It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, hasn’t it?

I’ve been busy with my new project; partnering with Evan Gardner on the “Where Are Your Keys?” (WAYK) language revitalization system.

If you’re a regular here, you know my love and respect for indigenous, animist languages. So you can imagine why the opportunity to completely turn around the world crisis of dying languages, within the decade, would captivate me.

“Where Are Your Keys?”, LLC, is a severely underfunded not-for-profit social enterprise dedicated to accomplishing this 10 year turn-around. With the paradigm shift of the Fluency Revolution, and the contagiousness play of the WAYK mentoring language, we believe this can be done.

But the clock only starts once we have sufficient funding. Help Evan and I focus on WAYK full-time, and bring the tools to communities who need them. We are looking for grantors, and like-minded angel investors to accomplish this.

Also, please attend and spread the word about the WAYK Save Your Language conference in Vancouver, B.C., on June 5th and 6th. Deadline for registration is June 1st!

Amidst all the environmental and cultural tragedy of this century and the last, we believe we have some really good news. We can help communities reclaim their traditions. We can bring languages back from the brink. We can help turn the tragic destinies of so much indigenous cultural wealth around.

Let’s start the clock on that decade of turn-around right now.

Contact me, Willem Larsen, for more information on how you can help:

mythic.cartographer@gmail.com

From a Open Space Gathering run by Chris Corrigan for First Nation folks in Alaska:

You’ve got to admire that. I mean really.

…or you’ll have me to deal with!

Recently I ran across a profoundly disturbing piece of science journalism regarding new observations of the teenaged brain. Read it, then come back here.

What offends me, exactly?  The part that no one notices - the part that people of the modern culture, especially (as far as I know) here in the USA, perpetuate without thought: the totally biased “scientific” interpretation (but perfectly accurate in terms of our cultural myths) on top of the actual observation of the teenage brain; though Teen brains may indeed not possess myelin sheaths that adults brains have, that doesn’t make them “unfinished”, in the sense that the article portrays: foolish, flawed, poor decision makers.

Without Teen’s “unfinished” brains 99% of the risk taking done in the name of love, art, idealism, adventure, protecting family, would disappear.

Teens excel at taking risks because they have perfectly developed brains for doing so.

Saying they have unfinished brains compares to saying a new moon hasn’t “finished” until it swells to a full moon. The Teen brain marks one moment in the cycle of the brains life where it has enormous potential for one kind of behavior - risk taking, adventure, romantic expression.

Think about this. Every moment of a human body’s life, the forces of life have demanded they produce vitality and excellence for all the humans in the social group. As natural people, belonging to family and land, we don’t “tolerate” the “slow development” of the teenage brain. We require teenagers to have fully intelligent minds, with just a little bit of crazy, to test the boundaries of our culture - to take risks, act like fools for love, to do everything that sober adults can’t do (without taking a deep breath).

It adds an extra layer to note that adults of the modern world (who belong to the culture of the above article) simultaneously want to consume teens (sexual exploitation, pop entertainment, using them to fuel our wars) along with demonizing, judging (like the neuroscientist in the article) and controlling them (oppressive schooling environments, curfews, etc.).

There would be no war in the world if it wasn’t for the teenage brain; and yet who runs those wars? Old men, adults. I don’t see the article explaining that part…

It’s awfully convenient to pin foolish behaviors on teens.

Every stage of a single person’s life creates Life for everyone around them, if they live it fully.

Children excel at Play, Teens excel at Risk, Adults excel at Providing, Elders excel at Story. The cycle never stops, it has no real beginning or endpoint. Without any one of these ripenings of human aspect, we would have never survived to the present. We would not exist. We require children, teens, adults, and elders to behave as they do for our very survival and vitality.

For those adults who look at children and see the inconvenience of playfulness, look at teens and feel threatened by their risky behavior, or look at elders and the ‘tiresomeness’ of their stories, I can only look at you and say:

Consider that if you haven’t done those things to your fullest ability, in your own time, then you haven’t lived.

