What do you think will happen when we agree? What exactly will that accomplish?

I know what you think it will accomplish – peace, harmony, solidarity, right?

I have had more trouble, more discontent, more disharmony, from relationships with people who “agree”, than any other kind. Right now you can observe a digital storm amongst groups that want “agreement”, all sides of which have experienced or deeply empathize with the pain of this insane modern world, in part or whole.

I believe that most (all?) attempts at agreement drive towards military action – to create the coherence and one mindedness necessary for effective group combat, verbal, physical, emotional, spiritual or otherwise. All “policy”, all “platforms”, really come down to choosing a war footing, creating a military confederacy. Perhaps you have your reasons; maybe you nod your head emphatically in response.

If so, then I have to ask – what makes you any different from any of the other Americans fully armed and ready for war? How does your sales pitch differ, except in content and branding? How can you tell your story, and listen to the stories of others, when you occupy yourself with worrying about reaching agreement, making the sale? How can you have a real conversation (the rhythm of changing others, and allowing them to change you) with an agenda?

The living web of life doesn’t agree on anything. Nor do they disagree. Beings eat each other, help each other, interact and intermingle their bodies, minds and spirits with each other. They tell their stories constantly, and listen to other stories told to them.

You don’t want me to agree with you. You want me to hear your story. Only then will the restlessness leave your heart.

Thanks for listening to mine.

For me, it has put a spotlight on the fascinating and fundamentally not-so-funny inability of americans to have adult conversations about points of disagreement. Rarely have I been able to “tell my story” connected to a contentious issue and hear it received respectfully.

Most interestingly, the fluoride debate has created divisions down the middle of groups which mainstream politic life sees as contiguous. If you subscribe to the mythical “left/right”, “progressive/conservative” divide as a useful way to think about public opinion – and I should mention here that I most emphatically do not subscribe to this – then you will feel befuddled to hear that progressives are yelling at each other, accusing each other of wielding rich white privilege. You’ll also hear cries of “tin-foil hats”, “pseudo-science”, and “tea-party thinking”.

In one exchange with a friend (also a tracker for goodness sake!), after his characterization of anti-fluoride folks this way (I am voting against fluoride), I piped up to protest his description of me, my family, local native and minority groups that also encourage voters to vote against fluoridation.

“Show me peer-reviewed science, ” he said.

“How will showing you more science change your disrespect of my differing opinion? Besides, this issue may concern interpretation of science and differing values, not the science itself,” I reply.

“I’m still waiting for the peer-reviewed science.”

And the conversation ended before it had ever begun.

For me, again, this puts the spotlight squarely where I’ve wanted it all along. For my friends and family who identify as “progressive”, I’ve noticed that for them the “other side” (conservative, GOP, whatever) has abandoned science for religion or conspiracy theory – they won’t think rationally, can’t reason on their own. Yet now that the left-leaning group has split in two…progressives (I might accidentally fall under this label, though I don’t consider myself one) point their fingers at each other and fire away with the same language.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

This should not come across as new news. I love this situation because it highlights the problem – a problem that has always rested within our control. I can choose to create a space for conversation, or I can choose to create a space for combat. Note I don’t cast this as “conflict vs. agreement” – all life comes from conflict, from different perspectives. But what do we do with those? We marry them! Interbreed them! Tell our stories to each other, ask questions, listen generously.

This has left us so completely that we seem to hardly remember it. And the blame falls on all of us, me included. How often do we fiercely protect a space for conversation? How often to we choose instead to jump in with the right solution, the correct perspective, or a sneering condescension?

One caveat: don’t try to have conversations with people without a capacity for empathy and connection. Identify and avoid them as early and often as possible. However, most of the time your difference of opinion, and not a difference in neurobiology, will lie at the center of why you feel so dissatisfied with your interaction.

Right now, the sense of expansion and enrichment in the tracking community has really amazed me. Over the past few decades a few different schools of thought have emerged in North America, exemplifying different styles and values about the utility and purpose of tracking. I myself have noticed trackers originating from the border patrol community, search and rescue community, conservation biology and academic community, and the rewilding communities.

Each of these communities has its own heroes, its own gurus, and its own technical jargon. The members of these communities tend to share amongst themselves their own reasons for getting out to wild places.

For many of us who feel that Tracking itself has more value than any one of these communities, we’ve had a hard time communicating and passing along our skills. ISPT, the International Society of Professional Trackers, came about as one organization established for exactly this – to connect the disparate communities of tracking.

However, in my own corner of the world of Tracking (which includes the folks at Rewild Portland  and surrounds), the folks at Cybertracker have had the greatest impact on my own little community of trackers coming together and refinding our inspiration for this amazing art and science. Through their tracker certification program, we have had more excitement, adventure, and conversations lately than I can remember us having in quite a while – as a community.

And it has all happened from a test.

From schooling, many of us tend to think of tests as something awful, something to avoid, perhaps even something to game and cheat so that we get the desired grade. These schooling tests of course do no-one any good. They judge, praise and condemn, but beyond that we drop them and move on.

However, a test that tells you what you next need to learn – that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? And every time you take it, you  just discover more and learn more about what to learn next.

This test compares exactly with the ACTFL language profiency test that defines and drives my work at Language Hunters.

The tracking community used to feel fairly aggressive and hollow – a bunch of folks pretending to know a lot, who either hid their knowledge or bragged about it. Though certain folks focused entirely on the mentoring traditions of tracking, still many of these teaching/learning relationships fell flat. I’ve heard many of my fellow trackers talk about the frustration and hollowness of the “I don’t know, what do you think?” strategy for passing on tracking skills.

And yet, with this Tracker Certification test, we do almost exactly that – an instructor establishes a bunch of tracks and sign that will serve as quiz questions. Then you try to answer, then the evaluator tells you what they see. But without the false sense of “mentoring”, the quasi-coyote relationship with a stranger or pseudo-mentor holding a bit more dirt-time over your head. You never really knew what skills your pseudo-mentor actually had – and the condescension of their mentoring style caused resentment. But to learn from someone who actually knows their stuff (and we know how much they know because we have a way to get feedback on how much we know – whew!), and shares it – rather than holding it back as some kind of eternal carrot just out reach – feels really nourishing.

Questions create vacuums, we know this. Vacuums accelerate learning, this we know too. Friendship, laughter, and community accelerates learning too. Somehow, rather than pretending to “mentor” each other, preparing for a test has done all this for us. A test that you don’t just take once – but you take again and again, climbing the ladder of dirt-time and skill.

This gives us a lot to think about, as mentors, as parents, as peers, as communities. We haven’t finished building a culture of tracking yet, not by a long shot.

Photo Credit: jenny downing via Compfight cc

I’ve spent time practicing thinking in accord with “degrees of confidence”, rather than right or wrong, true or false. When we use our analytical mind, not only does “lack of proof” not disprove anything, the presence of evidence can’t conclusively prove anything either. We can only establish levels of confidence, degrees, in accord with the evidence (or lack thereof) of our senses.

This takes us to the next issue: I don’t care what you believe in, I care what you have confidence in, and to what degree. Possibly I might also mean “degrees of belief”, depending how you use the word. The scale below should clear things up, on a scale from -10 (strong confidence against) to 10 (strong confidence for). Here’s just the top 10:

10. Urgency – high confidence level drives behavior even when inconvenient (directs your world), and inspires storytelling of abundant experience.

8. Relatively high confidence level drives behavior when convenient (influences your world), and inspires advice and story from some limited personal experience.

5. Present confidence level drives advising and storytelling without personal experience (drives your conversations).

3. Confidence level drives discussion and questioning of one’s present paradigm (influences your conversations).

1. Barest hint of confidence bubbles up in private thoughts, dreams, and maybe in a conversation on a rare occasion.

When someone says they “believe” in something, rather than taking them at their word, try interviewing them, and finding where they land on this scale. Even better, when you claim to believe in something, discover for yourself how much confidence you have in that belief. And then ask “why?”

I hope you enjoy this. Use this as a tool to play with your perceptions, please don’t use it as a lens with which to judge or abuse yourself. Drive your inquiry with it!

Photo Credit: mohammadali via Compfight cc

Èṣù is a spirit of Chaos and Trickery, the deity with the power over fortune and misfortune, and the personification of death…and plays frequently by leading mortals to temptation and possible tribulation in the hopes that the experience will lead ultimately to their maturation.

In this way he is certainly a difficult teacher, but in the end is usually found to be a good one. As an example of this, let us look at one of his “patakis” or stories of the faith. Èṣù was walking down a road one day, wearing a hat that was red on one side and black on the other. Sometime after he entered a village which the road went through, the villagers who had seen him began arguing about whether the stranger’s hat was black or red.

The villagers on one side of the road had only been capable of seeing the black side, and the villagers on the other side had only been capable of seeing the red one. They soon came to blows over the disagreement – […] the two halves of the village were not stopped short of extreme violence; they actually annihilated each other, and Èṣù laughed at the result, saying “Bringing strife is my greatest joy”.

Èṣù is involved within the Orisha-Ifá system of Yorùbá religion as well as in African diasporic faiths like Santería/Lukumi and Candomblé, developed by the descendants of enslaved West Africans in the Americas. 

What do you think?

As you read this blog post, remember, I definitely don’t intend that you consider psychopathic behavior harmless, or something we can blithely tolerate, or anything of the sort.

Psychopaths test us, they test our individuality and the strength of our village, and unfortunately in the modern era, they find the strengths of our souls and villages severely lacking. We ourselves give them the language to abuse us, the anonymous landscape in which to hide, the needy codependence that prevents us from holding strong boundaries like adults.

I mentioned before that wisdom in this arena would lie somewhere in the natural world, and said I couldn’t find it. Well, I actually did have a trail to follow, a glimmer of a suspicion. Inside me a story has begun to spun out, another way to rewild our relationship with an oft-times terrifying, and always beautiful world.

I strongly believe in a loving, life-affirming universe. And yet, that doesn’t mean the suffocating love, security and comfort promised by civilized lips. That means the brutal, testing, beautiful life-affirming forces of a fully alive world. Burning cold and heat, carnivores hungry for the children of all species.

The storms of life don’t judge your degree of naughty or nice before they blow your house down – Hurricane Sandy killed and injured, and rendered homeless, anyone in her way. The storms of life prune trees, churn landscapes, roll the dice to create more fertility and possibility growing out of a completely rearranged ecosystem.

Do we consider this psychopathic behavior? I deeply believe in the loving force of a storm, and yet the storm will take your children if you don’t pay attention. Doesn’t a psychopath do the same thing?

Within the body of these people-without-a-conscience, their cells and organs take care of each other, celebrate and feast each other, and yet at the human-to-human level this consideration and conscience disappears. Perhaps it appears again at the village-to-village level, where the psychopath acted as an original trickster force pruning and testing human communities to continually grow themselves into more aware, wise people, readying them for the greater storms of the world, for the larger tricksters that range and predate across ecosystems?

The Christmas-time whip-wielding Krampus in Austria, the Sacred Clowns of Pueblo indians, Coyote in the Northwest US native culture, the dice-playing Lords of Death of the Tzutujil, don’t these all display “psychopathic” behavior, a lack of conscience, a willingless to lie and manipulate to get their way, no matter what the context?

The Cooper’s Hawk plucking one chirping Robin chick after another out of the nest, only leaving the one that finally learns to stop loudly begging for food (read Jon Young’s What the Robin Knows for more on these dramas of the bird world), while the rest of the terrified bird community weeps silently in terror.

In interacting with those playing with rewilding, or reconnecting with indigenous ways of thinking, I’ve often run into the “I’m a coyote, love me or hate me baby” gambit – where an individual defends a cruel streak by painting themselves in the holy colors of the Coyote. Depending on the native tradition that they want to use as a “call to authority” to excuse their behavior (native peoples have many diverse stories about coyotes, some more noble, some less so), this also then means we can consider them a ridiculous shit-eating son of a bitch. Literally, according to the stories of the NW trickster Coyote. Which they themselves might feel okay with – but it reminds us that though Holy, we don’t want to embody the manipulative cruelty and helplessly self-defeating ways of the trickster Coyote. We want to learn from him, walk through the world as clear-eyed adults ready for the appearance of this teacher. Ready for Èṣù.

What do you do before a storm comes? You prepare.

What do you do while a storm rages? You endure, using all the wisdom you can muster.

What do you do after a storm passes? You pick up the pieces – grieve what you’ve lost and praise what you still have. And perhaps most importantly, you reflect deeply on the lessons you’ve learned to prepare you for the next storm.

These answers all work just as well for human psychopaths, for Storms-in-human-shape, as it does for these natural forces.

These answers all work just as well for humans wearing the skin of a psychopath, such as the psychopath-skin uniforms of soldiers and police officers, or bureaucrats.

Anytime someone says, “It’s nothing personal”, you know you’ve met someone wearing the skin of a psychopath. A storm doesn’t mean it personally either. If we think of the civilized world as an array of toxic natural forces, of storms borne from human psychopathic culture, that we must prepare for, endure, grieve, and learn from, celebrating the continuance of a people sufficiently magnificent and wise to justify their survival.

What do we do when our culture itself seems propped up by sheeple in psychopath-skins, wherever we look? In this culture that has digested the values of a psychopath – the lust to win, the lust for power, for control,the hunger to know “how to win friends and influence people”, what can we possibly do?

If we pick up the lance to defend our families, does that cause us to don the skin of a psychopath?

I suspect that the problem lies with the urge to “win”, an abstraction and part of the matrix of psychopathic values that civilization perpetuates. Humans don’t want to win – like all living things, they want to live, love, and fight well. In a worthy way that justifies the food they must kill to maintain their own life, to justify their own body.

Perhaps we can defend our families safely, sanely, if we just say “Today is a good day to die”, and fight whether or not we can possibly win.

Perhaps we best defend our people regardless of whether any of us will survive – to show our love and the greatness of our hearts by sacrificing our bodies, “winning” whether we win or lose.

I continue to carry these questions. I don’t believe in one answer; how will you live in a world where a roll of the dice means the death of your children? Where lone predators parasitize your friends, and where Presidents justify the murder of distant villages while they cry crocodile tears over the tragedies in our backyard?

Whatever else, I know we must all endeavor to improve ourselves as clear-eyed adults, make ourselves stronger and wiser, and our families and communities too. Most of the living community adores a natural human being just as they adore each other; they adore our tears, our songs, our gifts. They feel affection when, to eat, we kill them with respect and compassion; they bring us our stories and dreams, they raise our children when lost in the woods.

But the Lords of Death don’t care about our tears; they only care about turning our bodies into mud, the substrate of all life. A dirty job; but someone has to do it.

I still want to explore this, but not today. Today let’s talk about remorse.

Shame and guilt has done tremendous emotional damage to many rewilders. In the modern world, we use shame and guilt as a whip to motivate the enslaved and the colonized. We embed emotional violence in our very language (see the excellent writings of Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication). We condemn, in order to compel others to behave as we want, and praise for the same reasons.

Even for those of us who want to create a richer life, unless we spend regular time examining our language, we unknowingly injure those we love with “shoulds” and “oughts” and “you’re so wonderful!”

For these reasons, I don’t speak of shame and guilt lightly. However, in order to talk about conscience (or the lack thereof), we must talk about the empathic experience of our hearts hurting because we “feel how others feel about us” – their anger, sadness, whether imagined or real. On this blog, and in the research on psychopaths, we mean the term “conscience” in this way. And though our culture uses guilt and shame as a weapon, I also know that human communities stick together partly because of this capacity to feel shame and guilt over actions that have hurt the group, and therefore drive action to repair damage and heal communal bonds.

Remorse, shame, guilt, all of these words describe painful feelings that cause us to want to grow, want to change, to improve ourselves. Painful feelings of shame, in a healthy conscience, happen on their own without any blaming or coercion, and help us to point our learning towards growing as a community and strengthen bonds. Maintaining these bonds feel deeply nourishing to human beings. We pursue them because of how they make us feel.

We work on our ability to “get along” and connect with each other precisely because of the twin phenomena of a hunger for the deep pleasure of familial ties and friendships, and the experience of remorse when we fail at obtaining or maintaining these well.

Except the psychopath, who of course, seems to only have the ability to feel emotions very shallowly – frustration and pleasure, for example, rather than anger, fear, and joy.

I alternate between talking about “people who exhibit psychopathic behaviors” and simply using the label “psychopaths”. Honestly, the word “psychopath” gets in the way of what we need to talk about here, because it implies, no matter how many disclaimers I write, an on/off, either/or extreme neurobiological state. Until I can come up with a better way of talking about them – not only does “psychopath” imply an all-or-nothing condition, but it also causes an instant hot-button emotional reaction trained from media across countless movies, true crime novels, and decades of television – perhaps we at least need a new word, like “disempath”, that connotes the true issue at hand: the inability of certain individuals to experience or empathize with emotions. I’m not sure. Creating a new label still perpetuates the innate problem of labeling, still leaves unaddressed the degrees and dimensions in which you can express the extent of the individual’s undeveloped emotions and empathy. We’ll just have to exercise our e-prime I suppose!

Now let’s start tracking. I want to review some of the behaviors psychopaths exhibit that act as “warning colors” to their biological inability to feel deep emotion or remorse, and thus crave thrills that require predation on other human beings.

Psychopaths live in the moment, immersed in an impulsive Now, and if you meet them on those terms, you will surely fall prey. You must look at their tracks, their trails, their history, in order to recognize them.

You’ll notice first that psychopaths don’t really seem to grow or change over time. Because of their inability to feel remorse, they don’t and can’t focus their learning on how to “get along” and build more satisfying relationships. Therefore they leave a trail of drama and bitter ex-friends, ex-business associates, and family members. And they continue on in the present moment, just like they always have, in a kind of perpetual adolescence, using the same tactics to get their needs and wants met at the cost of developing a healthier community around them. They can’t even see this trade-off, because they don’t have the emotional eyes to see it (or the lack of it).

They have a poor sense of smell. Yes, as recent research suggests, due to their poor ability to use the front part of their brain, a region involved in planning and impulse control, other capacities governed by this area, such as distinguishing between different smells, also seem to fall victim to their handicap.

Gestures (while talking) increase when describing emotional states or using emotional words. As you may know from my work with endangered languages, the use of hand gestures increases “fluency”, even in our mother tongue. When we struggle to use a word, or with language that we haven’t mastered, hand gestures can help us “pull it out” more fluently. Psychopaths seem to need gestural support when talking about subjects that they really can never understand; emotions and empathy.

They seek thrills and edgy experiences, often seeming “more alive” than other people. They may seek physical thrills, along with creating crises so that they can then solve them. Drama seems to follow them wherever they go, whether or not it affects them.

Grandiosity. They value themselves and their own abilities quite highly; they have a very healthy self-esteem.

They use tantrums and crocodile tears to get what they want. Because they’ve mimed these emotions, they can shake them off as if nothing happened.

They seem glib and charming, using language oddly; they go on more tangents, more often than others, connect sentences oddly, contradict themselves. Like the psychopath who replied, when asked if he had ever committed a violent crime, “No, I never have, but once I had to kill someone.” This may derive from a combination of the unusual structure of their brain, and an innate desire to manipulate. In any case, their cobbled-together syntax reveals the strangely scrambled cognition (even if brilliant!)

Their behavior doesn’t change with the application of consequences, punishments, or pain. This may connect with their impulsivity and shallowness, but psychopaths don’t seem to care about any future pain; they don’t experience fear or anxiety. You can’t threaten or intimidate them. They only respond to rewards, not punishments, and in fact they seem to experience pleasurable stimuli twice as intensely as non-psychopaths. Imagine the behavior of someone completely driven by their own pleasure, with little or no experience of fear or anxiety.

Their predatory focus may act like tunnel-vision, damping their awareness of surrounding context. Does this imply a bias towards the focused-manipulation hemisphere of the brain, over the expanded-awareness hemisphere, even more so than already exists in Western culture? Would a psychopath struggle with using “owl-eyes” (wide-angle vision)?

They lie consistently, even in minor situations that may defeat their purpose. This odd compulsion means that it doesn’t take much to discover the trail of lies; just start double-checking, out of habit, what most folks say, and if you run across a trail of consistent lying it will instantly become obvious.

I don’t claim this as a complete list – certainly I’ve left out the violent behaviors and criminality that the most extreme psychopaths exhibit – but I think this works great as a starting point for those of us wanting to have a rough sense of what to look for.

Again, these behaviors and symptoms will all happen to a degree, not in an all-or-nothing manner.  It depends on the extent of the particular individual’s emotional damping. I assume, as with all things, that a whole range of emotional perception must exist, from almost zero emotions (full-blown psychopath) all the way to an inability to distinguish between one’s own emotions and others (full-blown empath). Perhaps other dimensions too – could humans who mostly experience anxiety, or only love, exist?

It also happens that children, with fully felt emotions, with poor parenting and/or a toxic culture, can grow up ill-equipped to connect with others’ emotional experience. Psychiatrists call these people “narcissists”, and they may resemble psychopaths in every way (grandiosity, aggression, charm, tantrums, etc.) except one: they feel ongoing pain over their inability to create and maintain healthy relationships, losing contact with friends, spouses, children. They experience emotions; but they never had the chance to develop empathy.

For my own children, to keep their empathic capacities healthy and intact, and out of common-sense good parenting, I don’t ever “punish” them. I constantly redirect their minds to their feelings and the feelings of others, without much explaining or discussion. How do you feel? How do they feel? Why? What can you do to make it better?

Again, we still have more to talk about, perhaps one more blog post, on what we can do about it if we run across these individuals. From a rewilder/tracker’s point of view, how can we possibly respond to psychopathic behavior?

In reading about psychopaths, something hit my consciousness with an almost physical force, that in a certain sense has nothing to do with this terrifying syndrome, but rather the opposite…

If psychopaths experience so much success, and in truth (much like no house has an immunity to a fully determined burglar, given enough time) can manipulate almost anyone, then what does this tell us about the rest of the world, the 95% or more of humanity?

It means that the vast majority of people, almost every human you meet, has a deeply feeling heart hungry for human connection, relationship, meaning. It means we share a language of love, joy, rage, sadness. And this commonality makes us vulnerable to the psychopath who can only imagine what this might feel like.

When I realized this, when it hit home, I think I also realized that I had begun to assume that many, many people I met every day didn’t care, had stone-hearts, when looking at what we’re doing to the world and ourselves.

Now I fully realize, that regardless of any other issues, 95% of the people I meet only feel fully nourished by deep, real connections with other human beings.

Stop and absorb this. Take a moment to do this.

A psychopath abuses this knowledge…but this knowledge empowers us as cultural creatives.

So then, accepting that…how do we explain the present monstrosity, the devouring of the world?

We feel pretty confident, from American-based research performed after World War II on the nature of “evil” and human morality, that ~65% of a given population have an ability, and a willingness to mute their conscience when influenced to do so by someone they accept as an authority. They still have a conscience; their actions still haunt them (in the form of PTSD, for example), but they will do it in the presence of sufficiently powerful, eloquent authority.

However, ~30% of a given population has a far less developed ability to do so – you might consider these the ones protesting in the streets, arguing with family members, acting out and objecting to the pressure of authority to act against their conscience. They can’t ignore it. They can’t mute it so easily.

And then, ~5% of that population requires little or no inducement to act in ways contrary to the expected desires of a healthy conscience, and seems to suffer no remorse.

Does this spread accurately represent human communities through out time, back through 200,000 years and beyond? I suppose we may  never know. For our purposes, I propose that we treat it as such; that this probably biased, American vision of human behavior in terms of authority and conscience, that we accept it fully.

If nothing else, if you live in the modern Western world, you have to deal with it no matter what you think about its normality.

Again, perhaps surprisingly, I find these statistics inspiring. This means that 30% of the people you meet struggle deeply with muting their conscience, even under authoritative pressure. 1 out of 3 people!

I can also imagine a world where the 60%, whom I sometimes call “sheeple” for their willingness to go along with the herd, contribute deeply needed stability to human communities by a stubborn willingness to perpetuate old wisdom and long held traditions even in the face of questions and uncertainty. I equate the “authoritative” figure in western culture, to the traditions of indigenous culture. What authority exists in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical indigenous village? The authority of tradition, of course.

I don’t doubt this makes human beings more successful; if we abandoned every traditional belief or tool just because we started to question it, or it became uncomfortable, then, where would we end up? Nowadays many rewilders probably wish we had fought harder to resist change.

And yet, on the flip-side, now all our modern traditions, values and conservatism seem to drive us towards our doom. So let’s start listening to that 30%!

We’ve arrived at another way to think about Daniel Quinn’s notion of needing “another Story to be in” [sic].

So we have talked about the “sheeple”, what about the “wolves in sheep’s clothing”?

My inability to find a wild, nature-based analogy for the predatory behavior of psychopaths disturbs me more than anything else. I feel strongly that we must accept everything in the world as something that happens, that has happened, that may happen again. Meaning, we must accept it as natural. We can’t treat reality as “unnatural”. I feel this as a tracker, a thinker, a human being.

You would think, then, that this psychopathic behavior would pop up other places. Let’s find it together.

What do you think? Where do you believe you see a lack of a conscience in the natural world?

This article springs from several urges; to fully own my own responsibility for thinking critically (with a Tracker’s eye) about the issues of my life, and to create a deeply safe community space for my extended family and friends to flourish as human beings and rewilders. Upfront, let me make it totally clear: I have no credentials or academic expertise in this area. I write as just another adult human being.

I believe that over time I’ve unconsciously sought out and built relationships with folks exhibiting psychopathic behaviors (see below). This sounds like I’ve consorted with axe murderers, but as you’ll see, psychopathy doesn’t necessarily involve violence at all – it all depends on the individual.

I’ve wondered, “why have I done this to myself?”, and indeed the books I’ve read on psychopathy have exhorted readers to learn about themselves, learn about their own flaws and foibles, because psychopaths will certainly see them right away and begin pushing your buttons and pulling levers to get you to behave the way they want.

I have no need to hide from you all, my readers, what I believe drove me to seek out these folks; I sought their willingness to “play on the edge”, to break society’s rules, to act impulsively and come up with “out of the box” solutions. I did this on purpose, wanting more inspiration and energy in my own life, thinking I couldn’t provide this for myself.

I’ve grown up and realized that, firstly,  that I can indeed do this for myself, and secondly, as you’ll see, those of us  with a healthy conscience don’t need more edgy drama in our lives. We have plenty already, thank you.

Though modern people tend to view humans as “specially special”, and at the same time, curiously broken (darn those naturally warlike humans!), humans came into this world (and will go out of it) as just yet another beautiful animal nation. Not needed for the world to continue, and yet a wonderful addition to it (in spite of the recent problems with one segment of this vast human family – the “civilizing” one).

I’d like to begin this rumination on psychopaths by talking about the wonderful diversity of human beings, a diversity taken for granted by traditional indigenous minds, yet feared and resisted by modern peoples.

What kind of diversity? We have genderqueer diversity (how many genders are there – two, three, four, five, can we even number them?), we have diversity of cognition (autism, dyslexia, and more), diversity of perception (the blind, the Deaf, and more), handedness (right-hand dominant, left-hand dominant, cross-dominance, situational-dominance, etc.), and diversity of conscience (empaths, psycho/socio-paths, “sheeple”).

No, I can’t list them all here, but I think that makes for a good beginning. Keep in mind every one of these lines of diversity expresses in degrees and dimensions. For example, we don’t experience blindness and the lack of it just as an either/or state. You can have more or less blindness, and experience blindness in different ways (color-blindness, night-blindness, face-blindness, etc.)

All of these diversities have been with us as long as we’ve been human. I don’t doubt this in the least. I don’t see anything broken or handicapped or accidental about any of these peoples. I mean, humans don’t fall into two categories – “fully human” humans, and “less-than-human/unnatural” humans. Right handed dominant folks don’t necessarily behave more gracefully (latin: more “dexter”-ous) and left-handed preferring folks don’t necessarily behave more evilly (again, latin: more “sinister”).

And yet…

Even after allowing for the curious variances amongst all the others – the Deaf, the transgender, the autistic, and on and on – even after allowing and respecting the dignity and fresh perspectives of all these peoples, and breathing deep, allowing that they too have helped make human cultures work for countless millenia, not as unnatural humans, but as fully natural ones…

…mustn’t we still sharpen our tongues (and knives!) against the Sociopath?

Well, perhaps. Certainly, we can’t do “nothing” about them. As it turns out, the anonymity and individual-glorifying nature of the modern world has created the richest predatory habitat ever conceived for these human beings without a conscience, without any need for human connection.

Others have written eloquently about this – Peter Bauer from a rewilder’s point of view, Clinton Callahan from an anti-civ point of view, Joe Brewer from a policy and politics point of view, Dr. Martha Stout from a popular science point of view, Dr. Robert Hare from research and clinical point of view.

Most people react to the word “psychopath”, as used in everyday life (as in, “that guy/gal is a psychopath [sic]“), from either a colloquial angle (understanding that the speaker doesn’t intend the clinical definition), or the true crime novel angle (treated as a phenomenon that happens to other folks, but not us). Calling someone, right here, right now, a “psychopath” just perpetuates melodrama, doesn’t it…? The individual in question – “they can’t possibly be all that bad.”

But for psychopaths – who may appear in our culture at a rate somewhere between 1-5% (yes, that means in a room of 20 people, a psychopath could easily stand in plain sight, unrecognized), and for folks with some degree of, but not full-blown, psychopathic behavior this rate increases up to a possible 15%, or 3 out of 20 -  as commonly as they might appear in our company, we seem awfully unprepared to deal with them.

Yet almost every indigenous culture in the world has a human role, often called a “witch” by modern observers (meaning a practitioner of black, rather than white magic, assuming you define those squishy concepts as most seem to do), filled by a community member with predatory behavior and a lack of a conscience.

The modern eye has long mocked the ignorance of the village “witch-hunt”; and certainly in the modern age (medieval modernity included!) witch-hunts provide just another horrific opportunity for sociopaths to predate on human communities.

And yet I begin to understand that the feared “witches” of old – again, not conscience-burdened wisdom keepers and medicine people that we call “witches”, but those without any such burden – perhaps once isolated and easily ferreted out in close-knit village communities, have become so well-fed on human misery, and have acquired so much power, that whole societies have bowed to the pressure to glorify what these predators glorify. Which, as I mentioned above, might explain some things about the present state of civilization.

We find ourselves several thousand years into a culture seemingly born to serve these predators.

Before we go farther, let’s describe psychopathy. At this point, most folks researching psychopaths agree that “psychopathy” (or “sociopathy”, which gives it more of a social-context coloring) labels a syndrome of behaviors that appears to different degrees, in different dimensions. According to the book, Almost a Psychopath (published by  Harvard Medical School for those dealing with the still terrible, but not “full-blown”, instances of subcriminal psychopathy), you can look for 10 indicators of less-than-the-full-nightmare psychopathy:

1. Charming and glib, with an answer for everything.
2. Lack of empathy, difficulty to understand and/or appreciate the emotions of others.
3. Opportunities for moral choices result in decisions made for their own self-interest.
4. Repeated lying, even when unnecessary or for minor reasons.
5. Conning and manipulative.
6. When criticized, they always place fault and blame on others.
7. Lack of true remorse when they have caused harm to others.
8. Limited ability to express feelings for others, or maintain relationships.
9. They find it easy to ignore responsibilities.
10. People and situations seem to exist solely for satisfying their needs and wants.

This is a pretty awful list, as embodied by a person standing in front of you and exhibiting these behaviors, even keeping in mind that this list represents a non-violent, non-”criminal” expression or degree of psychopathic behaviors.

Dr. Hare’s research on the brains of fully psychopathic individuals shows that they literally do not have the same emotional experiences as us. They feel happiness, frustration, thrills, but don’t seem capable of truly felt rage, joy, sadness, love, or other feelings, though they may commonly use false displays of these (tantrums, crocodile tears, etc.) feelings to influence others.

Because they don’t have the same deep feelings, or don’t have them to the same degree, for psychopaths, describing “love” or “terror” to psychopaths compares to describing colors (“cornflower blue, not teal”) to the blind.

In addition, researches like Hare do not consider psychopaths “insane”, and psychopaths see themselves as perfectly healthy (often more healthy!) and reasonable. We live in a dog eat dog world, after all…?

So says the psychopath, anyway.

Psychopaths, due to how they use their brains, also seem less aware of surrounding context – they have a predatory focus, and when they do get “caught” it happens because they didn’t see the surrounding warning signs, even though we may consider them otherwise brilliant.

This connects with the modern conception that we don’t have a left brain/right brain (i.e., math/art) split, but rather a focused manipulation of the defined/expanded awareness of the undefined split.

This has caused me to wonder about the psychopath’s ability to perceive with “owl-eyes”/wide-angle vision. I wonder if this could offer another way to track the presence of a psychopath. Certainly when I have been with people who, in my estimation, showed some psychopathic behaviors, they seemed in a kind of perpetual tunnel-vision, unaware of their surroundings in odd ways.

The other symptom of psychopathology – for some reason not on the checklist for subcriminal psychopathy, but certainly present on the “full-blown” criminal checklist – a hunger for thrills and excitement, comes from the total lack of drama in the psychopath’s inner life, that the rest of us experience on a daily basis.

Can you imagine all of that emotional pull and push just disappearing? How would it feel?

The psychopath will tell you how it feels – a never-ending battle with intense boredom. Suffocating, agonizing boredom.

What would you do with all that free time, absent of all that drama? Well, again, in the right context, a psychopath will happily tell you – seek thrills, manipulate people, turn the social landscape into a game that you can win or lose.

It occurs to me, that though this in fact describes deep social disconnection, this sounds like mainstream American marketing/media/business culture. It may not surprise you that American/Western culture seems to produce  psychopaths at a couple orders of magnitude greater than, say, Asian (Chinese/Japanese) culture. The statistics: 1-5% in Western culture, as opposed to .03% in Asian cultures (according to Dr. Stout’s book). Say what you like about Asian culture (Confucianism terrifies me), we really have brought the horrors of civilization to a pinnacle in the U.S.

I’ll bring this to a close for now; I have lots more to share though!

Have you had experiences with people exhibiting psychopathic behaviors? What did you learn from them? Do you feel uncomfortable even thinking in terms of such a “hot-button”, inflammatory label? I’d love to hear your thoughts – I may address some of your responses in the next post in this series (yes, more to come!)

The Reigning Master of Where’s Waldo (image (c) Don Bacchus)

I have good news and bad news.  

The bad news: it’s taken way longer than I would have guessed to improve my eyesight to the degree I sought (i.e., good enough for driving, seeing signs, etc.) Let’s call this the goal of greater visual acuity.

The good news – the rewilding of my vision started right away, and has only gotten more and more fascinating. I continue to discover endless depths and frontiers to the visual world. And my wide-angle vision has become an unforeseeably magnificent animal – like running across a wolverine in the mountains, when you’re just out for a walk.

I can honestly say, with sufficient light, I never feel bored – ever! I always take advantage of the opportunity to just watch the world, and explore what I can do today, in this moment, with my eyesight.

With how rich my visual experience has become, it has only increased my awareness of and passion for exploring the potential rich depths of my other senses – hearing, smell, taste, touch (and others?)

This flavor of vision improvement has its costs.

Rewilding my vision has yoked my wide-angle vision to my visual acuity. Meaning, my progress in clearing my vision continues only as I improve my wide-angle visual perception. I know of methods that don’t create this connection at all – such as Brian Severson’s Vision Freedom method that I ran across a decade and a half ago – and participants seem to progress much more quickly.

This understanding has given me much more patience –  I could have clearer vision more quickly, but by doing it this way, I improve my peripheral, wide-angle vision too. And that has made all the difference!

Already, early on in rewilding my vision, playing perception games (like flipping through a Where’s Waldo book), I found myself in a class all my own. Usually it only took a few seconds to solve such puzzles – and outside observer would just see me flipping one page after another.

Now, scavenger hunts in the real world also feel much easier. I have a much deeper sense of the “pattern search” nature of tracking. Like a blood-hound smelling a pair of shoes before a search, I just need to know accurately what my sought-after object looks like, and I can find it rapidly.

How do I know I’ve made progress?

I now regularly, all day long, experience a phenomenon, where I can, at will, clear up my visual field. I go from blurry to almost painfully clear with just a thought.

This bounces back and forth – I usually need time to go for a walk in the morning light to set the tone for the day, and computer use acts as one factor “blunting” my vision.

I also can intensely feel the muscles lining the socket of my eye working –  like after an intense workout, you can feel muscles you didn’t even know you had. I didn’t even know some of these eye  muscles had anything to do with my vision!

I’ve discovered that they seem to hold the eye taut, like the people holding the sides of a trampoline. Though my eye can clear up without this extra effort, this “tautness” of the muscles around the eye make for the most extended clearing-up.

And it just feels amazing.

Synesthesia!

Another odd side-effect of improved wide-angle vision: when I start nearing a jump in my peripheral vision, objects and colors to the sides of me feel “wiped on my cheeks”, I have an almost physical sense of them to my sides. Very cool!

So give it a shot.

