tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70369543627663627772024-03-18T11:00:37.509-07:00Green Man RamblingsMusings about personal and planetary healing from an herbalist, poet, and witch.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.comBlogger114125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-10139939062589472892019-01-17T17:17:00.005-08:002019-01-17T17:35:52.912-08:00The Wild Geese Fly Home: Gratitude for Mary Oliver<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="7ls8j" data-offset-key="4qks1-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">In one of the deepest moments of grief and shame and fear I have ever </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">known, in the last words she would share with me before we went our </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">separate ways, a dear friend sent me a single line from Mary Oliver:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">"You do not have to be good."</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">and I wept.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Releasing</span><span style="font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">for a moment my deep sense of failure and disgrace, and opening into </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">he possibility that I could breathe the</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">next breath and live</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Several</span> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">weeks later, in a ceremony held by a community that was willing to </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">hold all the complexity of my healing, as my prayer deepened, Mary </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Oliver's words came again, spoken in the voice of that same cara anam </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">(friend of my soul):</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">"You</span> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">do not have to walk on your knees</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">for</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">a hundred miles through the desert repenting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">You </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">only have to let the soft animal of your body</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">love </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">what it loves."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">and</span> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">again, tears flowed, washing away a lifetime of stories of worthiness </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">and unworthiness, deserving and undeserving fall away, understanding </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">that no matter what had come before, and no matter what would come </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">next, in that moment I could choose to be with the beating of my </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">heart and the beating of the drum . . and love.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Love,
wild love,</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> unconditional love</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> has fallen out of fashion in these times. </span></span>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We fear it will not be enough. Or that we will not be strong enough to sustain us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We fear it will reach the underserving. We fear we might be among them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We fear it will make us vulnerable. We fear it will make us fools.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We treat the imperfection of its expression as proof that it was never real.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">And </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">yet, love is truly the only thing that can overcome evil, because it </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">is the only thing evil cannot understand, and hence the only thing </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">that catches evil by surprise.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">(I do not believe that there are evil people, but I do believe that evil is a force in the world that finds its way through the cracks in our hearts when our hearts are not turned toward love.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And deserving and undeserving are meaningless in the hearts of the wild and the divine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Thomas Paine wrote that belief in a cruel god makes men cruel. I see all around us, people sharpening the edges of righteousness, praying for the suffering of their enemies, whether they are paying to one god or to many or to an impersonal ideal of justice.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Mary Oliver's poetry again and again reminds us to turn toward the beauty of the living world, remember its goodness, remember love. It turns us away from cruel gods and invites us back into our own hearts, our own soft animal bodies that love what they love.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And so, as Wild Geese on the wing fly through the snowy twilight, and their calls echo from the sky, I remember you with gratitude, Mary Oliver.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1c1e21;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And I remember to love.</span></span></div>
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com240tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-45083829864006435182018-04-13T19:15:00.001-07:002018-04-13T19:15:21.499-07:00Unnatural Categories: In Defense of Barnhill and Martucci<span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">I read the controversial article that </span><a href="http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/03/02/peds.2015-4154" style="font-family: inherit;">Dr. Anne Barnhill and Dr. Jessica Martucci </a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">wrote in </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"> Pediatrics Perspectives,</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: inherit;"> problematizing the use of the word "natural" in breastfeeding promotion campaigns, and while I think that they oversimplify the variety of reasons why people would be skeptical or resistant around adhereing current vaccination regimes, their core argument is an important one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Barnhill and Martucci write:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">" <span style="background-color: white; color: black;">It makes sense that breastfeeding promotion would make appeals to the 'natural.; The resurgence in breastfeeding rates over roughly the past 4 decades is rooted in a history of women’s organized efforts during the 1950s and 1960s to redeem the value of feeding babies 'naturally' in the face of widespread medical support for formula feeding.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black;">Coupling nature with motherhood, however, can inadvertently support biologically deterministic arguments about the roles of men and women in the family (for example, that women should be the primary caretakers of children). Referencing the “natural” in breastfeeding promotion, then, may inadvertently endorse a controversial set of values about family life and gender roles, which would be ethically inappropriate. Invoking the “natural” is also imprecise because it lacks a clear definition."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Their point is not that breastfeeding is not beneficial, or shouldn't be promoted, but that in identifying it as "natural" and assigning a moral value to that category we identify mothers and families who can't breastfeed -- women and other mothers who don't lactate, men and other fathers who are raising babies together or on their own -- as "unnatural" in ways that skirt dangerously close to the rhetoric of Christian fundamentalists and Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists. (If you aren't familiar with Judith Butler's questioning of the category of "natural woman" here is a taste -- <a href="http://magdor.tumblr.com/post/108754874029/when-aretha-franklin-sings-you-make-me-feel-like">http://magdor.tumblr.com/post/108754874029/when-aretha-franklin-sings-you-make-me-feel-like</a>)</span><br />
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The problem with dismissing things as "unnatural" is that it quickly leads to dismissing people as "unnatural." I am highly critical of the choices we in this culture make around technologies such as genetic engineering, petrochemical production, smartphones, and the methods of using and administering pharmaceuticals -- but I find that as soon as people move beyond the specifics of how the use of these technologies is impacting complex living systems and into the argument that they are "unnatural" they soon begin talking about the ways in which those technologies are allegedly responsible for the existence of monstrously unnatural people -- usually members of sexual and neurological minorities that have existed since the beginning of humanity and beyond. <br />
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I am an animist -- I experience everything in the world as alive and conscious, and nothing as un-natural. This includes things made by human technology. I wish humans wouldn't dig up uranium and put it in nuclear reactors and produce plutonium -- but the plutonium humans produce is still part of the living world, just as much as Roses and Hummingbirds and waterfalls are, and only when we fully engage it can we begin to transform the systems that produce it and find ways to deal with the reality of its toxicity.<br />
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And sometimes the best and least disruptive interventions we can make to support someone's healing involve technologies and approaches we might otherwise be critical of which ultimately support the establishment of coherence and healthy flow in living systems in ways more efficient and less damaging than ostensibly more natural interventions. As an herbalist, it is easier for me to support healthy tissue recovery after a surgery to remove a skin cancer than it is for me to do so after someone has applied a caustic "black salve." Sometimes technologies we might otherwise be loathe to apply are the best means in a given situation to stabilize a person whose health is rapidly deteriorating so we can move forward with the real work of healing.<br />
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My teacher, Karina, repeated to me over and over again that "A witch works with all things"-- dismissing some of those things as "unnatural" can be an impediment to healing, magic. and justice.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com85tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-6059114467906167102017-05-22T16:44:00.001-07:002017-05-22T16:44:15.700-07:00Materia Medica: Bear Medicine -- an excerpt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyD_Ni1VeC7_2OlBKLzwoahUTO3AGOTaCJrniO8OlB31QopTJOh3rrCcbEUTRH4O0_XxnZAK_SpbZA_epzAxOfUrzTrUyY-v3uKzQvrqD3WpCGFcqNEF-pX1lRa4HmERRBSbtUdO4COQzn/s1600/GLBA_BearEating_275x188_3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyD_Ni1VeC7_2OlBKLzwoahUTO3AGOTaCJrniO8OlB31QopTJOh3rrCcbEUTRH4O0_XxnZAK_SpbZA_epzAxOfUrzTrUyY-v3uKzQvrqD3WpCGFcqNEF-pX1lRa4HmERRBSbtUdO4COQzn/s1600/GLBA_BearEating_275x188_3.jpg" /></a></div>
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This is an excerpt from the notes accompanying my recent lecture on bear medicines from my online <a href="http://www.seandonahueherbalist.com/materia-magica-online-may-october/">Materia Magica</a> course which started in May. If you like it and want to see/hear/read/learn more, please consider signing up for the course. You will be sent my notes and lectures on Hawthorn and Bear Medicine immediately and will receive future lectures and notes twice a month through October -- <a href="http://www.seandonahueherbalist.com/materia-magica-online-may-october/">http://www.seandonahueherbalist.com/materia-magica-online-may-october/</a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">In the forest I
inhabit, bear and salmon are bringers of life – as they were in the
lost Irish forests of my ancestors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Returning from the
ocean to spawn and die, salmon draw bears to rivers and streams, and
the bears drag the carcasses of the fish into the forest where they
feed the topsoil.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua", serif;">In the Irish tradition,
the salmon is the oldest creature, and holds the wisdom of three
worlds – the watery underworld it swims through, the airy heavens
it leaps through, and the earth its body returns to. Who eats its
body gains its knowledge and insight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Bears gorge on Salmon
in autumn, and then retreat into their own dark underworld, where
their dreams are shaped by the mycorrhizal songs of the sleeping
forest. When they stir in spring, they dig their medicine roots –
which Matthew Wood notes are “brown, furry, pungent, and oily”
like bears themselves. Wherever people and bears live in
proximity, humans have traditionally followed suit, digging and
decocting those same roots. And they have told stories of people
who married those strange dark giants who rear up on two legs and
whose skinned bodies look human.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">There is linguistic
evidence of deep reverence for bears in early Ireland.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Ireland was ruled
through the last several centuries of the first millennium of the
Common Era by a High King, an Ard-Rí, whose sovereignty was granted
by the land itself as it spoke through the Lia Fáil, a stone that
held powers of regeneration for the king and the earth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">But there is also an
older Irish word, art-rí which means a king of bears or a bear-like
king. (The Welsh version of the same word is likely the origin of
the names of King Arthur and a Feri god.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">What would the nature
of a bear king be?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">Old stories of sacred
kings speak of the ways in which the life of the land and the life
and death of the king intertwine. Their modern re-iterations speak
of the king being sacrificed at Samhain. The king's life and death
are dedicated to the well being and blossoming of the people and the
land itself. </span>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">The salmon provides one
model for this sacrifice – giving its life in the journey upstream
to spawn, giving its body to the soil in death. And the bound
bodies of chieftans and kings found in peat bogs suggest that for
some kings, this sacrifice involved literal death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">The bear rides the
wheel of the year in a different way. Three seasons awake, walking
through our world, one season in darkness. A bear king might work
in the same way. Spending nine months tending to the well-being of
the community and the realm, three months in trance and dream and
contemplation listening to the soil and the stones and the
underground springs and the roots of the trees and the bones of the
dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">The English word king
suggests authority rather than power, to use the late John Trudell's