Just because we live in a culture that worships gods of productivity and production, does not make such worship sane. To the extent that I did not play enough, or risk enough, I regret it. It has made me a smaller person.

Without a doubt, I do intend to make the most of my adult and elderhood. I only have the present moment to create the wealth of a well-lived life.

I’ve put this off for a long time. I once made the claim that I planned to say something that might possibly inspire feelings of hate towards me.

And then I got a bit scared and backed off from even saying it.

So, now I’ve given it its very own post, so that neither I, nor it, can hide. To wit:

Believing we “are one” [sic] has killed our souls as fierce, diverse, beautiful peoples.

Adhering to the annihilation of our diversity through all-consuming nationalities and hyper-evangelizing religions has smothered our wildness.

We need to narrow our sense of identity and belonging, down to the smallest and most human of scales.

We need to do this, because we need the “other”. We need the “not-us”. If we treat every stranger on the street as if they belong to that intimate circle of blood and village, than we leave ourselves wide open for abuse, consumption, enslavement. We also take away every opportunity for courtship, for ceremony, for sacredness and particularity of space and feeling.

The host needs a guest; the village needs the out-of-towners. To honor and welcome, to show off and out-do.

We need a human identity, not one married to a vast rapacious imperial corporation, that has created both the problem of the enemy nation “them”, and the solution of the national “we”, and the aw-shucks-what-can-we-do shrug at the need to consume the earth and everything beautiful to feed the slathering maw of that fiction.

As human beings, children of lineages that stretch back across great spans of time and trauma, we people a diversity. We do not belong to one “big love”. We belong to ourselves, our families, to the land that nourishes us, to the ineffable spark that enflames life.

We demonstrate our fierce and beautiful smallness, by welcoming strangers in our homes, into our villages, who don’t belong to our people, and for precisely that reason we can demonstrate how great a people the strangers have discovered.

If we can’t say who doesn’t belong, then our “welcome” doesn’t mean much.

We must identify with that which creates life; our unique nature, our family, our village of friends and families, however we arrive at that. And we must de-identify with the nation-state, with its politics of distraction, and begin to solve our own problems, so unique to our little group of families (or to our one little family), ourselves.

Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, as I may have thought. We dwell in a crisis of identity; do we identify with the stories of Hollywood and the American nationalism (or pick your own country’s entertainment and governing fictions), or do we shrink our world down to right here, where life comes out of the ground, in this place, into the bodies, hearts, voices of our family and village.

Whether in the city, or the country, in an ecovillage on the dark side of the moon, or in the depths of a metropolis, we have a family, and we can create a village. We can do this by coming home to our true identity, something that only ever consisted of human and more-than-human relationships, real people that create life in each other. Not the imperial fiction that uses our allegiance as fuel to power the devouring of the world.

Discover your in-group, and then protect it fiercely; don’t let just anybody in, not without a fight, as any good village Grandmother will show you. Protect this in-group, so that then you can honor your out-group, the not-you.

Give up the “we are all one” religion. It has killed your soul. Let the diversity of peoples shatter oneness into countless billions of longings and courtship. Marry what you eat, court your neighbors, belong to yourselves and that which gives you life.

Tell your own stories, solve your own disputes. Identify with the life of your place.

Rewilding your eyesight means retraining your mind how to ride the wild willful ponies we call your “eyes”.

You, like me, probably learned as a child in school, and as an adult in the workplace, to tug at the reigns of your eyes, demanding (through squinting and staring) that they just see what you want them to see. Much like school and work demanded of you to ’snap to’ and do what they commanded you to do.

Learning to see, to ride those frisky, untame-able, przewalski’s ponies, really comes down to three things you’ll ask your eyes to do, and a whole lot of letting them do what they want to do.

