Adult Theather Improv and the Nature of the Village

Community Intuition, Improvisational, and Theater games

With Lisa Wells and Willem Larsen
Ages 16-ADULT
Taster Day Sunday, April 6, 2008, 7pm-9pm
8 week session Every Sunday, begins April 14, 2008, 7pm-9pm

Awesome Creativity The ability to play is with us from birth. Recognizing this source of energy, Viola Spolin created the world of improv games popularly applied to theater disciplines. These games are responsible for most improvisation circles such as the world famous Second City theatre in Chicago. But the work of these games is far more profound than mere comedy, they explore the gamut of emotion and archetype. Spolin herself used them as peacemaking and community building exercises among inner city kids in Chicago. Her games have developed currency well beyond actor training. Her systems are in use internationally not only in university, community, and professional theater training programs, but also in countless curricula concerned with agile teams, non-verbal and non-violent communication. Her work opens the experience of play to people of all ages and interest.

Through Spolin games, play emerges naturally and spontaneously; age, background, and content are irrelevant. There are games to free the player of tension, games to unburden the player of subjective preconceptions, games of relationship and character, games of concentration. By using techniques of physicalization, spontaneity, intuition, audience, and transformation a group of players is able to achieve high functioning one-mindedness. These games heighten sensitivity, increase self-awareness, and effect group and interpersonal communication.

We follow a NO CENSORSHIP principle. Please take this into consideration when deciding if this class is a good match for you.

For more information and registration, go to TrackersNW.

For youth improv and theater, register here.

Natural Way: Indigenous Voices is honored to present

Roy Wilson

Medicine Wheels: Ancient Teachings for Modern Times

Friday, April 11, 2008, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Roy Wilson, Itswwot Wawa Hyiu (Bear Who Talks Much), is a Cowlitz spiritual leader in the old traditional ways as well as a Methodist minister. Roy was born on the Yakama Indian Reservation from an Indian father and a non-Indian mother and lives in Chimacum, Washington with wife, Cherilyn. Together they have eight children, fourteen grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren.

Roy served thirty-two years on the Cowlitz tribal council, as Chairman of the General Council in the 1970s, and in the latter years as Chairman of the Tribal Council. Much of his time is spent in colleges, universities, and churches teaching about the Medicine Wheel. He often tells groups about ancient Indian legends that say that eventually the White man will call for the Indian to bring healing to them. He believes that the healing for the world will come through the Indian Medicine Wheel and its teachings. Roy shows the similarities between these teachings and the teachings of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions.

Roy also has an extensive background in theological study and pastoral ministries. Among his published books are:  Medicine Wheels – Ancient Teachings for Modern Times, The Gospel According to Matthew – A Longhouse Version, Native American Annotated Bibliography, Voices From the Earth Mother, and Historical Overview of the Cowlitz Tribe.

Location: PSU Smith Memorial Union, Room 338, 1825 SW Broadway at Harrison, Portland, Oregon

Cost: $10-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium

Co-sponsors: Earth & Spirit Council at www.earthandspirit.org, PSU Multicultural Center at www.culture.pdx.edu , Trellis Earth at www.trellisearth.com, and The College of Mythic Cartography at www.mythic-cartography.org.

Eye-contact means intimacy.

Intimacy means empathy, trust, and physical closeness.  It means kindred spirits, and like minds.

Sitting around that shared pool of vivid dream requires these things.

I stand at the end of a lineage of theater improv education that runs from Viola Spolin, to her son Paul Sills, to Adrienne Flagg, to Lisa Wells, to myself. In the tradition I’ve inherited, we place a high value on the power of eye-contact to create intimacy, and to connect to intuition.

I’ve thought a lot about this, knowing that according to Jean Liedloff, author of the Continuum Concept, indigenous children grow up healthier because their mothers and fathers give them an ‘in-arms’ phase, marked by ongoing skin-to-skin touch, and extensive eye-contact. Yep. The ol’ baby gazing thing.

Some therapists who work according to the ‘attachment’ parenting paradigm,  actually recapitulate this phase of infacy, for children (foster or adopted) who didn’t experience with their parents.

To me, this means that eye-contact takes us back to primal places of trust and bonding,  and explains why, when used in the context of theater games, it can create such powerful one-mindedness and connections.