distinction – authority comes from dominating and coercing others
into obedience, whereas power comes from being part of life
unfolding. But the Irish word rí has an interesting etymology,
deriving from the same root word as the Sanskrit rig, which means
praise or shine. This suggests the possibility of seeing the sacred
king more as a priest or shaman, not the maker of laws in the modern
sense, but the speaker and interpreter of natural law through the
gnosis gained from giving a quarter of each year to walking in the
dark world that lies before all beginnings and after all endings, the
original darkness from which all things emerge and to which all
things return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;">The bear medicines all
serve to facilitate the movement from darkness and stillness into
motion and light. Their bitterness grounds us into our bodies,
their heady aromatic scents melt tension to allow the blood stirred
by their heat to move through the body. The body of the art-rí
that comes back to life when the snowmelt streams flow into fields of
bright blossoms. </span>
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<span style="font-family: Book Antiqua, serif;"><i>The rest of the notes and the lecture go into the specific natures of Eastern and Western Skunk Cabbage, Osha, and Angelica. <a href="http://www.seandonahueherbalist.com/materia-magica-online-may-october/"> <b>To learn more, register for Materia Magica today!</b></a></i></span></div>
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-56478983821281361112017-05-01T10:23:00.002-07:002017-05-01T10:23:26.618-07:00Beltane Blessings<span class="il" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I can't remember how many years ago I wrote this for the<i> Earth First! Journal,</i> but it comes back to me as a reminder of "the reason for the season" as those of a younger religion might say:</span><br />
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<span class="il" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Beltane</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> marks the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice -- a time of the world coming alive.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">The smooth, muscular curves of the supple boughs of a young Aspen. The pulsing rise of Birch sap. Rushing water. Lush moss.</span><br />
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Or maybe its the scent of Chapparal hanging heavy in the air after a desert rain. <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Or the wind blowing in from the sea on the first warm day of spring.</span></div>
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The living world seduces us, bringing us into our bodies, calling us to taste, smell, see, and feel.</div>
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<span class="il">Beltane</span> is a festival of fertility and lust. The Celts marked it with wild excess – bonfires and sweaty ecstatic dancing and heady Heather (or Psilocybe cubensis) mead, and lovers sneaking off into the forest at night, bringing back green boughs in the morning. The festivities began when the Hawthorn bloomed and continued until May's “Honey Moon” began to wane. </div>
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The Hawthorn has powerful associations with the Fae. The Tuatha de Danaan are said to have arrived in Ireland from out of the northern mists on <span class="il">Beltane</span> as the Hawthorn bloomed -- and the Celtic sons of Mil also arrived from Spain and launched the war that would bring the Danaan down on <span class="il">Beltane</span> as the Hawthorn bloomed. And it was under the Hawthorn that Thomas the Rhymer met the Queen of Elfland who would take him away for seven years.</div>
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The Maypole, mummer's dances involving the Fool and Jack in the Green, the custom of leaving flowers on doorsteps on May Day, are all remnants of older <span class="il">Beltane</span> traditions. </div>
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In much of modern pagandom, the erotic energy celebrated at <span class="il">Beltane</span> is cast in terms of heterosexual reproduction. But in the wild and to our wild selves, the force of <span class="il">Eros</span> -- vibrant, vital, lusty life -- knows no such limits and categories. The ecstasy of the Earth emerges in myriad forms. And we experience it viscerally when we allow ourselves to be fully present.</div>
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<span class="il">Terry</span> Tempest Williams writes:</div>
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<i>"Erotic means 'in relation.' Erotic is what those deep relations are and can be that engage the whole body - our heart, our mind, our spirit, our flesh. It is that moment of being exquisitely present. It does not speak well for us as a people that we even have to make the distinction between what is erotic and what is not, because an erotic connection is a life-engaged making love to the world that I think comes very naturally. Eroticism, being in relation, calls inner life into play."</i></div>
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The hunger for wildness that stirs the blood, the fierce love of the living Earth are fed by our sensual experience of the wild world around us – be that the delight in seeing a dandelion cracking through the concrete of a Manhattan sidewalk or the sharp intake of breath when you wade into a snowmelt stream in the high Rockies. Williams writes – <i>“No longer numb, we feel the magnetic pull of our bodies toward something stronger, more than simply ourselves. Arousal becomes a dance with longing. We form a secret partnership with possibility."</i></div>
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-16941370561751842782017-02-21T18:25:00.002-08:002017-02-21T18:25:15.482-08:00Why I keep writing about AutismOn days like today, I am tempted to never write about Autism again.<br />
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Most Autistic people spend a lot of our lives having people try to figure out what is "wrong" with us and why, telling us that if we only tried harder we would be better at the things that challenge us and that the things we are good at or passionate about are irrelevant, trying to get us to change the ways we think and speak and move and the things we like and dislike, and telling us how difficult it is to understand us.<br />
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When we speak about or experiences we tend to be told that we are too sensitive, asked to listen to and agree with people's theories about where Autism comes from, lectured to about the non-existent "Autism epidemic," told that Autistic people are a burden on our families, or shut down by being told that we aren't "really" Autistic or that we are "high functioning" (a presumption based on our ability to use language) and therefore aren't "Autistic enough" and therefore should defer to the wisdom of "experts." The similarities between these responses and the things we have heard about ourselves all our lives can bring up a lot of relational trauma. After one of these conversations, it often takes me a day or two to recover my capacities to write and engage.<br />
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And it is heartbreaking and frustrating that after four years of writing and speaking and teaching about Autism, the starting point of most discussions is still defending our right to exist as we are. There is so much more about my Autistic experience that I would like to be sharing beyond convincing people that my existence is not a tragedy.<br />
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So why do I keep writing about Autism?<br />
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Because when I found the writing of people like Nick Walker and Rosie Guedes and Lydia X. Z. Brown it transformed my sense of who I was and of my place in the world. And every once in a while I hear from another Autistic person who feels that same sense of recognition when they read my words, or a parent who gains a new empathy for their child from hearing about my experiences.<br />
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Because it is an act of intellectual self-defense. After a lifetime of internalizing the idea that there is something wrong with my way of being, in order to not re-internalize those ideas I need to speak out when people repeat them. Especially when they are people in my communities.<br />
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Because I know other people I love feel under attack when anti-Autistic messages are out in the world and not everyone is out to the people in their lives or has the emotional resources to speak out on a given day.<br />
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And, because, occasionally, people listen. And every time one fewer person is repeating hurtful ideas about Autism, there is a little more room for Autistic people to carve out space to exist in this culture.<br />
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So I will keep writing about Autism, despite the cost. But please remember when you engage me, this isn't an abstraction for me, this is my lif.<br />
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<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-85523685023766867272017-02-05T16:45:00.003-08:002017-02-05T17:04:28.195-08:00Damiana and the Cauldron of Warming<div style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." -- Albert Camus</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Damiana (Turnera diffusa) is a light at the southwestern horizon reminding us that though the night descending is dark, morning will come. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bitter, warming, and aromatic, Damiana grounds us into our bodies, stirs our heart to quicken the rhythm of the movement of our blood, and relaxes the tension we hold to allow the blood to flow freely to all of our parts -- and where blood flows, awareness goes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In winters of snow and ice, winters of the heart, and winters of our collective experience, Damiana awakens the memory of the invincible summer within us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">For my Irish ancestors, the time when ewes' milk came in marked the turning point out of winter, and became a festival honoring Brighid of the Three Fires -- the fire of the hearth, the fire of the forge, and the fire in the head. Her three fires roughly correspond to the three cauldrons the gods are said to have filled in different proportions in each human, spoken of in an old Irish poem, "<a href="http://www.seanet.com/~inisglas/cauldronpoesy.html#poesytext">The Cauldron of Poesy</a>", which is traditionally attributed to the great bard, Amergin, I think of Damiana as stoking the fire of the hearth, which heats the first cauldron, the Cauldron of Warming (sometimes translated as the Cauldron of Incubation,) which in turn provides deep sustenance for the Cauldron of Motion and the Cauldron of Wisdom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Cauldron of Warming is the cauldron by which life enters the body, animating the flesh, setting us into motion. I associate it with our Wild Self which experiences the world through sensation and emotion, and with the fire of the hearth that warms our bodies. It resides in the pelvic bowl. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The essence poured into it is taken by the gods "<span style="background-color: white;">from the mysteries of the elemental abyss" -- a reminder that it is our own most primal nature that connects us with the ecstatic birth of the universe, the emergence of cosmos from teeming chaos.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Damiana is well know for its capacity to stimulate pelvic circulation, bringing blood and awareness flowing to the genitals, giving rise to its reputation as an aphrodisiac. And it excels in this manner. Damiana infused in Coconut oil makes a wonderful lube for those who are not using latex condoms (and Kava is a nice addition for those who enjoy the juxtaposition of numbing and tingling sensations.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But to fully appreciate the stirring Damiana brings to the body, we need to broaden our definition of the erotic. <a href="https://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/04/ecstasy-and-revolution/">Eros</a> is the force that sets matter dancing, the ecstatic flow of life. By relaxing tension and increasing blood flow and sensation, Damiana invites us to more deeply inhabit our bodies, engaging eros in new ways. It is an herb of joyful embodiment, restoring sensual pleasure in all of its forms -- dancing, touch, savoring delicious food, breathing in the scent of snow and Fir and Pine and woodsmoke. I often give Damiana to elders who are living in a world that forgets that bodies of all ages need and desire sensual pleasure and to people recovering from injuries and illnesses who are learning to be in their bodies again. I often Damiana with Corydalis yanhuso to keep the return of sensation from being too overhwelming at first. Damiana is also delicious in honey and amazing in mead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Like all bitter, warming, aromatic herbs, Damiana is a carminative, stimulating sluggish digestion and relieving gas and bloating. The latter action of carminatives is an important consideration in the timing of the administration of Damiana as an aprhodisiac in the conventional sense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Medical science is also bringing us to the understanding that the stimulation of the bitter taste receptors in our digestive tracts (and airways and genitals) dilates our airways, and that the light molecules that we experience as scent when they brush against our nerve endings relax muscular tension by stimulating our parasympathetic nervous systems, meaning that all bitter, aromatic herbs can help us breathe more easily and more deeply. Holding a tincture or tea or honey infused with Damiana in your mouth for a moment will facilitate this opening. Damiana makes a wonderful smoking herb as well. I love mixing it with Cannabis and then swimming or lifting weights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Cauldron of Motion, which resides in the rib cage, corresponds to the Talking Self, which holds conscious intention and gives direction to our movement in the world. Whirlpools within that very cauldron can lead the mind to spin in circles without being able to engage the body to take in new information from the world, becoming stuck in an imagined perception of how things are based on past experience. By returning awareness and sensation to the body, Damiana allows us to come back to our selves and to the world as it is, reshaping our perception and intention and direction accordingly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Cauldron of Wisdom, which resides in the head, corresponds to our Divine Self, the part of us that knows its own infinity. It is important in thinking of this cauldron not to impose our modern understanding of the meaning of the head onto this old Irish framework. We tend to associate the head with thought and language and logic -- but this emerges from Descarte's decision to drink more than 70 cups of coffee and narrow his consciousness to the point where he believed that his conscious thoughts and his existence were one and the same. The old Irish understanding of the head was as the place where the gods would set a fire blazing, bringing poets into ecstatic, direct encounter with the living world. In poetry, Yeats spins the tale of the god <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/55687">Aengus</a>, who tells us</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; text-indent: -1em;">I went out to the hazel wood,</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Because a fire was in my head"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">that fire then tooks the form of a "glimmering girl" who called his name and runs -- and Aengus spent</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> the rest of his days wandering the world searching for her, his life devoted to the desire to taste her </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">lips. This is not the stuff of the theologian's contemplation of the nature of the world, but rather of </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">the mystic's drive to make love to the mystery. </span></div>
