a parent,
or some other powerful political and/or economic figure
in any younger and significantly less powerful life,
were to rant and rave about my stinky marginal self,
as a child I would hear this as a foul-soiled Ego identity.
Not necessarily something that could be easily remedied with a soapy bath.

We begin as fundamentalists,
in which stinky mindbody pathology issues
delivered with ballistic verbal aggression
root more deeply into our self-identity,
to help us discover how we must be,
steeped in negativity, pathology.

The opposite of all the above
could lead to reduced cognitive-affective dissonance,
and a more Positive Psychology,
a more cooperative political economy of proactive self and other communication
as polycultural
multicultural
interdependent
synergetic
integral
unitarian
coarising
co-gravitating
WinWin exegetical enculturation

Rather than more competitive fundamentalist
Lose the Stinky Loser!

Capacity to sustain mature loving communication
expands through longer sustained primary political and economic relationships.

These primal communicative transactions
favor finding our co-empathic balance,
where my image of how you are feeling,
my predictions of how you will feel and think
when I do and say as I prefer right now,
matters not more than my own ego’s thoughts and feelings,
but not less either.

Rather, political and economic cooperative relationships
evolve positively across time’s revolving moments,
actively sending and stretching toward our mutually co-arising confluence
(“contentment” for students of Laotse)
to live within this relationship
within each moment of time
within this Basic Attendance sweet spot as much as possible,
and to learn how to co-adjust,
how to communicate with bilaterally cooperative political mind
and economic body balance
to co-host our future Beloved Communication,
spinning away from climatic crises
yet embracing their opportunities for deeply fundamental learning,
gaining more mature, healthier, co-arising polycultural capacity for love.
Norwood, Pascal, and Pronoia v Political Pathology

Robin Norwood brings evidence that too much active love
invested where not appreciated,
so perhaps divested of appropriate communication,
can grow beyond ego’s capacity to sustain healthy
self-nurturing curiosity, active hope and faith in self identity
as good and loving and healthy person,
causing chronic,
occasionally critical,
mindbody disease.

Yet, Poet Pascal,
“When one does not love too much,
one does not love enough.”

Perhaps Pascal does not know sustained investment in active love
without at least occasional appreciation of love in return.
Perhaps this critical and chronic disease
of too much comparatively given
and not received
and returned positive intention despite not received
is more about active faith than reiteratively healthy love.

Abundantly reiterative love
grows crippled through non-investment in faith
in basic ego’s healthy attendance,
in basic anthro’s healthy co-attendance to Earth’s exegetically syntaxed nature,
active hope roots and delivers through past mutually co-gravitational
co-arising investments in time’s universally healthy love
regeneration, fundamentally exegetical
and ecologically eisegetical
co-arising through (0) sum political balance,
as positive co-lateral enthymematic intent.
Shout out (but not too loud or soft)
to Rob Brezsyn
“Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia”
for pointing to this Norwood-Pascal paradox,
dipolar appositions of creative political stress
through cognitive dissonance.
Bucky Fuller’s Bilateral Existentialism

Experience,
consciousness of experience
when remembered
emerges thru DNA/RNA encoding memory restrictions, strictures,
notnot structures,
appositional associations between

metaphysical ecosystemic minds
CO-ARISING
physical biosystemic bodies.

Experience co-arises positively and cooperatively through evolutionary hope
of further enthymematic co-gravitation,
notnot, dust to dust of dipolar complexity
appositioned with Positive to Positive,
WinBioEgo + WinEco

Ego – Eco
in Fullerian iconography
Plan B + Plan A
organic + systemic co-intelligence of DNA,
RNA,
Embryonic Seedship Earth
as Solar-Powered Health v. Pathology Intelligent Design
Designed
Co-Designing Past thru Future BiLateral Time.

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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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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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May Fog

This foggy sky
darkly and relentlessly rains
especially for an early May morning.

He is not prepared for darkness
seeping in from new-born leaves,
not yet full grown
into this year’s tree-lacing dress,
soaking in from saturated soil,
slurping into his complexly relaxing empathic soul.

Perhaps this open quality
endears him to those few who could ever know him
enough to watch him,
watching,
noticing,
hoping for less rain inside today,
each day,
all Earth’s Days.

Wet liturgical Mays
dissolve his Taurean ways.