This doesn’t mean that during a storyjam session we gaze into each other’s eyes – rather, it means that we have warmed up with improvisational and intuition games that have required extensive eye-contact to get us to a one-minded place.

Then, once we start the actual storytelling part of the storyjam session, we just do what we do. We just collaborate on story, from that place we’ve all come to together.

I don’t have any advice about this as of yet for storyjammers out there, but I wanted to touch on it as I continue to develop for myself how to apply theater games to create deep and rich storyjamming.

Fun with Venn diagrams…I thought I’d throw out more ideas than before.

What point do I want to make with this? Illuminating the richness that awaits in storyjamming! To wit:

Sensory immersion – requires you learn to tune-up your everyday senses, so that you have a rich reservoir from which to draw.

One-mindedness – requires you to learn ‘listen and respond’ skills, to fully give up your ego for the benefit of the story, much like animal tracking requires you to do the same to earn the gift of the animal’s life (or, when not hunting, a glimpse of a private moment).

Stories-worth-telling - stories that have emotional weight, creative insight, and make us reflect on our lives. For more on this, you might check out another Vincent Baker piece, Creating Theme. I’d also add, as an animist, stories of my place, of my Land, and my local other-than-human family.

“just enough rules” – rules provided not to win, or to compete on the level of who understands the rules better, but rather just sufficient rules to give us enough to drive a story, and tell us what to do next. Maybe they also enable us to see things from a different point of view, that we haven’t yet experienced…hence Jason’s goal with the Fifth World, to make a set of rules that give the players a peek into the world of relationships that animists experience.

Fully collaborative – no authority figure (known in conventional role-playing games as the GameMaster or DungeonMaster), but only (at the most) a facilitator of the story-game experience.

Follow what the dream says – instead of ‘inventing’ or ‘making up’, we acknowledge that a common pool of vivid dream reality sits waiting in the middle of the storyjam, and always we go there to (often imperfectly, but as best we can) experience it, and bring it back in our bodies, manifesting in word, gesture, expression. This explains admonitions for improv and storyjamming such as ‘play the obvious’, ‘play the average’, and even ‘play boring!’. Those, in essence, tell us to play naturally, which means to dip from the pool of shared dream, waiting for us in a rich vivid other-reality, that wants us to enact its story. We don’t have to become ‘inventive’ or ‘clever’ (and if we do, we ruin it!) – we just have to go to that vivid dream-place, and bring it back as best we can.

The overlap in the diagram shows that people experience these things even in conventional role-playing, and if you listen to their stories sometimes you’ll hear the hush, mystery, and awe conferred to the rare experience of a good Story and a fully immersive experience.

For Trackers, Dreamers, and Rewilders, we revere the experience, though it holds a lot less mystery and rarity for us, because we know how to get there.

Storyjam!

So, as Jason mentioned at his design diary blog for the Fifth World (a story-game set 500 years or so from now in the post-collapse and animist world of our descendants), Oracles can have a powerful effect on driving our stories in the direction we want them to go.

I personally first heard the word ‘Oracle’ used in reference to Vincent Baker’s role-playing game, In A Wicked Age. You can look at an online version of the oracle he wrote for his game.

An Oracle provides the essential elements for a Story. It seeds the players minds with characters (and motivations), locations, objects and events.

I really like Vincent’s Oracle style, and I heartily recommend studying it to understand what makes a good oracle Element. By really poring over his Oracles, I felt good about producing my own. In my mind, each oracle Element needs to provide an opportunity for motives, for dynamic interaction. For example:

A peerless hunter, sworn never to take more than his need, or lose his soul…

Yikes! Right? Can you see the motive, the opportunity for conflicts of interest? Who did he swear to? Why would he lose his soul? Who would want him to? That Element provides all kinds of fuel for story. Whittling it down to just ‘A peerless hunter…’ doesn’t provide enough oomph, for my taste. When in doubt, I encourage you to go for ‘Woo-hoo!’, rather than just ‘Interesting…’.

[A note - I've chosen to stick to my own Elements, out of respect to the other designers, but don't mistake this to mean I think mine offer better examples...please check out the links above, and the veritable panoply of oracles at Abulafia, from oracles on the mafia, superheroes, horror, Shakespeare, westerns, anime...check it out. I think you will notice a quality difference over all the oracles, in terms of providing the necessary 'oomph', but I certainly enjoyed the outporing of creativity.]