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In my training as a <a href="http://blackheartferi.com/about-2/">Feri</a> priest I learned that our Talking Selves are incapable of directly connecting with our Divine Selves because the knowledge of our own infinity would shatter all our concepts, leaving our minds in incoherent disarray. But, when freed from shame and guilt and fear, our Wild Selves can touch that infinity directly through opening completely to sensation -- finding divinity in the feeling of warm water on our skin, the shining of the stars in the sky, the breath of Redwood and Rose, the line of a lover's collarbone. Damiana invites us into that kind of exquisite presence, bringing us back to ourselves and back into connection with all that is.</div>
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Come learn more about Damiana and other herbs for "Rekindling the Heart Fire" at my workshop in Bellingham, Februaru 11 and 12! Details at <a href="http://www.wildrootbotanicals.com/html/Sean%20Donahue.html"> http://www.wildrootbotanicals.com/</a></div>
Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-30955254567281434282017-01-11T12:57:00.002-08:002017-01-11T12:57:43.864-08:00This post is not about vaccines<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Every time people begin debating vaccines, I know that I need to prepare for an onslaught of messages about how my existence, and the existence of other people like me, is an unspeakable tragedy. </span></span><br />
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Every discussion about vaccines inevitably turns to the question of whether vaccines cause Autism. And Autistic voices are almost always pushed out of the discussion<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />The anti-vaccine movement has built its popularity on celebrity support for the discredited former gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield, who falsified data to suggest a non-existent link between vaccines and Autism in order to explain a non-existent Autism "epidemic." (Wakefield embellished the stories of the subjects of his study to make them fit his theories, and the apparent increase in the prevalence of Autism is largely a function of increased awareness and expanded diagnostic criteria.) That movement relies heavily on damaging and pathologizing descriptions of Autism, combined with junk science, to build its base. One of the movement's leading voices, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks of the "<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">catastrophic tragedy of autism which has now destroyed the lives of over 20 million children and shattered their families." Kennedy is now in talks with the President Elect about launching a national commission on vaccines and Autism.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #1d2129;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span>Now, I know that not all people who oppose or question current vaccination protocols subscribe to Wakefield's theories or cite Autism as a reason for their position. And my own views on vaccines are complex (I think some vaccines are potentially lifesaving for most people and that with others both the benefits and the risks are relatively small and that in almost every instance people should have a right to refuse any medical intervention that they don't want.) But when Autistic people are saying that the anti-vaccine movement's depiction of Autism as a horror to be prevented is hurting us, the compassionate response is to acknowledge that pain, not to push past it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Suicide is one of the leading causes of death of Autistic adults -- for much the same reasons that it is one of the leading killers of Queer and Trans people. We live in a culture that every day in dozens of ways shows and tells us that there is something wrong with our existence. If we move or speak in the ways that our neurobiologies compel us to, we face discrimination, ostracism, and violence. Yes, some of us are able to force ourselves to hold our bodies and craft our words and even move our eyes and our faces in ways that are more comfortable to the majority -- but the price is high in terms of the stress of constantly monitoring our every word and gesture, living in fear that our performance will slip, and the internalization of beliefs that it is not okay to make too much or too little eye contact, or to shake and rock to discharge excess energy running through our nervous systems, or to speak in language that is too complex or too simple or that doesn't use words at all about things that are too childish or too heavy or too esoteric for too long. We interact with systems designed to meet other people's neurological needs and if we express our difficulties with them or ask for changes we are seen as deficient or needy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Personally, I live in fear that a trip to the bank will leave me overhwelmed to the point where I become agitated and begin to shake and lose speech, and that a frightened bystander will call the police and the encounter will escalate into violence. It happens to Autistic people every day. Not because we are Autistic. But because the culture we live in only accepts one way of communicating and one way of processing sensation and emotion. The things that make it difficult for me to live in this culture are also the things that give me the capacity to engage with plants and gods and history in unique and beautiful ways. But for large stretches of my life I lived in a world that emphasized my disadvantages and trivialized or ignored my strengths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now imagine living this reality. And imagine being a fifteen year old in a community where the only time the existence of Autistic people is acknowledged is when non-Autistic people are debating vaccines. And the only thing you ever hear said about Autistic people is that our existence is an abomination to be prevented. How do you think this would make you feel about yourself?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you are part of the movement against mandatory vaccination, instead of telling me that you are not doing it because you hate people like me, I would love it if you would take the message to others who are opposed to mandatory vaccination that Autism is part of the natural variation in human neurobiologies that has existed as long as our species has and, like every other variation has its challenges and its gifts. Please tell people to stop pathologizing us. Your voice is more likely to be heard by those within the movement than mine. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The pro-vaccination camp has not done much better by us. Yes, those in favor of vaccination do frequently point out Wakefield's fraud. But they seldom contest the idea that their is something wrong with being Autistic. Rather than saying that Autism is not a tragedy, they tend to say vaccines do not cause tragic problems like Autism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If you are a vaccination advocate, when you are responding to charges that vaccines cause Autism, please talk about the beauty of Autistic minds besides refuting the false science of your opponents.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And whatever camp you fall in, when Autistic people tell you that we are tired of being a political football in your debate, please stop and listen instead of going back to your script.</span><br />
<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-83795188521546663582016-08-30T16:48:00.000-07:002016-08-30T17:17:12.603-07:00On Safe Spaces and Ritual PurityMy gods are ancient and immense. <br />
<br />
Like me, they emanate from the ecstatic explosion that ensued when the original darkness looked on darknesself's reflection and fell in love and in lust with darkness' own reflection.<br />
<br />
Like me, they contain multitudes.<br />
<br />
They are irreducible, and they teach me to own and to stand in the fullness of who I am.<br />
<br />
Each morning, I pray that they help me keep pure the intentions of my heart.<br />
<br />
They tell me "the only thing that is impure is your concept of impurity."<br />
<br />
And so I take a cup of water in my hands and begin the work of releasing and transmuting all the fear and hate and guilt and shame that cause me to reject any part of their beauty, my beauty, and the beauty of the world we weave together, along with the myriad embodied and disembodied beings who join us in the perpetual orgasm of creation.<br />
<br />
----<br />
<br />
So what would it say if I invited them into a space that was hostile and uninviting to people who have been marginalized and oppressed?<br />
<br />
My teacher, Karina taught me that Victor Anderson said that if we did not address our racism and misogyny, we would be in danger when we stood with the gods in circle.<br />
<br />
My gods exist before and outside human gender. What do I say to them if I say that only people performing the gender they were assigned at birth are welcome in my circle?<br />
<br />
My gods are lusty and fecund. What do I say to them if entry into my circle is denied to people based on who and how they love and desire?<br />
<br />
My gods take pleasure in the multitudes of biological expressions that exist even within a species. What do I say to them if my circle is not welcoming to every kind of human body?<br />
<br />
Before they were my gods, my gods were the gods of the East African ancestors of all of humanity (or at least of those among them who walked beyond the edge of the fire to re-encounter the wild). What do I say to them if I disown these ancestors or their fellow descendants just because they do not come from the same continent or have the same skin color as my more recent ancestors?<br />
<br />
Freeing my circle and myself of hatred, bigotry, and oppression is the most important act of ritual purification I can engage in.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
Those who say "sacred spaces are not safe" engage in the <a href="https://bookofbadarguments.com/">fallacy of equivocation</a>.<br />
<br />
On the one hand, absolutely, no ritual space worth of the name is truly safe, in that encounters with the divine and with the wild tend to upend all our categories of judgement, all our structures of belief, all the places we have become rigid.<br />
<br />
But if by "safe spaces" we mean spaces that are as free as we can make them of oppressive actions and attitudes and images, then the only truly sacred spaces are safe spaces, because they are the only spaces in which the gods we invite are invited to bring all of who they are. Its not that these spaces are unsafe for the gods, they will sanctify whatever they touch by pulling it into resonance with their own natures, but rather that they are unsafe for those who would enter them clinging tightly to their own fear and hatred. The gods will shake them loose. And if someone is holding tight to their bigotry, the shaking will not be a pleasant one. <br />
<br />
Standing in the presence of the old gods is unsafe for those who make spaces unsafe for others. The only thing that is impure is our concept of impurity. And it, too, will be purified, one way or another.<br />
<br />
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]Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-55703684176999526402016-07-24T14:20:00.004-07:002021-05-25T09:46:11.637-07:00Ghost Pipe: A Cautionary Tale<i>Thank you to <a href="http://www.goldrootherbs.com/">Renee Davis</a> for the Facebook post that pushed me to stop procrastinating on writing this. And to<a href="http://botanicalstudies.net/"> Howie Brounstein </a>for telling me many of these things in is inimitably loving way.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>"<span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -1em;">I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #404040; font-family: Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-indent: -1em;"> </span></b><br />
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<b>meeting the unmarked strip of light— </b></div>
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<b>ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: </b></div>
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<b>I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. </b></div>
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<b><br style="margin-bottom: 0px;" /></b></div>
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<b>"And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you </b></div>
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<b>anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these </b></div>
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<b>to have you listen at all, it's necessary </b></div>
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<b>to talk about trees." </b></div>
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<b><br /></b></div>
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<b>-- Adrinenne Rich <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51092">"Revolutionary Road"</a></b></div>
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I thought it was enough that I didn't give the names of the forests where I found it.</div>
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I thought it was enough that I told people to take only the aerial parts and only a few from each stand and not share their harvest spots and only use the medicine when nothing else would do.</div>
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But none of that matters to the plant whose populations my writing and teaching served a role in decimating.</div>
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I thought it was enough that I had the plant's permission to teach about it.</div>
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But plant's don't know much about our culture's desire to take things and have them for our own. So it was never really informed consent.</div>
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I told myself it was ok because William Cook had written about Monotropa uniflora all the way back in the nineteenth century and he hadn't made its populations dwindle. But I didn't understand the impact another century of removing people further and further from the wild and from their own wildness would have.</div>
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I thought, nobody is going to read what some upstart late bloomer herbalist in rural Maine says, these words won't reach very far. My false humility kept me from understanding how far my voice would carry.</div>
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I wish I had never begun writing and speaking about Ghost Pipe.</div>
