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.

I’ve rambled on and on about the Tzutujil and the Roma because I want to underscore that all this has to do with now, today, here. Not ancient traditions from the dawn of time, but what we have the ability and response-ability to attend to in our own lifetime, in our own families, amongst our friends, at work and home.

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.

I offer the Gypsy Roma and Tzutujil examples to how how Family and Village relationships to peace, community, collaboration, still work even in the modern climate of the predatory mass media culture. Tribal peoples today deal with this culture and retaining their identity constantly. Some more successfully than others, sure, so all the more reason to pay attention to those successfully navigating the boiling waters of this modern cultural melting pot.

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!

Author, speaker, and teacher Martín Prechtel writes on this from the perspective of the Tzutujil Mayans of Highland Guatemala. In their village of Santiago Atitlan, they have a similar proceeding to the kris romaniya (excerpted from Long Life, Honey in the Heart, pages 168-170):

…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.

[cont’d from Widening Conversational Scope: the Preamble]

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.

In the articles A Community of Rewilding Means Adults Maintaining Accord, and When the State Assigns Blame, I started a line of inquiry I want to continue here. Using the examples of the Gypsy Roma, as studied by the essayists in Gypsy Law, edited by Walter Weyrauch, I saw that an intact, relatively animist, tribal people successfully retained their identity and cultural vitality amidst the constant daily horrors of civilization’s growth economy. How do they keep their connection to Family, to Tribe, in the face of the commodifying machine who sees them as yet unapportioned human resources?

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.

Animism means choosing to see the personhood and kinship in all things.

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.

Now we have a paradox to wrestle.  The mindset that sees a verb ‘to be’-based reality, itself sees simply removing ‘to be’ as the course of action. In the ‘to be’-based mind, if I cut out ‘to be’, then it will no longer ‘be’. Problem solved, right?

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?

Long time readers here will note that “e-prime” refers to the use of English when completely avoiding the verb “to be”. This removes what Alfred Korzybski, father of the General Semantics movement (and coiner of such gems as “the map is not the territory”), called the errors of identity (”she is a woman”), and of predication (”she is beautiful”); the e-prime discipline also removes the progressive tenses - tenses that actually come in handy quite a bit. “I am walking”, “I was thinking”, etc. ‘To be’ acts as a helper verb in these situations, a purely coincidental (in my mind) construct in English, differing from other modern languages. Progressive tense makes no errors of identity or predication; it gives tone and image to the verb, a sense of “ongoingness” rather than “abruptness”. We lose this progressive tense in e-prime purely because, if we continue to use as it stands, the verb ‘to be’ creeps back in bit by bit. You can’t easily remove ‘to be’ errors unless you remove all occurrences of the verb, innocent or not. At least, many have tried, but it substantially extends the learning curve, so much so that I don’t know anyone that successfully speaks or writes in e-prime that keeps the progressive tense use.

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]

[continuing from Parts I and 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!

[this continues a series on learning the game Polaris - please refer to Part I for context]

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 thought I’d start walking my talk and actually provide an example of how to make a game not only learnable and accessible, but also enjoyable at every level of ‘tutorial’ play. In a sense, all play then becomes a tutorial stage, because once you master the present stage you can always make the game more complex by adding another. You don’t have to…but this does give hope for some games that bet the farm on complexity, but lose a lot of players because of it. Complexity doesn’t make a game unplayable; the lack of a workable play pedagogy makes a game unplayable (or at least, played by less people).

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]

I measure the success of a story by noticing how much it sticks with me, changes my perspective, helps me solve problems in my own life. This means the story itself has ’stuck’ to me on many levels; it has moved (literally, moved, wrenched, pushed and pulled) me emotionally, engaged me sensuously, hit major themes and major points on the Arc of Meaning, referred to by mythologist Joseph Campbell as ‘the Hero’s Journey’, and leaves me with a sense of abiding mystery and ‘no final answers’.

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.