These three things, in the beginning, you will practice separately, over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over…

I want to state first that I have myopia (nearsightedness), so that my descriptions will provide instructions specific to that kind of eyesight issue. You can apply this to presbyopia (farsightedness), but you’ll need to figure out how by yourself, for now. Now, the “things”:

Thing #1: Identify something that you do over and over anyway, that involves either sitting, standing or walking, with a view into the distance (i.e, not in a windowless room, but walking down a street, driving, working at a desk in front of a window, etc.).[aka the WAYK “Same Conversation”, for you smarty pants out there].

Thing #2: Broaden your vision to “wide-angle vision”.

[See the vision section of the sensory tune-up]

Thing #3: Look for the smallest detail in the distance, even if blurry and “impossible” to see.

Simple! It will never get any harder than this. It just takes time, and some other details and tiny wrinkles can accelerate the process, if you know about them, but you don’t need to. Wide-angle vision, and hunting for the smallest detail, in a consistently recurring familiar setting with a view of the distance, will do it all.

Of course, if you can learn it all just from this, you’ll impress me.

Next, in Part III, I’ll explain the step by step nature of the process.

We first learned how to see as babies. Then we learned how to not see, in school and in work, as we became adults. How do we rewild our eyesight?

Allow me to first retell my personal story of rewilding my eyesight.

As a child, I had normal, everyday, fantastic eyesight, no problem. I had a rich inner life, and a rich outer one too. Both of these lives felt in balance.

Then, at the age of 11, I moved from small-town Oregon to the big city, and started attending an inner-city middle-school in Portland, Oregon. Within a year my vision began markedly blurring. Within a couple years I couldn’t watch movies without glasses, and my inner life swelled out of all proportion, as my outer life shrunk to the size of a pea (or thereabouts).

Every year, my vision worsened, prescriptions strengthened. Immediately I distrusted the whole experience; the willingness of optometrists to write stronger and stronger prescriptions, the apparent helplessness of anyone to explain or remedy my worsening vision. My only role: to find eyeglass frames that didn’t look too ridiculous. A role which I failed at for years, I might add.

During high school I stumbled across Dr. William Bates’ “Bates Method” of vision therapy; though I couldn’t get it to “work” (and I struggled with doing the exercises consistently), I never forgot the hope of regaining my once fantastic, naturally perfect vision, that the “Bates’ Method’ offered.

I’ve spent a few hundred dollars on books, pinhole glasses, vision therapy kits, and so on, since. But the most useful money I ever spent, I spent at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, on a standard class, where he said:

“Folks, practicing wide-angle vision will not only increase your awareness remarkably, but some of my students have used it to regain their eyesight and throw away their glasses.”

Pretty much everything else I have to say stems from this simple, throwaway claim. If you don’t know what I mean by wide-angle (or “peripheral”) vision, I’ll explain more of this later. For now, know that it means just “seeing things out of the corner of your eye” - all the time!

“But, I’m specially broken…”

I thought this for years, that my loss of eyesight would resist any attempts to regain it, that I had special problems somehow not addressed by the various programs. Let me go through some objections you may have.

Objection #1: What if my vision “is specially broken”?

I don’t know. I thought this too. Mine recovered. Why not yours?

Objection #2: But I’ve had glasses since the age of two. I don’t have any great vision to regain!

Maybe. Maybe you never had the chance to really learn how to see in the first place, due to the vagaries of modern diet and family life.

Objection #3: I don’t do well at following regimens and self-help stuff. What if it doesn’t work, and I lose patience?

Yeah, me neither. Yes, I worried about that too. And yet, now in my thirties (two decades after the problem began), I have begun to regain my formerly amazing vision.

You don’t want to “fix” your eyesight. You want to relearn how to see, and to rewild your vision.

More than anything else about how I’ve gone about regaining my vision, I love the fact that it has improved my visual awareness too. Not just acuity; but awareness!  Since it has involved retraining my ability to use my eyes, it has made me wonder if I will ever have to worry about presbyopia (old-age vision, the need for reading glasses, etc.) either. In fact, if vision really operates as a skill relating the mind to the eyes, for the rest of my life, my eyesight may just get better, and better, and better. Until I’m seeing stars with my naked eyes that would require a modern person to use a telescope. You’ve heard those stories of ancient astronomers (not astronauts! I mean native, indigenous star watchers), haven’t you? How did they see those stars?