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Yes, there are people who were helped who no other plant could serve who met Ghost Pipe through my writings. And people who fell in love with the plant after I introduced them to hir and have built loving relationships with hir. But I know enough about plants and about magic to know that I could have made this happen in more discerning ways.</div>
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So I am writing this now so you do not accidentally betray a beloved plant in the way that I have.</div>
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___________________________</div>
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Another <a href="https://joelmarino.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/north-american-time-by-adrienne-rich/">Adrienne Rich poem</a> comes to mind:</div>
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<br />"Everything we write<br />will be used against us<br />or against those we love.<br />These are the terms,<br />take them or leave them.<br />Poetry never stood a chance<br />of standing outside history.<br />One line typed twenty years ago<br />can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint<br />to glorify art as detachment<br />or torture of those we<br />did not love but also<br />did not want to kill.<br />We move but our words stand<br />become responsibly<br />for more than we intended<br />and this is verbal privilege"</blockquote>
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___________________________</div>
<br />
The nature of plant knowledge is similar to that of other magical lore. Those new to the Craft, tasting the liberation and vitality they are feeling in enduring ways for the first time in their lives, want to share everything so that others can be free too. They assume the magic they have found is so pure and so powerful that it will transform the hearts of those who engage it, leaving no need to fear for its abuse.<br />
<br />
That was what I believed when I began writing and teaching about Ghost Pipe. Connecting with plants made you a better person, so all knowledge should be out there, free for the reading and finding. <br />
<br />
The years that followed gave me a more nuanced understanding.<br />
<br />
Yes, absolutely, the plants are there for all to encounter. Just like the gods and the elements of nature.<br />
<br />
But as with gods, there are some plants, and some aspects of their being and their medicine that are best shared by the plants themselves alone, when and how they choose to share them. Or, by a seasoned practitioner with a trusted student after years of working together. Not because that knowledge belongs to an elect few, but because it loses meaning outside its context.<br />
<br />
Many of us who teach hold this to be true about poisonous plants and profoundly mind altering plants, because of the dangers they might pose to people using them without the knowledge of the proper time and place and manner.<br />
<br />
It is equally true of rare and fragile plants, because of the danger people might pose to them by using them without the knowledge of the proper time and place and manner.<br />
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___________________________</div>
<br />
I understand why knowledge of a plant like Ghost Pipe spreads like wildfire. We live in a time when people feel cut off from the living world, and finding out about a strange, beautiful plant that taps into the mind of an entire forest brings a stir of recognition of the kind of connection the deepest parts of ourselves know is possible, even when we so seldom experience it in our lives and our worlds.<br />
<br />
And I understand why so many feel the need to harvest the plant for themselves or buy the tincture from someone else. We live in a culture that has objectified and commodified everything. And in which the sense of our entitlement is magnified and the sense of our impact on the living world is diminished -- my own included, or I wouldn't be here writing this mea culpa. It can seem like the only way to access the magic Ghost Pipe represents to us is to hold something made of the body through which that magic moves.<br />
<br />
I am not saying nobody should use Ghost Pipe as medicine. I am saying it should be used only when no other medicine will do, by people with enough knowledge to know that no other medicine will do, who have also cultivated a deep relationship with the plant.<br />
<br />
For those who have come here seeking knowledge about this plant, here is what I suggest you do instead:<br />
<br />
go to the forests, the fields, the deserts, the mountains<br />
<br />
find strange and beautiful beings<br />
<br />
make respectful loving relationships with them<br />
<br />
and hold their medicine as close as you would hold a Beloved.<br />
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-51815548893129488532016-07-21T16:51:00.000-07:002016-07-21T16:51:05.409-07:00Our Existence is Not an Epidemic: An Open Letter to Jill Stein<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dear Dr. Stein,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was an activist in the early days of the Massachusetts Green Party in the late 1990's and early 2000's. We met briefly a few times when you were running for Governor.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am also Autistic. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The last time you ran for President,<a href="http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/jill-stein-third-party-candidate-causes-second-thoughts/"> you told John Saul</a> of the Seattle Times that:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="color: #231f20; line-height: 27px;">In 25 years in clinics, I witnessed an increase in diseases – asthma, obesity, autism. Certainly our DNA did not change in that short time; the problem is with our sick food system, pollution and failing health care,”</span></span></blockquote>
<br />
When you make statements like this you are further marginalizing people like me -- which flies in the face of the values the Green Party is supposed to represent.<br />
<br />
Autism is not a disease. As Autistic scholar <a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/what-is-autism/">Nick Walker</a> writes "Autism is a genetically-based human neurological variant." Our divergence comes in the form of increased sensitivity to sensory and emotional stimuli, marked differences in verbal and non-verbal communication from the general population, and a tendency toward non-linear systems-oriented thinking. These differences have made us driving forces in technological and cultural change throughout human history. And, in this culture, they have made us pathologized and feared. Many of us have trouble "functioning" in the ways this society expects us to, because this society was not made with us in mind -- just as Queer and Trans people often find challenges to integrating into a society that is based on heteronormative and cis-normative assumptions about gender and sexuality, Autistic people often find it challenging to integrate into a culture rooted in assumed <a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basic-terms-definitions/">neurotypicality.</a><br />
<br />
(Incidentally,<a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2013/03/7-problems-with-obesity-epidemic.html"> being fat is not a disease</a>, either. While there is some correlation between a variety of health problems and high body weight or high body fat, correlation does not equal causation, and healthy bodies come in many shapes and sizes. The <a href="http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/1/55.full">moral panic about "obesity" is unscientific</a> and contributes to<a href="http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/resources/upload/docs/what/bias/WeightBiasDieteticsStudents.pdf"> discrimination</a> <a href="http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-8-128">against</a><a href="http://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/images/journals/docs/pdf/spq/Mar11SPQFeature.pdf"> fat </a><a href="http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/resources/upload/docs/what/bias/WeightBiasStudy.pdf">people</a>.)<br />
<br />
Nor is there an "Autism epidemic." First of all, in order to have an epidemic you have to have a disease. But, secondly, the increase in the frequency of Autism diagnoses is <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mrdd.10029/abstract">explained by changes in definitions and diagnostic criteria.</a><br />
<br />
As someone who struggled with asthma most of my life, in part because of growing up in a cluster of trash incinerators in Massachusetts, I am more aware than most of the public health crises caused by pollution. But my neurobiology is neither a pathological condition nor is it the result of anything in my environment.<br />
<br />
Please:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Stop talking about Autism as a "disease" or an "epidemic."</li>
<li>Clearly and publicly distance yourself from the fraudulent and hurtful claims of former gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield that vaccines cause Autism. While I understand your principled position that vaccines should not be mandatory because people should have a right to make their own health care decisions, in the absence of such a clear statement, your opposition to vaccine laws provides cover for those spreading false information about vaccines and Autism.</li>
<li>Get to know Autistic adults. Consult with us about our needs. Adopt policies that support the work and struggles of Autistic people.</li>
</ul>
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I would love to be able to support your campaign, but I cannot do so while you pathologize people like me.</div>
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Sincerely,</div>
<div>
Sean Donahue</div>
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<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-52577809720122774842016-04-10T00:34:00.001-07:002016-04-10T00:34:49.141-07:00All Acts of Love and Pleasure<b>"Both of us say there are laws to obey. But frankly, I don't like your tone. You want to change the way I make love. I want to leave it alone." -- Leonard Cohen</b><br />
<br />
What does it mean to be sex positive?<br />
<br />
Seeing more and more people openly express the vibrant, healthy, holy, liberatory potential of sexuality is a beautiful thing.<br />
<br />
But from lube shaming and to descriptions and proscriptions and prescriptions of right and wrong ways to experience orgasms to the erasure and/or objectification of the bodies and sexualities experiences of Queer people, Trans people, fat people, disabled people, and People of Color to the lack of understanding of how the sensory experiences of neurodivergent people and trauma survivors shape their sexual experiences, a lot of what passes for sex positivity in contemporary culture too often excludes a lot of people's experiences of sex.<br />
<br />
So, I want to spell out what I mean when I talk about being a sex positive herbalist, a sex positive priest, a sex positive person:<br />
<br />
I am sex positive even when I struggle with shame and fear about my own sexuality. Even when shame makes it difficult for me to engage or express my own desire. Even when fear makes me too dissociated to be able to connect with a lover. Just as much as when I am feeling as free and embodied and lusty as a rutting stag. All of these have been common experiences at different points in my life. All of them are part of my experience now. Sometimes I experience all of them at once. I am sex positive because I believe in being present to my body's authentic responses and sensations and desires and emotions however they show up.<br />
<br />
I am sex positive when I encourage other people to allow themselves to play with and explore their own bodies. And when I celebrate the pleasure they share with each other. And when I encourage them to be honor their own boundaries, their own hesitation, to be still and slow and present with all of their parts as they come into different states of embodiment and different intensities and flavors of sexual desire and sexual aversion.<br />
<br />
I am sex positive when I say that there are no right or wrong ways for people to have or not have sex, to have or not have orgasms, to ejaculate or not ejaculate, to stretch their own boundaries or honor their own need safety, to run power through their bodies alone or with other people, to play with flows of power and pleasure between people, to explore sensation so long as they are grounded in authenticity, respect, and consent. No such thing as too much or too little sex as long as a person's relationship with their sexuality helps them engage their vitality. No profane sex except that which violates someone's sense of integrity. <br />
<br />
As Doreen Valiente wrote in "The Charge of the Goddess," "All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals."<br />
<br />
And it is my goal to liberate my own love and pleasure, and be an ally in others' liberation.<br />
<br />
That is what sex positivity means to me.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-36946479730476706182016-03-12T17:45:00.001-08:002016-03-12T17:45:49.393-08:00Gods, Authority, and Sovereignty"A witch bows to no one."<br />
<br />
This was among the first things I was taught in my training as a Feri priest.<br />
<br />
No human, no institution, and no god ultimately holds authority over me. I am responsible for standing in the fullness of my power, taking responsibility for my role in events unfolding in all worlds, for the ripples across space and time that trace back to my presence, my movements, my very breath. My own godsoul, the divine aspect of my being, is the only being that rightly sits on the throne of my heart. Victor Anderson taught that the true meaning of the first commandment was that nothing should ever be allowed to come between us and our highest selves, no god should come before our godsoul. <br />
<br />
What, then is our relationship with the gods?<br />
<br />
They are part of the same world that we are. Older and more immense by almost unimaginable magnitudes, to be sure. But they are like us, but they are not greater than us. A Redwood is far older and larger than a Hummingbird, but it is not holier or more important, both are part of the same ecology. The same is true of gods and humans. Anaar, the one living Grandmaster of my tradition, says "We sit at the table of the gods. Sometimes we need booster seats, but we sit at the table of the gods."<br />
<br />
Our tradition agrees with physics that our universe is made of matter and energy that came into being in the orgasmic explosion science calls the Big Bang, arranging and rearranging itself over and over again. Gods have persisted in form for longer than we have. But we are now less creators of worlds. I create the world within me and reshape the world around me, as do all other beings. And my world is transformed by the Sage that exhales the carvone that I inhale, that relaxes tension and opens the senses so I can connect more deeply with the living world around me.<br />
<br />
I grew up in a religion that taught that the sacrifice of our body's pleasure and our own lifeforce was necessary to show devotion to a god who was crucified. The church that taught that enforced it with emotional, psychological, and emotional violence and I still carry scars from that time. To sacrifice means to make sacred. Our bodies, our sovereignty, our autonomy, and our authentic desires are already sacred. Any human or institution or god that demands their sacrifice is lying to us, promising to make us what we already are if only we give up what makes us who we are. The gods I ally with are the gods who love me and want to see me free.<br />