Yet, for him, right now,
such dark openness yawns too large
for even one dreary lonely hour
of self-isolation.

His two medically complex clients have gone,
as usual,
Monday morning until late afternoon.
Today, as he contemplates his decadent ways,
he misses their distracting charms.
Each so different.
YinYin so loudly Trumpian,
post-millennial triumphalist,
but also with some significant undiagnosed bipolar control issues.
Meanwhile Yang,
unable to speak or sign,
so hidden,
yin-shy shadow of rich warm love,
immersed in life’s right-now ripe composting time,
each moment,
graciously emerging from his co-arising past
to spin toward future yang-yin equipoise memories
of time’s karmic grace.

But, right now he must sustain thru dark raining dreams of suicide
without them.
He suffers withdrawal from feeling needed,
unworthy of becoming truly wanted.

Ironic,
a PermaCultural Family EcoTherapist,
actually achieving good polycultural outcomes
with his broken clients,
the one highly de-specialized professional wheelhouse
most needed to accelerate global networking
cooperative outcomes,
challenging each family and all climatic systems
with Yang-encultured dominance,
right here and now in this post-millennial generation
of ecologically balancing great and small,
daily transitions,
yet he feels hopeless,
not knowing where he could ever begin again
so late in this biological incarnation
already showing concerns that “Black Lives Matter”
but maybe not so much old black,
or white,
or even green lives matter
beyond their retiring biofunctional usefulness.

We all help make great compost when we die.
It’s getting in there,
completing the job,
embracing the vocation,
once and for all,
that continues to challenge life as EgoDeath love.

How does one retiring PermaCultural Therapist
best contribute to this time,
this ecosystem,
this community,
this family,
this primal relationship with Earth
and all Her tribal dialects
and languages
and species
and multicultural diversities of life and death cycles
and recycles,
and repurposes?

Probably reading F Scott Fitzgerald’s issues about cultural decay
and ethical integrity of bodies and minds
ingesting and regurgitating Earth’s generous beauty
is rather like sitting under a rain-drenched tarp,
writing stories of suicidal dissipation,
while Earth calls for Revolutionary EcoTherapists
to heal Her as she cries,
this early May morning,
under foggy dripping skies.

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SunGod’s Fertile Evolution

From Darwin, and other naturalists,
we learned survival of the fittest
as polymorphically equivalent
to thrival of the fit-in-ingest.

Hmmm,…fittest mutual cooperators
…or maybe peer-to-peer positive-to-positive
equals reverse correlative negative-to-negative communisystemic.

Yikes!

At least permacultural naturalists
speak evolution of biosystemic species
as an EarthTribe emergence
toward polycultural density
of healthy relational balance
among networking interdependent ecosystems,
or so we might conclude
from inter-species political relationships
and nutritional economic transactions
and toxic exploitive peer-to-peer competitions,
segregations,
marginalizations,
monocultural dominations,
border mutual immunity defenses,
subliminally outlined
by PolyCulturing BeLoving Internal as External Garden Paradise
of sacred-natural regenerative potential,
ecological balance.

Evolution
or synergy
or integrity
or creativity,
or regenerativity,
or co-gravitational integrity,
or nondual co-arising bicameral ecoconsciousness,
and whatever emerges as your most regeneratively active TruthGod,
your Great Transitional Purpose eco-larger than ego-self,
unites,
integrates,
integrals,
fractals,
densifies,
deep-nurturing network trends emerge diastolically toward global diastasis,
peer-to-peer universal yang-power
with yinyin richly balanced fertile flow-pattern
of WinWin Gaming EcoLogic
speaking Creativity as holonic healthy truths
of light’s thermodynamic balance
polymorphing time’s incarnation
through Eulerian nondual co-arising Primal Function,
convex-yang bi-elliptically (0)-soul equivalent
with concave double-binding yinyin bionic balance
polymorphic to WinWin fractal-RNA regenerate function
of Time’s Health-Enculturing Revolution.

It matters to global evolution,
as to personal Interior Garden evolution,
this density of polymorphic fitting-in
cooperative political and economic intention
toward ecologicl fractal-octave nature-spirit ecoconsciousness
of explicating-yang and implicating-yinyin bicameral order
as bilateral fractal-fold (0)-soul center of Dialectic Time,
as primal tipping point of CoPresence,
surfing co-gravitationally between Alpha Original Intent
of SunGod’s Light
through (0)-polymorphic fit-in-ingest Point
of future’s primal Earth polymorphic consciousness,
Time’s elational-regenerative v. contentious dualdark evolution
of Truth’s healthy love
absorbing, co-redeeming nondual PastAnger as FutureFear.