In Rewilding Your Vision Part II, I gave some specific instructions on trying this out.

As my friend, and fellow tracker, Billy says: “There are 11 kinds of Wide-Angle Vision”. I may have my own number (and want to learn more about his!), but without a doubt this unfinished journey has felt worth every step. I have every confidence that my vision as I age will only get better; perhaps at age 80 I’ll have the best vision of my life!

Thanks again to one of my mentors, Tom Brown, Jr., who shared this possibility with me.

Fencing is a conversation between arms.

My ears perked up, and I came back to myself a little bit.

This feeling of conversation – and I do mean “feeling”, like the feelings of softness, or hardness, or a swaying motion, or tension, or relaxed calm, for me “conversation” describes a real feeling – carries such an enlivening power.

I can sense back-and-forth in there, an exchange, but even more so – a sensitivity. What you say, I allow it to change me. And what I say, you allow it to change you. I feel interested and open, as do you. When aggression, or a loss of sensitivity, or a loss of generosity, enters the picture, the conversation transforms to discussion, or a debate, or even an argument.

This reminds me of Martín Prechtel’s discrimination between courtship and seduction – one has no agenda except experiencing a relationship, the other has a strongly felt agenda.

How many conversations happen in political life nowadays? I see none. Zero. They’ve completely left.

And therefore, how many politicians that I know of, knowing their current behavior, would I freely allow in my living room? Maybe 1. Probably none.

But what about me? Have I kept close to this commitment of conversation?

I begin to go down the list of everything in my life – did I make that a conversation? Did I make this a conversation? I’m hearing a lot of “no’s” in response.

This reminds me of becoming traditional. I keep needing to come back to the world as a conversation, because I’m never done with the conversation, and the human-made modern landscape contains a lot of well-crafted distraction from it. Conversations don’t increase profits, I suppose.

Everything honest feels like a conversation. Why “honest”? I don’t mean a valuation of “good” or “bad”, but I suppose I mean, with full awareness, perceiving the other’s personhood, with no hidden agendas, no deflection of responsibility. Or, in any case, to the extent that a humble adult can do such a thing nowadays.

I bless your conversations, all of you.

This holiday season we’re fundraising on kickstarter to complete our Irish Language Hunt project – a series of language game videos that simultaneously documents and teaches the endangered Irish language.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/242604490/irish-language-hunt

By doing this we’re working on a model usable by anyone working in language revitalization; the ability to rapidly learn, teach, and document, via video and audio, the languages that are the soul of our families, communties, and identities. The words and songs that weave our lives into wholeness.

This holiday season please support this ground-breaking work we’re doing.

“Some tell me that what I say is true but that I only point out a problem and offer no solution. This is because they cannot give themselves to the solution that is made obvious by how I describe the problem. Tell me, if you are not willing to confess our part in these things and be broken hearted about it, what makes you think you are willing to do something more when you are not willing to do this least of things? I ask  you to confess and be broken hearted. If you will not do this, there is no point in saying more.”  - Chapter 3, page 79, Growing Up in Occupied America.

I’ve just finished the third reading of author and nomadic permaculturalist Finisia Medrano’s book, Growing Up in Occupied America – a book both born of our culture, and leading beyond it, at times laugh out loud funny, at others heart-breaking, inspiring, and unnerving.

Some know Finisia also as “tranny granny”, due to her physically and spiritually straddling the worlds of male and female.  I’ve known of Finisia for a long time, though I’ve never met her. She holds a heroic space for me, nomadically tending the original wild-food-abundant land in places where most would see only desert of the Great Basin and beyond. For this reason, romanticizing her comes easy to me – she does feel like a coyote constantly circling camp from a distance. And  yet I know romanticizing marks the spoor of the monstrous epidemic of disconnection, romanticizing with one hand while ostracizing in the other. So let’s keep Finisia human.

In her book, she tells a very human story. The first half she dedicates to telling some of her life story, segueing into writings during her time in a Utah jail cell. Her writing reminds me of Tom Brown, Jr.’s (whose father preached in his family’s local church) –  clear, urgent and evangelical, and at the same time lost, vulnerable and despairing.

The Christian story may not move me much (consciously anyway), though I know for my parents, grand-parents, and ancestors it played a large role, but secular puritanism still plays a massive (though diminishing) role in my life. Though there are certainly folks my age who identify as Christian and struggle to keep that way flourishing, I’ve woven a story in my mind of a slow cultural transition to a different kind of guiding story through the generations, as grand-parents gave birth to parents and them to me. Our story continues to change into something more rooted, more about belonging here, and less about waiting for home to find us. For Christians, they may look for their home in heaven. For modern non-Christians, they look for much the same; they may look for hope in the Singularity, or Star Trek, or “evolving to the next level of human consciousness”.

Christian or not, our culture loves to look anywhere but here for peace, meaning, belonging.

So Finisia straddles these stories too, having gone from childhood atheism to adult Christianity to the blended story that guides her now.  This story-travel embodies much of what Finisia has to offer – a way of getting from one culture to another, of rethinking of our relationship to civilization and the land.

Finisia talks a lot about the Christian story in her book, holding it close, rejecting it in disgust, seeing it freshly. Cain, the farmer and city-builder, murdering Abel the pastoralist hunter-gatherer across the millenia and across continents.

She also offers the simple reality of planting back the land with wild foods, falling in love with green growing relatives like the biscuit roots, camas, wild onions, pinõn. She offers the innately human rhythm of wandering across what she calls the “hoop”, the seasonal migration according to plant harvest times, climate, altitude. She reminds us that our mothering earth hurts terribly in our spiritual and physical absence, missing us, needing us to replant the places that ranching, agriculture, and backcountry recreation have destroyed or degraded.

I don’t “agree” with everything Finisia has to say; I don’t read books to “agree” with people. I don’t work in the “agreeing” business. I listen to stories, and tell my own. And Finisia’s story – ballsy, accusatory, comical, threatening, cajoling, inspiring, heartbreaking, grounded – moved me, inspired me, and left me wanting more.

You can find her book at Lulu.com -  I highly recommend it, and all the proceeds go to support Finisia and the work she does. Read it, and tell your friends to read it.  Especially the brave, fierce friends looking for more out of life.

I’d also to specially thank Seda Joseph Saine, the editor, for keeping the flame burning and making sure such a wonderful book got published.

As some of you may know, I’m a big fan of Matthijs Holter’s quiet, simple story game Archipelago II. I told a friend recently that I believe all story games are “hacks” of Archipelago. This is of course ridiculous, and absolutely true in a totally false way.

Archipelago presents a simple structure to navigate scene-by-scene storyjamming. I’ve hacked it myself to make it even friendlier to new players, for example by adding the “help” ritual phrase, and by adding hand signs.

One other change that I find absolutely essential is the “I See You” collaborative character generation process. This is described elsewhere.  I’ve been dissatisfied with it up til recently – at Gamestorm I tried a new experiment and it came off wonderfully. I’ve noticed too, that often “I See You” is my favorite part of the game. So I had a thought…

What if the whole game had the same essential structure as “I See You”?

This is such a fundamental change, that I feel comfortable admitting that I’ve drifted the original Archipelago game enough that I need to start calling it something else. So I’m now officially working on “Songline”, a game for storyjamming in the modern mythtime.

It has a setting, absolutely, because though generic games (like Archipelago) have their own charm, they also can leave players adrift. The setting is where the modern world overlaps with the deeper world. It’s about the places you find in your dreams, like when you discover an extra door off the kitchen that you’ve never noticed before, and it takes you somewhere totally…other.

It’s about how the deeply, fundamentally magical world can survive in spite of the absolute plundering of its body and soul.

My goal is to reliably, consistently, pull storyjammers into a deeply satisfying place. Not because they’re skilled, or because the group is already experienced, or because we just got lucky this time. I want this to be the experience the game delivers – quiet, raw, reflective depths.

This is of course all part of my quest to make family storytelling an accessible, vital activity, and a functional alternative to pop television, movies, and written fiction.

If you hadn’t guessed, the fluency hunting game design system is absolutely guiding my hand in this. I continually remind myself to keep following the fundamental principle: “obviously!”

Give it a listen!

I still endeavor to introduce storyjamming to players who have never done it before. I believe collaborative storytelling can really enrich anyone’s life, and make more personally relevant stories than Hollywood or other media. I had at least five players who had never played a “story game” before, for a total of 8 players (!!).

I always have an experiment going for every game I run. Most importantly, I want every step of game play to feel like fun, including “learning the rules”. To maximize fun and most quickly learn the fundaments of game play, I have an array of tools I use.

In the past, I had a series of warm-up games I consistently used, specifically (in this order) “Firing Line”, “One Word at a Time”, “Color, Advance”, and “I see you”. These games have a downside in that they don’t necessarily relate directly to the setting or story, unless you have a creative way to make them relevant. I’ve gotten positive feedback from players, but still I want every moment of play to contribute to the shared story.

I love Archipelago because the ritual phrases offer an alternative way to ease into a game and gain confidence setting scenes (such as “Try a different way”, “More details”, “That won’t be so easy”).

I realized that most importantly to me, I want new players to feel confident and comfortable creating fiction; in the back of Archipelago Matthijs lists several principles of good Archipelago play (such as “Yes, and…” and “Accept input”).

I made five major decisions to accelerate play, group cohesion, confidence in contributing in the shared fiction, and learning the “rules” of Archipelago.

First, I gave all the ritual phrases hand signs (taken from ASL), that made it easier and gentler to interrupt another player’s flow to get “more details” or “try things differently”, and modeled memorably using the ritual phrases.

Second, I created two other ritual phrases, “Help”, to support the “Ask for input” principle. New players don’t know how to quickly get rescued from a creative block, and tend to freeze up and stress out. “Help” worked amazingly; everyone had an easy out, all they had to do was make the ASL hand sign  for “Help” and other players jumped in to rescue the moment. Also, I used the ASL hand-sign “Finish” to indicate the end of scene.

Third, I ran “I see you” for everyone’s character. All the players remarked on how vivid their shared vision of each other became. They really enjoyed this part. Formerly stereotyped, cardboard characters became rich and mysterious, everyone wondering how they would fare in the story. Already interesting characters acquired even more depth.

Fourth, instead of a destiny “statement”, we all created destiny “loaded questions” to answer, and per the rules, once answered, that character’s story finished. I did this inspired by the Jason Morningstar and Matthijs Holter partnership Archipelago games “Last Train Out of Warsaw” and “Love in the Time of Seith”. The players really loved this too; it really heightened the mystery and anticipation of the game to an extraordinary degree.

Five, I allowed “secondary players”, much like the Moons in Ben Lehman’s “Polaris”, that had no role other than to play bit parts and help with the setting. The WAYK game’s “Lunatic Fringe” technique inspired this. I also allowed “paired” character ownership, so that players could tag team for one character and retain a lot of energy and comfort with play.

Things I’d change for next time:

Less characters, more secondary players.

Each player can choose more than one destiny “loaded question”; players had a difficult time choosing one due to the rich variety of questions that other players wrote, so why limit it?

Change the process of “I See You”; rather than saying “I don’t see it” and ending the game, use Archipelago’s “Try something different” and keep going. Go two or three rounds around the table, until the player says “Finished”.

Cognitive scientists are more and more confirming the everyday empirical evidence accumulated by anyone paying attention; that how we talk about things drives how we think about things. What you won’t hear from scientists quite yet, but I will happily share, concerns the everyday practicality of language. If we can talk about a thing (say, tracking) easily, we can collaborate on it and improve it easily. If we can only talk about a thing with difficulty, we will collaborate and improve with difficulty. Anyone who has ever improvised a technical jargon for a hobby or past-time knows this.

Yet this understanding doesn’t just apply to new coinings for particular tools or methods for niche activities (say, the equipment and techniques necessary for paragliding). This doesn’t just involve technical jargons, but our ability to talk about the world in useful ways.

How we talk about time, space, agency, roles, and relationships, in modern languages such as Chinese, English, French, Russian – does this support richer lives, on a human (rather than industrial or hierarchical) scale? Does this help us understand root causes of social problems, and move towards healing? How does the Hopi concept of Manifested/Unmanifested time, for example, change the richness of relationships in human/wild communities, as opposed to the Indo-European concept of Past/Present/Future?

When I say “richness”, I mean viable human wealth, not the material kind, but the kind that sustains generations of human beings in a web of relatedness to the living community around them.

You can imagine the implications of losing over half the world’s remaining 7000 languages within the  century, as you think about these issues.

A skilled flintknapper can make amazing lithic tools, such as arrowheads, every bit as beautiful as one you would find still anciently lying in the earth. Yet the language for speaking about this act, making that arrowhead, and giving it as a gift for the food of the animal’s body, we cannot reproduce in English, without tremendous insight and effort.

I don’t say it cannot be done (neither Edward Sapir nor Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the misnamed Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, crafted by linguists in the mid-twentieth century, proposing that language limits thinking; rather they believed that language drives and powerfully influences our ability to think about the world). Instead, I say our language provides an enormous impediment for us to wrestle it into saying something meaningful, against the coding of all its grammar and idiom. It wants us to think (and therefore do) what will perpetuate and generate the world we see – the “civilized world”.

Don’t waste my time. The past is the past. We are all one.  Be a winner, don’t be a loser. Let’s evolve to the next stage of human progress.

What on earth do these things even mean? Note how you can barely tell whether a Christian fundamentalist, a Buddhist, or a pagan New-Ager said these things. I stand in awe of the ability of English (and other modern languages) to keep us thinking the same old things, revolution after revolution.

At the very least, we have a tremendous amount to learn from non-Indo-european (and non-”civilized”) languages, in order to wrestle these issues in our modern mother tongues. Indigenous languages represent an unbroken tradition of human brilliance (what did indigenous “rocket scientist”-type minds do 30,000 years ago? or today, in the indigenous communities where they still live? certainly not just build a more effective friction fire kit, or knap a better arrowhead, but far more than our modern minds can imagine).

For this reason, I’ve dedicated my adult life to helping revitalize endangered languages.  Along with my partner in this endeavor, I’ve made it my goal to turn around the world endangered language crisis within the decade. I look forward to the day when I can turn my attention to other issues, but for now, I can’t imagine more important work than the work of helping to revitalize the indigenous soul, around the world.

In the culture of the I.Q. test, and owing to the amount of times government agents (also known as teachers) have analyzed and judged us, it doesn’t surprise me that we have such a poor vocabulary for speaking about this subject usefully.

Most folks with some amount of curiosity have come to the conclusion, at least, that humans can have multiple forms of intelligence. Musical, Emotional, Spatial, Mathematical, Linguistic, Kinesthetic, and many more, surely.

And yet at the core of this discrimination of intelligence, we continue to call some folks dumb (whether mathematically, or otherwise), and some folks smart.

I think this discrimination still fails to usefully talk about this issue.

As I continue to work with the “Where Are Your Keys?” community mentoring tools, and play (in language) with hundreds of people, of varying ages and temperaments, in a highly structured environment, for hundreds of hours, I have begun to feel I have enough useful observations to put together a way of looking at intelligence that I can actually apply to my life, and accrue benefit from.

I no longer believe in multiple intelligences; I’ve seen too many linguists struggle with the language game to believe in that simplistic explanation. Something else sits at the core of what it means to have a bright, questing mind, and the ability to quickly absorb new understandings.

I believe it comes down to “willingness”. Or even better, let’s capitalize it: “Willingness”.

“Willingness”, as I intend to coin the term, means the willingness of a human being to move. I mean movement in every possible dimension – emotional, physical, mental and more.

By moving my mind, my body, my emotions, my social environment, my values, my voice, I quickly absorb new skills as they map onto me in all those dimensions.

This to me further illuminates the danger of fundamentalism in any sphere. I may “believe” in the collapse of civilization, the fundamental insanity of industrial culture, the wisdom and vitality of traditional/primitive living skills, all things that one could argue a curious, aware person would begin to observe, but if my “belief” causes me to fix a position, or become rigid in my “correctness” and “rightness”, and see these things as unchanging, unarguable truths…

Well…

Then I’ve ceased to move, haven’t I?

I believe modern culture, especially as articulated by its recent apologists and thinkers such as Aristotle (yes, Aristotle came late to the scene of civilized endeavor – the memes existed long before him), believes the world is most safe, most sane, most successful, when it  appears unchanging, carved from marble, easily categorizable, and behind glass. Like meat in a butcher’s case, or a courtroom, or a man in uniform.

To me, however, these characteristics indicate a society at its most unstable, its most traumatized, its most fragile and desperate. Though folks like Aristotle believe that the world contains countless objects with unchanging essences (plumbers, politicians, sentient beings, unsentient beings, supposed “dead matter” such as rocks and stars and water), the empirical (and to many professional scientists at this time in history, the “scientific”) preponderance of evidence points to a world in a flux, where nothing “is” as it seems.

To live in accord with this dynamic flux, means to “move”.

A mind (and a body, and a heart, and so on…) willing to move in accord with this dynamic flux, will most readily adapt and thrive. A mind that moves a certain amount, if willing to move even more, will thrive yet more.

The willingness to move, not the movement itself, indicates intelligence. The movement of yesterday may not match the moving universe today.

So, friends and readers, I encourage you keep moving, keep looking, keep dancing, keep talking, keep listening. Share your insights with each other.

We’ll all get there together.

This begs the question – “well, what other stories await to add to mine?”, to begin filling in the communal puzzle of our-story-together (as a family, and as a culture), creating a Story, begging all the Big Stories of other peoples to be added to our own, not contradicting, but enriching each other.

Roles don’t comprise reality. What-actually-happens, to you or someone else, makes up “reality”. In an intact culture, Roles help us navigate reality. In a toxic culture, they replace reality, acting as a shield against what-we-actually-experience. They begin to “mis-map” our experience into bizarre prescriptive (“you should behave this way…”) models of relationships.

You are [sic] not the Teacher, and I am [sic] not the Student. You are [sic] not a Woman, and I am [sic] not a Man.  You may move through the world woman-ing, and I may do manly things, and we may enrich these roles and express them in a healthy way, but at core our bodies move in a dazzling, thundering, dynamic storm of circulating desire for the other-than-us, with potentials and predispositions, but nothing hammered down or definite.

I believe healthy, lightly-held roles make this whirling chaos of yearning more navigable, but they do not replace it. I feel fine to have chosen my version of the role of “man”, but it does not eclipse that one can pick from an infinite array of gender roles. Truly one must pity a culture reduced to the poverty of choosing from “he, she, and it”. He, she, and it? Really? Wow.

You understand I don’t have a terrible amount of confidence in the culture of science, but it still feels satisfying to hear scientists speak to this. I like to think that a culture of inquiry who, in theory, values what they observe more than what they want to see, will sooner or later cross paths with my own thinking, and bring to the table their own eloquence. To wit:

From Alternet.org, “Why Are We Often Terrified of Our Own Sexuality” by Michael Ventura:

Alice Dreger is professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. This summer, on August 21, during the controversy over whether South African runner Caster Semenya was a man or a woman, Dreger published an essay in The New York Times in which she stated: “The biology of sex is a lot more complicated than the average [person] believes.”…Dreger informs us that there exists no scientific test to determine whether a person is, finally and definitely, female or male!

…When I discussed this essay with an especially well-informed shrink friend whom we’ll call Zachariah, he said, “The fear of encountering one’s in-betweenness in the sexual trance is probably the least discussed aspect of sexuality. The secret of sex is that sense of the free-floatingness and boundarylessness of it, the way you float through the boundaries of male and female, the unpredictability of it. Sex remains a mystery because of this shape-shifting quality.”…

…There’s no fixed place in the realm of the senses — no “there” there. What you know changes every time you go into it. As was told me once by a woman whom we’ll call Zia, “There are things you have to learn all over again, every night.”…

…Sexuality is scary because it’s where we meet ourselves most directly, without filters, without verbiage, and, if we go far enough, without fixed roles. It’s where we meet ourselves with and through the Other — this Other with whom we journey into the realm; this Other, a partner as fluid we are…

…Sex is scary the way the sea is scary, the way a storm is scary — because it’s elemental, and, as in all great elemental things, the same qualities that make it so powerfully beautiful can make it powerfully frightening.

Huh. Just like the rest of our world.

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

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

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

LIFE is Good
NW Unschooling Conference
Red Lion Hotel ~ Vancouver, WA
Memorial Day Weekend, May 21-24, 2009

In my continuing discovery of Christopher Alexander’s work, from his books the Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, published three decades ago, to ones published in the 21st century, the Nature of Order, and Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets, I’ve had a growing sense of the important, even vital, contribution Alexander has made to what I call the Rewilding Renaissance.

For a long time now, I’ve felt dissatisfied by the “sack-cloth and ashes” approach to redeeming ourselves in the community of life, and finding once again a place where we belong. I’ve seen many folks I work with in outdoor education, disappear into clothing of muted earthtones – muddy browns, grays, fading greens and blacks.

This way of dressing says a lot to me now; for now I believe that in order to survive, and thrive, as a human people, we must learn to make beauty. That, in the most real and practical sense imaginable, survival means beauty. I don’t mean ‘pretty’; I mean deep feeling of profound beauty, a ‘rusty beauty’ of the depth of everyday life. Look around you at the forest, at the seashore. Everyone you see has arrived at their beauty – the waves, the wind, the dry grass, the call of birds – because they have survived, because they have fit in and adapted to the natural demand that we all live a beautiful life, or perish.

Some of the folks I worked with would object when I’d bring up the idea of a “renaissance” of Rewilding. To them, it made them think of paintings, sculpture, music, rather than primitive skills and wilderness survival. I would always respond to this by jumping up and shouting “exactly!”.

In this spirit, I have the first of a series of quotes from Christopher Alexander to share, that I think further flesh out what it means to have a Rewilding Renaissance.

From Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets:

I have become convinced that a [woven] carpet [as having reached their pinnacle in early Turkish village carpet weaving], when it is a good one, reverberates with some kind of primitive and archetypal force, that it has in it some kind of being, that it connects with some primitive, almost animistic “soul of the world” — and that the carpet must be judged, in the end, according to the degree to which t does, or it does not, make a connection with this force.

In this sense, it is in its power, very much like the great bronze castings of the Chinese Shang dynasty, which establish an almost magic force, by establishing themselves as beings, in some realm, which connects us to itself, to which we are connected, which is an absolute realm of beings, and whose functioning is almost entirely animal-like, spirit-like, not matter-like, almost conscious — it is as if the thing, the bronze, or the carpet, establishes itself in my own belly, as a voice, speaks with my own voice, exists with my own force, and forces my awareness of an ultimate mother, or an ultimate creature of which I am a part — and which exists in me.

This nearly animistic view of carpets is consistent with the recent discoveries, already mentioned, that have centered around the tradition of prehistoric art in Central Anatolia. The essence of the view which lies behind these discoveries, is that what we naively call beauty, and what we experience as artistic force, lies in the creation of an object which speaks directly with my own inner voice, that there is, at the heart of all things, a single voice of universal blackness and thickness and light, that speaks in all tongues, and that holds all force into itself.

A carpet, when it holds the almost magical force which all carpet lovers recognize, holds this force, because, to some degree, it embodies this original voice, lets us see this original animal force that exists in ourselves. I believe the same is true, of every artifact. As a builder, I am trying, every time I make a building, to reach a connection with this force, and to make a thing, which fills us, with this animal and animistic force. The force, though primitive, and almost alien, is that underbelly of ourselves, which makes us human. Though unrecognizable, and almost taboo, because it is by turns violent, lustful, peaceful, and absurd, is nevertheless that thing which, to the degree it comes to life in us, makes us live innocently as people in the world.

The Pedagogy of Play: Bite-Sized Pieces, Part I

The Pedagogy of Play: Bite-Sized Pieces, Part II

The Pedogogy of Play: Bite-sized Pieces, Part III

I went to the Indie Hurrican at Gamestorm 11 this weekend, a game convention. I playtested my fluency strategy (“bite-sized pieces”) for Polaris, and had some great results. This has helped me improve it. Thanks to Zach, Jim, Mark, Jennifer, and Gilbert; I hope that your passion for Polaris inspires you to play it with people you care about! Read on for the changes and clarifications in my method. I’ve left out a lot of details and page number references, as you can find them in previous versions.

GREETING/CONVENING
0. One-paragraph summary of the Polaris setting.
1. Give brief Road Map of how we will acquire fluency in Polaris: Warm-Ups, Character Creation, Scene Framing skills, and the Ritual Phrases.

WARM UPS
1. name story
2. firing line
3. yes, and
4. color, advance
5. counting

CHARACTER CREATION
1. Choose a name, one aspect, write on character sheet (using ben lehman’s polaris name/aspect handouts).

2. Character Circle/”I don’t see it”: semi-collaborative character creation. One person gets 30 seconds (or so) to describe their character; then, randomly (popcorn-style), everyone in the circle gets to add one piece of “what they see”, keeping a hold of the initial description, staying true as possible to it. The formula for adding a piece: “[character name] has [braids/big sword with runes/constant pain from leg wound, etc.]“, “I see [character name] [chasing jehovah's witness/filing her nails compulsively/painting a masterpiece]“, “[character name] [dislikes/likes/loves/hates]“, etc. You get the idea. The group goes for about 3-5 minutes, then switches, unless someone pops the bubble by saying something that anyone else just can’t see fitting. The poppee must then say to the popper, “I don’t see it!”. They then move to the next player, who in 30 seconds also describes their character,etc. etc.. The goal: don’t pop the bubble, or put it off for as long as possible. Also, to get everyone repeating each other’s character’s names, so that we know them by heart.

SCENE FRAMING
CARD HANDLING: For each of the following categories, I slap down an index card with the ritual phrases on them. Between each card, as facilitator, I have picked out one paragraph or so of setting text for a player to read, rotating the reader of course. For each card, we go around the table giving everyone a chance to practice, resulting in 4 scenes per card (except for the session card and player intros, of course].

1. SESSION CARD: “Long Ago, The People Were Dying at the End of the World…”/”But All That Happened Long Ago, And There Are None Now Who Remember It.”

[SETTING: you might now read "moments frozen in time", from the beginning of the book]

2. CHARACTER CARD: “But Hope Was Not Yet Lost, for [name] Still Heard the Song of the Stars…”

3. SCENE CARD: /”And So It Was…”/”…And So It Was.”

[SETTING: another paragraph or two, etc. etc. continue to do this between the rest of the cards]

4. NEGOTIATE CARD: “But Only If…”/”…It Was Not Meant To Be”/”…And That Was How It Happened.”

5. MOONS CARD: “…But It Was No Matter.”/”…We Shall See What Comes of It.” (moon vetos I)

6. ESCALATE CARD: “…You Ask Far Too Much!”/”And Furthermore…” (exhausting themes) (moon vetos II)

7. DICE CARD: “…It Shall Not Come to Pass!” (assign ice, light, zeal) (start to check experience)

FARE-THEE-WELL/REFLECTION
However far we got in slowly adding and mastering each ritual phrase in order, when the session ends, we always discuss how it went, talk about high points, look for improvements we can make, etc. I know that most groups will need a “cool down”, just like they had a “warm up”, and I haven’t quite wrapped my head around where I want to go with that yet.

For next session, I recommend starting at the beginning (keep the same characters if you want, of course), and adding in phrases as people demonstrate fluency, building them back up to where you left off. Don’t simply go “ok, we all mastered all those phrases last time”, DOUBLE CHECK, methodically. You’ll have fun reliving the process, and you won’t regret the chance to go over it again, I wager. Don’t think “we already did that prep stuff last time”; think “this counts as part of the game; when you play polaris, you start with this part”. Enjoying the step-by-step nature will become part of the fun of playing Polaris. And when you teach it to new folks, you won’t have to change how you play; just play as you always play, starting at the beginning.

I twittered some of these things and got a request to bundle them up into a blogpost; I usually use twitter- for my half-formed ideas, but I’ll still give this a go. The amount of background I need for the “roadmap” for Agile team proficiency has grown larger than I expected, so I have had fun working through all the details. Some ideas that seem pretty feasible to me:

Idea #1:  When an Agile team improves proficiency, they must refactor their role to the rest of their company. As in code, so in Life.

Breakdown: Once we have a roadmap of proficiency, I believe we can better work on the implications of improved proficiency. At Novice level, an Agile team will need a certain relationship with the rest of their organization. They need a certain kind of support, and they have certain products they can easily deliver. At Intermediate this changes; their improved skills mean something tangible, that their relationship with the rest of the organization has changed. This continues on as they move through the levels of proficiency.

Idea #2: Agile teams that move through fluency levels, while refactoring their relationship to the organization, will inevitably transform the organization.

Breakdown: This essentially refers to the fractal nature of change; you can see this within a single team. One team member that improves their feedback skills, will begin to shift the work processes of the team. One team member that improves their ability to run Stand-up meetings, will accelerate the learning of the whole team in this manner. I believe that in a WAYK-style fluency paradigm, where skill equals ability to mentor that same skill, this deepens the viral effect of an already observable phenomenon. So extrapolate this to the whole organization; at some inevitable point, a highly proficient team begins to intentionally mentor the organization on how to relate to them. This mentoring will begin to virally change the rest of the organization, not just where it links up with the team. The culture itself will shift.

Idea #3:  No more “forming, storming, norming, performing” (or its ilk); now just try “performing”: “Novice performing, Intermediate performing, Advanced performing, Superior performing…”

Breakdown:  Rather than looking at the lifecycle of the team, or looking at a team as going through a series of development stages (like a fetus) before emerging as a “real team”, think of the team instead as always operating at a particular level of effortless proficiency. What does the team do fluently, right now? This will always speak to what the team needs to work on next to grow, but it will also make clear the nature of what the team can provide. When I explain the roadmap of “Where Are Your Keys?”(keeping in mind that the WAYK language fluency game represents one application of the larger Fluency game paradigm – this thinking applies to all skills and knowledge sets), and say “Novice means Barney conversations, Intermediate means Sesame Street, Advanced means Larry King Live, Superior means Charlie Rose”, each of those proficiency levels contains active, vital, fun, and productive conversations (well…I don’t really consider myself a fan of Barney the dinosaur, but pick your favorite children’s show of that fluency level, and you’ll get my point). The conversations have life, color, and effortless competence at the level of activity appropriate to their proficiency level.

Idea #4: What do children do really well? They play. What do teens do really well? They take risks. What do Adults do really well? They produce. What do Elders do really well? They remind us. All performing, at different fluency levels.

Breakdown: Now looking at “performance level”, rather than “development stage”, we automatically look through the lens of appreciative inquiry. At every stage of human life, we excel at what we do, if given room to do so. Think of Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, and Superior in this way. Each stage produces a markedly different product, really, really well. In a sense, each stage simply has a different role to contribute to the community. So you never have a malformed, vestigial, or incompletely developed team, if you look at them in terms of their fluencies: what they do effortlessly well.

Idea #5: You can’t remind if you haven’t played, risked, and produced. You can’t produce if you haven’t played and risked. You can’t risk if you haven’t played. Each stage builds on the other.

Breakdown: So now we see the “nested hierarchy” I keep referring to, in action. More foundational fluencies set the stage for the emergence of more finely-grained fluencies. All humans must know how to play;  not all humans need to have the life experience with which to remind us of what has worked in the past. We have Elders for that! The rest of us need to focus on improving our play, risk, and producing.

Conclusion

Can we see teams, family, community, in terms of their fluencies? Can we see everyone as performing at their particular level of fluency? Their level of “performing” tells us more about where to take them next than their ignorance; after all, people know far less than all that they don’t know, correct? We have a much smaller amount of knowledge, than we do have ignorance (probably an infinite commodity). If we keep looking for what a team can’t do or doesn’t know, we could essentially fill in the calendar of the rest of our working lives.

Knowing what someone doesn’t know, doesn’t help me. Knowing the edge of their fluency tells me exactly what to do, pedagogically. We have to ask questions to find that edge, not to find out what they don’t know. We’ll drown in the ocean of what they don’t know, directionless; if we can find the island of what they do know, and walk to its edge, then we can start fishing, make little trips out from shore in our canoe, free-dive for some deep-water adventures; we have a foundation to work from!

But I have to ask: why do I mostly see in Agile culture the two learning models, Dreyfus and Shu-Ha-Ri, that both specifically apply to individual progress?  If we see Agile as a model of team collaboration (for the most part in the environment of software development), then don’t we need to measure the fluency/competency of the team, rather than individuals?

I think one can apply some Agile principles to one’s own track of personal growth, but as a team methodology, I think we must look at Agile as happening, or not happening, on a team level. The team sinks or swims together.

This means that we have to step further back from individual-mastery focus of Dreyfus and Shu Ha Ri.

We also have to separate Agile, as a software development methodology, from the goals it enables the team to accomplish more quickly and efficiently. Think about linguistic fluency; I won’t quiz you on your ability to name and employ all the different pedagogical tools your French teacher used to teach you French (flash cards, conversation partners, worksheets, quizzes, etc.). I’ll quiz you on your ability to speak fluent French. As we have seen, I can differentiate this fluency into different levels of proficiency.

How on Earth do we do that with an Agile team? We need to measure Agile success not in terms of fluency in Agile, but in terms of the work group’s fluency in software development.

I’ve started poking around the internet for how folks measure the success of a software development team. I noticed Scott Downey, a Scrum Master at Myspace, uses the following metrics:

Velocity, Burndown, Work Capacity and Commitment Accuracy.

and

1. They are Hyper-Productive (>240% higher targeted value contribution)
2. They have completed three successful Sprints consecutively

As I understand it (not having used Agile in the software development world, but rather in the outdoor recreation world), a “successful Sprint” means that the stories that the team committed to finishing in that Sprint, have gotten to done/done; finished, tested, integrated, with customer approval. Shippable code.

Also, just as a fundamental skillset, every work group must express some level of skill in their ability to plan their work as a team, to give feedback and improve their work, to run effective meetings; all these things too must act as milestones, in some fashion, on their way to consistently producing shippable software.

So, can we weave all of this into a whole, differentiate it into four (or so) levels of proficiency, with an embedded Appreciative Inquiry tack? We want to know what the team can do fluently, at every level, in addition to what they may struggle with.

What does any software team do competently, at Novice proficiency? What directly observable behaviors? What can we tease out, and say, “yeah…I would call this set of basic fluencies a Novice level”?

What does any software development team do fluently, and competently, at Intermediate? Empirically, what do we see? What seems to fit well here?

At Advanced?

At Superior? How much experience do we have with Superior-level proficiency, in software development teams? We may have too much information on what we expect to see at this level, and too little for the others. So, what do we see at this high-performing level?

The ACTFL proficiency roadmap took quite a bit of development, back in its day. I think we can shake out a good roadmap from basic fluency to high-performing fluency pretty quickly, if we can dig out of our experience those consistent milestones that will help show us the route. Unfortunately, all of us probably have plenty of experience in what the team couldn’t do, but tried anyway, thus masking their level of fluency with the aura of struggle and failure. We don’t necessarily want to know where the team failed; we want to know, at each step, what the team could do competently and effortlessly, so that as Agile coaches we know exactly what to work on next. We have to create that nested hierarchy, so that every level the team has a solid grounding in success and fluency to take them to the next level of proficiency.

Any ideas? Looks like we may need a Part III.

A Summary

I’ve done some reading lately on models of learning out there in implementing some of my favorite process tools, and I’d like to put a puzzle together connecting all the pieces. In the Agile software world, the common learning models I see go by the names “Dreyfus Learning Model” and “Shu-Ha-Ri”. In the “Where Are Your Keys?” world we have a similar, but different learning model. This apparently small difference has huge implications in practice, for both speed and depth of learning. I call this fundamentally different experience of skill acquisition Fluency.

Background

Agile Teamwork refers to a culture of collaboration, mostly practiced in the software world (and mostly practiced there by those comfortable with innovation), that embraces the following priorities:

* Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
* Working software over comprehensive documentation
* Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
* Responding to change over following a plan

I recommend, for further understanding, reading the Twelve Principles of Agile Software. Though I have little experience in the IT world, I have used the Agile priorities and many major tools (Stand-Up Meetings, Iterations, Retrospectives) in the context of outdoor education, with quite satisfying results. It also tickles me that Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language book inspired some of the founding work in Agile; I have gotten a lot out of his work, so it doesn’t surprise me that Agile attracts me so.

Now, “Where Are Your Keys?” refers to one application (that of learning a foreign language) of the general principles in the Learning Fluency Game, created by learning innovator Evan Gardner. Ever since meeting Evan and working with him over the past two years, I’ve had a paradigm shift around learning; I now understand why some of my teaching methods work so well, some don’t, and how to make them work even more deeply, powerfully, and nicest of all, more quickly. “WAYK?” has a unique structure, which can teach us a lot how to take Agile Teamwork adoption to the next level, along with any other skill we want to take to mastery. We have had such tremendous and revolutionary success with building fluency in other languages with “WAYK?” that I almost immediately began to think about other applications.

A Fresh Look

This brings me to learning models and roadmaps. When we first meet a new skill, we need a Roadmap. “WAYK?” uses the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) ‘levels of proficiency’ roadmap, a schema developed in the 1950′s by the US State Department for diplomats and others in foreign service.