<br />
There are gods who are my lovers, gods who are my teachers and counselors, gods who are my protectors, gods I work with to turn the tides of history. But there are no gods to whom I surrender my authority and autonomy. And no human to whom I will give authority over my relationships with gods -- or overwhom I will assume authority.<br />
<br />
If the role of a priest is to practice theology and teach the truest law, then the law I teach is the only one that arises from my theology, the same one that Crowley expressed when he said that love is the whole of the law, love under Will. And the only correction I will offer if I see someone not living that law will be the example of my own continuing liberation and my solidarity and willingness to be an ally in theirs. Unless they are trying to take from others the ability to live that law, in which case I will resist them.<br />
<br />
"A witch bows to no one."Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-21832987262530384592015-12-09T00:31:00.001-08:002015-12-09T00:31:49.393-08:00What Herbalists Need to Know About Autism"We need to help Autistic children now or else we will be paying for them in prison later."<br />
<i><b> </b></i><br />
The opening words of David Winston's lecture hit me like a punch in the stomach.<br />
<br />
It was the fall of 2013, and I had only been "out" as Autistic in my professional life for a short time, and was still figuring out the implications of understanding and embracing my neurobiology. Perhaps I should have known that a workshop called "Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Search for Answers" was going to treat me as a problem to be solved, another puzzle piece, rather than as a person to be engaged and understood. Maybe if I had known I would have found language that day, found a way to be able to respond directly to the things that were being said and implied about people like me. But I was caught off guard and felt afraid of confronting a widely respected elder in a place where I didn't know if I could count on anyone else for support, so I bit my tongue and held back my tears and pulled myself together in time to teach my next class.<br />
<br />
Now, two years later, I have the same sick feeling in my gut that I had that afternoon, as I see that the journal published by the same organization that sponsored the conference where Winston delivered that lecture, the American Herbalist Guild, has published an article on Autism by another prominent herbalist who sees my neurobiology as a pathology. K.P. Khalsa's article is gentler than Winston's lecture, and his interest in Autism is clearly inspired by his love for his Autistic adult daughter, but it is still firmly rooted in <a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/throw-away-the-masters-tools-liberating-ourselves-from-the-pathology-paradigm/">a paradigm that presumes that there is one correct way for human nervous systems to develop and operate, </a>and that the goal of medicine should be to make Autistic minds and bodies less Autistic. <br />
<br />
Tonight, <a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-hyperlexic-paradox.html">I have words to speak.</a> And they are directed not just to Winston or Khalsa or the AHG, but to the entire herbal community. It is time for everyone to learn and understand some important things about Autism:<br />
<br />
<b>1) Autism is not a disorder.</b><br />
<br />
Autism is a natural variation in human neurobiology that has existed throughout the history of our species. As Autistic scholar, <a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/what-is-autism/">Nick Walker, writes</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Autism is a genetically-based human neurological variant. The complex
set of interrelated characteristics that distinguish autistic neurology
from non-autistic neurology is not yet fully understood, but current
evidence indicates that the central distinction is that autistic brains
are characterized by particularly high levels of synaptic connectivity
and responsiveness. This tends to make the autistic individual’s
subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic
individuals: on both the sensorimotor and cognitive levels, the
autistic mind tends to register more information, and the impact of each
bit of information tends to be both stronger and less predictable.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Autism is a developmental phenomenon, meaning that it begins <i>in utero</i>
and has a pervasive influence on development, on multiple levels,
throughout the lifespan. Autism produces distinctive, atypical ways of
thinking, moving, interaction, and sensory and cognitive processing. One
analogy that has often been made is that autistic individuals have a
different neurological 'operating system' than non-autistic individuals."</blockquote>
Neurodiversity -- the diversity of neurobiologies -- is as essential to the health of a culture as biodiversity is to the health of an ecosystem. Traditionally, in many cultures, people whose modes of perception varied from the majority's were recognized and trained as people who could be seers on behalf of their communities and intercessors with other-than-human realms. <a href="http://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/23/capitalism-neurotypicality-and-the-witch-at-the-edge-of-the-woods/">This culture has treated only one form of perception and sensation and processing and communication as permissible</a>, and as a result is now enduring a crisis of vision as it confronts human and ecological catastrophes.<br />
<br />
Oh, and there is no such thing as an "Autism epidemic." The increase in the number of Autism diagnoses in recent years is the result of changes in diagnostic criteria, and was accurately predicted by those who wrote those criteria. <br />
<br />
<b>2) Attempts to "prevent" or "cure" Autism are, by definition, <a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2015/10/eugenics-by-any-other-name.html">expressions of eugenics</a>.</b><br />
<br />
To speak about eliminating a genetically-based variation in the biology underlying consciousness is to speak about eliminating a way of being, a way of seeing, a way of feeling. As one of the people whose existence some of you would like to prevent our cure, I read such expressions to be declarations of war.<br />
<br />
<b>3) "High function" and "low function" are inherently oppressive concepts.</b><br />
<br />
What we are supposed to be "functioning" as is as economically productive members of society. And as people who act enough like neurotypical people to avoid making other people uncomfortable with our presence. Categorizing us as "low functioning" or "high functioning" dismisses both the beauty and genius of the minds of Autistic people who don't speak or don't hold jobs or can't still their hands and the struggles of Autistic people who can do those things, but sometimes only at great cost to our health, who still face stress and trauma related to the difficulty of navigating a society shaped by and for non-Autistic people.<b></b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>4) No understanding of Autistic health is complete if it doesn't integrate an understanding of the biological and psychological impacts of trauma and chronic stress.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
To be Autistic in this culture is to live in a world of physically painful sensory overstimulation, where we are subjected to social norms that demand that we suppress our natural expressions and perceptions, and where we are marginalized and pathologized. As people whose experience of the world is inherently intense, we are more vulnerable to trauma than many others, and living in a culture of enforced neurotypicality is universally stressful and frequently traumatizing to Autistic people. Other people's failure to understand, and hence empathize with, and our difficulties in navigating relationships with people whose modes of perception and communication are very difficult for us to understand also make us more likely to experience physical, emotional, and sexual violenc than the general population.<br />
<br />
Many of the "symptoms" and "co-morbidities" associated with Autism -- anxiety, depression, digestive disruption, dysautonomia, hypertension, autoimmune disease, asthma, allergies -- can be caused or exacerbated by the neuroendocrine disruptions caused by trauma and chronic stress. <a href="http://www.crazyherbalist.com/blog//cptsd-allostatic-load-and-giving-no-fucks">Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder</a> should almost always be investigated as a potential factor in our health problems.<br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>5) Our "symptoms" are differences with the majority of the culture, not problems to be solved.</b><br />
<br />
Let's take a look, if we must, at the <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/hcp-dsm.html">official diagnostic criteria</a> for Autism.<br />
<br />
We are said to have "persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction" because we have trouble recognizing social cues and adhering to social norms and we display "abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gesture." People claim that we can't read body language well -- but it turns out we read each others' body language and facial expressions quite well, we just have a hard time relating to the body language and facial expressions of non-Autistic people. But, you know what? Non-Autistic people have a harighly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focusd time understanding our nonverbal signals. And most of us do way better understanding the signals sent by non-Autistic people than Autistic people do understanding the signals we send. One additional "problem" we have: when there is a discrepancy between someone's words and gestures, or between their outward communication and their presence, we often don't know which signals we are "supposed" to believe and end up responding in ways that are more honest than polite. <br />
<br />
As for our other "symptoms": <br />
<br />
"stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech" - aka stims - represent our attempts to create a single stimulus strong enough to drown out the flood of sensation being carried across our nervous systems in order to ground ourselves in overwhelming situations . .<br />
<br />
"insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior" is another way of managing overwhelm in environments crafted by and for people with dramatically different from ours . . .<br />
<br />
"highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus" are passions we follow deeply enough and doggedly enough to discover patterns and possibilities no one else ever perceived . .<br />
<br />
"hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment" means we respond to sensory stimuli in ways that are different from the majority of the population.<br />
<br />
None of these are "symptoms" to be treated.<br />
<br />
<b>6) Nobody else can speak for us.</b><br />
<br />
Non-Autistic family members and friends and partners of Autistic people have their own experiences of the world. Some involve frustrations and challenges communicating and collaborating across a neurological divide. Some involve compassion and solidarity with Autistic people. Some involve really fucked up ideas about how they wish we were different or wish we didn't exist. They can speak for themselves. They and their organizations cannot and do not speak for us.<br />
<br />
<b>7) We have good reasons to be wary of "natural" and "alternative" healthcare providers.</b><br />
<br />
There are a lot of Autistic herbalists. And there are a lot of non-Autistic herbalists who support Autistic people in compassionate ways. But there are also a lot of herbalists and naturopaths and people who look and sound to all the world like herbalists and naturopaths who go around talking about preventing and curing Autism. There are a host of cruel and bizarre Autism treatments advocated by people who call themselves alternative or natural health practitioners -- eg bleach enemas. And the natural health community as a whole, and the herbal community in particular, have been major vectors for the transmission of <a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2014/08/toxic-myths-about-autism.html">toxic myths about Autism</a>.<b> </b>So don't be surprised if Autistic clients are a little nervous and hesitant at first. <br />
<br />
Still want to work with us? Great! Learn more about our lives by <a href="http://autpress.com/">reading Autistic writers </a> (and good allies like <a href="http://stevesilberman.com/book/neurotribes/">Steve Silberman.</a>) And then come meet us from a place of openness, curiosity, kindness, and respect, and wll will go well!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com274tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-37994766226946727372015-12-02T22:39:00.002-08:002015-12-02T22:39:38.812-08:00What is the work of this god? -- Reclaiming the Mean(ing)s of Production<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Who is this flower above me/ and what is the work of this god?// I would know myself in all my parts. -- Victor Anderson</blockquote>
<br />
It breaks my heart to see the ways in which so many of us healers and activists and artist and teachers and priests keep martyring ourselves to a god we don't even believe in by driving ourselves into the ground in the name of concepts of productivity derived from <a href="http://wildhunt.org/2015/05/column-the-revolt-of-remembering.html">capitalism's cult of progress.</a><br />
<br />
My decade and a half of full time activism saw me alternating between periods of working sixty hours a week and periods of barely being able to get out of bed. In both states I constantly berated myself for my lack of commitment -- and my lack of tangible results.<br />
<br />
Surrounded by a culture that values people primarily according to their ability to generate wealth, countercultures and opposition movements unwittingly replicate capitalist values by subtly and not so subtly measuring their members' worth and dedication by the amount of toil they engage in and by their outwardly visible achievements. Guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy are both consciously and unconsciously exploited to elicit more work from people. Eventually the voices demanding productivity become deeply internalized.<br />
<br />
As an Autistic person I am acutely aware that <a href="http://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/23/capitalism-neurotypicality-and-the-witch-at-the-edge-of-the-woods/" rel="nofollow">the degree to which most people are willing to grant me autonomy and equality is related to the degree to which they define me as "high functioning"</a> -- ie able to engage in work that the culture values economically. Though I pass as neurotypical or at least not obviously divergent in some settings sometimes, I require long periods of silence and solitude to reset myself after engaging with most humans, and after being in environments full of unfamiliar and artificial sensory stimuli. Nevertheless, I push myself to take on the same level of commitments as someone whose processing and cognitive styles more readily allow moving quickly from one task to another in places full of people -- and sometimes to take on more than is expected hoping that it will make up for my real and perceived deficits. (eg the inability to turn in attendance sheets competed properly and on time) I end up paying the price in terms of brain fog, autoimmune flare-ups, further declines in executive function, and brief periods where I cannot speak. And when I recover from these setbacks, I quickly throw myself into desperately trying to catch up, terrified that my life will come apart at the seams if I can't regain my level of outward productivity. <br />
