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.

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.

Evan Gardner and I have done a lot of brainstorming over the past several months, troubleshooting how to kick-start the revolution and begin spreading his language fluency game, “Where Are Your Keys?”.  Now we finally have a solid plan.

If you’ve kept up with the saga of WAYK, you’ll know the kind of revolution we hope for by increasing access to this game. We’ve decided upon a way to communicate the game, via the internet, in a youtube-like format using lots and lots of short single-technique videos. In collaboration with fellow players joining in, who will also send in their own videos of techniques they’ve pioneered (owing to the open source nature of the game), we’ll propel the game forward.

We have our eyes focused on the open source PHPmotion software on which to build a “video wiktionary”, and have a web developer ready to go.

If you’d like a way to support this project, have the option to participate in the “behind the scenes” usability test run this Fall, and get a whammy of a discount on a year subscription to the paid portion of the site starting in January 2010, then send $100 to the paypal account evan_gardner at yahoo dot com. Keep in mind, we only have room for 50 ‘early-adopter” subscribers at this time, and we will register early subscriptions first come, first serve.

If this inspires you, I look forward to seeing you online this Fall!

Recently (yesterday, as a matter of fact) I received a comment here from a physicist named Travis, who wanted to point out a couple of errors he perceived in my article on Animist Language.

I don’t know Travis; he doesn’t know me. But I’ve waited for him (or whoever would do the work that he has finally done for me) for a long time. I honestly can’t believe it’s taken him this long.

Often in describing the benefits of non-civilized animist languages, I’ve used (inspired by Dan Moonhawk Alford’s work on “quantum linguistics”) the ability to describe quantum mechanics well as a proof of a language’s ability to describe the world accurately, with integrity. English can’t really do this; many animist languages can. But as Travis points out, the language of mathematics describes quantum events more effectively than any other language out there.

I’ve never felt truly comfortable with using quantum mechanics to support my observations about language. I don’t fully understand it - I have, at best, a layman’s approximation of the theory. I certainly can’t speak with any authority on it, and by using it I fell into the trap Travis mentioned - I have appropriated it for ends unintended by the scientific community. Really, it has always served more as a rickety rope bridge for folks raised in modern scientific culture to reach the place I want them to see, even if only for a moment: the place of a truly, completely, living world. Quantum physics seemed to suggest something more magical going on than that conventionally held by the “common sense” of modern civilization.

But the reminder that mathematics so successfully describes quantum events leaves me with a problem. As a language, mathematics so fully objectifies its subjects that it barely even needs them anymore. What does one plus one equal? How can you answer that without knowing what “one” I mean? “One” what? Well, you can answer me, quite easily, without knowing “what”. And as Einstein said, “to the extent mathematics is true, it does not refer to reality…to the extent it refers to reality, it is not true”.

I wish to ever-improve my ability to speak about reality in a truthful, life-generating way.

This brings me to a fundamental problem. We have, before us, an incommensurability between the countless substantive models of animist inquiry (what you might call non-civilized science) based on an assumption of a living and person-ing world, and modern scientific models based on assumption of a dead, mechanical world (of which quantum mechanics makes a good example). Incommensurability means, according to Thomas Kuhn, (thank you Wikipedia) “the proponents of different scientific paradigms cannot fully appreciate or understand the other’s point of view because they are, as a way of speaking, living in different worlds”.

Kuhn, in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, wrote

When paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. Led by a new paradigm, scientists adopt new instruments and look into new places.

Combine this with Karl Popper’s observation (paraphrasing here) that “truth” doesn’t mark the result of scientific work, but rather that “the search for truth” fuels the work itself, and you have the likely story of what happened and will continue to happen to us as inquiring beings.

How do we evaluate “truth”?

When we change the world we experience (because of our beliefs about the world), we change what questions we ask, what we see as “real”. This change in attention and questions changes our language itself.

For what does language embody, but a set of directed attentions and questions about the world?

The language of mathematics doesn’t seem to produce more observant, successful, human-habitat-preserving thinking or behavior than any other modern language. Obviously for what it specializes in, it does quite well.

I submit that a language worth having, worth speaking, worth hearing, not only produces accurate (reproducible) observations, but also observations which encourage attention on that which increases the survivability and fulfillment of humans and their more-than-human community.

As far as I can tell, modern scientific language, and the technologies it  births, has accelerated the destruction of life and sanity more than any other force in history.

Therefore, to Travis, and to all the quantum physicists out there I have offended, I humbly apologize, and give you your quantum physics back.

When I listen to you tell your story

I embrace the possibilities you describe

and take the limits under advisement

Your possibilities show that somebody, somewhere, actually did it…

your limits show that somebody, somewhere, at one time, couldn’t…

I gallop after possibilities

rather than remaining behind to survey the particular borders

of what I, or you, or others

cannot do

What happens when you place the ability and responsibility for learning and teaching into the hands of the people with the passion to learn?

What happens when you blur the line between teacher and student, until it no longer exists?

What happens when “Those Who Can, Do, and Those Who Can’t, Teach” becomes “Those Who Can Do, Teach, and Those Who Can Teach, Do“?

What on earth does this mean for schools, colleges, universities, the institutional life of education?

If you know me at all, you’ll know I bear little love for the institution of schooling, and the lust for “schoolifying” everything. Formerly, if you wanted to learn something, you found somebody doing it and you apprenticed with them. Now if you want to learn something, you hit your web browser and google up a school.

What happened to us, as a culture? Well, you can read John Taylor Gatto’s the Underground History of American Education for the full story, but in short, we fell asleep, and woke up in school, and stopped questioning where and why it came from.

Once you take authority away from the institution, and put it back in the hands of the doers, where does that leave institutions?