Anytime a “WAYK?” instructor runs the game, they first present the roadmap. I usually frame the roadmap thus:

“I want to share our roadmap with you; I call it Travels With Charlie. As we gain fluency in [insert target language here], we will pass through four broad levels of proficiency.

The first, Novice, will sound a lot like an episode of Barney the Dinosaur: ‘We are singing, we are playing, we are laughing…”-type conversations, all in the present moment, about what occurs around us that we can observe. We see a lot of “what”/”who”/”where” questions.

The second, Intermediate, will sound a lot like an episode of Sesame Street: “Where are you going? -I’m going to the store. What are you going to buy? -I’m going to buy candy!”. We begin to see past and future tense involved, along with “when”/”how”/”why” questions added in.

The third level, Advanced, sounds a lot like an episode of Larry King Live: “When you look back on your life, what are your proudest moments?” “How did you feel when that happened? Why do you think that? Would you do it again?”. Lots of personal storytelling.

The fourth level, Superior, sounds a lot like an episode of Charlie Rose: “If you had advice for a new president, what would you give? How do you think presidents should behave? If we didn’t have a president, how would it change the world? Do we need them?”. We have moved beyond the personal, and into the world of society. We no longer tell our own stories, but the stories of society and how we think about economic, social, and political issues.

At any time, I will fish for your current fluency level, and then match our interaction to working on things just past that level. If you try to exceed your fluency level by using tools that lie farther away than ‘just past’, I’ll say ‘Sorry, Charlie!’, and we’ll drop back down to the level that your current fluency can absorb.”

Why do I love the “WAYK?” roadmap so much? Because it tells you exactly what to do, in any moment. It doesn’t abstract the learning process; it gives precise flags of where a language speaker stands and what help they need. Yet it allows for a lot flexibility and tailoring to the particular student/teacher. If I interact with an intermediate-level speaker of English, and ask them a few simple questions (“What’s that?” -”Oh, that’s my pen my mom gave me. I love it! I’m sorry, but you can’t borrow it, it has too much sentimental value; I got it while overseas and homesick.” “Wow! Really? Do you think pens work better than pencils? Would people improve their local economy by using pens?” -”I don’t know. I like pens.”), they will zoom to their level, I will test that indeed we’ve butted up against their fluency limit (a lack of fluency in economic/social/political discourse), and they will affirm it by their response.

Now, the “WAYK?” roadmap has a lot in common with Shu-Ha-Ri and the Dreyfus model. Let’s talk about Shu-Ha-Ri first. I like Alistair Cockburn’s articulation of Japanese traditional culture’s model of learning, which runs thus:

People who are learning and mastering new skills pass through three quite different stages of behavior: following, detaching, and fluent.

Lovely! This really echoes my experience.

When I combine this with my past experience creating fluency with “Where Are Your Keys?”, I realize I would refine the middle step: rather than ‘detaching’, I would call the Ha stage ‘contextualizing/connecting/interweaving’. ‘Context’ actually comes from the Old English root for woven material, “text” (as in “textile”); speakers of Old English loved poetry, riddles, and song, and saw all those activities as “word-weaving”, and so referred to the contents of books as “texts”, or “word-fabric”. Hence why I equate “context” with “interweaving”: connecting concepts to each other and through each other.

I would not call this stage “detaching” or “finding when the rule doesn’t work” or “breaking the rule”, because the ways in which things don’t work far outnumber (by many orders of magnitude, if not actually stretching into infinity) the ways in which they do work. I take a decidedly Appreciative Inquiry tack, as cued by the Fluency game methodology. We could talk all day about how not to do something. The more we focus on the relatively few ways in which you can interweave different concepts successfully, the more efficient our time together. I see this as a speed and efficiency issue. Some folks prefer to find the many exceptions to rules; I prefer to find the few successful application of rules. I will spend far less time practicing and mastering successful application than someone exploring the many unsuccessful applications of a tool. Hammers apply well to nails and a few other things; anything else they damage. How much damage do we need to do before we focus on mastering what a hammer does well (and very few people know how to use a hammer well, letting the weight of the tool do the work)?

I do notice something else about Shu-Ha-Ri; “WAYK?” employs this model at the small-chunk level. When we have Barney conversations, we acquire full fluency in Barney-level proficiency. Each step within Novice/Barney, we work to individual fluency in each particular tool. We pass to Ri (fluency) about a hundred times over in an hour of “WAYK?”, as we master each individual piece of language, first following, then interweaving and contextualizing, and then speaking fluently without hesitation, over and over and over.

Let’s accent those two points. I suggest we’d increase our speed of fluency by terming the Ha, in Shu-Ha-Ri, as contextualizing the successful use of the tool (rather than breaking or finding exceptions). I also propose that Shu-Ha-Ri doesn’t describe a big picture roadmap, like Travels With Charlie, as well as it does the small-chunk acquisition of fluency in specific skill tools.

But that last statement contains 90% of what you need to know about why “WAYK?” works so efficiently. It fractally contains all of its pedagogical philosophy; fluency of skill comes by progression through a nested hierarchy of skills, first more broadly applicable skills, to the finer- and finer-grained level. Think about making a sundae. You have to get the container, then scoop in the icecream, then the sauce, then the whipped cream, and only then the cherry on top (so much for my paleo diet…now I want a sundae!).

Let’s move on to the Dreyfus model. It actually has a lot in common with the Fluency roadmap. It has some of the same language (“Novice”, “Intermediate”, etc.); it may even actually derive from some of the academic understandings that inspired the ACTFL roadmap. I do see a divergence; it seems to also go the Shu-Ha-Ri route. It has more levels, more clearly defined, but it still takes a small-chunk understanding of gaining fluency in specific skills, and generalizes that to a roadmap-sized schema, unproductively, I think.

Though pointing out a useful progression at a small-chunk level, because of its small-chunk use the Dreyfus model actually makes gaining fluency in these sub-skills (aka patterns) look a bit more complicated than it actually works in practice (at least in the context of “WAYK?”). I like Shu-Ha-Ri because it reflects the potential speed of small-chunk fluency with three short, one-syllable steps. Additionally, I don’t think students or teachers need this understanding, necessarily, to efficiently move through these little fluencies. I think, whether they know it or not, they want a big-picture road map, with road signs of physical events and empirical behaviors to mark their progress. The Dreyfus model mostly refers to reflective or internal events within the learner, and to a more abstract picture of their general behavior. But what real, observable, empirical behaviors indicate progress through a roadmap? I’ve given you the road signs for “WAYK?”; actual words used at different levels of fluency, specific grammatical skills, and specific cognitive skills.

So let’s make the leap. As a thought experiment, I will apply the Fluency Game principles to a hypothetical Agile Teamwork adoption and see what happens. I haven’t tried this before today; this marks iteration one! But I think we’ll still see some surprisingly good initial results.

Stay tuned for Part II, An Agile Roadmap: The First Iteration

Whether you choose to embrace this modern culture, and follow the values of material success, or you choose to rebel against it, and follow seemingly new values, you will almost certainly enact the same story: fleeing to another city, or even another country, in pursuit of the ghost of these values, abandoning your connection to family and your birthplace.

Why do we all seem in such agreement, that we modern people value Family least of all things? That we consider it an inconvenience, a hindrance to our goals, whether counter-cultural or not? We regard the opinions and attention of Family almost as we would an annoying mosquito.

And yet to this day, we can find people who have a much different opinion of Family, and who would die to protect it. Why?

Family holds all wealth, all health, all wholeness, and all holiness. A connection to a grass-skirted lake as a mothering being, reflects our relationship with our human mother. A connection to a windswept mountain shoulder as a fathering being, reflects our relationship with our human father. While on the hunt, to call a brown-eyed doe your sister, means you must look to your relationship with your human sister for guidance. If we see the life all around us as our relatives, then how did we first experience this, but in the embrace of Family?

And if we have left them far behind, how can we possibly embrace them anew?

Our Family tests our human skills, more than any other environment. Our ability to listen, to empathize, to forgive, to give and receive gifts, we practice these most deeply and truly with those who gave us life and walked beside us as we matured.

The care freely offered by Family comes very expensive when we seek others to provide it. Nurses, storytellers, teachers, mentors, cooks, Family filled all these roles and many more. Now that many of us have abandoned our families, we must find substitutes, often toxic ones. In the end, what can substitute for love and feeling known? Not the finest meal in the best restaurant, nor the most skilled storyteller, nor the most expert teacher. We seek family-for-hire so often it has become a way of life.

Once we begin the work of healing our tattered Family bonds, and see the first fruits of it, only then do we truly discover what it means to live in the vast community of Life, and see the kinship in all things.

College indicates a society of Peers, and peers-in-training, who prioritize communicating and collaborating on what they feel passionate about. Colleagues, working together in an egalitarian way, to caretake that which they love.

Mythic refers to meaningful Story, the kind of stories and spoken traditions (riddles, dreams, mythtime tales, and so on) that carry a deeply practical instruction for relating to the community of life in an ever-more-successful and maturing way. This kind of Story stands in stark contrast to that which we call entertainment.

Cartography points to a language of the Land, and the human method of carrying this language. Though certainly humans can do this visually, they have an even stronger heritage of doing this through rhythm, song, poetry, and dance. We have embodied maps for far longer than we have drawn them on paper.

Any intact, animist, indigenous culture carries a college of mythic cartography amongst its members. For us children of modern civilization, the work to rebuild colleges of this kind, in rapport with the particular Land which reclaimed our heart, beckons to us. As adult children, we can now consciously choose the parent made of Land over the parent made of metal wire and bottled milk.

Of course all this relates to Evan Gardner’s “learning how to learn game” methodology in a wonderful way. I hope you’ll listen on in; whether you have 20/20 vision, or very blurry vision, you can still learn to continuously improve the clarity of your vision so that one day they may call you “hawkeye”!

Sensory Tune-up Game

Dr. William H. Bates and the “Bates Method”

Brian Severson’s Vision Freedom method

Evan Gardner, a learning technology innovator, developed the language fluency game “Where Are Your Keys?” after observing for several years the teaching techniques that seemed to work most effectively for the greatest amount of students.

This game creates fluent speakers in a language more quickly than any other method out there, without resorting to conventional homework or textbooks. You can play the game anywhere, anytime, with anyone, as long as you have a single fluent speaker of the target language, preferably with no conventional teaching experience.

Educators have employed many of the game’s techniques in classrooms for many years, but no one has used them all at once, in one place, consistently. Nor has anyone ever created a seamless whole in which these techniques operate, subject to constant refinement and development, in partnership with the students, continuously increasing the effectiveness of the game. As students and teachers discover new teaching and learning accelerators, they can and do add them to the game, in a modular fashion. They game accomodates ongoing innovation pioneered by new students and teachers; in fact, it relies on and drives this kind of initiative.

This collaboration between teacher and student makes every student a trained teacher, once they gain fluency. The game thus spreads virally, changing the way we teach and become fluent in languages.

“Where are Your Keys?” represents one application of a larger set of principles, the “Learning How to Learn” game, applicable to any targeted skill, whether mechanical, scientific, linguistic, or artistic. The “Learning How to Learn” game essentially creates a language of learning, accelerating and expanding our learning capacity.

Evan describes one inevitable result of this transformed learning/teaching paradigm as the “twenty language child”, a child of parents so steeped in the culture of the learning game that they transmit their language skills effortlessly and easily to a child who sees all this high-performing education as a normal way of life.

We see another important byproduct of this learning revolution in the creation of Language Saviors; by teaching this game to the youth of Native American and other indigenous cultures with endangered languages, they then can go back to their hometowns and play this game with the few remaining speakers of their heritage language, learning and resuscitating traditions that otherwise they may have lost forever.

I’d like to prepare you for the next podcast interview with Evan (please help with my archiving and equipment struggles by contributing to the podcast Nest Egg) by further articulating the paradigmatic leap Evan has asked us to make.

We seek Fluency, not Knowledge.

We belong to a culture of “knowledge”, a culture of certification. The self-taught genius, the high-performing maverick, though we may regard them with awe and envy, we don’t encourage our children to follow that risky path. We see the safe route as a plodding journey of toil along a well-traveled path, jumping through hoops placed low enough for the perservering questor to finally gain that piece of paper that says “I sat in that seat; I listened in that classroom; I read those books.”

We call this “learning”. We see the intelligence quotient as a mark of the size of your internal encyclopedia, the sheer amount of facts you carry around. We applaud this kind of intelligence. In fact, intelligence, of the high-forehead brainy variety, in no way connotes competence.  Expertise, and competence, diverge in our cultural mythology here, in a rather bizarre way. An expert in an academic field may still not know how to have a simple conversation, or tie their shoes, or cook a meal.

From an animist point of view, we only measure your competence, not your intelligence. We measure it in many ways.  By the grace in which you do things, your comfort in challenging situations, and by your sheer curiosity. The more questions you carry around inside you, the shinier the glint in your eyes as they dance around, the more respect we have for you as a thinker and doer.

Notice the distinction there; in our modern culture we value the amount of facts you carry. In an animist culture we value the amount of questions.

In a modern sense, to “know” something means to have an intellectual understanding of it, though the execution of it may elude you.

In an animist sense, to “know” something means you feel comfortable in your skin about it, that you can implement this knowledge easily and gracefully.

Essentially, this underscores the difference between learning a language, and gaining fluency in a language.

Evan Gardner’s “Where Are Your Keys?” language game trains fluency, not learning. It prioritizes grace and effortless command of fundamental skills, over sheer accumulation of vocabulary. It won’t turn you into a walking dictionary of your target language; it will turn you into a graceful speaker of the fundamental adult speech of your target language.

The “Where Are Your Keys?” game, as a sub-game of the “Learning How to Learn” game that umbrellas it, merely expresses this fundamental priority of fluency.

You can achieve fluency in any skill, for any skill essentially expresses its own language. Not a spoken language, necessarily, but a language of what to do when, of what questions to ask, of how things work, of relationships to (and use of) tools and space.

Fluency, in this sense, means what it suggests:  fluidity, flow, grace. Fluency means you can “enter the flow” in a certain skill, without fear or hesitation. It means you know just where to start, and where to go after that.

Fluency, in the “Learning How to Learn” paradigm, means you don’t learn, you teach; either you teach yourself, or you teach others. In doing so, you achieve a major animist milestone: all your skills and knowledge “come alive”, because they can readily jump from you into others. As living skills, they can spread throughout the people in your extended Family and Village. And your fluency in one skill signifies a fluency in self-teaching. With any new skill, you know just where to start, and where to go after that.

As fluent self-teacher mixes in a growing culture of other fluent self-teachers, the exponential increase of the relationship network (two people have one relationship between them; five people have far more than just five relationships, because they each relate to each other, you’ve increased to ten individual relationships, and so on) accelerates the learning of the group to presently unimaginable levels. Each fluent teacher teaching everyone else, and receiving teaching from everyone else.

This in fact, marks a sea-change from our former notions of the lone individual striving for mastery in their area of endeavor. It means we move as a group into ever-more challenging and exciting areas, increasing in speed of fluency continuously.

It marks a renaissance in community learning; a revolution of fluency over knowledge.

Animist language, otherwise known as intact, indigenous language, differs profoundly from all modern languages. Each belongs to an entirely different sphere of endeavor.

Modern languages occupy themselves with encouraging their speakers to disassociate from the world and all its phenomena, by encouraging its speakers to think and speak in terms of strict cause-effect logic, abstract notions of roles, possession and time, and a noun-based illusion of factuality. Modern speakers like phrases such as “that’s just the way things are”, “time is money”. They see human beings (and the world itself) fitting into rigid unchanging roles. A President is one class of human; a janitor another. Natural resources (everything but human beings) are dead things; Human beings (and usually American or first-world human beings) are alive things. Except when they’re “criminals”. And except for the parts of their body that don’t count; like intestinal flora, the breath in our lungs and blood, the calcium in our bones. Okay, maybe everything except the human brain is dead. The human brain in law-abiding first-world citizens. With white skin?

Yeah. Yuck.

As an option to this relationship-killing language, to this world-killing culture of thought, we have the language of our distant ancestry.

Rather than nouny-ness, and factuality, animist language prioritizes verby-ness, and perceptual flux. Each person sees differently according to their own nature; and when they articulate what they see, they describe, rather than define. They observe, rather than adjudicate.

I’ve heard more than once a modern speaker of an animist language reflect, “I can talk all day without saying a single noun.” Think about this.

This kind of culture of language and thought matches quite well with emerging quantum scientific notions of nonlocality, flux, and vibration.  Unlike in English, where scientists struggle to productively speak about quantum mechanics, animist languages come equipped to speak about this deep nature of reality. Of course, right? Human beings observe the world, and have always done so. Human beings experience joy in this observation and mimicry of what they see out there, in Story, in Tracking. We only changed to accomodate a civilizing culture that reprioritized why we spoke, why we observed. That prioritized abstraction, rigid roles, and disassociated relationships, in the name of pyramid-building.

We call animist thinkers, speakers, and trackers “primitive”, when in fact they represent an apex of thought, speech, and true scientific observation. Their languages assume nonlocality (change this thing, and it affects that related thing far away, instantly), flux (everything changes constantly – one moment light ‘particles’, the next it ‘waves’), and vibration (everything verbs constantly, everything does something – thus rocks, sky, water, all think and co-create our world with us). All of these, quantum understandings.

Much of where modern language went wrong, occurred when the verb “to be” took over more and more of our idiom and thought. No fully intact animist languages have a verb “to be” (nor do they have a word for “time”).”To Be” according to Alfred Korzybski, developer of the General Semantics movement, creates fundamental errors of thought, such as the “is” of identification (Joe “is” a plumber), such as the “is” of predication (Joe “is” stupid).

Thus we have begun experimenting with ways to remedy English’s modern biases; e-prime, English without the use of verb “to be”, and e-primitive, a more verby and observation based version of e-prime.

I believe humans belong to that group of animals that we call “mimics”; the australian Lyre bird, the Parrot, the Mynah bird, Corvids (Jays, Crows, Ravens, Whiskey Jacks, Magpies), Octopi, Cuttlefish, Chameleons, Coyotes, all these animals specialize in a specific kind of intelligence that involves mimicry of sound, behavior, or of color and visual patterns.

These animals think about the world in a special way. They reflect the world back, with great delicacy. For some of them, they experiment with different strategies and lifeways even, borrowed from other animals.

I believe humans emerged as a primate specializing in this kind of mimicking intelligence, and when we first told stories, when we first really began to tell complex stories to each other, we did it with imitative sound and movement. We danced and sang what we heard and saw. Why did we do this? Because, as we began to experiment with team hunting, communicating to our team-mates both to stay in accord, and to bring back intelligence of animal movements, exponentially increased our success. Tracking made us mimics; Story made us mimics; collaboration made us mimics.

Our first words, then, sounded like what we described; either literally, as in whistling a birdsong,  or more figuratively, as in using sound to imitate the pattern of movement, much like saying “boink! boink! boink!” when describing a stotting deer.

Over time these sounds became more symbolic, more abbreviated, so that we could layer even more complexity into our language. At this time I believe we moved to polysynthetic language; language composed of a one or more root ideas, bookended by prefixes and suffixes that qualify relationships and characteristics of that root idea.

A good example of a polysynthetic word, and just darn entertaining, comes from Mohawk. First a couple examples; in a polysynthetic language, specifically an intact indigenous one, a word like “teacher” will translate thus:

shakorihonnyennis: “he teaches them”

How about a policeman?

shakoyenahs: “he catches them”

This theme continues with places. For example, kitchen:

tsi yekhonnyatha: “the place where one cooks”

Or, store-

tsi yontaterihonnyennitha: “the place where one sells”

The best example of polysynthesis in Mohawk, comes in the lowly form of stove polish:

yontenonhsa’tariha’tahkwatsherahon’tsihstatsherahstara’the’tahkwa: “the stuff that makes shiney that one puts on the thing that is used to heat the house”

Okay, you get the picture. Polysynthesis allows you to have a self-sufficient language with an infinitely expandable vocabulary, something we have lost somewhat. English borrows heavily from other languages to create new words, languages with more capacity for polysynthesis (like Latin and Greek, with their plethora of prefixes and suffixes).

In polysynthesis, you build concepts piece by piece, syllable by syllable, and a word can run as long as a sentence, and give more information more compactly. I imagine this makes you more aware of the meaning of each part of your language too; how many everyday English-speaking folks can really explain what “dis-” means, or “trans-”, or “tele-”? A polysynthetic speaker has an intimate knowledge of how speakers put words together.

So I believe all languages, in an intact indigenous culture, really fully form and mature into a polysynthetic stage, and additionally, have no nouns. Because, if you think about it, up till this point we just “mimicked” the pattern and sound of the world, and then tightened things up a bit to support a more complex and layered language. But we didn’t need nouns yet (I should add that Mohawk does have two classes of nouns, one of which corresponds more to the idea of a “verb phrase”, and the other more in accord with how we think of nouns. They have relatively few of these “formal nouns”. I’ll address this later).

I believe as we began to experiment with sedentary Village lifestyles, that our language began to reflect this. I believe that the first long-term settlements partnered with the emergence of nouns. Nouns mean stability. Nouns mean firm foundation. Nouns justify themselves, by meaning themselves. Nothing connotes that, to me, like a Village. Nomadic hunter-gatherer life takes advantage of dynamic flux. In a Village, you put down stakes, start having more and more specific roles for Village members. Village life can actually offer much more work (I almost would say “toil”, but let’s wait for the emergence of cities and civilization to call it that) than a more flexible semi- or fully nomadic life, but for the members to continue it, they must see the life as its own justificaiton. And, honestly, Village cultures produce amazing aesthetic worlds that still inspire me. The life does have it’s temptations! Certainly I don’t consider Villages as better or worse than nomadic life. Just different.

Hopi, Mohawk, Chinuk Wawa, these kinds of Village-based native languages have an emerging class of nouns, some to a greater extent than others, and none as extremely as modern languages of civilization. The peoples speaking them had begun to heavily invest in the Village lifestyle. It makes sense that their language would reflect the rhythms of such a lifestyle; but this lifestyle still heavily accomdated the dynamic flux of the community of life to which they belonged. I want to accent this. A few nouns doesn’t mean they’ve taken up civilized modes. A language that worships nouny-ness, factuality, and the logic of linear cause-effect rests a long way from these cultures.

So, as the power structures of emerging civilized cultures need more efficiency from their social networks in the adventure of pyramid building and agriculture, they need a language that could encourage culture members to view themselves in ever more rigid roles and relationships.

This endeavor progressed until we have the extreme situation of today, where few modern people truly know how to talk, listen, converse, collaborate, or decide in accord with another human being. We have a poverty of social technology and thought when it comes to really nourishing relationships, and this impacts our work, family, land, and village.

So. My rampant unfounded speculation has ended. I have little proof for this, but I see it in a similar way to the spherical-planetary model of an hydrogen atom. It doesn’t really look like that, but thinking about it in that way produces useful things.

This I believe about this progression of language. More to come – next, Pattern Languages!

Additionally, I have far more ambitious plans than even the old plan would cover.

If you really love the podcasts, and get a lot out of them, help me keep them coming and making them even better (perhaps getting a second microphone for interviews…but first things first, archiving!).

I’ve started a new fundable.com account so I can keep putting podcasts up, and to secure storage for the next year. Contribute at:

The College of Mythic Cartography’s Podcast Nest Egg

-If a part Two to Evan Gardnener’s interview excites you…

-If you look forward to regular Riddling segments…

-If you look forward to hearing more real-time Dream Interview examples…

-If you look forward to more on Storyjamming and communal storytelling…

-If you want to hear more about emerging social technologies that support the Learning Revolution and the Rewilding Renaissance, such as “Where are Your Keys?”, Open Space Technolgy, and Clarity Skills…

Please Contribute today!

Evan Gardner and I will do another interview soon, but in the meanwhile I wanted to underscore and flesh out some of the really startling insights that Evan threw out there. I’ve put his perspective together with mine, and felt the earth quake. What did Evan say that has caused me to completely rethink teaching and learning? Listen in and you’ll find out.

Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School

Jon Young

John Holt

John Taylor Gatto

Daniel Quinn

I promised this podcast to some very supportive folks, so I will post it. But just give me a second here.

Evan Gardner addresses some pretty big stuff in this interview. Big stuff. “Where Are Your Keys?” covers far more than you think. You’ll need to really listen closely, and perhaps multiple times, to catch it all (and we haven’t even made Part Two yet!). When he talks about the emerging role of the Language Savior in revivifying indigenous languages, or the Twenty Language Child, or the emerging cultures of WAYK-style teachers, really think about what this means. As a mentor and self-identified “coyote teacher” myself, this has got me looking at and reexamining everything in my toolkit, and seeing a whole ‘nother side of the rewilding renaissance; a rebirth and revisioning of coyote mentoring culture itself.

I think I have a new motto. “WAYK UP AND LEARN, REWILDERS!”. Enough of schooling; let’s truly take back our own ability to learn anything in the world, as easily and quickly as playing a game!

The original podcast description, for new folks:

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Rewild Camp with Urban Scout

Chinuk Wawa at the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde

American Council on the Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Proficiency Testing

Agile Teamwork

Revitalizing Your Language, by Leanne Hinton

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander

Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School

The Rosetta Stone

Early Adopters

I coined the word Storyjamming to refer to a specific style of collaborative storytelling. When jamming Story, the performers fill the role of the audience as they weave a story together, using one of very many story games to structure and guide their participation.

This doesn’t differ much, if at all, from musical jamming, especially as expressed in Old-Time music gatherings, where a circle of fiddlers, guitarists, and others will crank away at tunes for hours, purely for their own satisfaction, riffing and playing with the form.

Storyjamming has some very specific techniques to pull a group together and warm them up for the challenging and thrilling exercise of their intuition and surrender to group creativity; Viola Spolin’s Theater Games method inspired the use of most of these games. For the actual structure of the story, we often pick up the work of indie story game designers, a culture that includes many creators with ‘zine’ style sensibilities.

When we jam story, we, the tale tellers, share a vivid waking dream, and participate by each representing a character in that story, and drive it with these characters’ wants, needs, hopes, and fears. Sometimes we jam epic Myths, sometimes Horror, sometimes we jam everyday Soap Opera. But always the stories that come from skilled players carry a great meaning and potential for healing for their daily lives.

Storyjamming roots itself in many great oral traditions. It owes a lot to Flyting, the scottish poetic contest of boasts and insults. It owes a lot to the story-bards of India, who heal sick cattle with the just right story. Pick the culture, and you’ll find storyjamming occurring somewhere, in some unique form.

We storyjammers see this as the revival of a folk tradition long in need of a dusting off. We’ve just begun to relearn the licks – and we have lots of room in the circle!

I don’t refer to just the every-day third world enslavement of sweatshop workers and cash crop laborers of all kinds that make cheap goods and food possible; I also mean the modern first-world wage slavery that remains invisible to most people ensnared in it (though they most certainly feel it in their guts).

Marshall Rosenberg, developer of Compassionate (aka Nonviolent) Communication, mentioned once that he saw English itself as a language of Masters and Slaves, and built a whole methodology to explore sidestepping the impulses of such a language world. What do Masters and Slaves think about constantly?

“Is he Good? Am I Bad? Am I Right? Is he Wrong?”

Slaves think about whether or not they deserve a punishment; Masters think about whether or not the Slaves deserve more. These ideas of approval/disapproval interdepend on punishment to such an extent that you cannot separate them. Masters (or at least the meme of having a Master, if the subtlely matters to you) want to get inside your head, make you think that their thought belongs to you; that you in fact thought it yourself, when you didn’t. For the Slave, they always want to “get away” with things, and “work the system”. For the Master they always want to increase control, and work the Slaves harder. Keep in mind too, that no Master in our culture escapes enslavement to a Master greater than them. Anyone who plays the game of Masters and Slaves will play both roles in their lifetime, will play them both in many different places and at different times. A Father enslaves the child; the child Masters a younger sibling; the Foreman Masters the Father.

Does anybody still remain blissfully ignorant that the oppressed learn the tools of oppression most thoroughly of all, since they know more than anyone how the harsh command sounds, and the bite of the whip feels?

For many people in our culture, they carry a lingering guilt that they participate in a culture of  this same enslavement. But many of these people don’t realize that they have Masters too, and that the reason they can’t step outside of choices which enslave others, the reason why each decision they make to act ethically only leads to more hypocritical dead ends, the reason that drives this impossible chase through the labyrinth of the devouring Minotaur with sinews woven of our own culture’s dark side, this reason lays hidden behind our illusion of freedom and “first-world” status. Abandoning the labyrinth would in fact mean abandoning everything good, and right, and true. Get it? By doing Right, you’ve done Wrong, and you’ll have to get back in line.

How do you deal with such heartsickness, and the impossible tangled web of hypocrisy which you can’t escape? For me, you begin with burying the dead.

Once we admit that Right and Wrong have died to us, as useful companions, we can start burying their many masks. Owing to the ghost-stuff of which this culture made them, we can’t actually put them in the ground, but their Masks…! Ah, their Masks. We have lots of those. For some, old Report Cards mask these companions; for others, awards and certificates. For some their profession itself masks the attempt to stay one step ahead of the Minotaur of shame and guilt. For others, the watch on their wrist. For others, makeup, clothes, cars, gadgets. He who dies with the most toys wins, you know.

Whatever the Mask, you can hold a funeral for Right and Wrong, just as you would for anyone else with whom you’d had a bittersweet relationship. Certainly it felt so sweet to be Right. But of course, that meant too you had to often feel the harsh smallness of being Wrong. Right sounded like fanfare and felt like falling confetti; but Wrong felt quite different, like abandonment, loss, exclusion. Sometimes Right feels like justified Anger, wrathful and condemning. Sometimes Wrong felt like failure, self-hate, depression. Together these two took you on a wild bipolar ride of addiction. You can’t just throw dust on the place of Wrong; you have to also leave flowers on the Grave of Right. The same pale face lies behind all the masks – look now. The same face, both Wrong, and Right. The same person.

The exact same haunting ghost, now caught on the wind of your goodbye prayers, just as you begin to speak them…

Every year and every day, at this time, this ghost, this pale face both Right and Wrong will ask you about the new Spring. Will you shed hot tears, remember how good indeed Right felt, but decline the companionship, as you bury more Masks of this faithful, footstep-dogging companion?

Who in this culture escapes the trap of addiction? At the very base of it all, no one escapes the need to constantly rebury Right and Wrong. Certainly not me.

What does that leave us with? How do we then measure and adapt to the feedback of the world? We’ve only ever used Right and Wrong to measure these things.

Everytime I bury a Right or a Wrong, I reaffirm my commitment to a new measure: that which creates life, and liveliness.

I learn more and more what this means, all the time. The path to recovery can start with an edge of narcissism, but only because someone interrupted the years specially set aside for our narcissism (childhood) with harsh appraisals of Right and Wrong. Once we recalibrate, we learn how social and compassionate “life and liveliness” looks, no matter where we stand. But don’t overthink the trip; you’ll only learn by walking there.

[For those of you not in the know, a reference to Evan T. Pritchard's book, and to the fact that no intact indigenous languages have a word that corresponds to the word 'time' in modern languages. Also check out my podcast EPISODE 20: The Ceaselessly Latering Day].

How we move our attention, either supports or distracts us from our intentions. Our ability to talk about a task easily, makes it easier to finish it, and finish it in line with our intentions.

Every field of endeavor has its own jargon for this reason. Different fields of science may have their own grammar; some even involve entirely different languages than English (such as algebra). Think of David Bohm’s quest to create the English-based “rheomode” (verb-only English) so he could easily talk about quantum phenomena.

Building pyramids, as I’ve mentioned oft before, required the innovation of professional classes. Societies without strict roles simply don’t build pyramids. What do wandering free families need with a pyramid?

If you want to accomplish something in a sustainable fashion (i.e. with grace and ease), you need to learn its language. To hunt a deer, you must learn Deer language. To navigate the ocean in a kayak, you must learn Ocean language. To revivify traditions of Family, Village, and Land, you must learn the languages of these organisms. Speaking the language used for building pyramids,  in the context of building family, will make this work harder, sow confusion and distraction, and constantly drag against a task for which it has no functional language to talk about.

An example – if you descend from a long line of English speakers, does anyone in your family ever talk about “frith”? Frith comes from Old English, and indicates the deep peace and security that comes from healthy social and kin companionship.

Trick question, sorry. Frith died out in use as Middle English emerged. But let me reask that – do you even have a word for such a thing? Do any heavily acculturated modern peoples even think about such things? Perhaps the lucky ones. For most of us, we lost the word as we lost the value for this peace that we feel in the secure bonds of a joyful gathering of kin, blood or not.

What you have no words for, you will rarely think about; and when you do think about it, you will have long-winded attempts to encapsulate your meaning. I haven’t even really plumbed the depths of “frith” – I regard my above definition as a rather shallow and brief one. These long-winded attempts to talk about something mean that you can’t easily do anything about it.

Idiom can impact this too. You don’t always need words, sometimes you just need idiom to keep an idea alive. Our replacement idiom for frith, however, pales in comparision: “blood is thicker than water”. I don’t entirely know what that means, actually. However, think of the Gypsy Roma and their animate idiom towards killer cars, water, alcohol and electricity.

To reviviy traditions and technologies, we must create the language tools to speak of them: idioms, words, and grammar. We can start anywhere, though.

Sometimes it only takes a word – like “frith”.

I, and others, have adopted the term to describe a large part of what we do, because we never before had a good word for what exactly we do.

And what do we do? We don’t practice primitive skills, because although we enjoy starting campfires with a wooden bow-drill, building wilderness shelters, tracking animals, we neither see these skills as  “primitive”, nor as the beginning and end of what we do.

We don’t practice Native American spirituality, because although we endeavor to grow roots in our  bioregion, and choose animist relationships with the world around us (and receive further mentoring from native Indian mentors on how to explore this choice), we don’t see root-growing and animist choices as exclusively Native American activities, nor do they simply fit under the label of “spirituality”.

We don’t practice permaculture, because although we do continue to learn from and implement how indigenous peoples cared for the land under our feet to maximize food production, we pursue a far deeper and more committed relationship to the Land than an agricultural one.

We don’t pursue green anarchism, because although we do see the unsustainable nature of civilization in all its historical forms, we see a need for more than just political and social change.

We don’t pursue end-times survivalism, because although we can see the ongoing collapse of modern civilization and all its many institutions, we don’t await its end with stockpiled food and exit strategies, but rather see it as the best excuse ever to choose a life worth living today.

So, we don’t do a lot of things, apparently. But still, what exactly do we do?

Rewilding, in the sense that mythic cartographers and animist folks of varying background use it, means a constant renaissance and return to values and technologies of Family, Village, and Land.

To me, this truly means living the Good Life. It means enjoying and prioritizing food, family, ethical work, partnerships with the wild. It means taking responsibility for our ancestry, it means taking time to grieve for what we’ve got, and praise for what we’ve lost. It means no more “move on, get over it”. It means walking away from the life we no longer want to live, and choosing now the life we want to live. It means following our hearts.

The Rewilding Renaissance describes the ever-growing commitment of so many people to recreating and reinventing lost traditions of Family, Village, and Land. We don’t see an end-point to this process; human beings have always had to renew their commitment to living in a beautiful way that works.

It only matters that we begin.

So, where did I leave off?

Family. Now, we have tools, modern social technologies (soon you’ll recognize these as the most valuable of all technologies, once you realize what we’ve lost and have to reinvent), that have begun to address our cultural, familial, and social poverty. You can throw ‘spiritual’ in there too, if you like. We can use these tools to start rebuilding and reinspiring our Family and Village culture.

Let’s start with one of my favorite tools, Open Space Technology.

OST, or Open Space, names a specific kind of gathering, familiar to most indigenous people, though modified for the needs of average modern folks. I’ve written a lot about Open Space here, you can do a search of the blog if you want more info, and it has lots of adherents on the internet in general. I should note that the ‘creator’ of OST, Harrison Owen, claims he developed its structure inspired by his experiences in a West African village during his time in the Peace Corps.

Coincidences don’t exist, folks. At least not random ones.

Open Spaces, by their nature, widen the scope of the conversation, by allowing the attendees to set the agenda in the first hour of the event, by offering a billboard-style ‘marketplace’ schedule, usually on a wall, for folks to place meeting announcements on. Any meeting, by any one, with any number of attendees, in any available time slot. A nicely widened scope, yes? But in order to work, Open Space must narrow its scope somehow.

OST does this by having a specific theme, and an invitation, that will attract the appropriate participants. But this still doesn’t narrow the scope all that much.

OST, as commonly used, errs on the side of inclusion. I think this colors the kind of results you can expect. Now we’ve entered the realm of speculation, but I have a bet, from looking at the success of tribal models:

The more unified the identity of the group, the powerful the impact of the Open Space Gathering.

This doesn’t necessarily mean small. This doesn’t mean ‘like-minded’, either. I use the word ‘identity’ very carefully. In so far as Open Space serves a group that (like the Gypsies) can only profit from outsiders, speaks the same language, and has intimate knowledge of each other’s lives (along with intermarriage, geographic proximity, etc.).