So next after character, we have Elements concerning location. One I wrote:

Once a Great Lake, full of voices, now a hot Desert, where the spirits meet…

Do you feel it? The location has a direction, by benefit of its history. How did it become a Desert? Who lived there in its Lake days? What spirits, why do they meet? Pack those elements with juiciness.

Next, lets go for objects. How about this:

The grandmother of all drums, still and silent in the hidden womb of the cave…

Who made her? Who hid her? What does ‘grandmother of all drums’ even mean? For me, an object of contention should always have some movement to it. Hidden, stolen, borrowed, offered as a gift, damaged, and on and on. Notice how switching ‘hidden’ with the other adjectives changes the feel of where the story could go, while maintaining the fuel for story. It wants to burn, somehow!

How about events?

A sorry prophecy, hard to hear after so many happy ones have come to fruition…

Do you feel all the directions, all the stories that could spawn? That prophecy could almost count as an ‘object’ , so I’ll toss out a freebie:

A sudden storm, wrathful and focused…

Which in an animist sense, could also count as a character. You get the idea. Funerals, marriages, fires, ceremonies, negotiations, inconvenient revelations…

I’ve written the full text of my animist oracle, if you’d like to see it, at this thread on REWILD.info.

Once you have a hefty list of Oracle Elements (the game In A Wicked Age uses 52 at at a time, so you can use a deck of playing cards to randomly select them), write them down on index cards, and randomly draw 4 or so to set the stage for your story. Then pick your favorite characters, location, objects, and events. You may want to balance out the Oracle you’ve made, to make sure that enough characters exist to interact with each other, and have locations in which to set their drama. I suspect that tinkering with a good Oracle will reveal a whole world of ways to improve and balance it out to make better and better stories.

I’ve only just begun to explore the potential of story-seeding through Oracles. Notice too, in all of this, that ‘hacking’ story-games for your own needs consititutes a hallowed activity. Adding Oracles to games that don’t explicity require them, or making your own game around an Oracle, may just provide a big part of the fun for you.

Oh, and I’ve saved the best part for last…where did I get the ideas for those particular Elements above, for my animist Cascadian Folklore Oracle? Why, they all came from Phantom Waters, a recently published book of native and regional folklore, collected and re-told by Jessica Amanda Salmonson!

What does this mean for you? It means, go find your favorite books, your favorite stories, your favorite movies and tv shows, and pore through them, stealing the best characters, locations, events and mysterious objects! You yourself will rewrite the Oracle Elements in a pithy and concise fashion, so no worries about stealing really…the story will gain a life of its own. In this way, you’ll guarantee inspiration for a story worth telling.

Pretty cool.

As I mentioned here (in the description of the free indie game ‘the Pool’), I wanted to explain the purpose of Oracles.

Indie-gamers use them sometimes to seed stories, to provide the essential elements of Situation, that will create and drive a story worth telling.

Really, it always comes down to that for me: a story worth telling. I define that as one which moves me emotionally, inspires me creatively, and which influences my choices in everyday life (essentially, it gives me food for thought – stuff I can’t digest right away, but need to ruminate on, and therefore make me grow as a person).

I realize more and more, few people play role-playing games for this purpose. Even fewer of these people who play to create Story, also play purposely to work and improve their storytelling skills, by sharing the same vivid waking dream.

To share the same vivid waking dream, means to achieve group one-mindedness, to immerse oneselves in the sensory world of one’s mind’s eye (and to do this, you practice by immersing yourself in the sensory world of the every-day ‘real world’). This involves skill-building and some real work!

Thus why I coined the term Storyjamming, and why it differs fundamentally from ‘vanilla’ role-playing. The two endeavors do overlap, however, and in that overlap we’ll continue to learn from each other, I think. Certainly I wouldn’t have gotten even this far without them!

To make it clear:

Vincent Baker, creator of the game In A Wicked Age, the game my storyband currently plays, has a great breakdown of how one creates a-story-worth-telling, by focusing on the creation of Situation.

Essentially, he defines Situation as this:

Dynamic interaction between specific characters and small-scale setting elements; Situations are divided into scenes.

Dynamic interaction means situations (small ‘s’) that cannot remain the same, that must resolve one way or another, by the nature of the differing interests of the characters involved.

Specific characters means defined roles with conflicting interests.

Small-scale setting elements means objects, locations, groups, and points of contention.