I believe a role does remain for these institutions. For a long time, as the various permutations of fluency games improve and cohere, they’ll need the guiding hand of those with the skills, and with some understanding of the pedagogical challenge at hand. It will take a while to fully transition from a culture of expert pedagogues to a culture of self-teaching play. Because Evan and I have first aimed at language education, I think we will see some rapid culture change there once we get the ball rolling. Everything else will come in its own time.

Perhaps eventually the schools, colleges, and academies will transform into cultural and community centers, places with the space and tools to facilitate experimental and exploratory play in the fluency of different skills. Hotbeds of light-hearted conversation and commensality, perhaps they will have a role for quite some time to come.

In any case, let’s begin. Whatever happens, we know where we started. Right here.

When it comes to culture change and personal growth, I notice folks often (naturally, according to the conditioning of our culture) asking others to “go first”. But why not apply new tools and understandings to ourselves first, until we’ve mastered them? Why not “go first”, ourselves?

For example, take the practice of Nonviolent Communication. When I first started practicing NVC, I “helped” conversation partners out a lot by “correcting” their NVC use. After indulging this kind of arrogant mischief for quite a while, it finally occurred to me that correcting others behavior presented a massive wall to trust, understanding, and peace. In essence, by correcting them (without their request to do so), I spoke “violently” (in the parlance of NVC). From that point on I made it a practice of applying the observation and empathic skills strictly to myself and my own needs, assuming that others would benefit from the clarity such practice produced in me. I discovered the truth in that assumption as my skill improved.

Funny enough (or not so funny, depending on how you look at this) I practiced the same short-sighted abuse of new tools when learning Don Miguel Ruiz’ “Four Agreements”.  You could find me lecturing my girlfriend of the time on how she hadn’t adhered to “Don’t Take Anything Personally”, or one of the other Agreements.

Honestly, I have done this with many of these kinds of personal and communicative tools, over the years.

By the time I began to experiment and practice the Haudensaunee’s three “Peace Principles” as communicated to me by Jake Tekaronianeken Swamp, I think I’d finally hit on it. I accepted these principles as a gift for myself, and they would benefit others to the extent they changed my behavior in more life-affirming ways, rather than how I lectured and corrected others in their use.

American culture elevates the ‘word’, especially the written word, to such a high level, that it commonly eclipses the purpose of the word: to communicate understanding, to change behavior, to have a real impact in the world. Often words talk to words, without any of them sullying each other by affecting the “real world”.

I stand here to say that my life has grown far more satisfying once I lost interest in explaining my philosophy, in favor of benefiting from it.

In fact, could someone come to understand your values, and learn the tools of communication you use, simply by experiencing you using them? Not through your articulation of them, nor purchasing the book that explains them, nor through diagrams on white boards, but simply from observing you as a role model?

This sounds an awful lot like “mentoring”, doesn’t it?

Perhaps you will allow me to challenge you: can you take your top, most dearly held values, or your favorite new tool of growth or communication, and embody them for a month without explaining or articulating them to anyone else, enough so that an observant person could discern these unspoken values, tools, or focus of growth?

A pretty cool idea, I think.

What presuppostitions does “disagreement” hide? Do “agreement” and “disagreement” help (or hinder) conversations, decisions, and understanding?

For a long time now, whenever I hear someone say “I disagree” to me, or someone else, it always sticks in my craw a little bit. I haven’t quite understood why; certainly I want folks I converse with to feel free to tell their own stories and speak about their experiences.

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Nonviolent Communication, helped me to understand that one can violently appreciate just as easily as condemn. To call me “right”, “perfect”, to grade me with an “A+”, implies that you can also grade with an “F-”, and call me “wrong” and “flawed”. The dark side of positive labels rests uneasily behind the euphoria that such labeling produces.

So how does this apply to agreement or disagreement?

If you say you “disagree” with me, than that indicates you’ve heard me, understood my story, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t match your own attitudes and opinions well. But what if you don’t understand my story? Only I can say whether or not you’ve heard me; only I can say whether or not I feel that you have gone the distance in understanding me so that I can relax and allow that you have a good grasp of my experience.

In other words, how can you disagree with something you don’t understand yet? You must understand it before you can agree or disagree.

But then, what about when you decide that you agree with me, before you understand me? Has this ever happened to you, where someone responds affirmatively to an opinion of yours, then takes off running, saying all kinds of (in your mind) off-base things, that they think express your opinion too?

So, do agreement or disagreement even matter? They seem so extraneous to the goal of understanding each other. Do we mean anything else by these words, other than the ham-fisted application of judgement and labels?

And what about those conversations where you argue for an hour, and then at the end realize you both “agree”? The waste of energy and emotion over…what?

I’d like to hear about your experiences with agreement and disagreement. When have they helped? Hurt?

I wanted to keep you updated on where learning innovator Evan Gardner and I have lately had a chance to share his viral language fluency game, “Where Are Your Keys?”.

On April 29th, Chris Sims and Elizabeth Hendrickson hosted us at the Agile Learning Games Party; we had a great session of WAYK along with playing some other fun Agile teamwork games.

On May 2nd we played WAYK at Portland’s BarCamp 3, again somewhat of a techie gathering. Another amazing session! I’ve discovered that along with everybody enjoying themselves, a session of WAYK always creates one or two “believers” - folks who see the same possibility in the game that we do. We also discovered a lot of connections between software and domain languages, and ‘normal’ languages (such as French, English, German, Chinese, etc.). WAYK has a far broader application than first glance!

Both Evan and I have committed to finding such opportunities to share WAYK, so folks can get a taste for how the game works. If you have any ideas, please contact me: mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com. Of course, we prefer local events, but if you can give us a hand, we can hit the road too.

Not Your Grandparent’s Square Dance from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.