What does all that mean? To me, it speaks about passion, and responsibility, the two watchwords of the OST process. Open Space runs on passion, and responsibility. To increase the impact of an Open Space, you support the increase of the passion and responsibility of the participants. How do you do that? I believe identity holds a key here.

I’ve noticed that in teaching and working with foreign languages, the politics of identity always lurk in the shadows, periodically pushing hot buttons. Your own language, your own ethnic food, your traditions, all these things inspire great passion and responsibility in ordinary members of cultures with strong identities.

I think I just managed to get through a whole ‘nother blog post still without getting to the center of the tootsie roll pop. How many licks will this take?

Well, we’ll get there together.

This points to how we make a living, how we resolve disputes, and what dangers we cannot resolve, but simply must adapt to.

To the extent we try to make ourselves ‘all one’, we disperse our energies to the wind in a naive quest to ‘think globally’. Thinking globally got us into this mess to begin with (they call it ‘globalization’).

Rather than scattering over the earth, and across the internet, as individuals talking to other individuals, what if you represented an entire extended family, as their ambassador, you could in fact speak for them, because you had in fact listened to them.  Your words, your presence, as a representative of this family, would carry far more weight and meaning…because you would, in fact, have something meaningful to say. Something that had to do with what a family needed.

This doesn’t have to do with prestige, this points to purpose and mission. If you truly make the world better for your family, you will make it better for everyone else. It has worked this way since the human origin. Species come and go, but the community of life has remained rich, full of grief and joy, whatever face it wears in any particular moment.

But a culture (several cultures at once, actually) emerged that started talking about what the city needed, and then what the city-state needed, and then what the nation needed. Things have gotten pretty grim with this kind of thinking.

The ‘needs’ of abstract political entities (much like corporations) don’t come before people, if they even have true needs as we know it. America’s needs simply do not come before your family’s needs. If this sounds like total chaos, secession, and anarchy to you, then you’ve never met a family belonging to an intact indigenous culture. I’ve spent a lot of work making the case for human needs and feelings not as impediments to a happy life, but as pointers toward a happy life (check out the podcasts Needs and Feelings of the Human Animal, and Clarity and Peacemaking, both pretty short, and other similar podcasts for more on this). Family needs don’t differ from individual needs, in their ability to create life. They call us a social animal, right? Pod needs don’t harm whale needs, and Pack needs don’t harm individual wolf needs. Stepping back, whatever this or that individual struggles with, their social group exists because it has created a beautiful and successful life for its members, and for its neighbors too.

Village (or Tribe) needs don’t differ from Family needs, either. I don’t mean to say that the boundaries between individual, family, and village don’t have their own  natural points of friction, but that (as Martín Prechtel wrote in Long Life, Honey in the Heart) this friction signifies a healthy human community.

Once you get bigger than Village or Tribe, you’ve started entering a world that no longer sizes to a human scale. It took great minds with great wisdom to give birth and carry the Iroquoian Great Law of Peace, to address the extreme hazards of conflict at such a scale.

So, for now, unless you want to call up someone at Akwesasne in Upstate New York and get yourself a Mohawk Haudenosaunee mentor in the Great Law of Peace, I recommend you stay small. Let’s stick with yourself, then Family, then Village, then Tribe. One step at a time.

Now we get to the part that got me chomping at the bit to write this to begin with. In a moment, I’ll probably say something that you won’t like at all.  It will seem at odds with every modern value of diversity, political correctness, and equity. You may actually hate me for saying this:

You cannot widen the scope of a conversation, without narrowing some other factor. The Roma have retained their community precisely because they have excluded the non-community. The Roma in fact see the entire non-Gypsy world (culturally speaking, of course – I don’t mean individuals here) as members of a kind of ‘untouchable’ caste, possibly a hold-over from their days in India proper, before journeying west in a series of great migrations. For the Tzutujil, a sedentary village people, they have the same sense of highly developed local identity.

Successful tribal cultures create an in-group, by acknowledging and holding the boundary against the out-group. Where tribal cultures still survive (and, at times, thrive) in the modern world, you will see this acknowledgement. The romaniya (Gypsy law) goes so far as to forbid profiting economically from fellow Gypsies.

Trade economies, in these contexts, tend to occur between cultural groups, not within. Within the cultural group, you often see a Gift economy. Depending on pressure from the modern world, this can shift, but I see this as a common core. Having an in-group doesn’t have to mean you treat the other group as less than you, but rather that the legal and economic realities between groups must differ from those within. That which works between two distinct cultural groups, will have different priorities than one within. They may both seek the ‘re-establishment of peace’, but they cannot use the same methods, because they don’t have the same tribal values to rely on. ‘Peace’ then, will mean something different to both parties.

The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace addresses exactly this issue, intertribal conflict. Carriers of the Great Law of Peace inspired and helped frame the US Constitution. Of course, the Founding Fathers left out a couple vital pieces (and added in a President against the  counsel of the Iroquois), but the core purpose remains, defining a common ground for intertribal dispute.

As far as I can tell, the Gypsies and the Tzutujil seem to skip this extra legal system, because intertribal dispute really only becomes a problem when they have the option of violent conflict. The Tzutujil, under the control of the Guatemalan government, will no more go to war against the village across the lake, than the Gypsy Roma will go to war against Portland. The Iroquois Great Law of Peace explains why the Iroquois sit on their sovereign homeland to this day (a little known fact – they have passports and everything!), while the Tzutujil no longer own the ground under their own village.

Now, remembering that Culture Means the Means the Game We Play Together, and knowing that we can choose which game, and even design that game, according to the kind of play we want, where do we go from here?

For me, these inspiring and vital peoples tell me to look to my own house first. I long ago lost my land, and my ancestors fled as refugees from one bioregion to the next until it has become a way of life across half the globe for modern people (fleeing, I mean).

So here I stop, here in Cascadia, and put down what roots I can. The smallest place I can ‘widen the scope of conversation’ I find within myself, hence the importance of clarity tools and understanding one’s own needs and feelings.

The second place I turn to, I see close friends and family. How can we create an in-group together, and acknowledge and create a boundary between us and the out-group? How can we widen the scope of our conversation, while narrowing other important factors (such as participation, knowledge of tradition, and skill)? How can we come to resolutions over our in-group struggles, that receive support and enforcement by the people in the group, not by the state?

I feel like I haven’t gotten hardly anywhere with this. Stay tuned for ‘widening the scope: even more making your own meaty bits’, I guess. Whew!

…On regular [Sundays] we repaired outside the church to the old stone benches where we held court. Here decisions were made, arguments were settled, problems discussed, and whatever had to be done to keep the Earth alive was considered and put into action…The Tzutujil elders weren’t undemocratic. They listed to each villager’s complaint or questions one at a time. A large part of what the [spiritual elders] did with their time…was simply to listen…they listened a great deal more than they spoke because they knew that most people’s problems were just part of life and would never be finished or solved by human invention…By trying to fix or remedy what people envisioned as the injustices and setbacks in their lives, they usually compounded the situation, making a bigger problem for somebody else in the future…there was no cure for the unfairness and hardship in any human’s life…people were not put into this world to have a good time; they were put here to be beautiful…our happiness fed the Gods, but our suffering did as well…the zany old people [did] have ways of dealing with village problems…whatever they came up with was masterfully engineered to keep suffering from escalating into mass depression and violence by making sure the village grieved for any person’s difficulties. Being heard by the elders and the village at large didn’t fix anything, but it made life bearable because we were together, in love with the adventure of our tiny collective relevance to the hungry universe…

Now you’ve heard Tzutujil legal theory expressed about as succinctly as humanly possible. As it widens the scope once again, I don’t see it differing substantively from the romaniya, except as an expression of the particular uniqueness of the Tzutujil.

Now time to narrow the scope!

However, when people had a serious difficulty that threatened the safety of the village as a whole, then all the council would leap to their feet, blankets flapping, eyeballs rolling…Everyone had an opinion, and they all talked at once to everybody they could see to the front, side, back, or far away. Miraculously, everyone listened to everybody else simultaneously, pointing and gesticulating…yelling, laughing, or preaching in a low oratory. Amazing and insane, the roar fo such a meeting was like a plane taking off. Just as quickly as it began, it stopped, everyone having understood and been heard simultaneously. And in the second of silence it took everybody to sit back down, and calmly go back to smoking and waiting for the next issue, the headman would state matter-of-factly, “That’s decided then,” and the royal crowd would grunt in affirmation. then the next issue would be presented.

At first I couldn’t understand how anything got heard or what plan had adopted…Gradually, however, I too became a participant in the word orgy of the decision making and learned to hear as I was being heard…Those who didn’t understand soon did, as the policy passed into action.

There was an inner-sanctum aspect to this form of decision making, and anyone not initiated into it could not hope to participate, though the meetings were open to the village…

Whammo! The scope narrows. Keep in mind too, that you needed to speak Tzutujil Mayan (one of countless ornate Mayan dialects) in order to even experience exclusion from the decision making. To me, the ‘word orgy’ compares well to the ornate version of Romany spoken by the folk attorneys and krisnitorya.

I offer up the Tzutujil version to show you that indigenous peoples work this way, quite similarly all over the world. Village law, tribal law, family law, in indigenous cultures, aims for the re-establishment of peace, narrows scope naturally due to cultural identity and language, widens scope to garner the support of the community and get the Big Story of where the community stands.

Let’s look at a description of the kris, according to authors Walter Weyrauch and  Maureen Anne Bell:

…In all cases, it is the aggrieved party that must request the kris…the elders of the tribes then hold a meeting and select one or more men to act as judges…the senior judge is surrounded by the members of the kris council, who act as associate judges…Generally, five or more men from both sids, usually the elders, form the council. In the United States, the council may have as many as twenty-five members…It is now acceptable, if unusual, to have the entire family present for support…When members of the audience think the witness is not being truthful or responsive, they hiss or make jokes. In some delicate matters, such as adultery, the public and witnesses can be excluded. At a kris, only Romany may be spoken, and participants discourage lapses into English by shouting and hissing…

The scope narrows!

…Furthermore, arguments are often presented in a special oratory that differs grammatically from ordinary Romany and resembles a legal jargon…

The scope narrows even more! Learning a special oratory presents a major speedbump to participation.

…Witnesses may speak freely about the case, for the Gypsies believe there can be no justice without hearing the matter out to its fullest. Exaggerated claims and ornate stories referring to folktales and mythology are common….

Of course my ears perk up at that part. Also notice that suddenly, the scope has begun to widen.

…the parties or their spokesmen may speak freely and at length about their grievances. Similarly, the witnesses may present their testimony colorfully and expansively. In short, they may refer to past events, use exaggerations, and try to gain the favor of the judges and the audience. The presentation of facts does not focus on clarifying a single issue…the gypsies appear to be concerned primarily with the presntation of a complete picture of events and evidence, even at the expense of what non-Gypsies might call due process and the rights of the individual. The litigants air their grievances before representatives of a tightly knit group who will most likely be very familiar with every aspect of their lives. Audience members come from the same community as the parties, and thus follow the proceedings with an intense sense of  participation and a strong desire that jsutice be done. This attitude may lead to spontaneous offers of testimony, as well as expressions of approval or disapproval from the audience…Participation by the audience is expected and encouraged by custom. Members of the audience, although not formally called as witnesses, may feel justified in expressing views. Whether their contribution to the proceedings is based on personal observation or opinion does not matter…

And it widens some more!

Because the Roma narrow the scope of partipants (who may attend the proceedings), they can then widen the scope of information exchange. They can create a community conversation that works:

…The vindication of individuals’ rights, as understood in a non-Gypsy context, is not of the utmost significance in a Gypsy kris. Instead, the reestablishment of peace in the group is the proceeding’s prime objective…Individuals will view themslves as members of a larger group that has been treated in accordance with the law, even if they lose the case. A feeling that justice has prevailed pervades…

Of course, if ‘losing a case’ means you come into accord with your neighbors, then you have actually won it, from a systems/community point of view. You may not have gotten what you wanted to begin with, but you got what you needed in the end.

I have identified a contributing factor to this survival (and thrival!), in the kris romaniya. The kris works as a community hearing in which respected and experienced folk ‘judges’, after hearing wide-ranging testimony, essentially brainstorm a resolution that their community will support. The judgement has no other enforcement than the willingness and social pressure of the community itself, hence the importance of experienced and wise judges who can find these kinds of resolutions.

At the kris romaniya, participants can speak (according to Gypsy Law, also known as the romaniya) only in Romany, the Roma language related to Sanskrit. The audience and community will shout down any use of English. Pay attention to this: the kris has narrowed scope here. If you cannot speak Romany, the laws do not apply to you, and yet you also cannot apply to the laws. No non-Roma can attend a kris.

The Roma in fact accommodate the legal system of the state as best they can, for crimes between Gypsies and non-Gypsies. They also have a fair amount of cultural skepticism toward’s the state’s legal system, not seeming to particularly expect fairness or benefits from engaging it. They probably see it more as a natural predator, or a storm, a force which they must accomodate and adroitly bystep to survive, but one which they cannot ‘stop’ or ask for fair treatment as they would from a Roma. They simply  adapt.

I say all of this so we can get to the meaty bits, namely: how the community and the krisnatori (folk judges) use the kris to accomplish all kinds of goals, goals that a court of the state (say, an average American court of law) would find way beyond their scope.

I use the word Animism a lot, so it makes sense to clarify the meaning it carries for me. Though originally coined by Christian anthropologists to describe the ‘nature worshipping’ behavior of indigenous peoples (with the further common clueless addition ‘they believe everything – animals, rocks, sky – has a ‘soul”), a community of thinkers, authors, activists, scientists, artists and philosophers (including myself) have embraced it and invested it with deeper meaning.

Animism, essentially, means acknowledging the personhood and kinship of all Life, human, non-human, animate and ‘inanimate’. In the words of the Lakota, Mitakuye Oyasin, “We Are All Related”.

Personhood, therefore, means person-ing, the behavior, feelings, and values of a person. All people value the sanctity of their borders. All people want appreciation and respect.

Kinship indicates the inescapable interrelatedness of all things. Where does breath end, and the body begin? Where does stone end, and my body begin? Does the fire in all the cells of my body, differ from the sun that put that fire here to burn? An interdependence of Personhood means nothing else but Family. This means breath, stone, fire, all people and my kin.

Animism essentially means animating, a way of relating to the world that fully experiences and acknowledges the personhood and kinship of all things. This has nothing to do with belief; this has to do with attitude. I don’t have to ‘believe’ something ‘is’ [sic] a person, I only need treat that other as I would treat a person, and then I watch what happens. You animate by making a choice; the term animist simply indicates a person who often makes this choice.

We became beautiful, successful, grieving and praising human beings, by seeing the world this way. We didn’t get confused for a couple million years, only now to figure out that in fact the world ‘was’ [sic] dead after all. The community of life selected us to survive, helped us, cooperated with us, over and over, because of how we saw the world. Because of how we treated the world.

Now we have a choice. The community of life has received great injury from how the culture of modern civilization has seen it. Even now this living community makes natural selections that determine our fate. Perhaps, from a perspective of enlightened self-interest, we can choose to appreciate and respect the personhood and kinship in all things once more?

It saddens me that modern humans would need a metaphorical gun pointed at their head, in order to offer the basic courtesy of a relationship founded on acknowledging the other’s personhood. I actually hope that if you do choose Animism, if you do choose to treat the living world in a beautiful, grieving, and praising way, you do it not from fear, but from a love of Beauty.

It only takes a choice.

I think Albert Einstein called this trying to “solve the problem at the level of thinking in which it was created”.

Recently I discovered something that made me see these issues in a whole new light. But we’ll have to tackle this from a couple different angles.

I found a new voice articulating these same issues in Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of the Human Being. He refreshes the fundamental point:

The reality of non-locality: the physicists discovered the truth of this only within my lifetime; the Yup’ik Eskimos and other Native Americans have known its truth for millennia. When I lectured on quantum theory at the seminary, Sarah Owens confided afterward that her grandparents had told her as much.

And then proceeds to articulate another aspect of that point:

I am reminded of eastern woodland Indians in colonial times, blaming Europeans for their drunkenness, since it was they who furnished it after all. Or even blaming the beverage itself.

Oscar illustrated with a curious analogy. He said that when a man fires up his steamhouse (which is like a sauna) and invites the other men over, and they arrive and he begins pouring buckets of water on the fire, they accuse him of “throwing them out.” No! Oscar protested. “He’s not grabbing them and tossing them out! It’s not his fault! Think about it.” His voice is earnest. “It’s not that man’s fault they’re running out of the steam; it’s the steam’s fault! The steam is sending them running out the door.”…With alcohol, the western mind fingers the imbiber, Yupiit blame the vendor (or the drink).

So, the Yupiit, inheritors of animist language and logical systems, a non-’to be’ verb culture, observing the world in that quintessential animist way; focusing on animating relationships, on clear observation, on active verbs.

For a long time I’ve seen in the Gypsy Roma a still somewhat intact, relatively animist culture. They speak Romani, a language related to Sanskrit, and thus one of the family of modern, Indo-European languages, the classic (though not sole) perpetrators of Aristotelian  errors of “isness”. Their language possesses the verb ‘to be’, the linguistic tool that aids the conceptions of these errors making them easier to say and think, thus easier to embody and spread.

However!

Animist cultures clearly exist on a continuum. You don’t wake up one day, as a people, and discover you’ve all started following the teachings of Aristotle. Even for indigenous communities that have adopted Christianity, they can continue to see that faith through an animist lens; this almost surely fades over time.

So I offer up the Gypsy Roma as a culture of people who, though possessing the ‘to be’ verb (which made participation in the caste-based and highly stratified society of India possible), still continue to keep animating thought alive, in the form of their cultural idiom, even if not in the structure of their language itself. From Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, Ronald Lee writes:

While the Rom accept the dangers of drug abuse and forbid the use of illegal drugs, they generally do not consider alcoholism to be a problem. This results in situations where alcoholic Rom get into fights and other situations at group gatherings where acts are committed or words said which lead to problems that must be settled at the kris. If the guilty party committed the offense during a blackout, he then cannot remember what offense he committed or is accused of committing. His defense is then to admit his guilt and say Lya ma e rakiya — “The whiskey took me.” This will be acceptable as a defense since the Rom believe that visible or invisible forces can act on their own to influence actions of people. The action is not described in the passive, as it is in English. For example, if a Rom falls into the river and drowns, they will say: Mudardya les o pani — “The water killed him.” If he is accidently electrocuted, Mudardya les o ilektriko — “The electricity killed him.” Thus a Rom does not get drunk; the whiskey takes control of him and compels him to commit some act he would not commit if he were sober…thus the force, not the subject, is guilty. This can be seen in the following: If a Rom is killed in an automobile accident but the vehicle is still in good shape, it will immediately be sold to a non-Gypsy. The car, in the eyes of the Rom, has become a mudarimasko mobili (killer car) and has become bi-baxtaló (a bringer of bad karma). It was thus not the Rom’s careless driving or the fact that he had been drinking before the accident that caused the accident, but the car which has killed him.

The challenge for a modern mind lies in seeing that the Roma, the Yup’ik, and all intact indigenous peoples, as animist systems-thinkers who exist because of their ability to think ecologically, have identified relationships as the priority. Whereas the modern mind sees this as ignorant and childish, prioritizing a truly naive cause and effect paradigm, arguing over ‘facts’ (that even scientists, the faithkeepers of this modern world, know as a fallible notion – modern scientific exploration and thought, from statistics to quantum theory, continues to reveal this).

I think, if you’ve made it this far, you can handle the next idea. Martín Prechtel, author and speaker on intact indigenous cultures (having grown up with a foot in both worlds himself), asked an audience recently what they considered the opposite of the verb ‘to be’. The lack of the verb ‘to be’ doesn’t really count as its opposite, so he had pointed at some deeper truth there. “‘Description’,” I suggested to him, opposed ‘to be’.

“Sure,” he replied. “To de-scribe, to bring writing to life, rehydrate language and take it away from the page. Sure. But what, even more than that?”

Silence in the room…

“Story?” I offered.

“Yes. I believe Story is the opposite of the verb ‘to be’,” he said, grinning.

If Story opposes the verb ‘to be’, as Martín proposes, and not the simple and linear-minded excision of the offending verb itself, how does that change our attitudes toward English, and modern languages? What lies next for someone who, with informed consent, wants to speak a language that creates life and liveliness, that frees their natural identity, that allows them to walk away from hierarchical and civilized modes of enslaving thought, into the embrace of Village, Family, Land?

I don’t know. Let’s figure it out together – perhaps we’ll start by jamming Story, and see where it takes us. What do you think?

Admittedly, I know precious few people who speak or write in e-prime – the sample size could stand some enlargement for accuracy sake. I accept volunteers!

Now we come to ‘e-primitive’, the understanding that most, if not all (I have yet to find an exception!), intact indigenous languages, lack a ‘to be’ verb. On investigating this further I discovered that these animist and indigenous languages additionally prioritize useful non-Aristotelian observation (and therefore quantum, afactual, and highly in accord with modern scientific values of precision in language). Of course Aristotle made famous (though did not invent) the notion that objects in the world have an “isness” and essence. Thus we have the idea today that the “janitor” has little emotional, intellectual, or spiritual life outside of scrubbing toilets; movies like “Good Will Hunting” play up the cognitive dissonance that ‘genius janitors’ create in our impoverished Aristotelian minds.

These animist (animating) languages prioritize verby-ness over nouny-ness, some going so far as to having no nouns whatsoever in the language. This means if we modern folks look at a photo of a man in suspenders and flannel with an axe chopping down a tree, we see a logger, whereas an animist sees a photo of chopping. They see a photo filled with activity, we see a photo filled with a role.

“Is” light a particle or a wave? In English, this creates a crippling paradox, rendering quantum theory an obtuse and mysterious quagmire to this day. In animist language, we ask “does light particle? does it wave?”, creating a both/and answer that creates no paradox, because it removes the error of identity: “is” light a particle, or a wave?

Animism (or, because “ism” really hides another ‘to be’ verb, better to say animating thought) happily accomodates the non-locality (“changing this particle in my hand, will change that particle five miles away, instantaneously with no clear connection between them”),  flux (“everything constantly changes”), and vibrational (“everything verbs constantly”) understandings of quantum theory. David Bohm, a physicist and intellectual, once proposed (in his book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”) creating an entire mode of the English language called the rheomode (“flow-mode”), entirely composed of verbs, to support sane, clear conversations about quantum reality.

Animist languages have done this since humans first started speaking, and only stopped for reasons of hierarchical efficiency – to put it bluntly, personal freedom and a lack of a rigid box holding your identity hostage, makes it hard to finish the construction of pyramids. We need these restricting and suffocating roles (foreman, high priest, mason, president, guard, pharoah, police officer, teacher, artist) to keep the hunter-gatherers from wandering off and finding more fun things to do. Sorry about that. Anyway, enough of your weeping, look at all the great pyramids we built! We’ll give your Village and Family back (not to mention the holiness of your relationship to the constantly grieving and gifting Land from which you originate every day) once we finish this last pyramid. Well, maybe just one more pyramid after that (heck, we just got to the skyscraper-shaped pyramids)…and after that (three words: pyramids in space!)….and after that…

So, decisions, decisions. We have reached informed consent time. Some, figuring this out, still want to build pyramids (we still haven’t build the spaceship pyramids yet, like the USS Enterprise – c’mon people, let’s get to it!). Some, once the light bulb goes on above their head, feel pretty had by the whole enterprise (pun intended). They want to stop. They want to come home to the arms of Village, Family, Land. They want their freedom of identity back. Some run off to learn primitive skills with enthusiastic friends in the wilderness, only to find they brought the rigid boxes with them; that in fact, these rigid boxes extend beyond roles and on to other side-effects of enslavement, such as a belief in good and evil people, right and wrong behavior and belief. A clue: usually we see the other guy as the wrong, evil one. Sad fact: the more sensitive ones of us see themselves as the wrong, evil one. Watch the tragic fireworks.

To head off these kinds of tragedies, some will decide to change the way they think; knowing language drives their thinking, they’ll start exploring the use of e-prime and e-primitive. English without the verb ‘to be’, modified for ‘verby-ness’ over ‘nouny-ness’.

Now I finally arrive at the whole point of this article: but what if taking a razor to the English language and excising the verb ‘to be’ constitutes yet another attempt to use the ‘to be’ mentality itself to solve a problem?  In effect, ‘to be’ pulls a bait and switch, extending its own life by pretending to kill itself!

This kind of thing can keep me awake at night, let me tell you.

[continued in Part II]

LEVEL THREE

“SCENE FRAMING”

Skills: Learning the core scene framing of the game, slowly adding rules in piece by piece. Any numbered step here could constitute an entire game session, as each Heart and Mistaken in the group co-frame a scene. This works iteratively with the warm-ups. Each group will go to LEVEL ONE and warm-up (switching to more challenging games if needed), touch on LEVEL TWO by playing ‘See Me’ to refresh their memories, then move to their current step of focus in LEVEL THREE.

1. Start each Scene Framing session with “Long ago, the People were Dying at the End of the World…” and light a candle, end it with “But all that happened long ago, and now there are none who remember it” and blow the candle out. Designate someone to safeguard the telling of each phrase, session by session. You can keep a fresh hold on Polaris’ setting even if you’ve decided to go the Quick Play route, by selecting a section from the first part of the book to set a tone for your Scene Framing, continuing over your sessions till you have read all the material you’d like to the group, a little bit at a time (the design in Montsegur 1244 inspired this thought).
2. Introductory Scene Framing. Each Heart and Mistaken co-frame a gentle, introductory, collaborative scene for their character. One or both can choose or discuss Who, What, and Where to help frame the scene. Start each scene with “But hope was not yet…” name introduction, and then “And so it was…”. End each scene with ritual phrase “…and so it was.” (read Between Scenes, pg. 56-57, to prep for next session).
3. Scene Framing II, adding only the conflict phrases “But only if…”, “…it was not meant to be”, and “…and that was how it happened”. Every Heart frames slightly more contentions scenes with their Mistaken (read pp. 61-64, 75-77 for conflict phrase rules).
4. Scene Framing III,  inviting the Moons to join. Provide a one-sheet of names and relationships to write in the Hearts’ cosmos and have the Moons play. Add in the ritual  phrases, “…It was no matter”, and “…We shall see what comes of it” to use on the Moons (read pp. 77-78 for Moon advice, but ignore the stuff on Themes and Values just yet – also review relevant conflict phrase rules pp. 70-73).
5. Scene Framing IV, adding in the ritual phrases “And furthermore…”, “…You ask far too much”. Read the exhausting themes rules on page 73, and review the conflict phrases pp. 70-73).
6. Scene Framing V, congratulations! You now get to ROLL A DIE! Add in, “It shall not come to pass” as part of your pool of ritual phrases. Starting using the Experience rules. Give, or notice, the value for each Knight’s Ice, Light, and Zeal. For info on these things, read pg. 82-85.

LEVEL FOUR

If I have done my work (and you yours), you went from zero to finish shepherding a group of storyjamming newbies, enjoying every step of the way, and not even coming close to losing anyone to text burn-out or rule-fatigue. It should have felt like play, play, play the whole time, with 95% of your time spent creating increasingly meaningful fiction rather than talking about rules and handling the mechanics of the game.

In LEVEL FOUR you think about how to make this schema even better and more applicable to your play group. And you get to write one up for another game in which you want to take your group from ignorance to literacy enjoying every step of the way!

LEVEL ONE

“WARMING UP FOR PLAY – BUILDING TRUST – GELLING THE GROUP”

Skills: Turning off the self-censor, listening to other players, seeing the shared dream, building on other players’ contributions. Many of the activities below come from a handy aid called the ‘Juicers’ deck, made by Creative Advantage. Each activity has its purpose in parentheses after the name, and I usually run them in the order listed. This really marks a starting place for a group of absolute, rank beginners; one can up the level of trust, intuition, and creativity manifold by later choosing more difficult games.

1. Name Story  (gets people talking, hearing the sound of their own voice)
2. Firing Line (learning not to censor)
3. One Word at a Time (upping the challenge of not self-censoring,  building)
4. Yes, and…! (higher challenge not to self-censor, building)
5. Character Circle (seeing together, building)
6. Color, Advance (not censor, more building and interaction, slightly modified from original version by using characters from ‘character circle’, and accenting the ‘scene framing’ skill)
7. Counting (listening)

LEVEL TWO

“SETTING, CHARACTER, SITUATION”

Skills: Brainstorming, Consensus decision making. I have shortened this section, which I’d make much longer for other games (like Primetime Adventures), because Polaris has a ready-made setting that inspired you to play the game in the first place. Watch this space in other incarnations for really cool stuff on brainstorming, and skills that will bolster the kind of setting/situation/character creation one sees in games like Shock: Social Science Fiction.

1. Distribute One-sheet of Names, Themes/Aspects, Demons, and Oracles. (Short and sweet for Quick Play version, shorter than in the various Polaris appendices. Less choices, the better. For a chattier set up, dedicate the whole first game to character and situation creation – the rest of LEVEL TWO will assume Quick Play goals).
2. Make Three character concepts, Pick One (Timed – 2 minutes to make three concepts, 10 seconds to pick one – facilitator picks one for those who haven’t chosen).
3. See Me (modified version of ‘Character Circle’ – player announces their character concept/name/themes/description in 30 seconds, starting with the first Polaris ritual phrase “But hope was not yet lost, for … still heard the song of the stars”, and the group says what they see, collaboratively making the character until they reach ‘I don’t see it’).

[continued in Part III]

I have a indie story-game I love, called Polaris (“Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North”), by the much esteemed Ben Lehman. I recommend this game. I love reading the evocative text and looking at the ornate illustrations.

Problem: I have played this game maybe five times, all single sessions, all but two in convention environments, and I still don’t feel at all confident in the rules of play (and only really enjoyed a single game of any of those – the one with Lukas, Jordan, and Ogre at Indie Hurricane 2008). In fact, five sessions barely manages to count as one long-term story. For some reason, for me and my group, we just can’t learn the game as it stands. For my entire core group, our experience of the text ranks far higher than our experience of the game.

So I decided to make Polaris the subject of an experiment, of which I will write down the rough structure here.

GOALS:

1. To play an honest-to-goodness long-term game of Polaris, learning the rules until I know them without thinking.

2. To more generally change how I interact with the learning curve of all indie games, so that I spend at least 95% of my time playing and enjoying them, not flipping through books for rules, discussing the pros and cons of how and when to apply them, and generally reducing the overall non-fun handling time of game materials, like dice, text, and cards.

3. To constantly increase the amount of playing time in which I/we create fiction, and constantly improve the quality of the contributions to that fiction.

STRATEGY:

Some of this applies to just to Polaris, some more generally to all games. Even the Polaris-centric bits, if you poke at, you’ll see they have a pretty general application. I envision a stack of POLARIS GAME CARDS, each one having the stage below written on it, with a short description, and maybe a page reference. Once you slap a card on the table, the entire group knows what to work on.

[Cont'd in Parts II and III]

If you’ve read my articles here on Dream Interviews, you’ll noticed that dreams do all these things. They punch you in the gut with fear and ecstasy, fill your eyes, ears, nose and body with sensations,  and dance you through a series of scenes that measure an Arc of Meaning, in a sense Acts I, II, and III of a dream-life play. And of course, the dream leaves you with ‘what the hell did that all mean?’, a sense of deep abiding mystery (and perhaps not a little frustration and confusion).

In fact, in thinking about ways of teaching and encouraging storytelling, I’ve noticed that folks who recall a vivid dream already demonstrate incredible ability of recall and texture of the story, as if they spent all night hard at work memorizing a long, complex, bizarre folktale that they want to effortlessly perform at the drop of a hat.

Think about this.

Our dreams (and our dream-selves) have us figured out to an extent that they can do this to us. With no conscious work on our part, they burn their story into our being, and leave us giddy to tell someone ‘about that crazy dream I had last night’.

I have started to feel that this particular someone has a much better model for teaching storytelling than I do. Of course, dreams apply so individually and idiosyncratically that they usually don’t carry meaning to the often unimpressed listeners. And some out there do not remember their dreams (and others may think they do not even have them). So how do we apply the lessons of dreams to improve our storytelling?

One of my favorite effects of dreams comes from their unwillingness to tell or explain anything. That sense of mystery that they can impart has such a powerful impact, it can leave me with a sense of magic and divinity, even concerning the most mundane subjects. Modern storytellers, on the whole, just don’t seem to get this need for mystery as well as old myths and folktales.

For example, I believe that among devotees of the Star Wars storyline, the explanation of the mystical and all-pervading Force as sourcing from small mutualistic organisms in our blood called ‘midi-chlorians’ caused almost universal disappointment and frustration. I often heard the rationale for these feelings as the fans considered it a bad explanation, or it didn’t make sense, or it just sounded stupid.

I never heard anyone say, as I suspect, that George Lucas’ true transgression occurred when he tried to explain the Force at all; that, in fact, no explanation suffices for the Force. It dwells in a mythic space of story where, to explain something, means to kill it and pull it out of that space. I think the fans, consciously or unconsciously, knew this and reacted emotionally and viscerally in the defense of something meaningful and alive to them.

Part of the new tide of indie story games involves an effort to create setting and situation on the fly, out of a small number of evocative and inspiring story elements; pictures, poetry, snippets of story. To the extent this works, I believe it works because of the awareness of mystery and the discovery of more mystery to come. To ever end on an answer will kill a story, in my opinion. In my experience it certainly will kill a conversation, create dead ends in a spiritual life, and alienate the other in a relationship. Questions and mystery really matter when caring for and creating story that really matters too.

At the Story Games forum recently Nathan Herrold asked why so few (if any) indie games attended to ‘the Return Home’ part of the Hero’s Journey? That time of integration and reflection of the adventure and challenges abroad; that time of noticing how self has changed, and how home changed too. Lord of the Rings does this wonderfully when the hobbits return to the Shire in the chapters starting with ‘the Scouring of the Shire’. Odysseus has a similar experience when coming home from his journeys.

Integrating and reflection on what we have done and where we have gone can really challenge us, and I see us as a culture of people who live according to the motto, “get over it – move on with your life – find the next adventure”. I think by including this Return Home (a parallel to Act III in a dream) in our storyjamming life, we can create more meaningful stories that ‘stick with us’. By also not explaining, by leaving mysteries open-ended (or at least always ensure solving a mystery opens a new one), we can keep magic and awe in our tellings.

For a while now,  for myself, I’ve tried to boil down basic conversation and listening skills (what I call “clarity skills”) to a simple enough core that anyone can immediately use them. I want them to work for everyone, and I think to do so, we must design this core as a container that inspires the kind of behavior we want, rather than asking the players to go study up on conversation techniques. Much like a game of tag – sure, practice will deepen your satisfaction of play, but the game works, as it stands, without needing better players. And the rules naturally create the kind of play (behavior) that we want – running and giggling, in this case.

At Rewild.info, a forum I’ve helped moderate for a couple of years now (two years this Spring), we’ve used a discussion guideline to protect members and keep conversations satisfying.

The guideline goes:  Tell Your Story, Ask a Question, and Interpret Generously.

For the most part I have found that this suffices for guiding almost all conversations. Many of us participating at Rewild.info have noted the unusual air of congeniality there. I believe it stems not from the innate virtue of the people attracted to Rewild.info, but from simple, clear ground-rules laid down from almost the beginning. The “your” in Tell Your Story really matters, and it seems work on its own. To further explain it, if you begin to tell how someone else feels, or what they think, or to give advice, you have definitely begun telling their story, not yours. And likely they will disagree with you.

I made the ground-rules so simple because I knew the Internet complicates and obscures communication excellently. Blame anonymity, blame a lack of non-verbal cues, but we all experience it whenever we surf.

After a couple years of watching the guidelines do their magic, I now feel confident enough to recommend them to other forums and formats. In fact, I believe they suffice as a way to begin to learn to talk to each other in gatherings of all kinds.

An even simpler version of these rules exist (yes, color me shocked!). Steven List describes the ‘Circle of Questions’ at his blog. Please note in the comments some enlightening additions my mother Diana (who I interviewed in a podcast not so long ago) made.

I’ve noticed that most groups of modern people cannot handle even the apparent simplicity of a talking circle. I say apparent, because I see a talking circle as a far more complex group process than it appears at first glance, challenging and working participants on many levels. I see this often overwhelm participants (especially as talking circles grow beyond a dozen or so participants). If you just want to teach group listening skills, I’ve seen them work great to that end. If you want to address an issue, or achieve a different kind of group goal, you need a more focused process tool.

For myself, generally speaking, I like to pick one small ‘edge’ to work on at a time, one area where I know participants will have a hill to climb and may do some huffing and puffing before they get to the top, but they won’t arrive exhausted. If you have a similar value guiding your decisions, then I encourage you to start simple with something like the Circle of Questions.