Photosynthesis of light as fuel
enlightens polymorphic rich density of light’s divine polypathic (0)-soul,
Prime Relational MidWay Point,
humanely divining god’s teleology
as regeneratively potentiating eco-intelligent LoveNetworkIdentity
surrounded by suboptimizing AngerFear Hierarchical Management Protocol,
BusinessAsUsual competitions
feeding hungry cooperatively-healthy
ecoconscious
divinely humane
mindbodies,
polymorphing ecosystems
dancing and singing and vocationing and gardening
in EarthTribe’s Primal LoveNetwork.

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The Hills Are Alive

I grew up gay
and singing in musicals.
At the time, these two seemed coincidental,
diassociated,
although in retrospect….

Some dancing too
but with no training in that area,
more about singing.

I grew up with
The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music.

Then I stopped growing up,
and went about the sometimes cooperative business
of Mastering
Community Economic Development
Public Administration
Divinity (which Bucky would call Synergy)
and certifications
Permaculture Design,
for HIV medications,
and high blood pressure,
and bad cholesterol outweighing the good.
Then I began growing out,
and shorter,
singing The Earth is Alive
in all Six Senses of Musical Opera.

Now I’m growing more deeply
into long term polycultural ecotherapeutic outcome planning,
cooperative financial and health-investment,
for both interior and exterior landscapes,
polypathing co-elationally
to bicameral rhythmic heart beat and air flow,
dancing a PolyCultural Opera
as cooperatively possible
through PostMillennial ReGenesis
WinWin eco-political coop networks.

They are everywhere
once you learn to see through time’s health investment balance,
fractal-octave polycultural prime function,
e-squared = c-squared bicameral eyes, and trees,
ears, and Earth Tribe sounds of echoing hill music,
and autonomic bilateral diastolic precessive flow
with diastatic and post-recessive health regenerate hearts,
and autonomic dipolar diastatic yang
through fully purged yin nutrient breath-flow function,
like a tornado of wind
in slow, sustained, self-regenerating inclusive pace
of gratitude for less bad attitude.

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If I Could Take Time Back

If I could take it back
I would.
When I can bring you back
I will
make our bad word weapons disappear
so your heart and hope need not despair.

If I could repair your strong-heart soul
rich with vital confidence,
you can do this,
you can be this,
you are part of this,
in your way
which is a right way
for us to become with you,
you are doing this,
we are doing this together.

If I can take it back
I do
absorb our black ballistic tones
in minor tragic keys I aimed your way
out of my own fears
I can not love you fierce enough
to remember you must know
this extended Earth-stream has your back,
is your back,
together with you,
part of you,
always voting Yes for mutual wins,
where love embraces our shared hope
and not despair.

If you could catch this hope from me,
instead,
please do.

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April Loves

She worships her western horizon
toward the river, sparkling, hinting of lightning pasts and futures.

Leonardo is wrong.
This seems unlikely, perhaps judgmental,
harsh,
even so, his God clearly reconstructed in his well-owned glorious image,
universal God of Creative Architecture.

But, for her, as she watches bruised red wilt into painfully pale lavender,
over black night’s forest line,
cerebrally alone,
sacredly uniting
nature speaks through Gaia’s full-timed EcoLogos Voice,
sometimes in pastel skies and meadows,
sometimes in relentlessly vibrant green,
sometimes Full Moon, New Moon,…
Rain, Wind, sometimes sublime both on her tin roof, whistling through worn-out window frames.

If God were made in her image,
creation would speak in reasoned fertile seasons of shadow dark, and lightning bright,
synapses of climax, echoing down river valleys
rolling out grand majesty of EcoLogos,
perfect rhythms,
rain beating Earth’s thunderous future.

It would have been more revolutionary
and probably therapeutic,
most certainly lovelier, had Leonardo portrayed God as Earth’s logos voice
swirling light as surf,
tidal river waters gleaming wide at dusk,
narrower in dawn’s first light,
a ribbon flowing light emerging to west
reflecting waters greeting eastern sky enlightenment,
Gaia’s morning river logos
translating Sun’s architectural might.

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