The College of Mythic Cartography exists wherever Peers gather to tell meaningful Story about their relationship with the Land.

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.

In this seemingly tangential podcast, I further explain the use of the sensory tune-up game, and talk about how every game we play has both diagnostic and therapeutic properties. I speak a little bit of the history of Vision Therapy, the improvement of eyesight without corrective lenses, tell my own story of recent radical vision improvement, and offer up a method for those living in a similar context as myself; i.e. improving their health, changing their lifestyle, gaining self-clarity.

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

 

 The Vision Thing - COMC Podcast Episode 25 [47:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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.

[Warning to sensitive e-prime ears; I use a lot of “to be” language in this article to make a point.]

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 have refined a ridiculous theory based on pure speculation, concerning the development of language.

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!

I’d like to keep the podcasts coming out, but I’ve already run up against the archiving limit at liberated syndication, the podcast hosting service I use. I downgraded the archive size over the winter, due to me thinking I wouldn’t put out more podcasts. Now I don’t have the funds to up the hosting again for the recent revitalization of the College.

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!

WAYK UP REWILDERS!

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

 

 The Learning Revolution - COMC Podcast Episode 24 [37:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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

 

 Where Are Your Keys? - COMC Podcast Episode 23 [93:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The only way back to life-affirming Story, lies in taking back the responsibility to tell it.

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!

We belong to a culture founded on enslavement, even into the present day, even into our own workplaces, neighborhoods, and living rooms.

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].

The mind, along with the body’s needs, chooses and directs attention. I think we can start there. Our culture, our idiom, our language, all direct our attention. Questions direct our attention.

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”.

Rewilding means different things to different people. To a scientist, it may mean the reintroduction of a wild species into its former habitat. To an anarchist, it may mean the political and personal freedom achieved by abandoning modern values and habits.

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.

Honestly, we haven’t stopped talking about ‘widening conversation scope’. It just has a lot of parts to it. I make no guarantees how far we’ll get.

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.