In further discussing this with Diana, I see some things to add. Apparently, beyond a dozen or so people, the Circle of Questions begins to lose effectiveness. Also, keep in mind the rhythm, set by the facilitator of the circle: they tell the first story, then ask the first question of the person next to them, and then step out of the circle as this wave of ‘first story, then question’ ripples around the circle two times, taking its own time. In this way the Circle of Questions encourages openness and teaches curiosity as you first tell your story, and then ask a question.

Check out Diana’s book (with coauthor Esther Derby), Agile Retrospectives, for more process that focus group discussion and decision making in a productive way.

If the following notion doesn’t blow some circuits in your head, I need to take another vacation, because I’ve lost my touch:

The Roma maintain their self-sufficiency precisely because they live accordingly to tribal remedy law; a community mandate to “make things good again” when dischord emerges, rather than strictly punishing and rewarding. This means learned and wise adult resolutions work because the adults seek to discover what decision the community will support. This means they work together and brainstorm until they hit upon the necessary remedy.

The state justifies its existence by intervening into disputes, and assigning punishments and reward that no-one in the community need support; the state has force of arms to back up its decisions.

The state therefore blocks the self-sufficiency of cultural groups, and provides a foundation for its existence. By convincing us to believe in Right and Wrong, blame and punishment, the state cripples our ability to think in terms of community balance and harmony.

Like all great marketing schemes, the state has fabricated something for us to worry over and sells us its solution in the same stroke: justice.

Without the state, we would have to revert back to remedy law.

For many tribal peoples, including the Roma, they have chosen as a people to find that balance between existing in hierarchy, and maintaining their freedom as wild, free families.

How about in an intact, and indigenous culture? Does that picture change at all?

It does for me. In our culture we have the ‘provider’ side of adulthood down, but we seem to have long lost our traditions of agreements and community collaboration.

In Gypsy Law, Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, editor Walter Weyrauch has assembled a group of essays that address the heart of this subject, using a cultural group that has role-modeled a sustainable and vital adult tradition of collaboration and agreements for centuries now. Alternately demonized and romanticized, at the heart of Romani culture sits something extraordinary, invisible to modern eyes because it in fact impacts the mundane flow of day-to-day life the most; an unarticulated, yet ever-present system of religious (and therefore to indigenous minds, legal) strictures that modulate behavior and prepare the ground for community disputes and dischord, called the Romaniya.

For this essay I’d like to focus in on one piece of this vast and ever-evolving (yet also unchanging and the most ancient of traditions – deal with the paradox, you can do it!) web of laws held and passed on by the community elders. I’d like to single out the legal proceeding and communal adjudication known as the kris. A kris forms whenever two adult parties have irreconcilable differences and need some more powerful tools to find a resolution (and often, some kind of reparation).

In the United States of America, any typical courtroom in any legal context operates using a very important guideline: in a community of highly diverse religious traditions and values, from cultures all over the world, you must narrow the scope of the proceeding, and the kind and source of information, or total chaos will result.

Whether or not you agree with this notion, it defines our legal system, the system that, barring radical and fundamental cultural change, we do have to deal with as part of the bargain of living in the modern world.

The Roma (Gypsies) flip this idea of narrowed-scope. At a kris court proceeding, no complaint, story, comment, or rant from an adult belonging to the community lies outside the scope of the proceeding. Every kris acts as a chance for adults to voice the current crop of imbalances and issues at play in the community; this can seem like a stream of non sequitors, irrelevant to the stated reason the community convened the kris in the first place. And the spokesman for the different parties, what you might call ‘citizen attorneys’, act more as mediators.

So, in a state-controlled diverse context of highly varied values and traditions, we narrow scope to help find a resolution. In an egalitarian and communal context of very similar values and traditions, we widen the scope of information kind and source.

Note that each has a narrow scope, but of a different kind. Non-Roma (whom gypsies call gadje) do not attend a kris; the community excludes them. The Romaniya does not, in fact, apply to non-Rom, so they simply do not belong and have no say. So Roma narrow the scope of a kris by only including adult community members, and find their own kind of efficiency.

If you know anything about Open Spaces Gatherings, you may have just had quite the revelatory moment.

The Roma, amongst themselves, use the kris for every intra-Roma dispute that they can; issues of theft, adultery, and rare incidents like murder, they try to convince the state legal system to allow them to resolve. When the ‘crime’ or dispute has occurred between Roma and gadje outsiders, then they use the state’s legal system. They have interfaced in this way, between egalitarian Roma community and majority hierarchical state culture, for several centuries at least, and only have more success with this balance as they go along.

As a cultural critic I cannot help but note one other contrast between these two cultures, and of the balancing act it illuminates.

The United States legal system, along with narrowing the scope of information allowed, also employs an adversarial paradigm. The system applauds and supports the discontent of two parties, and assures them that, in the end, the state will announce one party ‘Right’ and the other ‘Wrong’, and divvy punishments and rewards accordingly.

The Romani legal system uses a paradigm of remedy; the kris endeavors to answer the question, “what must we do to make this situation right again?”, as opposed to “who do we blame, who do we punish?”. To stay clear, the kris does allot fines and other penalties at times, but it prioritizes the return to community balance over such solutions, and uses penalties and fault-finding in accord with mediation and peacemaking.

Boiling it all down, in one hand we have an adversarial system of narrowly-focused information exchange between parties of different values, and in the other a peacemaking system of widening-scope communal information exchange between parties of very similar values.

Ironically, I don’t see the state’s legal system as more efficient and less time-consuming; I emphatically see evidence of a situation quite the opposite, where the days or week of a kris court end in a resolution satisfying to the community, where state trials can last months and years ending in a resolution that truly satisfies few or even no one (anybody who gets paid from it probably feels pretty good).

For regular readers of the College of Mythic Cartography, I hope to tie a whole assortment of parallel threads together in this. In a culture of people who don’t actually listen to each other, but rather just wait for their turn to talk, we have very little experience when it comes to making systems of agreement, collaboration, and conversation that works. This whole field of knowledge really has just begun to open up with real possibilities.

I believe, that just as we can work with community energy by changing the games we play, just as we can choose our culture depending on the kind of experiences we want, we too can choose how to resolve disputes and remedy dischord by learning from the Romaniya and applying some of its principles.

I believe you can’t move human energy where you want it by forcing it, explaining to it, or blocking it.”Moving” energy really means opening space for the energy to go. In some kind of odd way, human energy fills the container you put it in, like water. So, by changing the shape  and structure of the container, you can really shape the energy of relationships within your group.

Think about this! The implications! I have a five year old friend who just discovered exclamation points, so in his spirit I won’t hold back. To wit: you change relationships within a group, not by changing the people within the group, but by changing the shape of their container!! This means you no longer look for virtuous (or flawed) behavior, but you simply play games that change the shape of the container the group dwells in, according to your needs.

I find this ridiculously cool. If you’ve listened to my “Yes, and…!” podcast (and read the corresponding article), or my interview with Lisa Wells, you know how no matter how simple the intuition/improv game, it has an incredible amount to teach and a broad applicability.

So you can use these games and this understanding, as principles, to subtlely shape any container you find yourself in with another human being, when you find the space disintegrating into something that doesn’t support healthy interactions. Nonviolent Communication sessions, decision making processes, project retrospectives, all these ‘containers’ comprise themselves of many sub-games and understandings, that you can further support using improv/intuition games (whether fully, or just in principle).

Now, many, many people use improv/intuition games with insufficient understanding of how they work. I don’t claim any expertise myself, but I’ve had some very good mentors and seen how skilled folks work the games. An improv game doesn’t work like a magic bullet – you don’t just play “yes, and…!” a couple times and consider your problems solved. Don’t use them as one-size-fits-all icebreakers, and pick them out as random candy to distribute. These games require attention and intention.

Each improv game has a diagnostic function, and an energy moving function. Every time you play a game, you look for how the group handles it. If they seem unready or overwhelmed, then you know to back up into simpler and more fundamental games. I had this experience just the other day over skype, in my mythweavers storyband. I’d never done improv games “over the phone” before, and yet I knew we needed some way to further cohere as a group. So I gave it a shot, and discovered I had run the games exactly backwards (which tells me a LOT about our group, what we needed, and what we hadn’t gotten yet). I first ran a game called “color, advance”, where I had one person (A) tell a story, while another person (B) yelled ‘color!’ for more details periodically, and yet another person (C) yelled ‘advance’ for plot progression. They struggled with that, so I knew to back up (diagnostics! don’t blame the group, change the shape of the container!). So I backed up to “Word at a Time”, where in order each person added a single word to an ongoing story, as quickly as possible. They struggled with that too. So, I backed up yet again, played “Firing Line”, where two folks took turns calling out words to a third person, who immediately responded with the first word that came to mind. I noticed them handling that pretty well, so once they had a definite rhythm we next went back to “Word at a Time”, did great, then finally back to “Color, Advance”, doing great (you can find a handy card deck that contains all or most of these improv games Creative Advantage, or look in Viola Spolin’s book).

Huh, you know? Simple.

Except for of course the unbelievable limits that skype places on what I would normally do with a group (way more body movement and interaction, way more emphasis on eye contact), I feel like we can at least work up a decent enough container to consistently get better-than-average moments out of our skype storyjamming. In a way, playing over skype feels like blindfolding the group, which I might do for an improv game anyway; so maybe in the end it has a lot of potential!

The model I normally follow to warm up for storyjamming specifically, looks like this:

Follow the energy – all groups need something silly to start with, more tired or distracted groups need more silly games than usual. Silly doesn’t mean ‘easy’,  just silly (think ‘musical chairs’). Once energy has really begun to fly around the room, after a couple different silly games, use that energy to fuel more focused games. When their focus burns out, go back to silly and fun. Then back to focus, amping up the level of focus challenge each time we return. Look for mutual group eye contact as a sign the group has begun to feel ready for bigger challenges. End with a fiendishly difficult group mind diagnostic game, like ‘Counting’.

Even more concisely put:

A) Follow the Energy

B) Build energy with silly fun, use that energy to focus until burn out, then back to silly fun until ready for next level of focus challenge.

C) End with a group diagnostic game that demonstrates group unity.

Now about that ‘level of focus challenge’ – this part has a very open-ended nature. You can’t run out of ever-deeper levels of focus challenge. Think about the play you want your story games to create, and tune the warm-ups to get you there. If you want to go all the way to method acting and beyond, well, why the hell not. I think it’ll surprise you what you can achieve, and how quickly. However, don’t rush things either; really, only time limits you. The group will get as far as it can get in each session. The quicker you want to create group cohesion, the more time you must spend watching and opening space for the group energy to move into. Ironically, the more in a hurry you feel, the more time you must spend playing; you could warm up for a couple hours if you really wanted to get to magical places fast.

Which brings up the last point. Do you need to play these games, to create the storyjamming that satisfies you? Certainly some folks have very satisfying and consistent play without ever hearing of these improv games. I’ve had great story jams without them, but not consistently, and I think I know why; I play with new groups all the time, and only recently formed my core group. Folks with great consistently play tend to have tight, intimate core groups with long histories. I think these tools solve the problem of building brand-new groups to a high level of cohesion quickly, creating a space for satisfying play to happen fast and consistently. I also think these warm-up games find one’s blindspots, and iron them out, making each player personally improve over time.

So, as they say, Go Play!

In any case, even without any nervousness, hesitancy, or self-censorship, I think a certain bag of tools can create play and story above and beyond the norm, on a consistent basis. As introduced to me by my friend Lisa Wells, I call this bag of tools “theater improv games”, or better yet “intuition games”. These games do many things; but first and foremost they blunt our ability to self-censor and overthink our behavior, which only leads to good stuff. In our culture we so overcondition and overvalue our own ability to think, rather than actually ever using it all the way to the hilt at any one time, it reminds me of the problem some of my favorite physical fitness methodologies endeavor to address.

Lots of high-repetition, low intensity strength training, results in chronic fatigue, lowered immune response, and injury. Whereas savvily applied sessions of extremely high intensity, low repetition, and varied exercises create a very happy and fit body. I see this as present in our thinking too; I see us working over the endless minutiae of our day, grocery lists, to do lists, over and over in our head, rather than amping up our curiousity and problem solving skills so high that they burnt out and we get thrown into the only thing that can catch us – our right brains. Body, emotion, pattern and picture; awareness, acceptance, and action. They don’t often direct us modern folks anymore, but in certain situations we can create a space to let them out.

Different artists have different methods, and what I will say in a moment does not apply to everyone. But I believe in it strongly. In my world, you don’t plan Story; you discover Story. You don’t decide Story; you dream Story. In a way, Story chooses you. And the more you can get out of your own way, the stronger the signal coming through from the Story place. And to discover worthwhile Story, you need to warm-up those story muscles first.

Also, once a person masters the basics of storyjamming, I think we still need intuition games to maintain our skills. Like how a good martial-artist constantly drills the basics, or a good animal tracker always keeps a beginner mind, and keeps returning to tracking as if they’ve never done it before.

I have a strong footing in the “show, don’t tell” tradition, in all its permutations. As an educator, artist, family member and friend, I practice showing rather than telling. Everybody has advice on how you should live; few people show you what happens when you follow it (for better or worse, in my case). I believe people learn more wholly and concretely from someone showing them, rather than telling them.

For example, if I write a story game text which encourages players to play in the spirit of “yes, and…!”, I have very low expectations of my players to follow this advice (if they even fully understand it). But if I warm up a story jam by playing the game “yes, and…!”, where one by one we tell a possibly nonsensical story by contributing bits and pieces, one after another, starting with the words “yes, and…!”, then if the group performs well, I know they can and will bring this spirit into our story jam, even if I don’t tell them to. Think about that. I have changed the culture of our play, by playing a game that changes them.

So, to me, a way to design a game that has the “yes, and…!” spirit in it, involves making the “yes, and…!” warm up part of the game.

I’ve always experienced that systems (whether an institution, a game, a factory, or a society) produce what they do because of their design, not in spite of it. If you want them to produce something else, you don’t train the factory workers more, or publish more articles on virtuous behavior, you change the design of the system.

This has run long, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of this issue, much less addressed something else I really value: an organic model of influencing the flow of energy with these diverse and specialized intuition games to create a culture of relationship within a group.

We’ll get there.

For example, I don’t often hear people argue about whether a person “wrote” something or “scribbled” it. But I often hear people argue about whether that person “is” [sic] a writer or not. You can extend this list infinitely to include arguments of all kinds about “is this an A or a B?”.

I think it improves one’s clarity of thought exponentially to toss this out as a valid subject for a conversation. Throw it in the compost. You’ll feel better, I wager.

So, can we categorize things usefully? I believe so. We just have to change the shape of the object that we call “category”, including all its various synonyms and idioms: sets, boxes, labels, and so on.

Right now, linguistically and in the common-sense logic of our culture, we believe that categories have solid borders. The next step of enlightenment (or as I prefer to call it, ‘clarity’) occurs when we notice the permeability of these borders (i.e. a person in the “riot cop” category quits her job and enters the “poet” category) in startling ways.

I believe the next step occurs when we stop seeing any borders at all, but rather clouds of points, each point indicating a specific subjective observation. For example, rather than the convention image of atoms as solid spheres, or like little solar systems with electrons moving in fixed orbits, quantum physics maps them this way:

[Thanks to image creator Blake Stacey, who describes this image as 'How quantum mechanics sees a hydrogen atom: one electron "inhabiting" the space around one proton.']

Now, let’s think of words as flags for marking a point of observation. So, for example, let’s say I assign the word “dog” to a certain animal I’ve observed. I’ve planted a flag, from inner cognitive space into physical space. Primary to this act: I have a relationship to that flag. I have feelings about that flag, because of the initial observation I made. Think of the red proton in the image as that flag, a symbol planted in the physical world. Now, everything around that, the electron cloud of probable location points, indicates all the further observations that I make  about the world that have some level of similarity to where I stuck my flag to begin with; the closer in, the more similarity, the farther out the lesser. Note that the electron and the proton do not share space; neither does my word “dog” inhabit any physical space. But the observation points cluster around the central point.

These observational clouds can (and do) overlap with clouds belonging to other flags. [Please keep in mind I've used the hydrogen atom image as a fun comparison; not all of this model of seeing 'categories' necessarily applies to the behavior of atoms!].

Now, instead of defining things according to whether they sit on this side of the border or that, we can define them according to their relationship to an abstract center we have created. Keep in mind that our flag doesn’t actually exist in the physical world; it models actual things we can observe, but doesn’t replace them.

Each person experiences flags differently; by their very nature, they must have a different relationship to this or that flag (you love dogs; I don’t – you grew up with dogs; I didn’t) that fundamentally orients how we think about all beings and observations that cluster ever more closely around that flag.

Nothing in this universe comes in neat little boxes; or at least, to believe so will only bring you a lot of grief. A flexible and relationship-to-a-center oriented way of organizing your perceptual world will increase your clarity of mind and cut out a lot of pointless arguments. Give it a shot!

Much like with Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication method, and with e-prime/primitive (of which I see this as an inextricable part), you may best spend your time translating others’ speech into this model, rather than explaining to them why “ur doin it rong”. I find that thinking and speaking in this way consciously will iron out fuzzy conversations without having to explain anything to anyone about electron clouds and center-focused categories.

But first, some clarification. Why should anyone care what I personally look for? And why do I look for it?

If you’ve read my blog over the past year, you’ll know I came to the indie role-playing game scene via my interest in teaching storytelling skills (and what the hell: improving my own too). Jason Godesky, designer of the (in beta playtest) Fifth World game pointed out to me the possibilities of ritual re-enactment, and resuscitating our ability to maintain healthy oral/spoken traditions.

This priority created a kind of play so consistently in one corner of the field of activity that one could call “role-playing”, that I gave it a name to reinforce its single-minded identity: storyjamming.

Now, a kind of play with such single-minded focus needs game design that supports that focus. The fact that I consistently play with storyjammers with no or little role-playing game experience (aka newbies) narrows that focus even more.

I see this as a place of super-high growth: people, who have never heard of role-playing or story gaming (or storyjamming, for that matter), discovering this activity, picking up games and jamming story together. I run into a lot of people who find this an exciting idea.

So, I want games for these purposes; easy on newbies, and supporting the specific kind of activity I call storyjamming. My friend Jake Richmond tossed out the possible term “art games” to point to a certain subset of indie games which I think excellently support storyjamming.

I propose that “art games” with the needed design will incorporate:

1. To really sum up, just “Judge your Design by what you’ve left out”. That incorporates pretty much everything else. But if you need more details, this incorporates the following aims -

A. “Just enough rules” in the “Keep It Simple, Stupid”  spirit. Sleek, elegant, spare.

B. “Bite-sized pieces” of rules, delivered one at a time according to an intentional pedagogy, so that players can play an enjoyable game at every stage of learning (small-chunk modularity spins off of this too, I think). Even if you’ve designed a ridiculously complex game, never let them know!

C. “Show, Don’t Tell” using evocative, succinct oracles, setting generators, and actual stories and sequential art that embody the setting. Remember, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’.

Something seriously needs attention here. Why do we assume that to learn a new role-playing game, we must drudge through the learning curve of a new system? I in fact hear players of some role-playing games say “I don’t want to play those indie games – I don’t want to have to learn a new rules system” (though they don’t bat an eye at learning to play new video games or card games).

This to me indicates that too little focus in indie role-playing game design has gone in to the pedagogy of play; meaning, how can we make sure players enjoy every step of learning the rules? How can we give them such bite-sized pieces that they never notice the medicine going down? Once they’ve mastered one rule, we go on to the next, and the next, and the next…

In fact, Evan Gardner’s language fluency game ‘Where Are Your Keys?’ works exactly like this; I think any highly player-friendly game works like this.

For some games, learning the complex rules counts as the price of admission. This makes sense in the right contexts.

But for story games, where we want to remove barriers to play, where we want them accessible by more kind of players in greater amounts, where we want to tell stories and storyjam with all kinds of folks who haven’t experienced it before – as indie game designers aiming for this new crowd, we need to start learning the pedagogy of play.

Oftentimes the gaming convention ‘demo rules’ version of story games makes them much more accessible and easy to play (above and beyond the fact that personal interaction makes them much more easily learnt). Problematically, I’ve bought games that I’ve played at a convention, gone home excited, and then couldn’t figure the rules out. So I see a need for an intentional step-by-step design to get a person from holding the game in their hands, to playing a fully complex version of the game.

I think most role-playing games, as a culture, have some very old and hard-to-shake traditions.  One has to do with designing according to what you put in (think traditional RPGs, with pages of charts, facts, magic items, abilities, setting, etc.), even though what you leave out makes an equally large impact. Designers have known this for a long time, and use it as a primary principle. What you leave out gives room for what you put in to breathe, to draw the mind and eye of your reader to what matters. I have noticed a very few indie game designers exploring this territory, not just graphically, but textually. That excites me; I want more!

Another traditional problem: role-playing game texts ‘tell’, instead of ‘showing’. Switching the balance around, by ‘showing’ more often than ‘telling‘, would make RPG texts far more easy to absorb and enjoy (god forbid) for many people, including myself.

Imagine, you have two options to absorb the proposed setting for an RPG. You can thoroughly explore it in the form of a novel (or graphic novel), or you can ‘learn’ it in the form of a history textbook.

Which do role-playing game designers most often choose?

Funny enough, many new RPGs, based on novels or comics (a ‘show’ medium if ever I saw one), immediately start ‘telling’, as if nothing could make more sense than to go from an enjoyable story that makes you want to inhabit its characters, to a history text about those characters that you must slog through and retain. Now, I think this has started to change (I just looked at the Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game, and it  does seem really promising!), but the pattern exists: “Oh,  you want  a role-playing game? That means stripping out the story and replacing it with lists of factoids and history”.

Now, many traditional RPG readers do absorb setting this way, and enjoyably so. I know some of these folks. We just need to expand the design values to include more of the rest of us. I sometimes hear that indie game designers want to pull in ‘non-role-players’ into the world of role-playing. Well, here lies one method: make  your books absorbable by a wider community of people.

I’ve learned the hard way that most newbie folks that I want to storyjam with me really cannot handle that many impediments to play itself; they don’t want to stop to have setting ‘told’ to them, they don’t want to look through lists and charts, they just want to play ASAP. If playing ever starts feeling like working, I immediately start losing them.

So, I propose that instead of creeping farther in the direction of including these kinds of people, we plant a flag in the place where design must end up to serve these folks. Rather than slowly shaving away traditional elements, or making RPG texts less text-like, we just jump over to that new spot and start designing the (at first) shockingly different games that those folks need.

I think Nordic role-playing game poems, though not exactly what I mean here in terms of visual presentation, do tend to ‘shock’ traditional and indie game players and designers in the way that I want. They often question whether or not we can even call them Role-playing Games. But I see this as a good sign; if you’ve designed something that makes  you wonder that, then boy do I have an ever growing group of players that want to play your game.

“Just then a high mournful sound broke in upon Stephen’s dream — a slow sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair was singing.

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if the song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in rapture at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Stephen began to dream again. This time he dreamt that the hills walked and the sky wept. Trees came and spoke to him and told him their secrets and also whether or not he might regard them as friends or enemies. Important destinies were hidden inside pebbles and crumpled leaves. He dreamt that everything in the world — stones and rivers, leaves and fire, had a purpose it was determined to carry out with the utmost rigor, but he also understood that it was sometimes possible to persuade things to a different purpose.”

…Fairies do not make a strong distinction between the animate and inanimate. They believe that stones, doors, trees, fire, clouds, and so forth all have souls and all are either masculine or feminine.”

I think, for far too long, buyers, creators, and players of RPGs determine the buying value of a particular game dependent on how much text it has, and the complexity of its rules.

I think this has continued even into the indie renaissance, even with games that have dead simple rules, still padding them with distracting and eventually confusing explanations, side chatter, setting descriptions.

I think a possible next step for indie games awaits the adventurous indie designer in making games that look as dead simple, elegant, and beautiful as a well-made children’s picture book or graphic novel. Think Frank Miller’s 300, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

My friend Jana, a graphic designer, tells me design blossoms from what you leave out, not what you put in. Bruce Lee says the same thing about martial arts, by the way.

So why do I see even my favorite indie games with gobs and gobs of background and text that nobody but the evangelist for the game will read?

Instead of pages and pages of setting, provided a streamlined setting oracle.

Instead of descriptions of character possibilities and worldbuilding, provide awe-inspiring portraits and landscape panoramas.

Instead of trying to teach someone how to play with the book, know that people only really learn role-playing games face-to-face, and let the book support that kind of learning.

I of course see some designers experimenting with this already; Nordic RPG poems in a sense may already have the tiger by the tail for some of this ethic – Jonathan Walton’s Murderland contest produced a whole bunch of awesome possibilities for exploring this territory – Matthijs Holter’s Archipelago works this angle really well Judd Karlman’s Dictionary of MU rocks this idea – Vincent’s IAWA design seems within the realm of this kind of thinking too. For just rules simplicity, check out Creative Advantage’s Juicers deck.

To sum: rather than ensuring value by the thickness of the book, or the amount of text, ensure value by making it beautiful and elegant. If people will slap down $15-$25 on a short children’s picture book or graphic novel, potential players will do that for your indie game, believe me, if you design it beautifully enough.

In other words, my priorities have begun to change, but we haven’t wrung out all of this blog’s potential just yet.

If you would like to pony up legal tender to have me personally speak to your chosen audience about the many ideas and issues here, please contact me, mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com.  I continue to explore this path of rewilding our language, bodies, relationships, and Land, and wish you the best of luck in doing the same.

Long Live the Rewilding Renaissance, and may it continue to flower amongst your Family and Land!

I just realized that I have abused Robin Dunbar’s intriguing model of how humans maintain social groups.

Not only me, but many others have ‘dumbed down’ Dunbar’s idea that the mean maximum for functioning human social groupings hovers around 150 persons (precisely 148, with a 95% confidence interval of 100-230).

What does this have to do with the College of Mythic Cartography? Hell, I don’t know. I mean, it has everything do with it. Ask me some other time. Let me get the issue down on electronic paper first.

Most folks hear this notion, and think one of several things (non-inclusively):

1) I can only have 150 human relationships

2) I can only have 100-230 human relationships

3) I can only have a mean maximum of 150 meaningful human relationships

4) Only 150 of my Myspace friends count

5) Companies should number no larger than 150 employees

6) Ideally sized Towns have 150 people in them, or neighborhoods of 150 people.

And the drivel goes on, with the magic number ’150′ tossed around like a new-age talking stick. If you say someting, and include the number 150, you’ve said something profound.

All of this misses an important secondary assertion that Dunbar makes. Namely, that it takes substantial work to maintain a social network.

Dunbar’s number only refers to a tightly cohesive human social network, capable of efficient (and life-affirming!) collaboration. Villages, military units, highly focused groups that emerge in the presence of intense environmental or economic pressures. Each of those possible 150 relationships that Dunbar refers to operate at a high-functioning level that many folks in our culture have never experienced beyond a very small group of friends or family. For some, only a family member or two, and a couple of friends, have relationships with them that fit the profile.

Dunbar estimates that to maintain the (mean) 150 high-functioning relationships, intrinsic to original and indigenous human cultures (village and cultural lineage groups), one must spend 42% of one’s time ‘social grooming’. This almost requires a certain level of constant physical proximity. The smaller the group you maintain, the smaller the portion of your time dedicated to maintenance (but also the less benefit you receive). A social network of 10 would not require 42% of your time spent in strengthening intimate social connections.

He coins ‘social grooming’ from the behavior of primates who spend time bonding through grooming behaviors. This should give you some idea of the nature of the work involved in maintaining a high-functioning relationship, rather than an acquaintanceship. ‘Social grooming’ doesn’t mean ‘spending time with’, it means creating and strengthening intimacy.

Think about this.

The fact that ancestral villages and cultural groups could get to, and maintain, a group of 150 tightly-knit individuals that stayed in relative physical proximity, constitutes an amazing achievement and a testament to the power of those traditional cultures.

This implies that most modern humans rarely experience these relationships on any significant network level. How much time do we spend bonding with others in a meaningful way?

And once we’ve started these bonded relationships (childhood and school friends, family, etc.), we can still lose those connections as the years pass, too, when we don’t know the value in them, and don’t maintain them.

Perhaps what has destroyed the landscape of modern american families, friendships, and workplaces, amounts to the problem that we have huge networks of acquaintances, but precious few fully human relationships.

Not families, but regularly interacting acquaintances.

Not friendships, but folks who ‘share interests’ and ‘know each other’.

I don’t say this to pronounce dire and certain doom on our lives. I say this to so that we can go, “HEY! LOOK! A thing! A thing that matters.”

When your Grandma (if you luckily had one like this) said, “Family comes first – family matters most,” you may not have known the profound human survival wisdom embedded in that statement. When she, or any other relative or friend, pestered you to attend that party, or that event, that you passed up because it seemed such a waste of time, now you know you (and your children, and your family) have paid for that in the wages of depression, exhaustion, isolation, disconnectedness.

So hey. Let’s get together more often. And when we do, let’s play some games, sing some songs, and take some risks to do some stuff that actually brings us closer. And lets build up our little groups, and count our wealth one by one, in each deep and fully human relationship.

Because it matters. It really, really matters.

Update in November 2008:

I picked this article up to read it again, and I feel I didn’t “step” on the point I wanted to make strongly enough, a point still important today.

Most workplaces or groups that obsess with this “150″ number, do so thinking that their adherence to it (or lack thereof) will have an impact. It won’t.

It won’t have any effect at all, unless that group dedicates 42% of their time (and imagine a business or corporation doing this!) to SOCIAL GROOMING, quite literally the modern human version of relaxedly picking nits out of each other’s hair. This means 42% of their time spent playing icebreaker games, giving hugs, talking about their children, massaging each other, etc.

Dunbar’s number doesn’t mean squat without the social grooming aspect; humans can have countless acquaintanceships (although, sure, you will hit a ceiling even with those), certainly more than 150. No problem.

The number 150 indicates an achievement, something you’ve earned, because you have fully invested that 42% of your time to make this HUGE group of intimates and extended family possible, a group that can then move forward to accomplish amazing collaborative team goals together, because of your investment.

And, no matter how hard you work socially grooming the people in your network, beyond 150 people your ability to keep up with further additions to your intimate network drops. Either because of psychological capacity, or the simple logistics of grooming that many folks, maintaing an intimately connected group bigger than 150 becomes more and more difficult until it becomes impossible altogether. New additions remain that which, in the modern world, we see as “normal” relationships – they become acquaintances. Not “things”, or “its”, but just acquaintances.

Statistically speaking.

in Eugene, OR

Friday Nov. 21 7 – 9 pm, and Saturday Nov. 22, 2008 9 am – 3 pm

Facilitator: Linda Neale, LMFT, LPC from Portland, OR

assisted by Willem Larsen & Toni Timmers

Location TBA

Dreams are a call to reality and to living life courageously. Dreams never lie. Called “the royal road to the unconscious” by Freud, some dreams prepare, announce or even warn about certain situations, often long before they actually happen. As Carl Jung said, “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather the breath of nature.” You will learn the dream interview method, enabling people to interpret their own dreams, in a safe and secure setting.

This workshop is limited to ten people, in order to give enough time to learn this form of dream interpretation, and to allow participants to discuss at least one dream each in a group setting.
Cost: $75
To enroll: Email timmerst@lanecc.org if you are interested in participating and send in your registration below. If you have questions, you can call Linda at 503-452-4431.

Text: The text for this class is All About Dreams by Gayle Delaney, although other books will be used as well. This book can be purchased at most local bookstores or through Amazon.com. Please buy or borrow this book before the workshop.

Facilitator: Linda Neale is a licensed marriage and family therapist, author, ceremonialist, and the founder of Earth & Spirit Council. She has led dream groups for eighteen years, and is the author of The Power of Ceremony, a book on the role of ceremony in modern culture.

Download registration form.

I’ve always wanted to do more with the College of Mythic Cartography, ever since I had the vision of a jar of seed that would inspire a flowering of storytelling and cultural roundtables of folks bringing back the “ancient fresh ways” that marked our (for most of us) distant ancestors as wise sustaining villages, bands, and peoples.

I’ve already received much help from friends and contributers, and for that I thank you.

I believe strongly in the power of Open Source, collaboration and open access to ideas, experiments, and lessons learned.

Lately I’ve struggled with bringing the kind of attention and resources to the College that it needs to fully do this work. I know it needs more donations then I have so far received to keep it going, though honestly it doesn’t require much. And I can’t bring myself to “charge” for this cherished jar of seeds. That doesn’t seem in sync with the spirit of the College at all.

I truly believe that all of us stand in the first tremors of a great Rewilding Renaissance, and I dearly want to do my part and keep helping in the way that I know how. I also want to make sure that I create content that actually serves the needs and interests of supporters.

In that vein, I’ve recently come across a funding strategy that I plan to start experimenting with, using a website called Fundable.com. I think many small donations can make this whole endeavor fly, and I want to make sure that everything I create here actually has an audience that has declared their interest and expectation.

In Fundable’s words:

What is Fundable.com?

Fundable.com lets groups of people pool funds to raise money.

Each project has a description of how much money needs to be collected and what it will do. Once enough pledges (not payments) have been collected, Fundable turns them into real payments and sends the total to the project’s organizer.

No one takes a risk when making a pledge: if a collection expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges and never charges money. This lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. No one pays until and unless everyone else makes a pledge.

I’ll post a series of podcasts that I’d like to do, with a fundraising goal on each. We’ll start with this:

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Please donate to making this podcast possible. 

Sobonfu is a member of the Dagara tribe, Burkina Faso, Africa. Recognized by the elders as possessing special gifts, her destiny was foretold before her birth. She is an eloquent, profound speaker.

I strongly encourage all of you to attend Sobonfu’s talk. There are a great many parallels between her culture’s traditions and those of the native people of North America. Her book, “The Spirit of Intimacy,” is a best seller, and she leads workshops on spirituality, ritual, grieving and intimacy.

“My work is really a journey in self discovery and of building community through rituals,” she says.

Teachers and ambassadors from sustaining cultures, like Sobonfu Some, have the ability to remind us what it means to discover our own village nature again. I personally think Sobonfu has key insights that will help heal the wounds of cultural poverty that many of us possess. Bring your friends, attend as a community. You’ll feel glad you did.

COMC PODCASTS

I’ve also noticed the most popular podcast, “Rewilding Adulthood”, received twice as many downloads as the second  most popular. Ninety-five downloads and counting! I feel honored to have a readership with such mature interests (insert smiley emoticon here).

I interview Diana Larsen, of FutureWorks Consulting,  a world-class facilitator in teamwork and social technologies (and coincidentally, my mother). Together we explore the world of “holding space”.

Chapter Ten: The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu, page 217

We could describe the interaction of Skaay and Xhyuu as nothing more than banter – simply a way of passing the time and making a couple of bucks from a gullible anthropologist young enough to be the older poet’s grandson and the headman’s youngest son or nephew. That description is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. In the impromptu mythtelling contest staged by Skaay and Xhyuu there is a structure – just the sort of structure that often seems to spring up out of nothing when skilled musicians jam. Skaay and Xhyuu are telling jokes and spinning yarns, but that is not quite all; they are also working within a tradition as demanding in its way as the Virginia reel, the minuet, the ballad, or the twelve-bar blues.

In Scotland, such a contest between poets is known as a flyting. But the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu is different in character from the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy or other familiar Celtic examples. Classical Haida mythtellers don’t  inflate their pride or anger artificially, nor do they confess even their subtler emotions directly; they speak through characters and events, the way musicians speak through notes, motifs and chords, and painters peak through colors, shapes, and lines….

…Just as the classical Haida poets avoid portraying or praising themselves directly, so they avoid the directly abusive language often found in Scottish flytings. Skaay and Xhyuu are survivors, not combatants: two old refugees from death who have somehow not forgotten how to laugh.

Myth is a language made of timeless, not of momentary forms. The themes of the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu are not concocted for this occasion; they are original in a different sense. They are thousand- or ten-thousand-year-old stories put to current use; they renew the present world by rehearsing what is known of how that world came to be.

[bold emphasis added by me]

To my Indian Brothers and Sisters, to those who dance the Dance of all Nations, to members of the Dragon Clan, to Coyote’s Camp, to my Two-Spirited Walks Between Relations, to the Longhouses of the Fairies and Witches, and to all who strive to Walk in Beauty……

I humbly greet YOU with the HONOR you deserve and with LOVE and Gratitude in my heart for all you do.

After communicating with Forrest, who now owns Nonnie Camp in Arco, Kimi Jo, Clyde, and Finisia herself and based on the consensus that there should be no lapse in the annual occurrence of Root Festival, I have decided to coordinate the 2009 Root Festival. There will be much happening in and around SE Idaho. Kimi will be keeping camp near the Camas Prairie, while Forest and I will hold the camp in Arco. The festival of 2009 will look and be very different in that Finisia will not be participating. This was her decision and fully supported by those who will be holding the camps. She requested and received good, honest, loving, and heartfelt council from many of you. Asking for this and knowing she needed it was a BIG step for her. She opened her heart and mind to this council, and realized that her nonparticipation at Root Festival will hopefully begin to heal the wounds she caused and carry this Vision and these Teachings into the future, even unto seven generations. Aho

I will be in Arco for the month of June, except for the first week. The flyer announcement states that the Festival will occur from June 13-28. I am putting out a call for those of you who learned and immediately began teaching the Walks in Beauty way to consider in your hearts to come and share your understandings and skills in the nonhierarchical way to do this work and come together for and with a single purpose.