Scenes mean segments of story, just like you’d see in any Shakespeare play, folktale, TV show, movie; specifically, action between and within characters in discrete locations.

To see this in action, check out what I wrote about how one of our storyjam-sessions went.

Your story-game rules provide a structure that drives the movement of the characters across the different locations, acting against each other (and within themselves), and with the help of Lady Luck, brings the hand of other-than-humans to turn the storyline in unexpected and unlooked-for directions.

Cont’d in Part II…

With all this talk of storyjamming, where does a person start?

You can go to the Forge for the fundaments of indie game design, to the Story-Games website for further conversations and an extensive wiki on all the different indie games.

You can also try any of the many free downloadable indie games, offered as gifts to the indie story-game community, from folks in the indie game community. Nice, huh?

Just a not-so-random few to get you started:

Ganakogok – “You belong to the Nitu people, who have lived upon the mountainous ice-island of Ganakagok from time beyond memory, in a night-shrouded world where the Stars are gods. You are a hunter, or a shaman, or a chieftain as you choose, and you have seen the truth: things are changing. The dawn is coming to a world that has never known the Sun.” Check out the wiki page.

Bone White, Blood Red – “Roleplaying the Pueblo Revolt of 1680…from a native point of view.” The game’s blog here.

The Pool – A story-game with very few rules, and a light structure, and leaves it totally up to you where and when and about whom your stories concern. This probably would go well with an Oracle (I’ll talk more about Oracles soon, but for now, I’ll say that they offer up story ideas, like a deck of tarot cards). The wiki page.

Muse, the role-playing game – Another story-game with very few rules, and a light structure. An interesting variation on what you can do with collaborative story-telling.

The Shadow of Yesterday – Getting a little more pulp science-fantasy, pirates, swords, and sorcery! A bit more complex, too.

Thanks to all the hard working designers who contributed their creative sweat to make these games.

Why do we ask Lady Luck for her Opinion?

You’ll notice in these games that dice, cards, or the flip of a coin often seem to enter into guiding the story. You can find story-games that do not use the influence of fortune and ‘random chance’, definitely. Improv games themselves don’t use it. I see these different games as serving different purposes.

Improv/intuition games focusedly create one-mindedness, and get you to the place of ‘ready to make story’. You can use them too to script collaboratively ‘discovered’ plays and performances.

But it takes little searching to discover stories about the animist love of gambling and games of chance, and I have my own explanation for this: a tossed coin, a flipped card, and a rolled bone (or dice), bring in the invisible hands of other-than-humans. It keeps us ready for directions the story may need to take, that we could have never known, that we even may not want them to go. But if we don’t go there, we’ll just tell the same old story.

I see plenty of room for both ways though: stories told with, and without the help of Lady Luck will both feed life. I would neglect neither.

Not Better, Perhaps, but Definitely Different

How does a Story-jam differ from a conventional ‘role-playing game’?

Most traditional role-playing games focus on a teller/audience paradigm. The computer (or Gamemaster, or Dungeonmaster for D&D) creates a world, and the player interfaces with it in a limited fashion. The computer or Gamemaster makes the world come alive, and the player merely interacts in a limited way with the Story-world. The Gamemaster gets most all of the practice in Storytelling skills, and the players get a very limited amount.

In a sense, this has a lot in common with listening to a Storyteller do their work, with one step beyond in terms of interaction (you no longer just listen, but interact somewhat). However, you sit on invisible rails, and will only go where the computer or Gamemaster has planned for you to go.

In a Story-jam, we create the world together. In so doing, every player works on and constantly improves their Story skills.

Not only that, but we learn higher-level skills of collaboration, listening and responding, setting aside ego, following intuitive guidance, that the other scenarios do not require (though such skills would certainly improve their craft).

To Story-jam, means to learn Storytelling plus a whole other bunch of stuff too.

The Elements

Drawing from Viola Spolin’s Intuition and Improvisational Theater games, and my training at Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School, I see a convergence of skills and games…and guidelines for exploring them. In the Indie Story-game movement, we see books like Play Unsafe, by Graham Walmsley, that point us in this direction.

Truly though, I think it takes the animist perspective of the tracker to understand the forces at work in a rich Story-jam, and know what to emphasize and bring fully to life.

The first understanding, from this animist perspective, I’ll articulate this way:

When we Story-jam, we share the same vivid waking Dream.

Therefore, we see, rather than invent. We go there, to the vividly imagined place, and then bring it back in words and gestures.