<br />
Besides my health, crucial and unique elements of my perception and cognition get lost in the process. My ability to write, to teach, to craft ritual, to do medicine stems from m<a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/autism-aikido-and-systems-oriented-cognition/">y ability to see systems and networks and relationships</a> differently than other people. And that capacity depends on my ability to spend time in non-lingusitic space, letting the forest and the stones and those beloveds who know how to hold silence wordlessly remind my heart of its identity and its place in the world. On the time spent listening deeply to water and stars and strange water plants. My heart yang -- my outward expression -- draws nourishment from my heart yin -- my ability to receive beauty. <br />
<br />
I am a priest of a religion that says that the universe arose when the original darkness fell in love and in lust with hir own reflection and exploded outward in desire, dividing hirself again and again for the sake of discovery. I hold ecstasy sacred. So why I am I allowing my worth to be determined by what humans do and don't see me do?<br />
<br />
The true work of the god that I am -- and the god that you are -- is the work of becoming ourselves. "Fully human, fully wild, fully divine" as I was taught, aligned and whole in all our parts, centered in the black heart of innocence that mirrors the original darkness with its infinite potential. <br />
<br />
So why do we keep putting the needs of the false gods of market and progress ahead of what we are truly called to produce -- lives of love and pleasure and meaning?<br />
<br />
Its long past time to drive the bosses from our heads and reclaim the means and meaning of production.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-57592769194923867212015-10-17T21:40:00.003-07:002015-10-17T21:51:34.242-07:00Eugenics by Any Other NameThere is a reason why every time someone I know posts something about vaccines or pesticides causing the "autism epidemic" my heart starts pounding and I feel like I have been punched in the gut . . . and I am tired of being nice about, tired of pretending this is just some academic question about which we can agree to disagree.<br />
<br />
If you are someone who promotes these kinds of articles, what you are about to read might make you a little uncomfortable. But its nothing compared to what you do to me and to people like me when you spread unfounded stories that treat our existence as a tragedy or a blight.<br />
<br />
Before the Nazis began murdering Jews, they rounded up people they considered mentally or physically "defective" and murdered them, often with the knowledge and blessing of their families.<br />
<br />
Yes, I went there. Why? Because actual fucking Nazis killed actual people like me.<br />
<br />
And you know where they got the idea from? Not from some mis-reading of Nietzsche, They got it from the leading minds of the Ivy League medical schools in the U.S. who were promoting the "science" of eugenics -- the practice of "strengthening the gene pool" by deciding who did and didn't get to have children.<br />
<br />
Most overt expressions of eugenic thought are frowned upon today, at least in their most extreme forms. But its influence isn't hard to find. Just notice the casualness with which people will express their discomfort with two adults with Down's Syndrome kissing each other. The aversion is based on a fear that those two adults will have a child who is like them. And treating that possibility as tragic is tremendously cruel.<br />
<br />
And one place that eugenicist thinking shows its head is in the search for ways to prevent or "cure" Autism.<br />
<br />
You see, when you talk about preventing or curing Autism, you are talking about creating a world in which people like me don't exist, or at least are not as common.<br />
<br />
I want you to stop and think about that for a moment.<br />
<br />
How do you think a Queer friend would feel if you posted something about xeno-estrogens causing homosexuality?<br />
<br />
How do you think a Black friend would feel if you posted a graphic from text book from the last century that purported to show scientific proof that white people were more intelligent than Black people based on comparisons of the shapes of different people's skulls?<br />
<br />
Because besides representing the same kind of hatred the memes and articles you post about the "causes of the autism epidemic," these ideas have something else in common with the claims you are promoting -- they are all demonstrably false.<br />
<br />
There is no such thing as an "autism epidemic." The late Dr. Lorna Wing, who was part of the group that developed the diagnostic criteria for Autism in the DSM-IV demonstrated that the increase in Autism diagnoses in recent years exactly followed the increase predicted when the criteria were modified. There is no basis for asserting that Autism rates are on the rise.<br />
<br />
The claim that vaccines cause Autism was first advanced by a now discredited British gastroenterologist, Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield fabricated the data and seems to have sought to profit from a class action lawsuit. (Again -- think about this. Would you sue someone because your child were like me and you wish they weren't).<br />
<br />
Now, I no some of you will say that you knew a kid who never seemed Autistic until they were vaccinated. Maybe the kid was speaking and then stopped. The truth is we Autistic people frequently experience "regressive" events when we are under stress. I sometimes lose speech for brief periods of time. I experience loss of my already limited executive function for longer stretches. Sure, it is possible that in some instances an immunological response to a vaccine might bring on a regressive event by creating neuroendocrineimmune dysregulation. But regression has been happening to Autistic people living in a world of enforced neurotypicality long before vaccines existed.<br />
<br />
Autisms is not new. We have been here as long as humanity has. <a href="http://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/23/capitalism-neurotypicality-and-the-witch-at-the-edge-of-the-woods/"> We pre-exist this culture and we will outlast it.</a><br />
<br />
Do you still think you can talk about preventing more people like me from existing and call yourself my friend? And to think, they say Autistic people "lack empathy" . . .<br />
<br />
p.s. On that comparison with questioning the origin of Queer people -- "conversion therapy" for Queer people was based on the most popular form of therapy administered to Autistic people, developed in the same lab with involvement from the same researchers. Conversion therapy for Queer people is finally outlawed in the U.S. But in Massachusetts, Autistic people are still locked up and given electric shocks. <br />
<br />
<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-57027568651305518722015-10-15T20:23:00.001-07:002015-10-15T20:23:34.563-07:00Unsettling Thoughts on Cultural AppropriationGrowing up in Ireland, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewfu5fctXyg">Cora Anderson</a>'s grandfather, Pete Rivers learned to work with herbs. When he came to Alabama in the nineteenth century, he sought out Cherokee healers and they exchanged information about the names and uses of plants.<br />
<br />
I tell you this at the outset, because I want to say that there are times in history when people from Europe have met Indigenous people from North America on respectful terms and shared medicine. But, things were different then. Like my ancestors, Pete Rivers was an Indigenous person displaced from one continent to another. He met his Cherokee neighbors on a certain equal footing.<br />
<br />
My own great grandfather was probably two generations younger. When he arrived in Lynn, MA, at the age of 21, a young Irish revolutionary with a price on his head, the Irish were not yet <a href="http://wildhunt.org/2015/10/column-the-people-without-colour.html">"white." </a> He, and my grandfather, faced the Ku Klux Klan who were terrorizing Irish neighborhoods in Massachusetts. (Other ancestors of mine likely faced the same struggles when the Klan was going after Quebecois communities in Maine.)<br />
<br />
But, three generations later, my body is read as "white" in thus culture, and I am an uninvited interloper on unceded WSANEC territory. While the term "settler" doesn't, in my mind, fit my great grandfather, I am, against my will, a beneficiary of colonization, and of a white supremacist capitalist culture that values my life, my voice, my existence more than it values the lives and voices and existence of Indigenous people or Black people or Brown people. And as much as I try to resist the violence of capitalism and white supremacy, I live within them. The "privilige" given to me is not something I can renounce or give away. So I do not enter into relationship with the people whose land I am living on with the same kind of equal footing that Pete Rivers held. <br />
<br />
This doesn't make true exchange impossible, but it complicates it. <br />
<br />
Adrienne Rich wrote that "poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history." The same is true of herbalism.<br />
<br />
And in the case of relationships between the Indigenous people of this continent and the descendants of Europeans, that history is one where colonizers have again and again taken whatever they wanted and needed from Indigenous communities. And, now that capitalist colonialism has stolen almost every material thing from the original inhabitants of this land (and is doing its damnedest to take what's left), a lot of people who materially benefit from that theft are looking to Indigenous communities to feel their spiritual needs as well. Some are approaching respectfully, but most less so. And so Indigenous communities are rightly and understandably outraged when outsiders claim their medicines and their ceremonies as their own, especially when they profit from them without giving back to the people they took them from.<br />
<br />
Its true, plants belong to themselves, not to cultures. I disagree with the claim I have heard (though it is a rare one, and I hear people denouncing it more than I hear anyone making it) that white herbalists have no right to work with Osha or Devil's Club. We do have a right to make relationships with those plants on our own terms. And, then, to learn what there is to know about traditional understandings of those plants that might give us better context for our own relationships with plants. Where I draw the line is at claiming to be practicing the traditions that knowledge comes from without understanding and sharing the full cultural context they emerge from. And at harvesting these plants in ways that disrespect and disrupt Indigenous people's ability to access the plants that helped to shape their cultures.<br />
<br />
Its also true, that even in the presence of this history, real conversation and real exchange around plant medicine can happen between people form different communities. But most of the time I find that those conversations happen quietly. And the white people who engage in them don't tend to make bold, public claims about having a special knowledge of Indigenous medicine. They happen when one plant person recognizes another, and they get curious. <br />
<br />
Just like Pete Rivers and the Cherokee healers he met when he came to Alabama.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-55233186126693204162015-10-14T22:41:00.001-07:002015-10-14T22:41:59.729-07:00Fragments from a Lost Suitefor Van<br />
<br />
Until you left<br />
your body<br />
behind<br />
<br />
You never knew<br />
the limping god<br />
was not a lame god.<br />
<br />
Now he rises<br />
to dance<br />
to your tune,<br />
Orpheus<br />
<br />
and becomes<br />
a green light<br />
guiding you<br />
into the woods.<br />
<br />
But this time<br />
the will o' th' wisp<br />
burns true<br />
<br />
guiding you<br />
into the swamp<br />
in March<br />
<br />
where a<br />
purple flower<br />
rises from roots<br />
that melt through<br />
the ice.<br />
<br />
Its blossom<br />
will be your boat<br />
for the next part<br />
of your journey<br />
<br />
floating on dark waters<br />
through the cavern<br />
of your heart<br />
<br />
its beating<br />
reminding you<br />
of the rhythms<br />
that anchored<br />
you to the Earth.<br />
<br />
Follow that river home.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-35145659842188619992015-10-03T12:50:00.001-07:002015-10-03T12:50:44.840-07:00Political Correctness and CensorshipI have been noticing more and more lately the ways in which the concept of political correctness is stifling free speech.<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I see it happening again and again. Someone in a position of privilege says something cruel or ignorant about a group of people who are marginalized, pathologized, brutalized, or otherwise generally shit on by the dominant culture. People respond, pointing out the ways in which the things the privileged person said is hurtful or inaccurate or otherwise problematic. The privileged person complains about how political correctness is destroying freedom. And then everyone else is expected to shut the fuck up.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But, you see, that's not the way free speech works. You are absolutely permitted to say whatever you want -- I will always oppose any law that gets in the way of your doing that. But, then, I am allowed to say that what you said is fucked. And if you turn around and say that I am taking away your rights by criticizing you and I need to be quiet -- well, then, who is trying to shut down free speech?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Its kind of like the way Christians claim to be oppressed in this culture right now. Allowing people to have marriages that your church doesn't approve of doesn't stop you from practicing your religion -- nobody is requiring or expecting you to change your rules about who your clergy will and won't marry. But making laws that say that Quakers and Unitarians and Pagans aren't allowed to perform weddings that your megachurch pastor disapproves of really is curtailing religious freedom. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I don't go by the bullshit about "what this country was based on" or "what the Founding Fathers intended" -- what the Founding Fathers intended was for one group of white male landowners to be allowed to make money without paying taxes dictated by another group of white male landowners to pay off the debt from the genocidal wars waged to make both groups richer. But I am a believer in consistency. If you want to invoke freedom of speech, you need to realize that includes other people's right to call you out on bigotry.</div>
Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-60737187963151933522015-09-25T14:36:00.000-07:002015-09-25T14:36:37.087-07:00Gathering the Wild HerbalistsWhen I was a teenager growing up in suburban Massachusetts, the Earth First! Journal brought me news of struggles to protecting old growth ecosystems from the Redwoods of California to the Cedars of Alaska, and I dreamed that someday I would be part of giving voice to those ancient forests. Among my greatest inspirations was Lone Wolf Circles, and the Earth First! Warrior Poets Society that he founded. <br />
<br />