 

 

 

The only way we can do this is to give-back what has been given to us for the sake of our Mother. This year will be more focused and ceremonial than in the past, and therefore less of a Nonni camp. All of this will create safety and trust. This is the year we will kick it up to the next level. If this resonates with you PLEASE consider coming to support the direction that Spirit is taking this thing. (YES WE CAN!)

I LOVE you so
You help me see.
See YOU in Awe (all)
See You in Me
For I’m in You
And You’re in Me.
Yes, I’m in You
And You’re in Me.

Your Brother-Sister,
Spider

Email or call
(707) 869-1612

I’ll admit, mostly when we Dream, we sit in the lap of an Elder of the Original Language, and learn how to speak by listening. We don’t do much speaking then.

For my part, I don’t have much interest in “lucid dreaming” the kind that the waking self conspires to interrupt one’s dreams with. When it happens naturally, great…but do we understand our Dream language-world so well that we can interrupt the story halfway through and start mucking up the scenery?

We consume movie after movie, television shows, books, comics, thinking we feed our conscious sensibilities, never realizing fully that to do so actually constitutes a conversation with our dreaming self, far more fluent in the language of story-dream-myth-riddle.

Information to our Waking minds, Transformation to our Dream-selves.  Yes, that puts my experience of it well; the Original Language speaks a tongue of Transformation, while modern languages speak a tongue of Information. Modern languages and thoughts grind…Original Language and thoughts weave spells, poetry, story, music.

We have many tools before us, to work on our fluency in the Original Language. Storyjamming, Riddling, Dream Interviews, the Thanksgiving Address, the Sensory Tune-up (to create a fluent, rich depth of rewilding sensory diction upon whose new vocabulary your Dream language can flourish).

Of course, we can also study indigenous and signed languages to gain fresh insight into how others have done it.

But really, the Original Language came before all language, and from its depths all language emerged. Everyone’s; from the smallest ant who screams terror with a cloud of pungent pheromone-speak, to the tallest Mountain whose wrinkles and weather mutter constantly, to the humble Human’s chattering mouth and gesturing hands.

We don’t need to learn all these specific languages (though their speakers will certainly appreciate it if we do), as long as we learn the Original Language, we can converse with anyone.

Sometimes, if the game doesn’t truly satisfy, one of the players questions the quality of play, the general mood that the game creates. Maybe someone even successfully changes part of a rule a little bit, creating a “house rule” to (however imperfectly) address the problem. This road of “changing the game from within” often remains fraught with heartache and wasted effort.

Even more rarely, one of the players does something that creates real and powerful transformation, by simply choosing to play a different game.

How do we judge the play of our game, the life our culture creates? I believe we use exactly that measure: does our culture affirm life, and to what extent? Some would propose judging new rules based on whether they seem “Right” or “Wrong”. Unfortunately this usually means we’ve judged the rules of our game, by the rules of our game. An impossible situation (and does this perhaps explain the notions of “sustainable growth” and “voting for the lesser of two evils”?).

As time goes on, we understand that the measure “does it affirm Life?” biases us towards affirming other-than-human life first, because without clean air, clean water, and rich wildlands, we cannot live. Our Land comes first.

So how do we create a new game to play together? How do we pick the rules?

Well, exactly.

Fortunately, we have many games still in play, whose players quite enjoy themselves, and that have affirmed and nurtured life and land for millenia. So we have a place to start.

And now we can sniff around the world, asking these questions; if we play the game of language together, what rules will create play that affirms Life? The game of Marriage (or lack thereof)? The game of Ownership? The game of Family? Growing food?

At any time we can choose to play another game. I won’t claim that you will never have interference from others who despise the game you’ve chosen to play (and see it as overlapping into the space of their game, perhaps like a soccer game and a baseball game who have reserved the same field unwittingly).

I won’t even claim that leaving the old game will feel easy, in fact it will probably feel like you failed at it, rather than having left it as a sober and conscious adult choosing Life over Death.

But the game will never change until the players choose another. It will never change until we stop pretending that the rules of our games have innate justification. It will never change until we redream what it means to play games together, and to live lives worth living.

One time I decided to play one of the data-bearing audio-cassettes on an audio tape player. As soon as I pressed play, an amusing but simultaneously distressingly unpleasant grinding, banging, bleeping sound came out of the speakers, as if an electronic kitchen full of pots and pans had just rolled down a hill. Years later, while using modems, I realized they made the same sound when connecting to the internet.

This to me, puts the contrast well; Original Language, the language of immersive body experiences, of dream reason (sometimes called metaphor), sounds to the rest of the community of life like an audio cassette (with music on it) in an audio player. The music it plays determines their reaction; predatory, aggressive music will have certain effects, soothing melodic music otherwise. But putting in the data-cassette will always produce the cacophony of assaultive machine sounds, however sublimely ordered and sensibly coded, causing other-than-humans to flatten their ears against their skulls unpleasantly.

Certainly a coyote howling will speak to a deer that a radically different mind prowls somewhere out there; humans need not feel guilty for speaking like humans to each other, however much it offends other animals. We only need think about this issue in two cases:

One, when we want to speak to other-than-humans.

Two, when human language, as we experience it, has wandered down roads so toxic, polluted, and domesticated, that we no longer know what it means to speak a truly human language.

I believe both of these cases have come to front and center now. Both of them require us to stand up and pay attention. Our continued participation in the living world demands it of us.

We must return to the Original Language, bring our waking selves to a fluency in it, so that we can rebirth our ability to speak sanely, as adults who live in a community of life. So that we can join the Rewilding Renaissance, a rebirthing of belonging and meaning.

Perhaps “meaning” really signifies “belonging”. Perhaps the modern narcissistic quest for “meaning” really indicates a quest for “belonging”. Well, we didn’t come from anywhere else, regardless of what civilized myths tell us. If we want to have a relationship of belonging to our Land (before we not only cease to belong, but cease to fit into whatever habitat remains), we must choose it.

As children of the Original Dreaming Land, we always belonged. As abused children of civilization, we have tested the bonds of family to the limit.

They haven’t broken.

Yet.

These two things taken together suggest to me that posting some first draft excerpts would help new readers understand more fully the ideas and aims of the  College.

I can’t promise to begin exactly at the beginning; but I’ll certainly start somewhere near the Center and work outwards.

Richard Dawkin’s book, “the Selfish Gene”, made the (supposedly) provocative proposition that genes use us as vehicles for their perpetuation. They live their lives through us, and the chemical code of their nature lives beyond us, underscoring the essentially mechanical processes of life.

A traditional faithkeeper of the Tzutujil Maya tells the story that the Gods speak Poetry, which creates all life. That you embody the eloquence of a God’s language, along with all other beings. Saying the complex poetry of your name creates you; if the gods didn’t speak, and speak beautifully, you wouldn’t live.

Two storytellers telling essentially the same story; for one, it proves his point that the world has no meaning. For the other it fills the world with abundant, singing depths.

This has caused me to remember that the “adults” of the modern culture (its top intellectuals, no less!) resemble nothing as much as a coexisting community of abused children. For the abused, no amount of discussion or reason suffices to fill the gaping maws of their rapacious intellects (the pacman-like chomping of which purposes to excuse rather than resolve the ongoing weight of their petrified hearts).

Every year I renew my resolve to save my breath for those wanting to dream a new language together. Every year this sinks down to a deeper level, and changes in emotional texture; unfortunately this year (or perhaps quite healthfully so – I don’t really need to label it one way or the other I suppose) it feels and sounds like a healthy dollop of scorn for those who think the world belongs to them, rather than seeing that they belong to the world.

Some things I no longer offer up for debate; who belongs to whom stands as one of them. Humans don’t decide what has meaning; rather, the Land decides what Humans mean.

Harumph!

In fact, he makes the case that myths never enter this world as a communal expression, but rather as an expression of an individual voice. An excerpt:

Swanton’s hope, as he has told us, was to transcribe every story, or every mythic episode, told in Haida Gwaii. but you can no more record all the stories in a mythology than you can write down all the sentences in a language. A mythology is not a fixed body of stories; it is an open set. It is a narrative ecology: a watershed, a forest, a community of stories that are born and die and breed with one another and with stories from outside.

What a brilliant little summation; if you think of your dreaming life, writing down all the myths of a culture essentially means writing down all the dreams ever dreamed by a people. A neverending task! Your dreams speak your personal native tongue in the same sense that your culture’s myths provide a communal mythic tongue. Your dream language creates stories, much like your myth language does. And both feed into and aliven each other. The term “animism” seeks to make such “aliveness” and relevance to the present moment more clear; dogma means the death of aliveness. In our culture, we define religions as possessing dogma. Mythologies (as natively stewarded) have no dogma, only a language that they provide to tell stories in, refreshed by the community of dreamers. Anthropologists tend to turn mythologies into dogmas, and thus you have books that purport to tell all the stories of Norse, Hindu, or Greek “mythologies”. But only a dogma could offer such a finite set of story; a true mythology never stops speaking. More good stuff:

The mythteller’s calling differs little from the scientist’s. It is to elucidate the structure and the workings of the world. Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world (whereas novels, for example, more often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone). A genuine mythology is a systematically elaborated, extended, interconnected and adaptable set of myths. It is a kind of science in narrative from.

Science too is an ecology of ideas. Science, in fact, is a kind of mythology in computational form. Where science is in fashion and mythology is not, it is widely claimed that science is “true” and mythology is “false.” This claim proves, on close inspection, less a theorem in science’s defense than a partisan slogan. Both science and mythology aspire to be true, and both for that reason are perpetually under revision for as long as they are alive. Both lapse into dogma when these revisions stop. Where they are healthy, both mythology and science are as faithful to the real as their practitioners can make them, though it seems to be an axiom that neither ever perfectly succeeds.

Any persistent reader of the College of Mythic Cartography will know how close this lands to my heart; this resonant understanding of both science and myth by the author really surprises me. I would only clarify that whether or not Science aspires to “truth”, I would say more accurately that Mythology aspires to talk about the world in a useful way, to reflect it so that we can interact with it in a more effective way. It inextricably weaves both waking and dreaming reason together into a seamless tapestry of useful story, that affirms and increases life.

The Terrible Truth About Truth, Dr. Terry Halwes (a wonderful article that further explores the futility of looking for “truth” or “facts” of the natural world)

the Heroic Present, Jan Yoors
Language, Thought, and Reality, Benjamin Lee Whorf

Tom Brown Jr.’s Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking (contains the Wisdom of the Marks tracking excercise)

Relevant Articles:

Animism, Native Language, and Quantum Linguistics

A World of Shape and Movement

The Silent Realm

The Mouth Speaks, The Mind Boggles

“The Ones Who Are Dream And Land Together.”

Glimpses of the Animist Language-World

Benjamin Lee Whorf

No Word for Time, Evan T Pritchard (for discussion on Micmac culture and language)

The Balance Point, Julie Cramer (“Where the Profound and the Practical Meet”, a whole-life organizing and balance resource)

Getting Things Done, David Allen

“PLAY UNSAFE”, by Graham Walmsley

Related articles:

Open Space Technology as Culture, Tradition, Identity

The Power of “Yes, and…!” (blogpost)

Which reminds me of…this…

“Language, Thought, and Reality” by Benjamin Lee Whorf

Related articles:

The Dreamtime, MythicSpace, and ‘the Time Before History’

Storyjamming: the Podcast

The Elements of Storyjamming

Storyjamming with Free Indie Story-games

Holding Space, Standing Like A Tree

Standing at SHIFT

Listen to me interview Lisa Wells, instructor of theater, creative writing, and wilderness skills, author of Cedar Rapids: the Coming Derrick Dean, and poet-about-town.

In the interview she talks about the fascinating connection between prayer, theater, intuition, nature awareness, storytelling, and that ineffable creative energy that we sometimes call “shamanistic” or “mystical”.

I apologize in advance for a bit near the beginning where the microphone seems to go on a walkabout – I hope you can still catch what we say, as it addresses a worthwhile issue. Also, I mention the word “Duende” as meaning “wind” in Spanish. It doesn’t.

Get out of your head, and into your body, courtesy of Lisa Wells.

(see the original post here, with comments)

But first, to sum up: I believe strongly that indigenous languages prioritize observation of action/behavior, skillfull mimicry, and the illumination of relationships and roles. This stands in stark opposition to modern languages that possess the verb “to be”,  languages which purpose to fit the world into static categories (“he is a carpenter”), distract/disconnect actors from consequences (“mistakes were made”), and prioritize abstract value judgements (“that’s evil”) over concrete observations (“I feel scared when I see that”).

Both ASL and Navajo (along with all the other Athabaskan languages of North America) use a system of classifiers that purpose to communicate the shape and texture of objects, and thus the behavior of the object in space.

Navajo speakers modify the verbs (for example, “to give”) they use, according to the following list of shape/behaviors (thank you Wikipedia):

[it tickles my funny bone when I see that ice cream, mud, and drunks all fall into the same category]

ASL does the same! When referring to a subject after the signer has signified it as the topic, the signer uses stand-in classifiers, like pronouns, according to the subjects shape/behavior, to modify the signed verb. You can see that a signer uses, non-inclusively (please follow the link for what the classifiers actually look like):

1 Cl for single individuals walking or standing, a pencil lying on its side…

2 Cl for two people walking or standing, one person sitting or standing, a snake tongue…

3 Cl for vehicles, or three people walking or standing…

4 Cl for four people walking or standing, stripes, a fence, bars, teeth bared, bangs, whiskers…

5 Cl same as 4 Cl, plus five people standing,  falling leaves…

A Cl for stationary objects, such as statues, bottles on the shelf, objects on a table…

B Cl for surfaces, walls, floors, roads, shelves, clothing, flat objects

And so on, for eight more classifiers that delineate shape and motion.  Do you see the incredible similarity between the two languages? If anything, it looks like the Athabaskan languages evolved to accomodate all the wonderful information communicated by a primary, signed language. In any case, signed languages like ASL demonstrate the remarkable power of illuminated relationships, roles, form, and behavior, when communicating. Imagine what kind of poetry you could create, if you related to the world in this way! Imagine the kind of poetry that native ASL speakers create right now, because of the strength and beauty of their language, and I think you can understand the profound pride and identity possessed by the Deaf community.

I hesitate to call such action by its much more recognizable name: Violence.

My dictionary defines violence as “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill”. When I box with my friends, during our SHIFT workouts, we hurt each other often. Joyfully so! At the end, we feel invigorated, relaxed, a bit of communion, and have acquired a few new aches and sensitive spots on our bodies.

From my past experience practicing and learning the traditions behind Aikido, I  have long pondered the concept of “the life giving sword”: a sword only drawn when needed, and used in accord with the furtherance and affirmation of the community of life. I may die, the other may die, but whatever the moment dictates, it results in a benefit to my family, village, and land.

I add this to what my naturopath tells me: that activities that increase testosterone levels in men (boxing, for one), increase their cardiovascular protection, bone density, and overall health balance.

I stand strongly in my center, in the place where I practice martial skills for protection, health, and the benefit of all life in my community.

Yet recently, while daydreaming at the 2008 World Open Space on Open Space in San Francisco, something struck me: what if one of my fellow SHIFTers and I had a session on boxing, somewhere in a suitable distant corner, and knocked some sense into each other for a period of time? How would the other participants react?

Certainly Open Space allows for all kinds of activity, music, dance, conversation, games. But how would the community react to boxing?

I ask this in part because we finished the entire event, inspired by one participant who broke into a song, by singing of peace and holding hands in a circle.

This both accords with my deep values, and also causes me to pause and wonder if I understand peace differently than the rest of my community in that particular Open Space.

As a youth, I proudly inherited a philosophy of pacifism from both of my parents. On the playground, and in the neighborhood, I knew where I stood on “violence”. This resulted in many, many mixed experiences. Recently my mother and I had a conversation on how we had revised our perceptions of peaceful action; it now included protection! And I see it in a far more textured, nuanced way.

I’ve also talked to her about its power as something to affirm one’s own health, and the health of the partner. That the…

Oh. So, in a grounding note, a few minutes ago, at about an hour before midnight here, I heard gunfire on the street corner – a couple of folks just shot someone to death. Screams, running feet, and calls of “they shot Snake and his bros – y’all shot the wrong guys! y’all shot the wrong guys!” echoed down the street.

I don’t know why, but gunfire and my cross-streets seem to go together like bacon and eggs.

When this happens the police cruisers like to park in front of my house, and coruscate their lighting arrays while quietly chattering on the radio.

As the cruiser continues to warm its engine a couple feet from the baby fig tree in my front yard, I realize that I’ve lost interest on writing about violence tonight. I hope Snake, or the one of his brothers that died, receives the grief he needs to build his raft of tears and ride the night swells to the next place for him.

And, though I heard a lot of shots, with some luck only one of their families will need to face the difficult task of providing such tears for them. From the chatter and panicked gossip outside, I think only one young man died tonight, on this particular street corner.

Whoever comes are the right people

Whatever happens, is the only thing that could have

When it starts, it starts

When it ends, it ends

And one Law, the Law of Two Feet:

If you are neither learning nor contributing where you’re at, use your two feet to move somewhere where you can.

And an assortment of other understandings:

Be prepared to be surprised

Open Space works on passion, and responsibility

More on all this later.

My first thoughts coming out of this particular event involve the notion that ironically, “Open Space” does not describe an event at all! Rather, “Open Space” describes a culture of people who act and think in accord with its guiding principles, law, and understandings. In particular, Chris, Caitlin, Aine, and Finn’s description of how they unschool (or lifelearning, as they term it) as a family using the culture of Open Space, really opened my eyes to the possibilities. Both Chris and Caitlin described how their increasing understanding of the Open Space culture determined their ability to have a satisfying unschooling experience, as a family.

This means that we could say, that with Open Space Gatherings, as events, we take baby steps, opening up temporary spaces where for a short while participants try on this new culture for a while, seeing where it can go, and acquiring ever deeper accord with the cultural understandings that drive it.

Eventually though, if the space we create with Open Space truly vitalizes and nourishes us, at some point we may ask: “why ‘end’ the space?”. Does “Open Space” describe an event, or does it describe an ever-renewing process? What does it look like when entire communities and families act in accord with Open  Space, in this way?

And what does this say then, about the emerging identity of people who live  in accord with this evolving tradition?

And if “Open Space” does not describe an end-point (an event, a place, a static state), since we (as participants and facilitators of the space) perservere in acting in ever deeper accord with the principles and law of Open Space…

How does this differ from “Becoming Traditional”?

I would say it doesn’t differ much at all. In fact, during this Open Space more and more, I feel that deepening one’s accord with the culture of Open Space will naturally bring one to the same ever renewing processes of Rewilding: following one’s own heart and authority, withdrawing consent from institutions and obsolete political systems, acting out from a deep sense of belonging to one’s Land and Family, seeing the profound personhood and participation in Open Space among all the other-than-human members of one’s place: trees and clouds, stones and water, animals and plants. Passion, and Responsibility!

I feel really worn out from this experience, and later may take another, more successful crack at articulating this particular epiphany, but for now it feels good to get this out there. These past few days have really enriched my confidence and understanding of Open Space. We’ll see where it takes me, my Family, my Village, and my Land next!

Some of my questions about dreams are:
If you wake up to an alarm does it ruin the end of the dream? The ones that are interrupted are usually the ones I remember the best. Even the dream we did yesterday was interrupted by an alarm I think.

Well, if you interrupt a dream, you interrupt it! I noticed the shortness of the third Act of your dream, but I didn’t realize that it literally stopped when the alarm went off. Who knows what the rest of the third Act might have told you? Having said that, even a fragment of an image contains valuable stuff, and even moreso almost three full Acts of the dream in question. We do the best with what we get. Other options do exist for helping to recall dreams on waking, besides the interruption of the alarm. We can talk about those if you’d like.

When the dream changes scenes in a major way how do you know if it is a different act or an entirely different story? For example the dream of the fortune teller was preceeded with a dream of wandering in the woods which was preceeded by a steve kane (this guy from high school I have recurring dreams about) dream. I remember them bleeding into eachother without a pause, but they were significantly different. How much do you choose to interpret?

I’ve experienced “separate dreams” which turned out as Acts I, II, and III of a whole arc! The only way to tell involves looking/interviewing each in turn, as best you can.

Then what if all you recall is one particular fact out of what you know was a whole dream but it seems highly charged, like all I remember I was cuddling with Emilee Danielson, who I hate in real life? Is it possible to interpret at all?

Absolutely!  If nothing else, it makes for good practice to even go after the fragments. But I have had great realizations from single images or situations.

What about filling in the gaps when things are fuzzy. Lets say from example, i think the beagle girl had dark hair and glasses and looked like bookstore girl in the urban scout but it’s so faint I could be making it up now that I’m awake. Make it up or leave it out?

Well, I suspect you know more about that girl than you think. Why would your dreamself choose a whole character that it didn’t bother to actually use? In those situations, you can tease it out of yourself, by trying to get a negative reaction from yourself. You or the dream interviewer can do this. For example, you gave me just a description of a brunette girl, no more. What if I had said, “well, brunette like Angelina Jolie, or brunette like Betty Boop, or maybe she had no face at all, totally faceless, just brown hair…?” I bet you’d have an extreme reaction to those. In that way you can clear up from around the edges till you have a good sense of the person/thing/etc.

How important is it to write down the dream in as much detail as possible. If I dream of shoplifting from a store is it worth noting the light quality, that it was muted, the placement of the items that the shampoo was on the right, or what? I tend to think no, especially because i can visulize the scene in my head still, and recall those details if need be. I do think it was important that I went out the backdoor since I mention this later in the dream.

In the end, you know best how much you need to write to recall the dream. As you already experienced, you write the dream down as an anchor for remembering it. But the writing doesn’t remember it – you do! So, write as much as you need to help you reenter the dream when the interview starts.

I hope this helped. Thanks Penny Scout for the questions! And good luck.

Also check out the extensive blogging I’ve done on this topic:

Dreams and Story

Dreams, Aha!’s, and “I think I know what it means”

Dream Interpretation for Anarchists

The Subtle Task of Helping Dreamers

The Dreamtime, MythicSpace, and ‘the Time Before History’

Resources:

Gayle Delaney’s Dream site

Donations from Eric and Robert made this podcast possible. Thanks guys!

Lo and behold, yesterday one of the attendees came up to me and told me that she and her friends had put all that info to work to get their grassroots herbal apothecary off the ground. She said, “We’ve never been so organized before! It’s so simple!”

She seemed really happy and energized about it, and I asked her, if she got a chance, to write up how it went to further boost for this particular team approach to work.

Anyway, it felt really affirming to hear that.  I wish I could blog about this more here, but honestly it seems to work as one of those oral tradition things, person to person (with the aid of a whiteboard!). Maybe I’ll post a video sometime – that might work. Why I didn’t just video the VBC  talk, I have no idea. They asked a zillion fantastic questions, hard, challenging, and aimed right for the throat (in a respectful way!). We even had a couple moments where I had to step up my facilitation skills to deal with energy and behavior that didn’t belong in that space. Good stuff.

But the more I understand my own path of Rewilding, the more I understand a certain process underway in my life.  Namely, in order to abandon old  models of “rightness/wrongness”, and old uses for the models, I need to create newer ones that affirm life.

If every culture has their own Right way (including healthy indigenous ones), it means that when faced with a “wrong” way, you can meet a dialogue like this:

A: “We just don’t do it that way.”

B: “Why not?”

A: “We just don’t. A sensible person doesn’t do that.”

B: “But have you ever tried it?”

A: “No, only a foolish person would.”

Think of a traditional animist’s reaction to someone saying “hey, try treating everything as unliving, dead stuff, devoid of personhood”. They would probably laugh, walk away, scowl, or shake their head at such a proposal.

This indicates unarticulated wisdom; wisdom acquired through immersion in a culture, not through lectures, information, or questioning. It doesn’t need explaining; you can feel it in your bones.

I can imagine it surprising a reader to discover that I support this kind of almost unreflected “wisdom”, but it would only surprise a member of civilization, the sole culture in human history against which its members must defend themselves by deconstructing its fiendish paradoxes, traps, and devil’s bargains.

Traditionally, you could depend on your culture to unthinkingly protect you, to back you up, because time had tested and shaped it.

Only now do we find ourselves the slave labor force for the cultural monster bent on devouring the world.

My point? Abandon the Rights and Wrongs of this culture, walk away from that way of thinking for a goodly while. Use new measures (“does this action affirm life? create more of what I want – stronger family, healthier land?”) with which to evaluate the results of your actions and behaviors.

At some point, you will naturally discover that you don’t articulate these “new ways” anymore, and I guarantee you that your ways will differ from mine. But embrace these, just as you would embrace the unblinking adherence of an indigenous adult to traditions that affirm life. You will naturally find that you have a “Right Way” for you and your people again, without planning or ideology, and without discussion or enforcement.

Importantly, more and more, I see unarticulated wisdom as the most powerful, and long-term surviving, form of culture. If you participate in a discussion about your deeply held values, experiences, or relationships, you may discover that suddenly they seem less real, less important, less alive. You may begin to doubt them.

You may have already heard of the common tradition of  “not discussing sacred things or ceremonies”. This means these things go directly into that realm of protected, powerful, unarticulated cultural forces, that will survive and protect you and your descendants. Articulation with the wrong people, in the wrong environment, can kill this powerful, unarticulated, unintellectualized wisdom. Engaging in a conversation with the colonizer can sound the death knell for a traditional person, whether a new rewilder or one belonging to an animist culture that goes back to the dawn of time.

We live in a bottlenecked time of danger, where we may lose many things, many of us suffer spiritual (once again, I have no better word, still working on it) injury, many cultures and languages will disappear, much rewilding will suffocate or homogenize back into the colonizing power of civilization.

Treat your animist relationships and traditional values as priceless treasure, and sacred things. Perhaps work to someday allow them an unarticulated influence over your life, a silent courtship that provides constant companionship.

For those like myself, foolish enough to articulate the better-left-unsaid, I confess to the danger. Setting aside even that my story may simply not apply to your rewilding in any case, putting out there provides room for critique, the microscope of intellect, the razor of mind.

I’ve adapted to this by no longer “discussing” the reasonableness of my experiences, or relationships. I don’t engage, evangelize, or debate when it comes to the animism side of my rewilding. I’ll tell my Story, but I won’t make time for a critique of it. In this way I do the best I can, because for whatever reason I’ve acquired the passion to wake up as many fellow animists as possible to what they already experience and long for.

Without the corollary, “there is no one right way to live” sounds like more, new-agey, “it’s all good”, “we’re all one” (no, the profound lack of e-prime in those catch phrases did not escape my notice) sentiment.

What happens when you have one group, with a lively and profound sense of their own “right way” (tested by time and partnership with their land and each other), and this group bumps into another? You have conflict, affirmation of identity, diversity. I don’t experience conflict negatively at all, though I know the modern civilized culture does. Even moreso, conflict does not mean violence. An inability to resolve conflict leads to violence. Conflict itself, just means energy!

Also, these (let’s call them) cultural groups, use this energy to build belonging and solidarity when they bump into members of the other group. A tightening of community, in response to (quite literally) foreign bodies, like an immune response. But one person’s foreign bodies, belongs natively to another organism.

Without a sense of in-group (native belonging), and outgroup (strangers and rough-mannered foreigners), organisms, whether social or specific, die.

Our culture places a taboo on this kind of thing, this “clannishness”, in-group/out-group dynamic. All hail the “Great American Melting Pot”, the loss of language, tradition, color, diversity, into (ideally) one monochromatic swirl of humanity with an american flag on it. Ironically, this monochrome will look pretty brown, thanks to the influx of central american indian families (otherwise known as “mexicans”, “migrant workers”, and “illegal aliens”). But I digress. Only civilization would think highly of such a goal, that of homogenization, loss of identity to the greater colonizing culture.

The simplest way to reconnect to tradition, family, and nativeness to the Land, lies in our willingness to create our own identity, to reestablish our own in-group (and corresponding values and goals), and feel no guilt or shame at how we treat those with out-group values and goals.

Think of it this way. You need money (or barter, or whatever) to deal with people in the out-group, buying and selling things. For people in your in-group, support flows between members. Money that passes between in-group members occurs as a flow of support, not buying or selling anything, but helping others to trade with members of the out-group.

For the vast majority of those reading this, this may sound like an impossibly ideal situation. Or perhaps you’ve tried it experimentally, and it didn’t work so well. So goes the death of family and tribe. So how do we build it back up again?

First, I suggest a ruthless practicality. Self-honesty, on the risks you can actually take. And deep reflection, on who this works with, and who it doesn’t. Use this as a goal to work toward, not a measure of your rewilding. Build your in-group one member at a time. Treasure people you can trust and rely on, as more valuable than a mountain of gold and silver. Shower them with support. Do what you can to start with family; if you can’t start there, start with dear, old friends. Share food a lot. Think of the implications of this in-group, out-group issue, as a beginning of understanding native traditions of adoption. Perhaps adoption means “growing your in-group”, in exactly this way, with exactly these benefits and sacrifices?

In the end, I myself have no clear answers. I have to rebuild all of this too. But I know it matters. Good luck!

Currently we have two episodes up of our ongoing jam, “Howl of the People”, where we use the story-game Primetime Adventures to create an episodic storyline about a dysfunctional family of wolves in the Eagle Cap  Wilderness of NE Oregon.

We  have completed 3 episodes of our storyline, not including the first podcast which contains casting and setting creation. So far we only have one episode of the storyline up (“episode two” of the podcast, if that doesn’t confuse you too much).

For those who still don’t  understand the power and  potential of storyjamming, and resuscitating our own  oral/spoken traditions, the Mythweavers  offer up our humble effort at taken those first baby steps to telling stories about things we care about, and having a good time doing it.

“The Making of A Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms” by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

“Ki in Aikido: A Sampler of Ki Exercises”, C.M. Shifflett

“Aikido and the Harmony of Nature”, Mitsugi Saotome

“The Way of Energy”, Master Lam Kam Chuen

“The Way of the Scout”, Tom Brown, Jr.

“Mammal Tracks and Sign”, Mark Elbroch

Tom Brown, Jr.

http://www.trackerschool.com

Also see here:

Rewilding your ability to reason

Reality Therapy

The Story Games forum
http://www.story-games.com
Go Play Portland! (Oregon)
http://www.goplaypdx.com/forum

Go Play Northwest (based in Seattle, WA)
http://goplaynw.wetpaint.com/

Steal Away Jordan
http://stone-baby.com/?page_id=4

In A Wicked Age
http://www.lumpley.com/wicked.html

1001 Nights
http://www.nightskygames.com/

Polaris
http://swingpad.com/dustyboots/wordpress/?page_id=230

Also, do a word search on “storyjam” or “storyjamming” here for more COMC blog articles on storyjamming.

Check out “Making Space: Offering You Room to Bloom” by Julie Cramer.

An excerpt:

A Language of Space
One of the most important reasons to share this concept and give it a word, is that it creates a language, that then becomes a tool in relationship. Utilizing the language of space in actual day to day life relationships is worth a whole article in itself. For now, it is helpful even just to recognize it as a word, and start to ask yourself, what kind of “space” do I need right now to give what is inside of me room to bloom? Maybe you need to be heard, to be understood, to rest, to take action, to explore and so forth?

“Space” as  a Transformational Tool
The idea behind “space” as a transformational tool is simple. In fact,it is one of my favorite life paradoxes; the more we attempt to change or fix something, the more it stays they way it is, and, conversely, the more we allow things to be what they are, the more they begin to change and transform on their own!

Oh, I definitely run into doubters on this one! As a matter of fact, this simple concept, if one really gets it, is a complete life paradigm shift, and it is my belief that, when we can all truly understand what it means and how it works, we will live in a world of ever-transforming harmony, beauty and flow.  In some ways, it is counterintuitive, but once you really understand the depths of what it means to “make space”, you will see how very profound indeed it can be.

[correction: in this episode I refer to "Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain". I should have said Right. See below.]

Wilderness Awareness School
http://www.wildernessawareness.com

“Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”, Betty Edwards
http://www.drawright.com/

Let’s get to the bottom of this!

“All About Dreams”, Gayle Delaney
http://www.amazon.com/All-About-Dreams-Everything-Need/dp/0062514113

Tom Brown, Jr.’s Tracker School
http://www.trackerschool.com

Joseph Campbell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell

“Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy”
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/6Nations/EoL/

“Basic Call to Consciousness”
http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Call-Consciousness-Akwesasne-Notes/dp/1570671591

Our greatest power comes from those with whom we choose to collaborate. How do we make these choices? What happens when we make them consciously? What consequences follow from broken agreements, and choices that don’t create the results we hoped for or want?

My friend Evan Gardner, a “language savior”, once told me that rather than fixing English (in the philosophy of E-prime and E-primitive), American Sign Language itself seemed to satisfy everything I looked for in a renewed and animist way of communicating. At the time, I didn’t really believe him. Now, I still write in E-prime of course, and still see possibilities with E-primitive (inevitable ones, in fact), but I also now think I understand Evan’s point.

From Word Play, by Peter Farb (also author of Man’s Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America, an excellent book)

The Plains Sign Language lacked true nouns, verbs, or adjectives in the way that speakers of  English know them, yet it contained elements which could function like those parts of speech.

Also, regarding the Uburu of the Amazon, a tribe with a small hereditary deaf population:

Whatever the explanation, one must admire a society in which everyone learns a complete system of gestural communication simply to accommodate the handicap of a small minority. An equivalent case would be if everyone in the United States learned to read and write Braille for the benefit of the small percentage of the American population that is blind. And the sign language that the Urubu have developed is not merely dumb show; it represents a complete linguistic system which can fully communicate the utterances of the spoken language. I have sat with four or five Urubu men and listened to one of them tell a story. But as soon as we were joined by a deaf person, the speaker immediately switched to the sign language, apparently without omitting a thought.

For me, this doesn’t point to the ingenuity of the Plains Indians for drumming up an intercultural sign language, nor does it point to the generosity of the Urubu for nicely including deaf people in their conversations. Certainly ingenuity and compassion play a role in these situations, but animist expression plays the biggest part.

Humans, by my guess, became storytellers and trackers (and thus human) the same way the rest of the highly communicative species did: through imitation and mimicry. Mynah birds, Lyre birds, parrots, corvids (jays, crows, magpies, ravens), cuttlefish, octopi, mostly highly social and communicative animals, and certainly all excellent imitators, share a common kind of intelligence. I don’t know if we have an English word for what I mean by “kind of intelligence”, but I certainly don’t simply mean “smart”. Humans look at the world in a specific way, with a specific kind of trickster curiosity. Many of these animals share this odd perspective, or “spirit bundle”.

I believe all animist speech carries an intrinsic honesty, because it has imitative, rather than definitive, goals. It doesn’t try to label, it tries to pass on the sensory pattern: color, movement, sound, smell, texture. Thus you have birds named by their verbalized call (much like “Pumpkin-eeeeeeater”, aka Redwing Blackbird). David Abram speaks about this at length in the Spell of the Sensuous.

Sign language, most likely for practical reasons (but I won’t speculate), and more specifically American Sign Language, closely toes this imitative linguistic line.

In fact my friend RaVen once told me of her shock upon reading a faithful translation of Hopi language, because it sounded/felt/communicated just like American Sign Language.

So animists don’t have to make much of a leap from spoken animist language to signed animist language. But for decades, the grammer and subtle conceptualizations of ASL has eluded most modern language-speaking academics who have neglected until recently to even count it as a “real” language.

I highly recommend you learn ASL to further explore animist language; and if you can learn from a true Deaf speaker of ASL, so much the better. I believe you will learn something that comes as close as we can get to our own, honest, animist language. But behave respectfully: like with all languages, it belongs to a certain people, the people of the Deaf subculture. They steward and renew the language themselves, and teach it to us out of compassion and a wish to communicate.

Especially since this culture enforces a system of wage slavery? Of working to pay for what one once could freely harvest oneself – shelter, water, food.

Well, to escape slavery you need an Underground Railroad.

More and more opportunities to step outside, step beyond civilization, will emerge as time goes on. With each iteration, these opportunities will resemble more and more the healthy and original ways we used to live, in our indigenous ancestries.

In one example of filling this need, Finisia Medrano works to welcome back the plant relatives that the original peoples of California, Nevada, and Idaho relied upon for their sustenance, by traveling, as a caravan, in a big hoop, planting seeds, stewarding, digging roots, and following the seasons.

In her words: “I would again ask any who feel the need to give life to the native food plants and to a rewilding culture and the seven generations to come out and help us harvest and plant these seeds. I can assure you that you will learn much about how to sustain the wild that gives to everything.”

I once told someone that I really liked Daniel Quinn’s characterization of our work to move beyond civilization, as a “New Renaissance“.