I really think I’ve discovered how.

For only $99.95…

No, sorry. You won’t get it that easy. Or rather, you only get it by doing it the truly easy way. But you probably won’t like it. If I’ve learned anything, as I’ve begun working with a mentoring language that has shot my ability to learn and teach through the roof (and resulted in things like my eyesight improving at last), I’ve learned not to pretend that explaining something teaches it.

You’ll only learn to rewild and retrain your vision, by doing small easy things, one piece at a time.

My perfect vision hasn’t fully returned.

I describe my current vision level, as flashes of 20/20 vision that last from split seconds to several minutes, perhaps for a total of 30 minutes a day. In the dark, bad lighting, and unfamiliar situations, this total can nosedive. Keep in mind though, that (as I write this) winter currently reigns in Portland. Every summer, with full sunny, bright days, my vision takes the biggest leaps and bounds of improvements.

If I had to predict, I would guess that my vision, at the current rate, will fully improve by the end of this next summer, or the one after it, since good sunlight seems to play such a strong role. But I never stop training my vision, even in winter.

Okay, where do I start?

Start with a good “set-up”. Eat a rounded paleodiet (with fish oils, fermented foods, and so on), or close to it, or another nourishing tradition in accord with your body’s needs, not an ideology. Get to know your body’s needs. Get an allergy test, and avoid your food intolerances and allergies completely. Start exercising. Get your body healthy. Then the eyesight part will come much easier. My improved vision correlates overwhelmingly with my improved health.

I’ll speak more about the actual nitty-gritty of eyesight improvement practices in Part II.

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I’ve recently become consumed with the possibilities opened up by the mentoring language and “fluency game” called “Where Are Your Keys?”, as developed by Evan Gardner.

Join me in San Francisco, on Jan 23rd and 24th 2010, exploring the “fluency revolution”, and take advantage of this opportunity to come and play with us. The hosts of the workshop have generously set the workshop tuition at $50 for both days.

For more information, check out the event page hosted by Quality Software at the Agilistry Studio.

I hope now that some of you have tried asking that question, “which creates more of a sense of ‘at home’ in me: this, or that? Which can I more “come home” to?”.

For me, this question tends to have the most power to reveal the next step, the next decision or action, that  creates the most “wholeness” in me and everyone around me.

But I don’t see this question as an infallible one; it works for me, but quite possibly, another one will work better for you.

You could also ask, “What mirrors my true self more: this or that?”. Or, “what creates more wholeness in me?”. Try different questions; ask two of this about the same options, and see if you get different responses.

I encourage you to ask this question, in order to surprise yourself, by discovering that what you like, what fits your personal taste, does not necessarily indicate what creates more life in you and those around you. Compare those two questions, ask them in the same context, “what creates more of a ‘coming home’ in me” vs. “which do I like more?”. I think the answers will shock you.

You will find, that this sense of “wholeness” and “vitality” stays relatively consistent from person to person; that by far, most people (to their own surprise) will agree on what creates wholeness. They may need different questions to reveal this innate sense, but they will agree overall.

For example, though Christopher Alexander has had great success with it, I know for me the idea of “a mirror of my true self” does not call up the same sensitivity as “a feeling of coming home”. The “mirror of the self” sensation tends to get me thinking about personal likes and dislikes, whereas “coming home” sensitizes me to the raw, yet aesthetic animalness of myself…to the simpleness of what pleases a child, but yet the child-sense of an adult. What pleases my animal self. This may call up bearskin rugs, scratching posts, and abundant feasts, if you have a conventional sense of “animal” nature. But if you spend anytime observing, tracking, or relating to animals, truly relating, you know the extreme sensitivity and aesthetic sense that animals have - a delicacy of experiencing. We can train an animal to put up with terrible or domestic conditions, we can remove habitat and force them to adapt, but given the option they too choose that which creates the most wholeness in them and the life around them.