With the help of Graham Walmsley’s book (with Walmsley drawing his source material in turn from Keith Johnstone, improv teacher), we have some key ways of really capturing this attitude.

-Play! The Story-jam, like a music jam, shouldn’t feel like all work. If it does, spare your Band-mates by finding something else that you will actually enjoy. Building skill at this may feel uncomfortable, may work your brain, but it should feel fun too.

-Play the obvious. Don’t get clever. If you say what you see, you say the obvious thing. If you make stuff up, you get ‘clever’.

-Go for average play. Don’t grab the spotlight. Don’t try to outshine your band-mates. When you shoot for average, you play naturally, and stay in the flow of the shared Dream with your other players. Have loads of fun, but just go for average.

-Make each other look GOOD! Support other characters, and their stories-within-the-story. Make them look good, and trust that they’ll return the favor. You can look good playing a bumbling foolish part in a Story.

-Yes, and…! Build on the energy there, build on ideas, keep the flow going. Not ‘no, because…’, but rather ‘Yes, AND this happens next!’ The rules of the Story-game itself will cue you when and how to use character conflict to propel the story.

A World of Intuition and Improvisational Skills

We could add different elements and guidelines to that list all day long, but in the end they boil down to a very few core things. Work your ability to experience vividly with all 5 senses, in your imagination, and in every day life. They support each other. Learn to listen, and respond without censoring your natural instinct.

Of course, right? Basic animal tracking skills.

When in doubt during the jam, always go back to what you vividly see. Follow that.

As in Story, so in Life.

Can you let someone else solve their own riddle, while you remind them of its words?

Can you play a bumbling mirror, reflecting as best you can what you see and hear?

Can you set your curiosity far away, and let its distant song, carried on the wind, lead you without overwhelming you?

Can you study at someone else’s knee, learning their magic as their dreaming world teaches it?

Can you comport yourself as a guest, in a strange land that doesn’t need you for purpose, meaning, or solutions?

I don’t even know if I can do that. But I do my best.

So if Story Bands and Music Bands have a lot in common…

Then we can have Story-jams just like we have music -jams.

Then Storytellers become Story-jammers, don’t they?

And in any case, every Band needs a name, don’t they. What will you call yours?

And you’ll need to pick your first Band members with care, because you’ll need to trust them, know that they can listen and respond, that they want to make each other look good (instead of just themselves), and that they have the same (or at least harmonious) vibe as you.

I’ve already seen that Story-jamming takes far more skill and sensitivity than you’d think, and if you get good at it, Story-telling should feel effortless.

Because when you Story-jam, you do no less than share the same vivid waking dream.

(…of course we’d end up back at Dreams…)

The bioregional Cascadian martial-art SHIFT that I collaborate on growing, exploring, sharing, and developing with my really gifted friends, students, and mentors, also goes by other descriptions; ‘feral movement art’, ‘protector art’.

I wonder often if folks know how far this philosophy goes. A long time ago I ran across a practicioner of Aikido who put some of what I wanted to say really excellently. An excerpt:

…The logic of martial art is that of starting life as an individual and finishing it in a community way, a life of producing food. However there are two ways of living together. One is to produce food and the other is to form armies. Human beings need food. One can produce food or one can take food from others. One way needs agriculture to produce food and the other needs armies to take food from others. Thus, communities which produce food and communities which take food from others are very different. In industrial countries, governments choose to take food from others rather than produce food by themselves. It may be politically a correct idea because if one country only produces food then other countries will come with strong armies and take all food it has produced.

The basic question is to know whether one wants to live a life based on war or based on peace. If one wants to create a life based on peace, one must produce one’s own food in one’s own land…

Check it out.

The Back Story

Over on Rewild.info we’ve started an intense and varied conversation on resuscitating Story.

I’ve gotten into a funny space with stories and entertainment as of late. I know I’ve wanted for a long time to start replacing the movies and tv-shows-on-dvd that I’ve watched of late, with home-grown Story. But I didn’t know how. How do you kick-start a grass-roots storytelling scene, that has a fighting chance to out-do the wickedly skillful world of Hollywood entertainment?

Enter the indie story-game world, ‘indie’ as in ‘small press, creator-owned’, much like indie comics and indie film, and ‘story-game’ as the next generation of role-playing games, when all the shoot-’em-up-and-steal-their-stuff types have left the room to play networked carnage in a virtual world courtesy of the magical internet.