Similar to the medieval renaissance, where participants look back to classical ideals of “antiquity” (greek and arabic ideas and art), for a rebirth of culture, those who rewild today look to our original lifeways, both in our ancestry and where humans still practice them even amidst the pressures of civilization. In this, we experience a kind of rebirth.

To me, the experience of rebirth and renewal provides a major affirmation for animism. Traditions that don’t reflect an ancient and yet ever-changing landscape soon crumble, and leave their people grasping for a way that does work.

I know of a Tarot card, the Wheel of Fortune, which speaks to me of the product of Revolutions. A common symbol of European allegory, it usually contains these elements:

For me, you can ride the outside of the wheel, as embodied in civilization, the rise and fall of dynasties, regimes, revolutions, the peasants become king and the king peasants, or you can sit in the middle.

In some ways this points to the dark side of those “in the know” regarding collapse. Do we choose to put our lives on hold, waiting for the day when “collapse hits” and our culture radically changes? Or do we live now, today, and know the world will keep changing as it always has. Renewing and rebirthing traditions that honor that pattern, will mean we don’t need a tomorrow to make our today meaningful.

One person responded to the idea of rewilding as a “Renaissance” with the protest that when they thought of the “renaissance”, they thought of art, music, story, literature. They didn’t think of permaculture gardens, or bow drill fires, or wilderness shelters.

I smiled and said, “Exactly!”.

So welcome to the Rewilding Renaissance.

How nice does it feel, then, when you discover that you don’t necessarily have to uncover and articulate everything, to bring it back. Sometimes you can just go find it where it still exists, and immerse yourself in it! So two of my friends, newbies to Storyjamming, attended GoPlayNW, and took to it like fish to water. It all worked out so well. It reminded me that in many places, for many things, oral cultures still remain vibrant, alive, and important. That my former frustration with indie games (that they couldn’t mentor you how to play the game, by reading the game text alone), now stand revealed to me as their strength!

Also, the culture of the indie-game movement continues to really impress and delight me.  I know that one can’t find a culture of such supportive, creative, and sincere people just anywhere. Something about storyjamming, story-games, and the indie game culture has come together to make something really special.

Check out the story-games meetup directory for opportunities near you to immerse yourself in this culture!

I recently picked up Stewart Levine’s book, the Book of Agreement, and felt shocked – somebody had actually written about the “culture of agreement” that I’ve worked so hard to encourage in the circles in my life! What a relief. It has inspired me to write about this culture that I value so much.
We have so many traditions, cast aside hither and thither in the mad rush of “progress” to the modern era of abject american cultural poverty (I used to call it “spiritual poverty”…I still don’t feel totally satisfied on how to articulate our peculiar brand of glittery privation, emotional scarcity, and intangible inner destitution). The tradition of making clear, compassionate, wise accords, based on the world we want to create and experience together, falls among them. Instead, in the modern world, we create agreements of protection, those designed to help us experience as little harm as possible.

Relearning to reach an accord through agreements takes us closer to that place, of “oneminded” power/unity. That feeling of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other adults, who inspire pride in us that we can call them friends, family, kindred.

How many activist movements, families, business, and other modern social groups, fall apart through infighting and politics? How many stay somehow half-alive, teetering on the verge of imploding? How many people do we know, keeping their nose to the grindstone, with a steady muttered refrain of discontent, disconnection, and intermittent despair?

Every single one of us, constantly make and renew agreements, implicit (articulated only on the inside), or explict (discussed out loud between each other). In every generation, we must remake this culture all over again, from scratch. A culture without a new generation, agreeing to its principles, means a culture on its deathbed. It takes tremendous work, tremendous energy inputs, extensive institutions of schools, government, law enforcement, to make this happen for the modern world.

We remake this culture, by assenting to abide by its implict or explict demands for accords. Often, by keeping these accords taboo, unarticulated, and invisible, this culture accomplishes the magician’s trick of having us hand over our souls, heart’s-ease, and life-purpose, for no more than dust, hollow dreams, and fragments of a life worth living. We see the rotten deal only when we can actually, finally, see it.

This stems from the entrapping and complex web of secular puritanism, in which we strive to accomplish a variety of things, trusting that since other people claim to value them (without ever explaining why), we must want them too. That in our rush to achievement we have no time for petty things like our “inconvenient” needs, and “intangible” feelings, since everybody else seems embarrassed by them too. We often can react in jealousy and rage when someone else stands up for what they so desperately need – for why should they get it, “if I can’t have it”. Except who exactly told me I couldn’t?

In order to find ourselves again, we must tug on the tangled strings of our own needs and feelings, finding our way back to heart’s-ease and life purpose, even amidst a natural world under siege. To make room for this work, and to live lives together worth having, we relearn to make accords. In making accords, we discover the deep nature of conflict, that of abundant energy for change and growth.

Instead of fearing conflict, we learn to revel in it as an opportunity to reconcile even deeper, to renew bonds of collaboration, friendship, and family. We plan ahead, and make a place for conflict, knowing that whether we will or no, it will soon arrive. If we welcome it, it will stoke the hearth fire of our community. If we resist it, its flames will burn, smolder, reawaken, blackening the timbers of our lives, house by house, until we finally consent to embrace its message.

Have you ever wondered why we call them “flip-flops”? Of course not! Everybody knows. They always make that sound, “flip-flop, flip-flop”, when you walk with them on.

Well…

Almost always.

You see, I don’t make the flip-flop sound when I wear flip-flops. I hardly make any sound at all, just the slight scuffing of the soles against the sidewalk.

Question: why don’t I make the flip-flop sound?

Answer: because I don’t push off with my feet. I lift my feet up, rather than pushing against the ground to move forward. I do this in such a low-key way that nobody really notices. It doesn’t look funny, like a Ministry of Silly Walks variation.

(But surprisingly, you will indeed notice that the main character in the sketch, played by John Cleese, does indeed do his own “fox walk” variation much of the time.)

So, see how much you can cancel out the “flip-flop” sound, while wearing flip-flops, without overdoing it. You’ll learn a lot about movement, tension in your foot, and all kinds of good stuff.

Jake Swamp: http://www.treeofpeace.org
Jon Young: http://www.jonyoung.info
Rewilding: http://www.rewild.info

For the series on rewilding and breaking the spell of the modern culture, look into Breaking the Spell, parts One (Rewilding), Two (Rewilding Your Ability to Reason), Three (Reality Therapy), Four (the Village Philosopher), Five (the College of the Round Table), Six (the Reason for Riddles), and Seven (the Wise Compass).

Julie Cramer: http://www.thebalancepoint.org

Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morihei_Ueshiba

Nonviolent Communication (communcation centered on nonjudgemental observations of Needs and Feelings): http://www.cnvc.org/

I went back and edited the Odeo links out of all the podcasts, and replaced them with the new hosting service, as hyperlinks to the title of the particular podcast.

Thanks for your patience and ongoing support. Now that I have a new monthly archive bill added on to the other payments of domain hosting, equipment, and computer repair (don’t ask), I continue to really benefit from your donations.

In the future, I hope to podcast or post video of upcoming riddle workshops, dream interview circles, story jam roundtables, and such. If you’d like to see/hear these things, you know how to help!

I want to underscore a point I made in the last article concerning disgust at civilization. To articulate an argument against something insane, means that you can encompass it in your logical system. That means that you dignify it as one of the reasoned choices available to a member of your culture, however much you argue against it. By arguing against it, you say a reasonable person may choose it – because, you want to change this person’s mind by using a reasoned argument. You see?

Even now, culturally, we have things that you “just don’t do”, no explanation needed, and we have things that we haven’t made our minds up about.

Furthermore, a sane and life-affirming choice needs no logical support – you can feel the evidence with your body’s senses. Only abstractions need logical support. The more removed the abstraction, the more support needed.

Once you’ve exposed a life-denying choice for all to see, to argue further in the face of someone choosing it means you consider their choice reasonable. Which means that you leave the door open for you to choose it, someday, as a reasonable thing.

To reject something, without explanation or articulation, marks a step into a world where you can move directly into remedy, if you yourself end up choosing it. At that point, everyone in your micro-culture knows you “just don’t do that”. And in rewilding, everyone knows that punishment doesn’t address the actual issues at stake. So everyone moves directly into remedy.

The more of your rewilding culture that, once accepted on the basis of life-affirming evidence, you no longer articulate in a reasoned argument, the stronger it becomes. It, in fact, exits the vulnerable arena of american secular puritanism, a mental battlezone where your values and choices lay open to constant debate on whether they qualify as a “one right way”, amidst personal accusations of hypocrisy and so on.

As long as you engage in debate about the “personhood” of a tree, for example, you leave open the notion that a sane person could see the “itness” of a tree.

If you live a good life, people in search of a good life will flock to it. If you argue for a good life, people in search of an argument about what makes a good life will flock to it.

The more I learn about the successful “survivance” of tribal cultures, in the midst of civilization, the more I think that the basic human toolkit of confident disgust really works. In fact, I have a theory…

You have three kinds of people who need protection from the destructive influence of civilized culture.

1) Adults immersed in civilization.
2) Adults newly immersed in a culture dwelling beyond civilization.
3) Children

For #1, these people need explanations and articulations to reveal the dark side of civilization (at least, in so far as they ask for help and support to make sense of why this culture doesn’t satisfy their needs). They need it brought to light, so they can make a conscious choice about it.

For #2 and #3, articulating things makes acculturation more difficult. We just need to act in disgust and revulsion towards things that do not affirm life. Body language, and simple statements, lead the way.

As, in “yuck! gross! weird!”. With that Mr. Yuk face.

Nobody needs to explain to a child who sees Mr. Yuk what will happen if they taste the contents of a bottle with his face on it.

We all know, at this point, that civilization had to work overtime to fool anybody that it made even the least bit of sense. In fact, civilization created a “yuck!” response for abandonment.

Tribal cultures, the world over, have used gossip, and social pressure (otherwise known as “guilt” and “shaming”) to keep their cultures intact and humming along.

Guilt and Shame impact us rewilders so powerfully, that we have to tread incredibly lightly in rewilding these concepts. They have caused enormous amounts of pain in myself, and my friends, and even now haunt me a little. Such power they have! In using them, we can easily regress into civilized modes of virtue and purity, exactly what we want to escape.

But, as a community, I think we’ve reached a point where we can begin to talk about them, and begin to consider what it means to feel “shame” that one has made a life-denying choice.

At this point, civilization has done so much damage to human and other people, that the burden lies with it to explain itself. I reject it utterly in every aspect as a gruesome joke, an anti-life and anti-human endeavor. I need no more explanation, no more books like “Culture of Make Believe”. A cruel and laughable enterprise, Civilization makes a mockery of those who engage in it, and deserves no more substantive rebuttal than Mr. Yuk:

In balance to that, then you can celebrate the life-affirming side. Talking to plants and animals with your children, treasuring family connections and making them stronger, etc. etc.

I believe that we over-explain things to our children, and to each other. Children, and other adults, look to our faces, our body language, the tone of our voice, for direction on what affirms life, and what doesn’t. If we act from a strong center with disgust or joy, we embody the world we want.

Perhaps (concerning what I’ll write in a moment, here) I knew this already, but I didn’t KNOW it, if you get my drift. It sounds really simple, but I challenge you: do you really hear what it means, deeply? Apparently, I didn’t. To wit:

An intact rewilding culture, one based on the primacy of family and land relationships, maintains itself owing to a pool of constantly maturing adults who have the capacity to understand, make, and back up commitments to each other.

A maturing adult, according to this view, can make commitments not because they “just do it”, but because they understand their own surpluses and limitations. They do not agree to things that they cannot back up.

To understand one’s own ability to “back up” commitments, means exactly to understand the needs and feelings that drive human people, most of all, your own person.

This means that domesticated folks, beginning rewilding, will likely spend most of their time saying “No” to proposed commitments, as a default. They would do this, I suggest, because they do not understand what it means to honestly commit to something out of a natural capacity to back it up.

The status quo for modern domesticated folks has people saying “Yes, yes, yes” to requests, constantly breaking them and flaking out, blaming others for asking in the first place, overcommitting and out of balance. Or, worst of all, burning the candle at both ends in the “martyr syndrome”: never turning down or breaking a commitment, and slowly depleting one’s own health and vitality until…personal crisis or death.

* * *

Once a rewilding adult really understands this point of view, and puts it into action, I feel strongly that they make a quantum leap in trustworthiness and reliability. An intact rewilding culture means a group of people you can rely on, correct?

Current popular perceptions of rewilding may overly focus on the initial state of one-who-rewilds, that of reclaiming childhood passions, freedoms, and self-care, in order to come back into balance as a fully rewilding person. However, this initial state merely creates the foundation for one’s future reliability as a maturing adult, borne out of the self-knowledge that fruits from one’s reinvestment in self.

If I ask you to make a commitment to me, and you do any of the following things:

1) Say “yes”, even though you don’t want to, but you say it because of what you think I want to hear, meaning you eventually “flake out” on the commitment.

2) Say “yes”, because you want to make the commitment, but in honest reflection you know you don’t have the health and energy to back it up, and following through will further undermine your health reserves. You then eventually either “flake out” on the commitment to save yourself, or you follow through and have even less capacity to support your community.

If you respond these ways, how can I trust you? I need to know that you will only agree to things that affirm life, yours, mine, and everyone in our micro-culture.

This means that a maturing adult in a rewilding culture can not collaborate or rely on (though certainly they could support, befriend, play and eat together) any person who does not sufficiently understand their own needs and feelings.

No matter how much that other person wants to enter the world of “maturing adults”, no matter how much they will sacrifice to do it, an honest rewilding adult cannot support it, if they don’t share a common insight into the needs and feelings of human animals. As the saying goes, “we pave the road to hell with good intentions”. It refers exactly to this kind of situation, a lack of understanding of oneself and others.

Of course, you will see no clear line between someone who understands their needs, and someone who doesn’t – it runs in an unbroken continuum, from one end to the other. So all of this looks more like, “collaborating with those of a common level of understanding their needs and feelings”. Flock together with birds of a feather.

* * *

Now we get to the good part. Once you have a certain ability to make realistic commitments and back them up, and you associate with a group of adults with similar capacity, you have what the Mohawk call “Kashastensera”, translatable as both Power, and Unity.

You see, this points to one of those pieces of the Invisible Treasury that we lost. The ability to reach “one mind”, to act in accord with a group of rock-solid reliable adults, and change the world as a single organismal body when needed.

Once I understand myself, and don’t fear my needs or feelings, you can finally trust me. Once we trust each other in a real way, we can do anything together. One person, in accord with another person, have more than the power of the sum of two people. They have ten times the power. Ten people fully in accord with each other, have a thousand times the power of ten people not in accord.

Unity means we have the ability to conflict and disagree with each other, safely, because we no longer fear, or feel inconvenienced by, our needs and feelings, but rely on them to keep us true to course. This can look like arguments, mellow chatting, raucous laughter, whatever. It doesn’t mean we act like a bunch of monks at a buddhist monastery (or, our false image of even such a place).

It means we act like fully empowered adults. And we rock our world together.

From Eva Wong’s Tales of the Taoist Immortals

When I was a child, the stories of Taoist immortals were also dramatized in opera. Before Hong Kong became a bustling city crowded with skyscrapers and shopping centers, Chinese Opera troupes performed frequently in the streets. On the day before a performance, a street, usually one near a marketplace, would be closed. Workers would build the stage, set up rows of benches, and erect little tents where the performers could rest between acts. Large scaffolds decorated with flowers and banners would be placed around the stage and the seating area, and written on the banners were the names of the prinicipal singers. Whenever a troupe visited my neighborhood, our entire household–my parents, my grandmother, myself, and the servants–would go to the performances. I still have vivid memories of those shows; they were the only occasions when I was allowed to stay up late. The operas didn’t begin until dark, and, on a summer night in Hong Kong, that usually meant nine.

In Chinese opera, the performers were not only singers, but also acrobats and martial artists. The stories of the immortals–Chang Tao-ling’s battle with the lords of evil, Chu Yuan-chang’s (the founder of the Ming Dynasty) treacherous betrayal of his friends, Kiang Tzu-ya using his magic to defeat the evil emperor–came alive as the performers sang, whirled, sparred, and somersaulted around the stage.

In the way of Tracking, we have a wonderful metaphor for a relationship that we can use also with human people, not just the other-than-human ones.

In this episode I share my personal routine of reflection and communication that I use to improve relationships in my own life.

Jean Liedloff and the Continuum Concept: http://www.continuum-concept.org/

Marshall Rosenberg and Nonviolent Communication: http://www.cnvc.org/

Don Miguel Ruiz and the Four Agreements: http://www.miguelruiz.com/

While boxing the other night, I felt a huge revelation wash over me. The tool I learned from Viola Spolin, via Lisa Wells, called “Yes, and…”, has so many intriguing and empowering applications. As soon as I began to, with my body, say “yes, and…” to every move of my partner/opponent, suddenly I acquired an overwhelming sensitivity, and stopped receiving hits. Not only that, but I landed a quite remarkable hit on a mentor of mine who said “he never even saw it coming”.

This didn’t occur because I had practiced harder, or sparred more, or psyched myself up. It happened because I applied what I knew from improvisational games to boxing, out of intense need to avoid getting clobbered. I didn’t acquire more skill, I just applied sensitivity from one area of life, to another.

This has made me realize that, in every day life, in every moment, I can either embrace by saying “yes, and…”, or I can resist with “yes, but…”, or “no, because…”, or just plain “no!”.

A TAXONOMY OF RESISTANCE

“Yes, but…” gives the impression that I’ve accepted the input of my partner (whether a boxing partner, traffic, weather, a creative project), but really it works to passive-aggressively counter it in the end. It doesn’t actually say, “Yes, and…”.

“No, because…” strives to show how reasonably I act with my resistance. Really, in all rational courtesy and right thinking, one must accept that my refusal of the world’s input makes a lot of sense! I will talk my way out of the reality of my resistance. Unfortunately, this means: in boxing I get hit, in traffic I start road raging, when writing I don’t finish projects, in relationships I build grudges., when swimming I drown, and so on. “No, because…” may fool other people, but it doesn’t fool the prevailing forces of the world. And it doesn’t make for a satisfying life.

“No!” actually comes the closest to an honest form of resistance. No apologies, or disclaimers, just outright tension and rejection. I have a lot of respect for “No!”. However, don’t confuse “No!”, with using “Yes, and…” to say the word ‘no!’ to something. For example, someone wants a schoolkid’s lunch money. To express “No!” basically means to curl up into a ball, to turn away, to shut one’s eyes. To say, “Yes, and…” by saying the word ‘no!’ means to stand up for yourself, to draw a line, to totally accept the conflict in which you stand.

CONFLICT GIVES LIFE

“Yes, and…” doesn’t mean capitulating, it means accepting both the energy of your partner, and the energy coming from within yourself. It doesn’t mean to pretend buddha-hood…quite the opposite. Remember, it comes from a methodology used to train actors! So you open up wide for the energy flowing through you. To say “Yes, and…” in the face of your fears, may mean to say “No effing way!”, may mean you laugh, may mean you cry, but whatever it looks like, it means wholly accepting the energies in the present moment.

It means you never ignore energy, you in fact underline it, point at it, jump up and down and get excited when you see it. No matter what. Fear, Joy, Anger, Sadness. They all move as energy, and to follow them means to Flow.

LIFE MEANS MORE THAN SURVIVING

Once I saw a hand-out, for a class on wilderness survival. At the top, I read an admonition to the effect of: when you find yourself in a surivival situation, DON’T PANIC. This struck me as funny because of the unintended reference to Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and also because of the poor understanding of psychology it reflected. As a poor choice, “don’t panic” ranks second only to panicking, in a survival situation. It doesn’t tell you what to do, it tells you what to reject.

In an amusing way, this also compares well to an object in Douglas Adam’s book, the “Joo Janta 200 Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses”, a pair of sunglasses whose tinting turned completely opaque and jet-black in the presence of danger. This would count as a “No!”, in terms of improvisational technique.

How might you play with this? The next time you find yourself in an unpleasant or uncomfortable situation, with your whole self say “Yes, and…!” to it. Then go into action. Notice what happens.

I wish I could make it more complicated than that. Sorry.

If we wanted to change the way we speak, in order to reflect a more satisfying relationship with the Land around us, where might we start?

E-Prime, English without the verb “to be”, offers an approach.

E-Primitive takes it even farther, adding verbiness and other factors that deepen the observation and process-oriented perspective of the world around us.

This podcast clocks in at about 26 minutes.

And I still don’t see why one needs a plant-intermediary to help establish a deep connection to land and spirit.

As in the title above, for me building relationships with friends and family, human and other-than, feels like an ongoing series of weddings. Courtships, and laughter, dancing, and feasts. Gifts, gifts, gifts, and receive thankfulness and community in return.

A wedding has so much going on. Just imagine then, if a crew of guys came in, and started up a fourth-of-july quality fireworks show, right there? Thunder and explosions, bursts of color and light, oohs and ahhhs.

But what about the wedding? It suddenly turned into spectacle.

I’ll admit, Christmas lights and fireworks don’t do anything for me, and maybe this explains the disconnect on my part.

It just feels so simple to me, though. My routine works this way: You want to befriend Cedar? Give Cedar gifts! Talk, and listen, to Cedar! Steward the Land around Cedar! Ask for blessings. Give blessings.

Can entheogens even find room to coexist in such a cozy, tight space, between courtier and beloved, between two best friends living in the bright, rainy world?

I don’t have any advice for those thinking about entheogen use, or who currently do. I tell my own story here, and wish you luck with your own.

If you’ve never heard of “twitter”, essentially it allows for micro-blogging, putting a 140 character cap on any one post.

I hope, rather than the accumulated trivia of my day, you’ll find this another good resource for little thoughts on animism and updates on projects the College has going on.

If you’d like to see the College of Mythic Cartography produce more videos, podcasts, written materials, and workshops, please donate $5, $20, $50, $100, or more to help further the work we do. For as long as possible, we’d like to offer what you find here freely, to folks who need it. Help us put off the day as long as possible when we’ll need to bring in advertising or subscriptions to help fund what we do.

Thank you.

In the interview she talks about the fascinating connection between prayer, theater, intuition, nature awareness, storytelling, and that ineffable creative energy that we sometimes call “shamanistic” or “mystical”.

I apologize in advance for a bit near the beginning where the microphone seems to go on a walkabout – I hope you can still catch what we say, as it addresses a worthwhile issue. Also, I mention the word “Duende” as meaning “wind” in Spanish. It doesn’t.

Get out of your head, and into your body, courtesy of Lisa Wells.

powered by ODEO

The video runs a bit long. We made it for you die-hards out there.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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…

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.

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 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.

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…)

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.

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.

…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.

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.

When I think about the wisdom of early civilizations, I tend to think of the lessons they held on to from their pre-civilized animist heritages.

The Eye of Horus above provides an example to me of wisdom. You can look for yourself into the mythology spun around this symbol, as I won’t go into it. Suffice to say this eye has special ‘luck’ and magic to it, because it replaced the plucked eye of someone who had many struggles after descending into the Underworld.

This, to me, represents the eye of someone who has successfully grieved. Grieving opens up the door for magic to happen. Miracles can happen when a tear sits on your cheek, as symbolized by the Eye above.

In much of the animist world, seekers ‘cry’ for visions, make themselves small and pitiable, so that the world of life will notice and take pity on them.

What a simple thing!

I remember one green and sunny Springtime, walking along the street in Khabarovsk, a city in the Russian Far East. There on the sidewalk I saw an injured puppy.

An injured puppy for god’s sake!

Watching him ignored by passers-by, I had to take him home to my tiny cramped room on the tenth floor of a high-rise slum.

I took pity on him. I’ve experienced the world do this all the time for me. Though the Laws of Life say one must kill to live, in the right situation, with enough sincerity, the world will take pity on one freely and openly grieving, as vulnerable as a mouse under the wide blue sky.

On the other side, we fulfill our role too when we have empathy for the world, and take pity on our other-than-human family hurting within it.

Both together make a cycle where needing to kill to eat, and inevitably dying so that others may live, becomes a beautiful dance rather than the cruel cycle of suffering and control all-to-familiar to civilized and domesticated peoples.

So miracles, magic and power in animism comes from the simplicity of real feelings.

Animist peoples see spirituality as simple as behaving in a sincere, human, and real way.

So to experience the magical reality of the animist world, you might start with learning how to cry again.

I’ve certainly had to.

We’ve now expanded to two nights -

Mondays mostly courtesy of Dr. Mike, who has lived and breathed the world of martial-arts from the age of 6. He’ll focus mostly on western boxing, kickboxing,  and stick-fighting (via the filipino art of Kali/Eskrima).

Thursdays I instruct the feral movement side of things, including Standing/Zhan Zhuang, Animal movement, Stalking, and developing Center and grounding.

For details check out the SHIFT page here or the TrackersNW page linked above.

Until I do write something substantive on it, I’d like to share Yvonne Aburrow’s perspective on this activity. Check it out (the bit on walking the landscape sits towards the end…also, note that ‘wight’ means other-than-human person):

Attunement to the Landscape, by Yvonne Aburrow

Putting down roots

When you move to a new area, you feel uprooted. It takes a long time to put down roots and settle in the new place. That said, there are many magical techniques which can help you with this process…

Though historians and scientists may use it in one context (before ‘recorded’ history, etc.), it stubbornly suggests quite a different one. In this sense, it means something quite animistic, something mythological. It wouldn’t surprise me if modern folks use it as a way to dismiss the ‘reality’ of three million years of rich human life, events, and interactions. Certainly our culture seems to equate ‘myth’ with ‘false’, with the need to ‘believe’ in it, because we certainly couldn’t ever prove it or experience it. If a mythic (not mythical!) event happened to you, why would you need to worry about whether or not you ‘believe in it’. You witnessed it. I suppose Christians would call this type of thing a miracle.

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten a little of track here. Back on subject:

Indigenous cultures often have three broad categories of stories, recognized as such. Stories of ‘when Animals and Humans still spoke the same language’, stories of the Ancestors of the people, and stories of the people themselves. Though these can overlap in purpose and category, they do tend to shake this way: myths, ancestral history, and the present era.

You’d think they proceed in a linear fashion, from creation stories (the beginning), to stories of historical ancestors (what came next), to the present era. And you’d have it pretty much the way most anthropologists understand it (and the way modern folks feel most comfortable with it). But you’d have it far differently from how animists see it.

The time called Dreamtime, Myth, and ‘the time when Animals and Humans still spoke the same language’ didn’t come first, it comes deepest. The time when they spoke together, you’ll notice happening right now, if you choose to go there. Right now.

As before, knowing your Dream-self never sleeps, the Dreamtime itself never went away. If it did, all life would end, because the Dreamtime occurs deepest and first in the creation of the present moment. The Waking-self happens on top of it, supported by it, as a ground on which to occur.

Modern humans prioritize Waking thought, intelligence, and logic as indicators of superiority, of primacy, without realizing them as flowers blossoming on an ancient tree of Dreaming. No tree, no flowers. No dream, no wake. The wood looks dead, the leaves and blossoms full of life. But don’t let appearances deceive you.

Animists can see the living nature of stones, wind, and stars, because they don’t only see Waking beings, but also the Dreaming beings that may or may not wake. What does it matter if they do or don’t? Without them, we certainly couldn’t.

This makes sense both in the most material sense, and in the most profound and spiritual sense.

At any moment, fully sober, you can choose to step into Mythspace, the Dreamtime, when Humans and Animals still spoke the same language. You simply change how you experience the moment. It doesn’t necessarily even take belief, although it may take at least ‘pretend’.
It should neither astonish nor impress anyone that children more easily access the Mythspace, the time of legend, for they play ‘pretend’ all the time. We don’t need Peter Pan to tell healthy children to believe in fairies. Adults however, and many children of cynical adults, do need him and messengers like him.

To geek out a little bit, I think Einstein first articulated the notion of space-time, an inseparable wholeness to an experience or event. I think that expresses the Dreamtime/Mythspace experience quite well.

In the past, Animists didn’t have clocks, but certainly experienced linear time as the Sun tracked across the sky. They also experienced rhythmic time, ecstatic time, and all kinds of time.

Our modern word for time means almost nothing useful. When animists describe time, they describe a whole different paradigm of experience. For me, Time best describes a way of experiencing, which I see people doing all the time.

The Time of waiting in line at the bank, differs substantially and experientially from the Time of an athlete in the zone, or a baby coming into the world of light and air. Both differ from the Time of Dream and Myth.

Too far down this path lies hallucenogenic self-indulgence and phantasmagoria. I’ve never valued that destination, because for me it ruins both the poetry of this, and the utility of it. Can I say these things without it degrading into total gibberish? I think it has helped me that I’ve never ingested any hallucinogen or entheogen, and so I’ve never relied on them for this experience. I don’t pass judgement on whether or not others use them, so don’t take it that way. I just want you to know the context in which I say all this. I first and foremost want to say something useful, rather than something entertaining, aesthetic, or impressive.

So if useful, how do you use it? I can only offer you as compass, that I mean every word quite explicitly, and I see all these ways of experiencing as quite testable and ‘falsifiable’ (in the scientific sense: you can test whether it models your experience well, or not). Try them out. Can you choose to enter a world full of living, dreaming, and waking other-than-human beings?

I bet you can.

The final authority for the meaning of your dream symbols and metaphors comes from you. You own them. No one else can tell you what your dream means.

So we have stacks and stacks of ‘dream interpretation’ dictionaries and bibles, all happy to receive our power and authority to interpret the dreams that speak poetry in the language of our own unique hearts.

In a sense, as the title above suggests, to reject this looks like a kind of dream interpretation for anarchists.

Topple the dictators and tyrants of your dream life from their thrones, cast off the chains and manacles forged from the notion that you can learn about your dream through someone else’s opinion.

As I mentioned in the last post, this ends at the door of the tyrant of your own logical mind, who  ‘already knows what it means’.

So how do you reclaim your own dreaming authority? How do you pick up the responsibility for your own mythic life?

You ask yourself questions, or have a friend ask you questions. Step by step, you describe the elements in your dream.  As a questioner, you pretend you come from another world. You ask the dreamer to relate the whole dream, and then you go back to the beginning, and go through it piece by piece. You’ve never seen these elements before, you don’t recognize them, no matter how mundane. “I’ve never seen a dog. What do they do? Please describe them.” The dreamer, bit by bit, describes the elements. You’ll find one’s notions of ‘dog’ wildly varying from person to person, and herein you’ll discover your own native dream-tongue, the one that belongs to you and no-one else, the one you’ve carefully created your whole life, day by day.

Or do they offer the difficult answer? The one we either can’t see, or don’t want to see?

I’ve recently stepped up my work with dreams, mainly with the support of my friend and mentor Linda Neale, using the dream interview model as innovated through Gayle Delaney’s work.

Some major realizations have broken through of late. In my history in working with my own, and others’ dreams, I’ve seen a  pattern of  an “I already think I know what it means” mindset.

The ‘aha!’s seem to come when we shatter those first impressions.

I think this stems from our need to conserve energy. Living beings love to conserve energy, by taking the easy route, and repeating the habitual act. Looking around at all the life, I know this must work to some extent, as a way of moving through the world.

And then you have dreams, myth, and heroes’ journeys.

They seem almost to wholly purpose themselves to break us out of habit and the ‘easy’ route, when needful.

So when I have a dream, and ‘I think I know what it means’, I purposely set that aside. More often than not, I shatter that first impression to pieces, with an ‘Aha!’ moment. I see an unlooked for angle, experience an unexpected insight.

So, whenever you dream and already you ‘think you know what it means’, consider setting that aside. For, why bother to dream if no insight awaits? Why do we need intuition if it only will say the easy-to-see thing?

Perhaps dreams naturally balance our habitual natures, through their chaos and color. Like the Hanged Man in a Tarot Deck, they dangle us upside-down for a moment, and if we fully let go, we can see around a corner, into hidden places, that our habitual minds walk busily past.

We can’t help it.

It probably started with tracking. Certainly, if story didn’t feed us, we wouldn’t tell them, or create them. And so tracking embodies our hunger for story. See the deer tracks. Follow the deer tracks. Harvest (or lose!) the deer.

Stories have a three-act structure, in this sense. Beginning, Middle, and End.

Lo and behold, wouldn’t you know, as story-making animals, our dreams often have three-act structures. We can’t help it.

The next time you have a vivid dream, lay it out. See if you can observe the three acts: Beginning, Middle, and End.

If you can, then ask yourself:

If the Beginning says, “When these events occur…”

And the Middle says, “And you then do (or did) this…”

The End then says, “It therefore has these results”

So, this could mean your dream has advice (‘doing this particular action will have these beneficial results’) or your dream may just want to alert you to something you haven’t noticed (‘doing this particular action always causes this other thing to occur, that you don’t see connecting’).

Dreams have a poetic and subtle structure, definitely. You can’t crack them open by chasing literal meanings. But seeing at least this dream story-structure will start you down the road to receiving real help from your dreams.

Resources:

Gayle Delaney’s All About Dreams

Tom Brown Jr.’s Awakening Spirits

WHAT: Story Game evening
WHO: Anyone wanting to work their storytelling skills through collaborative story-gameplay, and playtest some independent and creator-owned/published story games
WHEN: Sunday, 5pm, Feb 3rd (More or less weekly)
WHERE: Scout Pit, 5040 SE Milwaukie, around back next to the parking lot, basement level double doors.
BRING: Pencils, snacks, drinks
PLEASE: RSVP – if you just show up, you may find we have moved location or something, if I don’t know to expect you. RSVP even if you only think you might come!

An intact traditional and native culture comes heavy and pregnant with these kinds of secrets-in-plain-sight, constantly renewing its people with the ho-hum, everyday magic that a nourishing culture provides, and that remains so untouchable and mysterious to modern peoples enmeshed in the anxiety of materialism and a failing worldview.

Recently she wrote an article on ‘intention’ that I really like, and I encourage you to check it out.

Introducing the Intention
I would like to introduce to you another option that gets met our need to continuously expand into better and better feeling places and into new experiences of our lives and our potential. It is a method that does not include any trying at all, as a matter of fact, the more you try, the less it works. Welcome to the power of setting Intention.

Finish the article at her website.

It may not surprise you that the stories that grab us the most, whether movies, television, written or oral traditions, operate off of central characters that must make a defining decision when confronted with a difficult choice.

The stories that may wow us stylistically (special effects, cleverness of prose, etc.), but still leave us cold and disconnected from true highs, forget about these kinds of characters, struggling to find their way down thorny paths. Thus you have Hollywood action movies and so on.

It may not surprise you that, when your parents or elders put you into tough situations, that compelled you to make tough decisions, and they told you it would “build character”, they meant exactly this (even if they didn’t know it).

Human beings eat story like a food, breath it like air, walk on it like earth, deepen intimacy with it like physical touch.

Most of us avoid conflict and discomfort, and help others to do the same, without realizing that a world without conflict and discomfort means a world devoid of story.

Which means a world devoid of food, air, earth, and physical touch.

Some peoples in the world experience constant conflict and discomfort (how many wars in the ‘third world’ do we have raging right now?), so the answer doesn’t lie in neverending struggle.

Rites of Passage, intitiations, and such experiences create a safe space to have conflict and discomfort, and to make difficult decisions.

Also, living a life where, once we’ve recovered from the last one, we dive right into the next edge-pushing experience, will build our interwoven personal stories and characters.

The most powerful and intimate relationships come from people who’ve shared incredibly harrowing experiences – plane crashes, war, abuse, and so on. Sometimes, rather than strengthening bonds, this breaks them, and the people involved. But when they work, they work because of the extremely condensed story they’ve shared together, of one conflict after another. One could have the same result just by having a friendship over many years. Sooner or later the number of conflicts and ‘character building’ moments will add up. Unfortunately, sometimes conflicts do overwhelm the participants, and rather than building them up, they break them down.

Thus the need for safe space for conflict! Our culture itself can create (or discourage) an atmosphere of this. Unfortunately, our culture conflates conflict with violence, and intimacy with sex.

An argument means you’ll come to blows, and a heart connection means sexual attraction, according to our cultural mythology (‘our’ meaning modern American culture).

Can you get into a safe argument with someone?

Can you feel a heart connection safely (with a matching gender, depending) without sex coming up?

Don’t get me wrong. I love violence, and I love sex. I also love conflict that doesn’t break friendships, and heart connections that enrich rather than unnecessarily complicating my life.

And don’t get me wrong on the other count either – ‘building character’ doesn’ t have a linear progression. One can build one’s character into a sneaking and deceptive diplomat, as well as a forthright and nurturing caregiver. I know who I’d want to spend more time with, but a good story needs all kinds of folks.

So, ‘building character’ really means revealing character.

In fact, working on a team with someone who I know has a tendency to lie or shirk jobs, under certain pressures, may work out just fine, because at least I know them.

I know their limits, and I know the times they’ve supported me too.

In fact, suddenly I wonder if anyone exists who wouldn’t reveal ‘interesting’ character under intense enough pressure.

Then this all starts to make much more sense – virtues and flaws fall away, and we begin to realistically care for another, and understand each others capacities and incapacities.