Once I realized which of two beautiful carpets in my home contained vastly more wholeness (surprisingly so!), I then began to notice that my cat would sit on that carpet almost exclusively, though it didn’t necessarily lie in a comfortable or convenient place. And seeing my cat on the carpet tended to make my cat more healthy seeming, more alive, more relaxed.

If you put all the puzzle pieces together, and remember that no indigenous people discriminate between art and function, no intact native people see ornament as “extra” or as not-innate to the function of what they make (bows, spoons, canoes, baskets, what-have-you), you’ll understand how this all pertains to the animalness of our true aesthetic selves, our ability to truly sense wholeness in the world.

So start asking questions. Start with one, right now. Ask it of the two  objects sitting next to you: “which one has more life? which one do I feel more “at home” with? which one do I like?”.

Don’t wait. Ask this now. Discoveries like this happen in no other moment than this one, right here.

A while back I wrote about my strong feeling that modern people have lost the ability to recognize life, and therefore cannot reliably act in ways or make decisions that foster life, vitality, and wholeness.

We constantly deprioritize the creation and experience of “wholeness” in favor of productivity. Productivity and efficiency, in the conventional sense, fundamentally act at cross purposes to “wholeness”. Of course, efficiency in the form of “elegance” doesn’t fall into this category. Grace, skill, insight, can express a kind of efficiency. So understand the kind I mean, a type of efficiency in abject service to the Gods of Production.

How do you then reprioritize acting in accord with wholeness, making choices that foster life and vitality?

In all honesty, this counts as the single, absorbing, challenging heart of a satisfying life, a pursuit and a struggle that continues in all the single moments we will ever have, up to our deathbed. I do not in any sense claim this comes easy, or that people don’t do it because of simple foolishness or ignorance.

Even if they know (even if I know) of this constant decision, from moment to moment, still to understand it, to increase one’s sensitivity to the point where one can answer it, still presents a challenge.

It all comes down to asking a simple question: “What causes me to feel more at home, fully, in the sense of my whole self, all my virtues and flaws, griefs and joys?”.

In a fluency sense,  I say choose only one moment a day, one action, to begin with, and ask this question. Perhaps ask it around what to have for breakfast, or where to sit and watch the sun come up. Even simpler, choose only two options, and ask it between them.

For example, I currently have begun learning to play the violin (aka fiddle). Every time I pick it up to play with it (I claim neither to “play it”, nor to “practice” on it), I ask myself: “Should I learn a tune yet? Or do I continue to explore the beautiful sounds this instrument can make?”.

Up till now, every time, I choose to keep exploring. Every time, it generates enormous feelings of satisfaction and wholeness in me, almost shock at the emotions that simply playing with sound and listening can produce. I feel almost certain that at some point, I will choose a melody to imitate (and then, at that point, I will have begun to “practice” perhaps, though I believe I will have earned a different, more satisfying and rich relationship than I had with former musical instruments I tried to learn), but I couldn’t possibly tell you when; in one month, one year, ten years? I don’t know.

One small decision, around that question: “What causes me more of a feeling of ‘coming home’ to this experience”.

Christopher Alexander remains the principal inspiration around this way of seeing the generation of wholeness and life in one’s actions and decisions, in what one makes, does, and says. His books the Nature of Order and his carpet book taught me a lot about the subtleties and permutations to this fundamental, but almost inarticulable question, concerning that wordless sense of vitality that stems from within when one has reached successfully in the direction of wholeness.

Before I write further, I ask you to choose one thing tomorrow to ask this about. Once you’ve decided the topic, give yourself two choices, and then ask “Which generates more of a feeling of ‘coming-home’ in me?”

You can try variations on this question too; once you’ve tried the first question, I’ll share some of the other possibilities.

I’d love to hear about what you asked too, if you’d share in the comments below.

In this episode of the College of Mythic Cartography podcast, I talk about my recent obsession with the “Where Are Your Keys?” fluency game, and mentoring language, and also with my ongoing success in revitalizing my vision.