Many of these games focus on creating Story itself, not just entertainment, but a satisfying, meaningful, and unexpected narrative. In doing so, they demand that the players brush-up on the skills that make a Story worth telling, and worth hearing.

What you end up with, then, involves a collaborative Story, where in the middle of a circle of creative people something emerges, greater than any could have done on their own. An expression of their creative commonality.

‘Hey guys, instead of starting a rock band, let’s start a Story Band!’

Calling this circle of storytellers a Band seems to most accurately sum up the experience, on all the levels that it takes place. The storytellers jam together to get to a place where things ‘click’, emotions run freely, and the characters and Story achieve their own life.

The rules of the particular story-game (and you’ll find a wide diversity of them, with very different rules in order to make specific kinds of stories) serve as the ‘rules’ of music itself. Do we play jazz? Blues? Rock? Pop? Punk? Each kind of Story requires a different structure to the experience.

Also, it requires the same skills as a group of jamming musicians. Generosity, the ability to listen and respond, staying in the moment (staying with the music!), and the oneness of mind that emerges from it. This both requires and creates trust, and so, like with any band, you pick the players carefully, with trust and safety in mind. Especially in the beginning, for those new-to-storytelling, who need to find their sea-legs and gain confidence.

Collaborative Story Means Teamwork

The other benefit of this rests in the need to learn not just to reconnect with Story, but to reconnect with other people. Learning to collaborate means learning team skills, means going back to our roots of consensus and sharing. I think music bands, and the stories, movies, and legends about them, inspire us so much because they remind us of the iconic power and satisfying lifestyle of the Team. The legendary backstory, the soap opera of loves and loss, we eat this up because we eat up sharing and collaborating and making beauty together.

So as you make Story, you’ll also remake each other.

And maybe too you’ll create a legendary Story-Band worth remembering.

But Why Make Story?

Do we do it just so we don’t watch TV, so we don’t consume movies and mass-entertainment?

I don’t know if I can tackle this one by myself. And anyway, if you read Martin Prechtel’s book, the Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, then I wouldn’t have anything more to say anyway. I wouldn’t have to, because you’d get it. Hint, hint.

So, if you bless the world and yourself with your sincerely offered tears…

…what if you’ve lost the ability to grieve?

What if the valves of your heart feel rusted shut?

I haven’t trained as a therapist, and I don’t completely understand these things myself. As a person who has struggled to reclaim the right to feel my emotions fully, and who has cast away pop-culture heroes who embody the inability to grieve, heroes who in fact ‘succeed’ and ‘win the day’ because, according to the stories of this culture, they shed no tears, they knuckle down, and stuff their sincerity deep inside and far away, like a heart locked in a box buried beneath a boulder far off in the trackless wilderness.

As this person, I know what it means to struggle back.

I’ve also had the honor of the friendship of people who can grieve, and share that ability without shame.

I’ve heard in Traditional Chinese Medicine that human beings store grief in the lungs. Often, when really crying, I’ve felt this swirling power in there, deep in my chest. I’ve also felt the lack of expressing grief as a tightness in the chest and throat.

My friend Julie offered me a little tool she used herself. Though often well able to cry at the drop of a hat, sometimes she couldn’t get there. So she’d make the sound.

The sound reminds me of a little kid all alone, having lost their mom and dad at a crowded place, and crying so long they’ve exhausted themselves but can’t stop crying in a low groan kind of way.

Even just taking the breath to make the sound makes my whole body ready to grieve.

If you have a private place where you can go, perhaps a quiet room, or a green place with a tree to lean up against, you might experiment with adding the sound to your practice of paying daily attention to yourself and the world.

As Martin Prechtel says, ‘the heart is a muscle’. You have to work it to make it strong, you have to practice to make your grieving something worth a world full of bittersweetness.

My good friend Julie has posted the next article in her series on Intention. Much like David Grace’s blog Health Beyond Civilization, I continue to believe we need “Wisdom Beyond Civilization”. What advice would a rewilded Grandma give us? What support would our Grandfather from 500 years in the future give us?

We have to rebuild the understanding of what makes us human, and how to enact a fully human life. Read Julie’s article, 11 Practical Tools for Setting a Powerful Intention for the kind of advice and tools of living you would have received from caring elders, had you entered this world into a fully rewilded culture.