After a decade and half on the frontlines of opposition to the violence of late capitalism -- visiting war zones, blockading weapons factories, planting sunflowers at nuclear power plants -- I left the city for the woods, and eventually found myself teaching and practicing herbal medicine in the Pacific rainforest, a few hours' drive south of Clayoquot Sound, where forest defenders made their stand in the '80's and '90's, and the Walbran where friends and students of mine will soon prepare to put their bodies on the line in defense of some of this island's last old growth. I venture from my forest home to come into Victoria to teach and work in the clinic at Pacific Rim College, to buy groceries, and to lift weights late at night when I am the only person in the gym. And every summer and fall I find myself on the road, teaching at herb conferences.<br />
<br />
Plant people are some of the best people I have met, and they make me feel welcome everywhere I go. But, I have to admit, among all the amazing gatherings I attend, one has a very special place in my heart: The <a href="http://planthealer.org/">Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference,</a> where, a few years ago, Lone Wolf Circles (now known as Jesse Wolf Hardin) and Kiva Rose took the risk of inviting an unknown herbalist with no formal training and a strange, poetic manner of speaking in spirals to come talk about my relationships with wild plants. They earned my eternal gratitude then by making room for a new voice, and I have watched them continue to do the same for others, as brilliant people who sat in some of my first workshops have begun to emerge as new, clear, strong, creative voices in our community. This year I had the special privilege of co-teaching with one of those still newer voices, Asia Suler, whose love and reverence for the land serve as weet but powerful medicine for the re-enchantment of the world.<br />
<br />
Wolf and Kiva invite people like me to teach not in spite of our strangeness, but because of it. They recognize that, as Albert Einstein may or may not have said, the problems we face will not be solved by the same thinking that gave rise to them. I was particularly moved by the amount of space consciously and deliberately created for<a href="http://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neurodiversity-some-basic-terms-definitions/"> neurodivergent</a> voices at this year's gathering.<br />
<br />
But that doesn't mean the conference is a free for all. The strange truths spoken in the high desert are grounded in lived experience and must pass through the finely tuned bullshit detectors of those willing to challenge what passes for wisdom, be it conventional or unconventional. The same rollicking spirit that inspired me when I first encountered Earth First! lives on in a conference that grew out of the movement of deep ecology from road blockades into medicine. I am already counting down the days until next September.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-47719813502512694792015-09-05T15:42:00.003-07:002015-09-05T15:44:23.810-07:00False Hierarchies and the Backlash Against Silberman's NeuroTribesHans Asperger, with guns to the heads of the children he treated,<a href="http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=436742377&m=436940063http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=436742377&m=436940063http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=436742377&m=436940063http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=436742377&m=436940063"> created the myth of "high functioning" and "low functioning"</a> Autism in a desperate attempt to save some of them from being killed in concentration camps.<br />
<br />
Those who insist on such a distinction today have no such excuse -- and are leading the backlash against Steve Silberman, the journalist whose meticulous work uncovered this history.<br />
<br />
In a review typical of this backlash, <a href="http://jennifermargulis.net/blog/2015/09/a-doctor-responds-to-terry-grosss-interview-with-steve-silberman-about-autism/">Dr. Jennifer Margoulis</a> writes "<i>Silberman is conflating children and adults who have some
neurodiversity with children and young adults who are suffering from
severe autism and related health issues like gastrointestinal problems
and severe pain."</i><br />
<br />
Let's parse her statement a bit.<br />
<br />
We'll begin with the most obvious -- Margoulis implies that proud Autistic people and our allies aren't interested in finding solutions to mitigating conditions that are common among Autistic people such as gastrointestinal problems and autoimmune conditions. Helping fellow Autistic people get to more happily inhabit bodies is on of my passions as an herbalist, and most of my Autistic patients have become amateur medical scholars of their own conditions -- we get obsessive about or special interests, or so the diagnostic manuals say. One thing many of have found is that conditions we are most prone to are also common among trauma survivors. To a large extent, they are likely linked to the experience of being neurodivergent in a culture of compulsory neurotypicality. (Organizations that claim to speak for us silence our voices will funding eugenic research aimed at preventing or existence in future generations. Our styles of speaking, thinking, and self-regulating are pathologized, often punitively. Some of us are institutionalized and subjected to electro-shock therapy and chemical lobotomy. Autistic People of Color are frequently looked in cells in schools as children and all too often become targets of police violence.)<br />
<br />
But more troubling is Margoulis's main point -- that we need to make a distinction between "adults who have some neurodiversity" and "children and young adults who are suffering from severe autism."<br />
<br />
As I have written elsewhere, such a distinction is false, and serves to<a href="http://godsandradicals.org/2015/05/23/capitalism-neurotypicality-and-the-witch-at-the-edge-of-the-woods/"> further capitalist agendas that value us according to our ability to participate in the creation of wealth</a>. Those of us who are assigned the category of "high functioning" maintain a performance of neurotypicality at a high cost to our health in order to get access to the things we need to survive in this culture. And, just as the late Dr. Oliver Sacks found with silent Parkinson's patients who were presumed to be mentally vacant, we are discovering that non-speaking Autistics have inner worlds that are rich and uncannily similar to those of speaking Autistics.<br />
<br />
Breaking things down further, talking about "adults who have some neurodiversity" suggests that neurological divergence is something to be accepted in moderation, but policed. "You Aspies are ok Sure, you are weird, but you talk with us. Yeah, we do like it best when you are in a separate room writing code. But you aren't like those other ones. You don't bite and kick." It echoes discourses around previously pathologized aspects of human diversity, like sexuality -- "Middle class lesbians and gay men who want to get married and own houses and avoid public displays of affection are ok, but not the flamboyant ones who wave their sexuality our faces. And Trans people skeeve us out."<br />
<br />
It is wrong when talking about sexuality, and it is just as wrong when talking about neurobiology.<br />
<br />
We're here. <a href="http://neuroqueer.blogspot.ca/"> Our neurobiologies are Queer.</a> Get used to it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-77600162983008322432015-08-26T23:44:00.002-07:002015-08-27T14:29:12.997-07:00Confessions of a Facebook WitchFacebook is one of my favorite magical tools.<br />
<br />
It is an amazing tool for divination -- I know people of all kinds scattered across a continent or two, and I can see what is showing up along each thread of my connections, and also pick up on things that are showing up at really disparate parts of my web. This gives me a way to feel what is moving through the world and discern its patterns. <br />
<br />
Sometimes, reading those patterns, it is possible to make just the slightest tonal shift in the song being sung by this part of the human world to change the music entirely. Words, images, songs have this capacity. Viral in the sense that we would mean if we embraced the necessity of the viral elements of our own microbiomes. The nature of the movement of the changes across the web predicted by complexity theory and chaos mathematics.<br />
<br />
Facebook is in so many ways a simulacrum of the internet itself, which in turn is a <a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2015/08/my-theology-is-mycorrhizal.html">simulacrum of a mycelial network, which mirrors a neural network</a>. The internet itself emerged when <a href="http://godsandradicals.org/2015/08/22/madness-and-poetry/">neurodivergent </a>people who had been given access to consciousness altering mushrooms and synthetic ergot derivatives were given access to enough silicon, enough electricity, and some new kinds of conductors. Right now much of the mycelium is still living under laboratory conditions, feeding off information poor simple sugars, but as we bring our wild selves into contact with the technology, it can be fed the rich nutrients of the forest floor (because some of us have forests inside us, and our very exhalations can be like falling leaves) which will allow it to blossom forth the most amazing fruiting bodies from the transformation of the nutrients.<br />
<br />
Karina taught me that "a witch works with all things." This web is one I tend.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-25988718680046546102015-08-12T00:51:00.001-07:002015-08-12T01:36:03.212-07:00My Theology is Mycorrhizal<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/awitchsashram/2015/08/11/relational-polytheism/">Niki Whiting,</a> just wrote <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/awitchsashram/2015/08/11/relational-polytheism/">a beautiful essay</a> on the relational and intersectional nature of her theology. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My theology is also relational and intersectional -- but it is above all ecological. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am a Feri priest, wedded to the gods of my tradition, oathbound to my kindred in my lineage and my tradition. My gods are not metaphors. But, aside from she-who-is-all-that-is-of-which-all-is-fractal-form (shhh! don't tell the other polytheists that I just confessed to monist heresy) they are not everything. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am also an animist, inhabiting a world in which everything is alive. Gods are one form of life -- like humans and Oaks and Salmon and Mountains and Rivers. The way in which gods differ from other beings is in their persistence of form -- some have lifespans as long as a river or a civilization, others live as long as a galaxy, a handful are almost as old as time itself. But ultimately we and they and the Owl calling outside my window and the Cedar the Owl is perched in and the forest floor and the ocean are all made of the same matter and energy infused with the memory of a world born of the love and desire that arose from the Darkness gazing on Hirself in the curved mirror of space and time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://whitewand.com/">Anaar</a> recently reminded me that in Feri, perception and experience come before belief, an that whatever is true is observable in nature. So it makes sense that our relationships with gods would resemble our relationships among other beings and other beings relationships with us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And just as <a href="https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QyCkwAGoVChMIprWb8YCixwIVxVw-Ch3mYwQX&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dysa5OBhXz-Q&ei=jW3KVea6KMW5-QHmx5G4AQ&usg=AFQjCNGYEchl6GZCXWmGvCdpHL5Xfndj0w&sig2=5pOzFxcJlaA53A7EiUqp5A&bvm=bv.99804247,d.cWw">Wolves shape Rivers</a> by preying on the Elk that graze the Willows that change the Rivers' course -- and are changed by the River and the Willows and the Elk in turn -- the presence - or absence - of gods changes an ecosystem. It leaves holes in worlds, internal and external.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The question is not whether the empty places inside us and in our world are god shaped of Bear shaped or Lady Slipper shaped holes, because all exist, all are real, the question is what are the relationships among those holes, and what do those relationships tell us about what is missing from our lives and how to invite its return. And what is ultimately absent is the sense of relationship itself. We have forgotten how to be in relation with gods because we have forgotten how to be in relation with life in all its complex, emergent forms around us. And in the absence of relationship, there is a loss of meaning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://wildhunt.org/2015/08/column-what-do-they-mean.html">Rhyd Wildermuth</a> writes:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />"<span style="background-color: #efefef; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Meaning is a social-act, a kind of intercourse between us and the world, and us and each other"</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">and</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: #efefef; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Meaning can’t be reduced, it only expands. Meaning has no cognate, and the only other word in the English language that comes close to functioning as its synonym is not Truth, but</span><strong style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px; word-wrap: break-word;"> Love. [ . . ] </strong><span style="background-color: #efefef; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">When I love someone, they have meaning for me. They are meaningful to me, I derive meaning from them, we mean something to each other. When I do not love someone, they hold no meaning for me; they are meaningless to me, or they mean no-thing to me."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Where there is no meaning there is no love, where there is no love their is no deep relatedness, where there is no deep relatedness there is no divinity, for divinity is nothing if not a complex emergent quality of a living system, and without deep relatedness there is no system and no complexity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But where I differ from Rhyd is with his claim that "<span style="background-color: #efefef; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">humans are the only seekers of meaning we’ve yet encountered" </span>When I call to Owl or Raven in sounds that mimic their vocalizations, they respond in kind, even though they know I am not a bird. When a Cedar exhales volatile oils into the air, they carry messenger molecules recognized by our own nervous and endocrine systems. We are used to experiencing meaning only through the interpretation of our talking selves, but we all know that around some of the most meaningful things, words and concepts fall away and are replaced by the felt sense of being of our wild selves. <a href="http://gaianstudies.org/articles2.htm">Stephen Buhner</a> writes:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Human beings, long embedded within their environment, have always been
sensitive to the meanings that surrounded them. Those contained within plant
communications, as with all communications, generate feelings in us in
response. We know the touch of the world upon us, that we have been caressed by
meaning, even though we might not be able to consciously say just what that
meaning is. A door opens inside, our unconscious gathers it in, and at night we
dream and it is woven into the fabric of our lives. We have always been
surrounded by such meaning-imbued language; later we created our own. Our
language also travels through the air, though it is vibrating waves of sound.