And so working on a high-performing team of folks, or interacting with a close and collaborative family, means you’ve reached that point. You’ve lived the story, you’ve seen character revealed, and you accept each other, warts and all.

Familiar warts can actually inspire quite a bit of affection, don’t you think?

Not only me, but many others have ‘dumbed down’ Dunbar’s idea that the mean maximum for functioning human social groupings hovers around 150 persons (precisely 148, with a 95% confidence interval of 100-230).

What does this have to do with the College of Mythic Cartography? Hell, I don’t know. I mean, it has everything do with it. Ask me some other time. Let me get the issue down on electronic paper first.

Most folks hear this notion, and think one of several things (non-inclusively):

1) I can only have 150 human relationships

2) I can only have 100-230 human relationships

3) I can only have a mean maximum of 150 meaningful human relationships

4) Only 150 of my Myspace friends count

5) Companies should number no larger than 150 employees

6) Ideally sized Towns have 150 people in them, or neighborhoods of 150 people.

And the drivel goes on, with the magic number ’150′ tossed around like a new-age talking stick. If you say someting, and include the number 150, you’ve said something profound.

All of this misses an important secondary assertion that Dunbar makes. Namely, that it takes substantial work to maintain a social network.

Dunbar’s number only refers to a tightly cohesive human social network, capable of efficient (and life-affirming!) collaboration. Villages, military units, highly focused groups that emerge in the presence of intense environmental or economic pressures. Each of those possible 150 relationships that Dunbar refers to operate at a high-functioning level that many folks in our culture have never experienced beyond a very small group of friends or family. For some, only a family member or two, and a couple of friends, have relationships with them that fit the profile.

Dunbar estimates that to maintain the (mean) 150 high-functioning relationships, intrinsic to original and indigenous human cultures (village and cultural lineage groups), one must spend 42% of one’s time ‘social grooming’. This almost requires a certain level of constant physical proximity. The smaller the group you maintain, the smaller the portion of your time dedicated to maintenance (but also the less benefit you receive). A social network of 10 would not require 42% of your time spent in strengthening intimate social connections.

He coins ‘social grooming’ from the behavior of primates who spend time bonding through grooming behaviors. This should give you some idea of the nature of the work involved in maintaining a high-functioning relationship, rather than an acquaintanceship. ‘Social grooming’ doesn’t mean ‘spending time with’, it means creating and strengthening intimacy.

Think about this.

The fact that ancestral villages and cultural groups could get to, and maintain, a group of 150 tightly-knit individuals that stayed in relative physical proximity, constitutes an amazing achievement and a testament to the power of those traditional cultures.

This implies that most modern humans rarely experience these relationships on any significant network level. How much time do we spend bonding with others in a meaningful way?

And once we’ve started these bonded relationships (childhood and school friends, family, etc.), we can still lose those connections as the years pass, too, when we don’t know the value in them, and don’t maintain them.

Perhaps what has destroyed the landscape of modern american families, friendships, and workplaces, amounts to the problem that we have huge networks of acquaintances, but precious few fully human relationships.

Not families, but regularly interacting acquaintances.

Not friendships, but folks who ‘share interests’ and ‘know each other’.

I don’t say this to pronounce dire and certain doom on our lives. I say this to so that we can go, “HEY! LOOK! A thing! A thing that matters.”

When your Grandma (if you luckily had one like this) said, “Family comes first – family matters most,” you may not have known the profound human survival wisdom embedded in that statement. When she, or any other relative or friend, pestered you to attend that party, or that event, that you passed up because it seemed such a waste of time, now you know you (and your children, and your family) have paid for that in the wages of depression, exhaustion, isolation, disconnectedness.

So hey. Let’s get together more often. And when we do, let’s play some games, sing some songs, and take some risks to do some stuff that actually brings us closer. And lets build up our little groups, and count our wealth one by one, in each deep and fully human relationship.

Because it matters. It really, really matters.

I’d like to start getting some feedback on these draft excerpts. Do they help? What have I left missing? What part works the best?

This feedback will end helping create the final version of this chapter. You’ll also notice this bears substantial resemblance to ‘the Riddler’s Way’ article on this blog, with some notable additions. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to split each of the sub-headings in the Riddle section into its own major section.

The Riddler’s Way

Developing your spoken tradition skills means developing your Riddling skills. Let’s celebrate a return of Riddles, and the delicious torture they induce in linear minds!

Achieving skill at solving and creating will change you into a different human being. A riddling animal. This of course describes our ancestors, for each one of us, if you go back far enough – the original questing, riddling beings. Seekers of holy places, plumbers of mysteries, never satisfied with answers that don’t open up further questions.

The Question

Everything in the world has a voice, and tells its stories over, and over, and over….everything. Challenge yourself to open a vaccuum, a pulling space, in your mind, in your senses. Embody a constant wordless question. The great Riddlers of old would fade away to nothing more than a human ‘?’, invisible ghosts upon the land,. Stretched out to the horizon, they knew everything that happened the moment it occurred.

It all begins with a question. Nothing more.

Pick a single object, the more mundane the better. Once a day, for a week, ask 50 questions of this object. Pick a new object every day, if necessary.

Count off the questions with your fingers. When you reach ten, touch your head with that finger, as a marker. Starting with your fingers again, count until the next ten, touching your left shoulder to signal twenty. Then the right shoulder. Then the left hip. Then the right hip. You just marked off 50 questions.

Does 50 questions sound impossible? Good. Find them anyway. Cheat (and if you can, you’ve probably discovered some foolish limits anyway, that you’ve imposed upon yourself for no good reason).

Ask simple, obvious questions at first. Ask questions that a martian, or a visitor from dimension X would ask of that object. Start very basic.

You do not have to answer any of the questions, though you may find yourself curious about them. Later on, do what you like with the answers. For now, just the questions.

The Web

Much like a spider’s web, you now weave a map of connections, everything leading back to the center, that object upon which you asked the 50 questions.

Once a day, find 50 links back to that object, 50 ways it connects to other things in the world. Count off the same as before. Links can consist of links-of-links, as far removed as you like, as long as they lead back to the center. You can consider the links in the web as relationships, metaphors, or associations, or poetic allusions, if it helps. Find those kinds of connections.

The Chronicles of the Dreamtime

Every night, when you go to bed, one part of you sleeps, while another remains awake. This one will teach you to master the riddling world, if you learn to speak its language.

When you wake up, you have two options. Immediately tell the story of your dreams, or what momentary snatches of them you remember, to the person next to you. Or, write them down. It amounts to the same thing. Some cultures honor the telling of dreams, and make space for it. In ours, you may find your best audience in the pages of a journal.

Write down all the details that you can remember, even the stupid, foolish, unpleasant, inconvenient, embarrassing ones. Especially those.

More layers exist for this, but essentially, take nothing for granted in the dream, and begin your mapping web on it. 10 links for every detail you can single out. Results don’t matter at this point, but the practice does. You don’t want to find out what anything ‘means’ – you want to see what connections you can make.

The ‘Aha!’

Having said results don’t matter, you may notice every once in a while, you get an ‘aha!’. Something clicks. Something makes sense. You accidentally decode a little piece of dream language. Good for you. Write it down. But don’t let it suck you in…focus on the practice, not the results.

The Waking Dreamtime

If this next notion doesn’t turn your world upside-down, I don’t know what will. Because before you now lies the task of treating your waking world like a dream. Take one short interaction, between yourself and the world and treat it like the dream. Find the connections, 10 connections to every element you can single out. How short? Make it short it enough that it seems effortless. Then make it a little longer every time you practice anew.

Making Riddles

To actually create a riddle, take one of your webs-of-links about an object you choose, and use that to write a short poem that captures your sense of that web, without mentioning outright the subject of the poem. Poems don’t really differ from Riddles. To some people this comes as news, to others not so much.

Solving Riddles

Do the riddle crafting in reverse. Take the details, weave out a web, and see what it all adds up to.

The Door Has Opened A Crack

You’ve just learned the most rudimentary practices of Riddling – rudimentary, but unspeakably powerful. Any single one of them could turn a life upside down, if practiced consistently. Consider that, if doing them all seems like too much. Start with one piece, one practice. Then add more practices, slowly, one at a time.

And the door will slowly open, inch by inch…you’ll hear the hinges complaining, but pay them no mind. Uncared for, abandoned, rusted with old grief, they have the right to complain, the Riddlers of Old (that took such care of them) having long ago disappeared into the maw of the machine that eats beauty and excretes despair. Make yourself indigestible to that machine. Keep the door opening, and oil the hinges with your Riddling mind.

Rekindling the Fire – An Evening with Calvin Hecocta

Thursday, February 7, 2008, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. (Note: This is not on Friday this month.)

Calvin Hecocta was raised by his parents and his elders in the Numa tribe near Beatty, Oregon. He learned the ceremonial and spiritual blessing ways from his grandfathers, uncles and others who were true to their traditions.  Calvin has taught Native American religion, philosophy and environmental ethics at Willamette University and Portland Community College. Of his work, he says, “The forests and the rivers are the greatest classroom in the world. I was lucky enough to be raised right, to value the land and its people—all of them, not only humans.”

Calvin conducts cultural and environmental workshops dealing with ancient beliefs as well as contemporary issues. “My lectures, workshops and performances are based on values and rituals that were provided me in my community. I use stories, poetry and music as bridges between cultures, allowing each listener to find his or her own soul place in this ancient yet new world. By incorporating my personal experiences and feelings into every lecture or performance, participants discover clarity and find individual relevance to matters in their own lives.”

Location:  PSU Multicultural Center, 228 Smith Memorial Union, 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.

I’ve gotten excited about them enough to start having playtest days, where we see what makes these games tick, use them to work our storytelling muscles, and possibly develop our own games.

WHAT: Indie role playing game day, where we playtest games that work our storytelling muscles in new and exciting ways.
WHO: You or someone like you. Including people you know who would really enjoy it.
WHEN: Sunday Jan 13th at 1pm
WHERE: The Scout Pit, 5040 SE Milwaukie, around back next to the parking lot.
WHY: To explore new tools for stretching our storytelling muscles, to innovate methods of teaching these skills, to help design possible tracker and animist-oriented story games.

COST: Free, but we welcome donations for sustaining the Scout Pit, a community center on the lip of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

An excerpt from Chapter Two:

To even touch the wild place, somehow we have to get to silence. You know what I mean – when you see wind rushing through tree branches, rain hitting a puddle, a bird rocking back and forth on a swinging power line, black against the sky. All these beings live in a ‘silent’, nonverbal world. Our power of language and thought enables us to do amazing things, but our obsession with it in these latter ages has sundered us from our wild relatives. Somehow we need to reopen that commonality of silence again. Fortunately, I have just the thing.

The Sensory Tune-in Game

This game you can play by yourself or with others, standing in a circle, anytime and anyplace – waiting for a bus, talking at a cafe, out at a park, anywhere!

If alone, direct yourself silently in your mind through the instructions. If in a group, choose one person to lead the others.

0. In this game you want to stay conscious of as many of your five senses as possible, all simultaneously. Once you can do all five, you want to increase the amount of sensations in each sense. In brackets you’ll find directions for different ways of increasing the sensations and challenge. Don’t worry about memorizing the exact words for directing people through each sense, but do note the phrasing, known as ‘pace and lead’. You don’t want to pop the experiential bubble by bossing folks around, you want to gently lead the way. Count silently to 8 seconds when transitioning from one of the 5 senses to another.

1. Owl eyes:  “Pick a distant point in front of you, and park the center of your vision there. As you begin to focus on that point, you can also notice the very edges of your vision, both all the way to the left, and all the way to the right. As your vision spreads out to each side, you can also begin to notice all the way up and down, all simultaneously. Now, as you see everything, all at once, in one great panorama, shadow and light, color and empty spaces, you can….”[notice negative spaces, the empty shapes formed by the crossing of tree branches etc. - how many shades of x color do you see - memorize the whole scene so you can draw it - what smallest detail do you notice - what have you missed - ]

2. Deer ears: “…Now hear all the sounds, all around you in  full circle, in a sphere, each one a separate sound, each one a separate note, or rhythm, or percussion…[ - hear the music in the sounds, as a symphony played them - what quietest sound do you hear? quieter than that? - pick a sound that you consider one thing, and separate it out into its sub-notes and rhythms - ]

3. Raccoon hands: “…”….as you continue to see everything, all at once….and hear…all the sounds, you can now begin to notice the feelings in your body…the movement of air against your skin, the clothes on your body, the pressure of the earth against your feet…the expanse of your back like a big reflector dish, receiving and sending ripples of feeling to, and from, all around you…[- offer out the palms of your hands moving them in an arc around you, feeling for changes in heat and sensation on them, like metal detector wands at the airport - how do different objects and directions around you make you feel, in your belly? in your heart? -]

4. Dog nose: “….as you continue to see everything, all at once….and hear…all the sounds…and feel, all the feelings…you can now begin to notice the smells…how many do scents do you detect…and which direction to they come from…and how close their source…[- what faintest smell do you smell? - how many scent notes can you pick apart from whole smells? - does taking big sniffs make your more sensitive, or do tiny puffs, like a dog? - ]

5. Snail tongue: “…as you continue to see everything, all at once….and hear…all the sounds…and feel, all the feelings…and smell, all the smells…you can now begin to notice the taste of your tongue in your mouth…” [ - do you taste salt? sour? sweet? bitter? how much of each? - ]

6. At some point during this game you may feel your world fuzz over a  bit, as your senses overwhelm your mind, and put you in a dream place. So much for drugs, eh? Who needs ‘em! Make this fuzzy place a goal, every time you do this exercise: perservere until you achieve the dreamy state. This will work the edge of your sensory ability, and make it a little stronger, each time.

Play this game over and over, and every time, learn something new…anything! If you look for it, you’ll find it.  Demand a discovery every time! And then blog about it! What improvements to the game have you innovated? What new sensory questions and challenges have you added to the game? Share with us.

We’ve moved locations – you’ll still find it at PSU. 

Tyler Williams    Friday, December 14, 2007

A UNIQUE JOURNEY
Tyler Williams, born of the Dit ti dhat Nation, will appear at The Natural Way: Indigenous Voices to share stories of his life’s journey. The Creator has gifted Tyler with a unique and positive perspective on life, and a special ability to communicate that to others.

Tyler was raised in Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. His people are traditionally hunters, fisherman, totem pole carvers and canoe builders. Like many of his peers, Tyler attended a government boarding
school which educated him in the ways of the dominant culture, not allowing him to learn the ways and traditions of his own people.  As an adult, he spent time in Portland and Seattle.

At age 30, Tyler began to spend time with Brave Buffalo, a Lakota teacher. From this experience he learned and adopted Lakota traditions, and has followed Lakota spiritual ways for more than 30 years. Tyler is valued in his community as a speaker, teacher, and spiritual advisor.
$10-20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium

Grab the Flyer!!

The Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

A Millennium of Continuous Democracy

What are the indigenous roots of our democracy? Are there other traditions

that point the way to a satisfying and sustainable future of peace and consensus?

Jake Swamp, ‘Tekaronianeken’, will appear at the Natural Way-Indigenous Voices on Friday evening, October 12, to discuss the traditions of peace and democracy originating amongst his people, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. As the role models for the Founding Fathers in the writing of the US Constitution, the Haudenosaunee have much experience to share with younger, struggling democracies.

Jake Swamp has been a Mohawk Sub-Chief and representative on the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and is an internationally renowned speaker on indigenous, environmental and social issues. He was directly involved in the creation of the Akwesasne Freedom School – a Mohawk language immersion school of critical acclaim that has been an inspiration to many First Nation peoples in the United States and Canada.

He is the author of the children’s book Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message, which has been translated into five languages and was featured on the PBS television show Reading Rainbow. Other projects include The Peacemaker’s Journey audiocassette produced by Parabola Magazine (1996), The U.S. Constitution & The Great Law of Peace: A Comparison (2004) and the film Dreamkeeper by Hallmark Entertainment (2003), for which he was a consultant.

Workshop: Saturday, October 13, 2007, 12:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp will preside over a ‘Tree of Peace’ Planting Ceremony. Over a thousand years ago, the Peacemaker and Aiionwatha (Hiawatha) brought the Great Law of Peace (Kaianerekowa) to the warring Indian nations of what is now New York State. The message of Peace, Power, and the Good Mind resulted in the forming of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois Confederacy. These nations were instructed to bury their weapons of war under the Great Tree of Peace. The Tree Planting Ceremony that Chief Swamp shares is an effort to bring awareness to environmental and social concerns. A potluck feast will follow the ceremony.

Location: Fawnwood at Deer Island (near St. Helens).

Directions: Take Highway 30 West towards St. Helens,
Apx. 45 minutes or less from downtown Portland you will come to the
town of Deer Island. Deer Island is about five miles past St. Helens.
As you pass the Deer Island Store on your left, reset mileage gage.
Continue on hwy 30 west 1.6 miles
Take left up Butterfield Road towards rust colored house.
(DO NOT TAKE SHARP LEFT UP STEEP DRIVEWAY THAT SAYS NO TRESPASSING)
Continue up gravel road past rust colored house, GO SLOW PLEASE
In 100 yards or so you will come to a modular home on left.
At modular home, turn left and pass through their driveway to gate.
(If you miss this turn you will come to a gate and have to turn
around. You will note the Yurt in the distance on your left. That is
where we are.)
GO EXTRA SLOW PLEASE
Go through gate and continue up driveway.
Travel time is approximately one 45 minutes or less from Portland.

What to Bring: Dress for outdoors and weather, folding chair, non-alcoholic beverages/water, picnic plate and eating utensils, and a potluck dish with serving utensil for the feast.

Cost: $5-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium. Registration is on-site.
Co-sponsors: Earth & Spirit Council at www.earthandspirit.org, The College of Mythic Cartography at www.mythic-cartography.org and Deerdance at www.deerdance.org. Contact: contactus@earthandspirit.org

What does it mean to receive mentoring from Trees, in Standing?

To keep focus.

To endure great discomfort in the search for personal discovery? How do we transform ‘suffering’ into the decision to stay totally present?

Choose it. Don’t waste a moment of real feeling, of pain or discomfort, for while you sit with them they open whole worlds for you. Save your edge experiences for when you feel fully prepared to suck the marrow out of them. Otherwise, why bother? People suffer all the time. You don’t get a medal for it. But when you feel ready to do something else than simply suffer, then we’ve got something to work with.

Let’s practice together.

One of my main daily physical practices nowadays often goes by the name, “Standing Like A Tree”, or Zhan Zhuang.

In this practice I’ve found a powerful way to work many skills simultaneously; the stillness of stalking, the power of center, and the fusion of body and intent.

The metaphorical crossroads of this physical practice, with the social innovation of space-holding activities, such as Open Space gatherings, has not missed my notice.

I make Standing Like A Tree a regular part of SHIFT gatherings. Consider finding someone in you area who can teach this powerful practice, with one caveat: though many teach this, few seem to understand it. I wish you good luck.

The vast realms of unexplored territories don’t exist on the distant periphery of our cultural worlds, but right in our own backyard.

Right in our own living rooms.

Right in our own minds.

Time for a short intermission:

What happened? What went wrong?

When we surround ourselves with people unwilling to inform the emperor of his nakedness, people who censor themselves when confronted with our fallibility, we venture into the place at which the venture of civilization has arrived: collapse. And everything looks great, doesn’t it? Except for the innumerable cracks and fissures erupting willy-nilly all over our culture and planetary ecology, of course. But the shiny new gadgets keep rolling out for us to buy, so why should we worry?

I would propose that by its very nature hierarchy invites collapse because of its resistance to the free flow of communication. Much of what I do now concerns opening up lines of communication: Open Space gatherings, Rewild Camps, the Rewild.info wiki and forums, Agile Team development, efficient and energizing meetings, clarity work and compassionate dialogue.

If you’ve read my series on Breaking the Spell, you’ve read the connection between the rise of science culture and the emergence of printed journals and scientific societies. The first could not occur without the second – peer dialogue and co-exploration of ‘what we can know’ about the world drives science, not a mythological scientific method invented by a nonscientific philosophers rather than actual scientists doing the work (indigenous trackers and knowledge workers have exquisitely developed systems of honest inquiry into observable phenomena for countless millenia, systems that often continue to make us look ignorant and stubborn by comparison). Look into the history.

Examine your blindspots. Forgive yourself your humanity. And, like the Kiai Master in the video, have the balls to put your insights and experience to the test: what you find out may just change your life.

Daughter, lead me

through the maze of future’s past

dark ways winding into light

Daughter, lead me

what memories burn behind your old woman’s eyes

a life full of surviving sacredly

Daughter, lead me

what wisdom did your father give you

that kept you on the living road

Daughter, lead me

tell me what you received

so that I may give it

to you

2

The wind pulls the rain down ever harder

every day it comes, swelling and splitting

the foundations of this world

the sky falling on our fallen idols

great stone heads, cheeks against the earth

drowing in themud

for some it looks like a summer’s day

but I hear the thunder

I smell the lightning
and with my family

we leave theruined world

and the vacationers

sunning themselves

amidst the sinking gods

The Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

A Millennium of Continuous Democracy

What are the indigenous roots of our democracy? Are there other traditions

that point the way to a satisfying and sustainable future of peace and consensus?
Lecture: Friday, October 12, 2007, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp, ‘Tekaronianeken’, will appear at the Natural Way-Indigenous Voices on Friday evening, October 12, to discuss the traditions of peace and democracy originating amongst his people, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. As the role models for the Founding Fathers in the writing of the US Constitution, the Haudenosaunee have much experience to share with younger, struggling democracies.

Jake Swamp has been a Mohawk Sub-Chief and representative on the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and is an internationally renowned speaker on indigenous, environmental and social issues. He was directly involved in the creation of the Akwesasne Freedom School – a Mohawk language immersion school of critical acclaim that has been an inspiration to many First Nation peoples in the United States and Canada.

He is the author of the children’s book Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message, which has been translated into five languages and was featured on the PBS television show Reading Rainbow. Other projects include The Peacemaker’s Journey audiocassette produced by Parabola Magazine (1996), The U.S. Constitution & The Great Law of Peace: A Comparison (2004) and the film Dreamkeeper by Hallmark Entertainment (2003), for which he was a consultant.

Location: Native American Student and Community Center at Portland State University, SW Broadway and Jackson, Portland, Oregon

Cost: $10-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium
Workshop: Saturday, October 13, 2007, 12:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp will preside over a ‘Tree of Peace’ Planting Ceremony. Over a thousand years ago, the Peacemaker and Aiionwatha (Hiawatha) brought the Great Law of Peace (Kaianerekowa) to the warring Indian nations of what is now New York State. The message of Peace, Power, and the Good Mind resulted in the forming of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois Confederacy. These nations were instructed to bury their weapons of war under the Great Tree of Peace. The Tree Planting Ceremony that Chief Swamp shares is an effort to bring awareness to environmental and social concerns. A potluck feast will follow the ceremony.

Location: Fawnwood at Deer Island (near St. Helens).

Directions: Take Highway 30 West towards St. Helens,
Apx. 45 minutes or less from downtown Portland you will come to the
town of Deer Island. Deer Island is about five miles past St. Helens.
As you pass the Deer Island Store on your left, reset mileage gage.
Continue on hwy 30 west 1.6 miles
Take left up Butterfield Road towards rust colored house.
(DO NOT TAKE SHARP LEFT UP STEEP DRIVEWAY THAT SAYS NO TRESPASSING)
Continue up gravel road past rust colored house, GO SLOW PLEASE
In 100 yards or so you will come to a modular home on left.
At modular home, turn left and pass through their driveway to gate.
(If you miss this turn you will come to a gate and have to turn
around. You will note the Yurt in the distance on your left. That is
where we are.)
GO EXTRA SLOW PLEASE
Go through gate and continue up driveway.
Travel time is approximately one 45 minutes or less from Portland.

What to Bring: Dress for outdoors and weather, folding chair, non-alcoholic beverages/water, picnic plate and eating utensils, and a potluck dish with serving utensil for the feast.

Cost: $5-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium. Registration is on-site.
Co-sponsors: Earth & Spirit Council at www.earthandspirit.org, The College of Mythic Cartography at www.mythic-cartography.org and Deerdance at www.deerdance.org. Contact: contactus@earthandspirit.org

I wanted to write a short note on holding space outdoors, as I’ve heard that opinions vary, and me and my gang went ahead and tried it. The Open Space, Rewild Camp Portland 2007, went really well, with a couple of glitches.

See our wiki:

http://www.rewild.info/fieldguide/index.php?title=Rewild_Camp_Portland_2007

We held our marketplace at a picnic table in a local urban park, under a large tree, along with updating a wiki with new meeting times, etc.

I wouldn’t do the wiki thing again, because it discouraged folks from returning to the marketplace; they simply looked up updates online, which (no wifi at the park) we didn’t always get up in a timely fashion, resulting in some crossed wires.

It worked really well in other ways – we had lots of passers-by looking at the marketplace, asking questions, wanting to join in (though few actually chose to, they all expressed interest). The houseless (aka homeless) folks at the park supported us so incredibly much, it added a truly magical element to the week. Not once did they hit us up for change etc., they just encouraged us, complimented us, congradulated us, and on and on. So much upbeat out-of-the-blue support carried us through a lot of slow times waiting for people to ‘come-back’ to the marketplace!

Most maps defines their use by what they leave out, not by what they show. Yet mythic maps must transform us into fully realized creatures of the Land. The stories that the Land tells us as humans must teach us how to live, must create a living map, in every human body. The depth and breadth of a mythic map encourages us on an ever-renewing journey into the revelation of the totality of place.

The word ‘cartography’, by its roots, implies a ‘writing-down’ of this map, but more and more I contest that. Some things we must not write down. I continue to use the word ‘cartography’ because we have no word for what we must become, an embody-ing of a Land that nourishes us, land-dreamers.

Some maps we can only ‘read’ by walking them, in our minds or in our bodies. These maps matter most to me. These maps return us to the earth. These maps rescue our starving selves.

Of course, real myths build very real worlds from their spell, as we can see around us: the legacy of diseased and metastisizing myths consuming the living world in their darkness of ‘one right way to live’, ‘humans separate from nature’, ‘man must conquer the world’.

These pathetic and flickering mythis even then don’t hold a candle to true sustaining mythology, mythology raised on reality therapy, a constant attention to the speech of the living world.

So I say ‘Mythic…’ because Myth reminds us of our true selves, of what Jeanette Armstrong calls ‘the land-dreaming capacity’, a core reality that defines and identifies our human natures. To question the Land, to let the Land dream us, means to experience constant revelation, a constant stream of insight and overwhelming awakening to the vast, colorful, and intensely powerful personalities that churn and vitalize the world.

Every story, every movie that we consume, produced by this culture, counters this capacity to allow the Land to dream us. Every tale of humans talking to each other, the soap opera of their petty desires, struggles, and insanities, while in the background trees wave and creak, air swirls and grumbles, birds scream, all protesting ‘don’t you see us…don’t you see us..’.

Which Myths will make our bodies? Perhaps like the story that science tells, of how our bodies remake themselves, down to the last cell, every seven years, perhaps we can remake ourselves with truly sustaining myths in a similar amount of time. A land-dreaming capacity healed by the insistance of allowing a living Land to dream us, rather than the dead one offered up by the culture magicians employed by this dying modern world.

How easily do we abandon Myths, to embrace new ones? Well, it takes a first step, an informed consent, an awakening of the perception that in every story this culture offers, the Land sits silently in the background, weeping: ‘you have abandoned us, you have forgotten us, please see us, please hear us again’.

But Colleges…they started out as neighbors talking to each other about what mattered.

Apocryphal? I don’t really care one way or the other, because the story teaches me something real about what matters. Talking to each other in the evenings will rescue us far more surely than all the Ph.D.’s in the world. We have work to do, as colleagues, neighbors, and families. Let’s get to it. In parks and public right-of-ways, in abandoned lots and condemned ruins, in living rooms and pubs, let’s get together on the Land that waits for us to return our hearts to her, and start talking.

What: SHIFT Archery! Bring a bow etc. if ya got ‘em. If you don’t, we may have loaners – come anyway.
Where: Forest Park Archery Range – on SW Kingston Rd between Hoyt Arboretum and the Rose Garden – look for straw bales and a clearing with gravel parking. Email for more precise directions.
When: Meet at the range at 10:30am.

What: An Open Space for rewilding skills. We encourage you to read about what an Open Space is by clicking here.

Where: Various Locations around PORTLAND, OR!

Why: To learn and share more about rewilding ourselves in our own bio-region with the people who live here with us in hopes that this sharing of information will build a better community and environment for the 7 generations to come and beyond.

How: Just show up on Saturday August 4th at Colonel Summers Park at 9am. Who: Anyone under the sun. We request that you RSVP by signing your name on the list below.

Rewild Camp Portland is a weeklong DIY social experiment/event held using the collaborative group information-share known as “open space technology,” to share rewilding skills and fun times such as: Archery, fire by friction, martial arts, hunting/trapping, stone tools, tan a hide, wool-felting, sensory awareness, capture the flag, backyard campfires, dance parties, wild-crafting, coffee shop conversations, impromptu dance parties, spontaneous hook-ups, gathering and cooking food, etc.

Now here’s how it works. Say you want to teach people how to make a bow-drill fire, Say you don’t want to teach anything, say you just want to take some friends and go shoot some bows and arrows, say you want to learn a skill like bike repair, say you want to give a lecture on the collapse of civilization, say you want to hear a lecture on the collapse of civilization, say you want to have a conversation about toxins in the Willamette river, say you want to have a dance party, all you need to do is show up on Saturday morning!

To hold the integrity of the event, we need you to show up on at least the first day of the Rewild Open Space Saturday, August 4th at 9am. On this day you will learn how Open Spaces work, and how to participate in them. If you do not show up this day but still want to participate, you must arrange to have the culture of the Open Space passed on to you somehow. Otherwise, confusion will result! After the first day, you can attend (or not) any day’s events freely. At Colonel Summers Park on SE 20th and Belmont.

During the morning we will collectively throw out ideas/topics/classes/discussions to be had, held, partied and use those to build a Calendar of activities for the week.

An Open Space is just plain hard to simply explain. You must experience it to understand. So, relax, show up on Saturday with lots of ideas.

The Activism for a better Cascadia begins 7/07/2007:

Join us for the Doug Honours Ceremony were we will gather to honour local/northwest activists and philanthropists by awarding them Doug Flags.

This event is the start of the movement, and where else than where it all started 164 years ago at Champoeg (pronounced sham-POO-ee), Oregon. Champoeg features a unique combination of history, nature, and recreation. This is the site where Oregon’s (i.e. Cascadia) first provisional government was formed by a historical vote in 1843.

At the event we will discuss future goals and initiatives, networking, participate in history tours, enjoy a potluck picnic, and enjoy a wonderful ceremony.

Reservation is for Riverside lot #3 and our event begins at 8am and ends at 8pm.

Discussion will begin at 11:30am
History Tour will begin at 1pm
Potluck Dinner at 5pm
Ceremony will begin at 7pm
Reservation ends at 8pm.

For those who wish to come to the park early you can enjoy swimming, disc golf, biking, hiking, bird watching, etc.

Directions:

Take I-5 South if traveling form North Cascadia, or take I-5 North if traveling from South Cascadia to exit 278, and then follow these directions:

1. Take exit 278 toward Donald/Aurora National Historic District 0.2 mi
2. Turn right at Ehlen Rd NE 2.5 mi 3 mins
3. Continue on Yergen Rd NE 1.0 mi 1 min
4. Turn right at Case Rd NE 1.4 mi 2 mins
5. Slight left at Champoeg Rd NE 0.9 mi 2 mins
6. To: Champoeg State Heritage Area: 7679 Champoeg Rd NE, St. Paul, OR 97137.

Where would you rather be on a Saturday Afternoon? Come to Champoeg Park on 7/7/07 for the Doug Honours Ceremony. If you wish to attend please send an email to savepac17@yahoo.com. Please RSVP ASAP as space is limited! Please bring food and drink (beer in cans or bottles– no kegs!) for the Potluck. Everyone is responsible for their own lunch. Again, please RSVP ASAP!

Onward Cascadia!

A Mayan one…

Tibetan Buddhist…

A Basque one (a tribal culture, the oldest in Europe), known as the Lauburu (‘four summits’)…

Native stone medicine wheels, aged up to 4,500 years old, found in Alberta, Canada…

The ‘classic’ North American medicine wheel that many will recognize, perhaps based on the Lakota version…

I’ll include the Celtic Cross in this list, though no evidence exists (that I know of) that points to its use as a compass, or its existence before the arrival of Christianity among the Celts. Whatever its meaning before the christian era, it has certainly taken on new meaning in the cultural and spiritual rennaissance of faiths such as neopaganism, druidry, and so on.

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. For the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss of locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored. Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination.

— Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)

The foregoing is drawn from Said’s consideration of 20th-century Irish literature, particularly the poetry of W.B. Yeats, as exemplary of global postcolonial resistance culture. Though most often subsumed into a “de-politicized” modernist canon, Yeats emerges for Said a study in the conflicting tensions which characterize the struggle for decolonization. Yeats recognizes British imperial domination of Ireland and seeks to counter assimilation by exploring and reifying an indigenous Irish cultural heritage…

…Successive Irish artists are indebted to Yeats as they inventively subvert imperialism and reclaim the geographical, political, and imaginative regions held by the colonizer…

Another plus to the essay – it substantially references a favorite movie of mine, Into the West, concerning two young Irish Travellers escaping the clutches of modern society on the back of a possibly magic horse.

Body Skills

Rewilders can easily overlook the importance of training their body, in favor of the technological skills of wilderness living. In fact, many cultures see the intimate knowledge of how to use one’s body effectively as a technology in and of itself. Modern humans have the overwhelming excess of calories to make moving inefficiently and carrying constant tension an option. A person with an efficient body will find the vast array of wilderness skills far easier and pleasant, even with little or no actual change in “technique”.

His description of the experience:

Making the Sound of the Jeweled Toad

What do you do after discovering that your Heart is actually a shiny jeweled Toad trying to dig her way out of the deep hibernating ground of who your think you are? A toad whose wild noise can startle the world into life again, back from this frowning, know-it-all, self-destructive drift toward a synthetic, machine-dependent, free-fall existence in the bottomless abyss of cynicism’s insatiable hunger. What happens when each of us in our own way making our indigenous sounds together finds out that being human does not mean what we have been taught, but that we on the other hand could become a grove of never-before-seen trees whose flowers of deep and unstoppable life-giving sounds make symphonies of natural jazz that cause the real world to sing again, dream again, swim again, jump-up-doing-mysterious-things again, armed only with the unarmed courage that comes from a vision of our diverse collective natural beauty: the sounds of each of our hearts in love with life, a sound of such an irresistible character as to cause the endangered spiritual DNA of all things to jump back out of their hiding place into their normal ecstatic, semi-random exuberant enormity whose staggered flowering, fruiting, reseeding and scattering is the face of the Holy in Nature?

Please come, help me, Martín Prechtel, not only to sing, but to try to ritually reseed in the ground of grief’s remembrance, the possibility of a time of hope beyond our own with the flowering of our hands and voices, driven by the magnificent spiritual pump of our dreaming hearts.

All Blessings- Martín Prechtel

The name SHIFT refers to the idea that rewilding, re-nativing, re-indigenizing, requires us to reconnect with natural forces and rhythms. It requires us to acquire a flexibility and flow, constantly attuned to our world, in both a moment-to-moment sense and a big-picture sense.

At SHIFT we explore this, by first connecting to the body, breathing life into its movements, imitating the living world, and then learning simple protector skills such as stick-fighting, but most of all: finding our natural and wild center, and moving from it.

Tamarack Song has some interesting things to say about this, things I’ve tried to say, but have to confess that Tamarack says them much better:

..

.Many of the movements in martial arts training are taken from the
natural realm. For example, tai chi – perhaps the best-known practice
– has movements with names such as “cloud hands,” “White stork
cools its wings,” and “snake creeps down.” Practitioners learn from
people who learned from people who learned from people who
originally learned from their animal relations. Would it not be more
honoring, and perhaps a better learning experience, to go back to the
source and learn as did the original masters? It is the way our
ancestors learned, and it is the way of all native people –
Two-leggeds, Four-leggeds, Six-leggeds, Wingeds, and Rooteds. It
could serve us well and are healing and reawakening to return to this
relationship of belonging, of learning from each other in a
Circle-relationship way, rather than turning our back on our
relations and purporting to know what they have to teach us. Is
dishonoring them in this way what we really want to do?

… I watch people in a building imitating their teacher in the practice of
an exercise such as Dancing in the Clouds when just a doorway away
they could be outside learning directly from real clouds. I see others
practicing Golden Pheasant Stretches his Leg with the birds
watching them from the nearby woods, wondering why the people
are learning from another person and not from them, as in the days
of old. And why are they learning a golden pheasant movement
when there are none for thousands of miles? Raven, heron and eagle
stand by watching, and saying to themselves “are we not good
enough?”