Thanks again to everyone who refilled the podcast fund; I hope my thoughts and experiences continue to help other folks with cultural renewal and rewilding.

 

 Catching Up - COMC Podcast Episode 26 [67:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

If you enjoy listening to the College of Mythic Cartography podcasts, want more to come, and enjoy supporting the opportunity for others to listen to them too, please consider donating $5 to keep them hosted. While my head was turned, the podcast fund just ran down to zero.  Oops! I usually keep better track of these things. If I don’t get enough funds in the next week, they’ll go offline for an indefinite period of time.

I also appreciate donations of goodwill and energy, if you have no money but want to gift me with a short comment or even a story on how the podcasts I’ve made have supported you in your own life and work.

Thanks everyone.

I leave it to you to recognize this within yourself, but for many of us, we have lost the reliable ability to see Life.

In discourse concerning the recent victims of civilization’s march, such as First Nations and Native north Americans, you’ll hear a phrase that describes a particular state-of-being that really embodies what it means to live and work in modern civilization.

Internal Colonization.

For those who can look at the ruins of their indigenous culture, at photos of magnificent grandparents and great grandparents, or if fortunate enough they see their culture still struggling to renew itself even today - for these people they surely must feel this “internal colonization” keenly.

For others, like myself, much of our rewilding journey runs through the territory of the sleeping grief-giant of our own stolen, hidden indigineity. How do you miss something that you never knew you had? When spiritual enslavement, when colonization, both external towards one’s “enemies”, and internal towards oneself, has continued through so many countless generation of ancestry, that even as you squint and peer back, you can summon no more than a vague and unpleasant sense of animal skin clothing, knapped stone tools, huddling around campfires. Each one of these a “thing”, an artifact viewed through prejudice, not a people, not the dreams they dreamt, the stories they told, or their fierce, shining, diverse beauty.

For those of us with no clear trail back to ancestral memory, we too must make the difficult journey of the “internally colonized” towards “decolonization”. But for us, we go blindfolded, groping in the dark.

On top of that, we bear the suffocating burden of a legion of clutching, rapacious, ancestral ghosts, like spectral monkeys on our back, the tsars, caesars, kaisers, and kings, the pharaohs and emperors, the slave masters and salesmen of empire and civilization.

With these slathering imperial ghost-voices echoing in our ears, as we grasp after indigenous art and people, for the sake of reconnecting to our own indigeneity, and our own rewilding, we destroy what we seek to love; we appropriate what we seek to celebrate; we condemn that which we seek to honor.

We attempt to destroy the emperor in ourselves and others, by imperial decree. We judge the judge, and execute the executioner. Through this hapless trap, this catch-22, we further buttress our own sociopathic urge towards destruction of all wildness.

We must admit to this fundamental problem before we can move forward. We must admit defeat. We must surrender our crown, scepter, and orb.

To learn once again, as our rewilding ancestors knew well, how to recognize Life.

Whoah. What a great idea. Anyway, I didn’t mean it that way - I have some logistical stuff to share…

If you haven’t heard yet, check out the Where Are Your Keys? blog. I’ll start posting WAYK articles over there, rather than here, just to keep things orderly and neat.

In further housekeeping, please start sending in your early adopter subscriptions via paypal to whereareyourkeys att gmail dott com, rather than the evan_gardner address. You can already see a vestigial site up at http://www.whereareyourkeys.org. Things have really begun to roll along! Please remember that we’ll only have room for the 50 adopters to access videos and help us design the online open source technique dictionary, and we will subscribe folks on a first come, first serve basis.

Now you’ll have to pardon me, as we have 94 degree day cooking up here in Portland, and I need to go swimming.

I offer up the first video evidence of language magic happening! Blame all the shakiness, and poor sound quality on me. I myself will then turn around and blame the altitude (Albuquerque at 5000 ft! I took lots of naps!).

“Where Are Your Keys?”: the Language Fluency Game from Willem Larsen on Vimeo.