(Did you think we made all this up out of our bulging forebrains alone?) We
have always lived, surrounded by original language."</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The new field of biosemiotics is examining communication within and between communities of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses. I imagine the field extending itself to theosemiotics, which would follow the same patterns observed in the wild world.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I learned what I know of speaking with gods from speaking with plants and fungi. There are gods who speak like Spruce, their breath calms us, and we stand in their shade. Their are gods that seduce us like Datura, their breath all perfume and pheromones and opium, There are gods like fermented Apples, who render us drunk or put us to sleep. There are gods like the Matronae who are like mushrooms, each Matrona an individual fruiting body with her own experience, but each connected to the whole by mycelial threads. There are gods like the roots of Oaks. And there are gods like the coiling of mycelium and rhizome.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like plants, all of them speak unmediated to the wild self, and the talking self finds its version of meaning in the traces of thought and language and narrative that arise where sensation touches consciousness.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #330000; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Gods are not plants or fungi or animal, but neither are they human. They meet me at the edge of the forest. And it was the forest that taught me how to speak with those who are not human. And so my theology is mycorrhizal.<br />
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Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-42843708010757030962015-07-21T00:26:00.002-07:002015-07-21T00:26:23.685-07:00Can Information Technology Deliver Us from Capitalism?<span style="font-family: inherit;">Will information technology succeed where popular movements have failed in leading us out of capitalism? That is British journalist <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism-begun?CMP=share_btn_fb">Paul Mason's contention.</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Mason says that because information technology has reduced the need for workers by automating more forms of work, disrupted price structures by flooding the market with an abundance of information, and facilitated new mechanisms of sharing and trade, it has begun to erode the fundamental structures of capitalism, coupled with external stresses, it will move us, over time, and with fits and starts, toward a post-capitalist world. The new project of the Left, he argues, should be the creation of alternative structures and institutions to replace those of the dominant culture as they disintegrate. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is much to like about Mason's essay. I agree with his contention that information technology has been an important force for liberation and for the establishment of a new commons in some spheres. (Though, we ignore the ways in which it also facilitates new forms or repression at our own peril. The manifestation of Foucault's <a href="http://scarletimprint.com/2015/03/beneath-the-rose/">Panopticon</a> in the form of surveillance technologies and the development of drone warfare are as much expressions of information technology as are cell phone cameras that can document police violence and technologies that democratize media.) I also agree that the Left would be well served by an increased focus on what Gandhi called the constructive program. (Though as a counterpart to, not as a replacement for, resistance. Mason argues that we need to stop engaging in defensive tactics. I think that we need to both defend communities, human and wild, and carve out new liberated spaces at the same time.) And there is the fact that a major British journalist is joining the growing and diverse list of public figures from Russell Brand to Pope Francis who are openly and directly critiquing capitalism in a culture that had been largely silent about capitalism since the end of the Cold War.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But Mason's acc</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">ount of the emergence of capitalism is deeply flawed in ways that also cloud his analysis of the present and the future. He writes:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;">The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;">The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method).</span></span></i></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This account begins with a popular misconception: that communal agriculture in feudal Europe collapsed because it over-stripped the carrying capacity of the land. The concept comes from a <a href="http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/angus250808.html">1968 article by Garrett Hardin</a> called "The Tragedy of the Commons." Hardin argued that in a situation where people farmed land in common, as was common in feudal England, nobody would protect the commons because each individual farmer would have an interest in using more than their share of resources and no incentive for conservation. Hardin's surmise was taken as historical fact -- despite a complete lack of evidence that any such thing did happen. If anything, it appears that communities of peasants organized to regulate the use of common resources.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://wildhunt.org/2015/05/column-the-revolt-of-remembering.html">The end of communal agriculture in England</a> was, in, fact, quite brutal and bloody. People were driven out of their communities and into the cities as communal land was forcibly seized and privatized and sold to people who had become wealthy as a result of Spain paying back its debts to British and other Western European creditors with gold and silver looted from the Americas. This created not a shortage, but an abundance of available labor, which provided the workforce for British industrialization. </span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;">This points to the second major flaw in Mason's reading of the history of capitalism -- Mason suggests that technologies like sailing ships and mining techniques were the drivers of capitalism's evolution while ignoring the human and material elements of the system. Technology appears as a force that precipitates cultural change rather than a product of that change. (For an excellent critique of this position see Raymond Williams'<a href="http://emmti.wikispaces.asu.edu/file/view/TV_Williams_long.pdf"> "The Technology and the Society."</a>) In his technological determinism, Mason misses a process vital to the emergence of capitalism: the process of accumulation.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;">Marx observed that the rise of capitalism was dependent on the influx of new wealth in the form of precious metals from the Americas which spawned the emergence of a managerial class, that most beloved class of modern politicians -- the middle class, which Marx called the bourgeoisie. <a href="https://libcom.org/files/Caliban%20and%20the%20Witch.pdf">Silvia Federici</a> points out that Marx's account of primitive accumulation was incomplete since it ignored the enclosure of the commons, the driving of rural workers into the cities to form the basis of the proletariat, the creation of a domestic sphere in which women provided free labor, and the witch persecutions which created a climate of terror that facilitated these changes. Slavery provided the work force for capitalist expansion in the Americas, following on the heels of genocide.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.8181819915772px;">Federici also points out that because it depends on infinite growth (nevermind the impossibility of such a thing given the laws of thermodynamics), <i>"capitalism must engage in continual accumulation "c</i></span></span><i>apitalist accumulation is structurally dependent on the free
appropriation of immense quantities of labor and resources that must appear as
externalities to the market"</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So does the information economy. This "post industrial" economy still depends on industry and agriculture, these simply occur out of the sight of most people in wealthy nations. The infrastructure of the information economy depends on the mining of minerals and the extraction of fossil fuels from lands expropriated from Indigenous communities and the labor of the displaced rural people from these areas in mines, oil and gas wells, and factories. Will these people be invited to be full participants in a "post-capitalist" economy? And is that what they and their communities want? Most likely not, but Mason doesn't tell us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Exits from capitalism have always been available to some for a price. The communes of the 1960's and 1970's were largely populated by the children of the bourgeoisie. Burners celebrate the cashless economy of Burning Man while forgetting the process of accumulation that feeds it -- people come to the desert to give away resources they obtained by succeeding within a capitalist economy, often with the benefit of racial, class, and colonial privilege. The post-capitalism Mason envisions may have room for more people, and may even be accessible to most people in the US and Canada and northwestern Europe and parts of Asia, but its hard to see it actually having room for everyone.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> This is not to say that such exits from capitalism play no role in transforming it -- but they are not complete, they are not enough.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The technologies themselves at play are of mixed provenance. On the one hand they are the product of the Cold War drive to maintain military control in the event of a nuclear war. On the other hand they are the product the work of groups that included a lot of neurodivergent people who had eaten fungi and fungal derivatives rich in serotonergic alkaloids creating a silicon simularum of mycelial webs. There were both repressive and liberatory impulses involved in the emergence of our information technologies, and they continue to be used in both repressive and liberatory ways.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Adrienne Rich once wrote "Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside of history." Neither does technology. Technological developments will both shape and be shaped by the people who engage them, who in turn are influenced by a host of political, economic, cultural, economic, spiritual, and magical forces. We can't rely on technology to bring down capitalism. We have to use it and engage it strategically in combination with old, new, and very old strategies of resistance and cultural innovation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-32066823637128297582015-06-21T02:16:00.001-07:002015-06-21T02:16:19.804-07:00Vox Clamantis in DesertoIt's Midsummer's Eve and the temperate rainforest I call home has turned hot and dry after months without rain, and I am awake after midnight, weeping at the beauty and power of a <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html">papal encyclical.</a><br />
<br />
Two years ago, a month before my initiation as a Feri Priest, I<a href="http://greenmanramblings.blogspot.ca/2013/02/exorcising-false-god.html"> wrote about </a>the intense liberation I felt with the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, which helped to break the chains the Church still had wrapped around my sense of myself in the world.<br />
<br />
Now, freed of that relationship, I am able to read the words of his successor, Pope Francis, with new eyes, and recognize a surprising resonance with my own Pagan practice. <br />
<br />
"Pagan" and "Heathen" are words that originally referred to the
unchurched and unlettered people of the countryside, and these were the
people Francis of Assisi ministered to -- a ministry marked not by
conversion but by inclusion in an animist form of Christianity, which
saw plants and animals and sun and rain and wind and stars as humanity's
kin. It is telling and significant that the saint's namesake draws
quite explicitly on that original Franciscan language, theology, and
spirit in an encyclical addressed not to Catholics but to the world. The Pope writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to
categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and
take us to the heart of what it is to be human. Just as happens when we
fall in love with someone, whenever he would gaze at the sun, the moon
or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other
creatures into his praise. He communed with all creation, even preaching
to the flowers, inviting them “to praise the Lord, just as if they were
endowed with reason”.<a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html#_ftn19" name="_ftnref19" title=""></a>
His response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual
appreciation or economic calculus, for to him each and every creature
was a sister united to him by bonds of affection. That is why he felt
called to care for all that exists. His disciple Saint Bonaventure tells
us that, “from a reflection on the primary source of all things, filled
with even more abundant piety, he would call creatures, no matter how
small, by the name of ‘brother’ or ‘sister’”.<a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html#_ftn20" name="_ftnref20" title=""> </a>Such a conviction cannot be written off as naive romanticism, for it
affects the choices which determine our behaviour. If we approach nature
and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no
longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship
with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers,
ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By
contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then
sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.</blockquote>
And, then, comes the really astounding part:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of
asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality
into an object simply to be used and controlled. </blockquote>
With these words, Pope Francis challenges the cosmology of capitalism, resurrecting a world that was declared dead, and calling for a new politics and a new economics that recognize the inherent worth and rights of all life, human or otherwise. <br />
<br />
He goes on to explicitly condemn anthropocentrism -- a complete reversal of Benedict XVI's position that challenges to the concept of a human centered world were inherently heretical. Writing of biodiversity, he says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is not enough, however, to think of different species merely as
potential “resources” to be exploited, while overlooking the fact that
they have value in themselves. Each year sees the disappearance of
thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which
our children will never see, because they have been lost for ever. The
great majority become extinct for reasons related to human activity.
Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by
their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such
right.
<br />
<br />
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It may well disturb us to learn of the extinction of mammals or
birds, since they are more visible. But the good functioning of
ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an
innumerable variety of microorganisms. Some less numerous species,
although generally unseen, nonetheless play a critical role in
maintaining the equilibrium of a particular place. Human beings must
intervene when a geosystem reaches a critical state. But nowadays, such
intervention in nature has become more and more frequent. As a
consequence, serious problems arise, leading to further interventions;
human activity becomes ubiquitous, with all the risks which this
entails. Often a vicious circle results, as human intervention to
resolve a problem further aggravates the situation. For example, many
birds and insects which disappear due to synthetic agrotoxins are
helpful for agriculture: their disappearance will have to be compensated
for by yet other techniques which may well prove harmful. We must be
grateful for the praiseworthy efforts being made by scientists and
engineers dedicated to finding solutions to man-made problems. But a
sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention,
often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually
making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey,
even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound
limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable
and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.</blockquote>
What we are witnessing here is a fundamental theological shift -- the Pope is moving the Church's position from a view of a world created by God for human use to a view of a world in which all life is sacred. <br />
<br />
He aligns himself and the Church, as well, with Indigenous people, taking the position that they are best caretakers of their traditional homelands, and that they
deserve to be allowed to honor an protect "a sacred space with which
they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and
values." These words are coming from the leader of a Church which for centuries blessed the extermination, forced conversion, and forced assimilation of Indigenous people. Now, witnessing a world devastated by colonialism and capitalism, the Pope is completely rewriting Church doctrine.<br />
<br />
Its appropriate that this comes just weeks after the Vatican beatified<a href="http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/report-oscar-romero-be-beatified-may-23"> Archbishop Oscar Romero</a>, who was killed by U.S.-trained assassins for speaking out on behalf of El Salvador's poor. Like Pope Francis, Romero was a quiet and moderate man who distanced himself from politics -- until he could no longer ignore the suffering around him. Romero said "“There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried” I wonder at the miracle of the tears that have cleared the eyes of Pope Francis.<br />
<br />
Pope Francis believes in a single God. Though he also speaks of Mary, beautifully, as the Mother and Queen of the universe: <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection
and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the
death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified
poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power.
Completely transfigured, she now lives with Jesus, and all creatures
sing of her fairness. She is the Woman, “clothed in the sun, with the
moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” Carried up into heaven, she is the Mother and Queen of all
creation. In her glorified body, together with the Risen Christ, part of
creation has reached the fullness of its beauty. She treasures the
entire life of Jesus in her heart and now
understands the meaning of all things. Hence, we can ask her to enable
us to look at this world with eyes of wisdom. </blockquote>
My spirituality is rooted not in belief, but in relationships -- and my relationships are with many gods - the Feri gods and the gods of my ancestors - and with plants and animals and rivers and stars.<br />
<br />
But that is almost all that separates my view of the world from the view Pope Francis articulates in this encyclical.<br />
<br />
And that brings great healing to this once Catholic heart.<br />
Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7036954362766362777.post-91749333387013899772015-06-10T23:09:00.001-07:002015-06-10T23:09:10.464-07:00Rainbow Family, Leave the Oglala Sioux Alone!I was saddened and disturbed today to learn that the Rainbow Family is planning to gather, uninvited, in the Sacred Hills of the Oglala Lakota Nation. This is an act of tremendous disrespect against people who have been fighting genocide and colonization for centuries.<br />
<br />
Early reports are that Rainbow Family "scouts" have been showing up at sacred sites, dismissing requests to stay away, answering them with promises that the Rainbow Family will leave the land "better than they found it." These are the same words outsiders have been using for years to justify their disrespect for Oglala Sioux sovereignty. <br />
<br />
The plans to leave the land "better than they found it" include plans to bring in non-native plants and plant them all over the Sacred Hills which are essential habitat for the plants that are at the core of the nation's traditional medicine.<br />
<br />
All of this is happening as the Oglala Lakota are preparing to go into the season of vision quests and prepare for the Sundance.<br />
<br />
The Rainbow Family's plans are unspeakably arrogant, ignorant, and destructive.<br />
<br />
Please:<br />
<br />
-- Do not take part in this gathering in any way.<br />
<br />
-- Speak out against the Rainbow Family's disrespect for Indigenous sovereignty.<br />
<br />
-- If you have information about the specific location of the Rainbow Family's June 17 Spring Council in South Dakota, pass it on so people from the tribe can try to talk some sense into those planning the gathering.Sean Donahuehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09806225446255948016noreply@blogger.com4