Many feel frustration about the failure of our “guardians” to act on the needs of our environments. They display, our own frozen helplessness when facing obvious threats. That’s great as just the kind of observation that is the stimulus for new kinds of thinking. “Changing Normal” for a planet stuck in the past, you might say.
In acknowledging Steve’s frustration with the crime of silence by our guardians was reserving the possibility that “masters of the universe” responsible might not be “the usual suspects”. It could also refer to anyone who thinks of their being a “master of their own fate”.
Frank then offered a nice way to prompt his students,
“Hmmm, each year for the past 20 or so, in orientation week, i greet my new crop of students with: “i am a green but the wilderness i am interested in is not in East Gippsland (Oregon?) but behind the eyes looking at me across this room. If i can make you wilder, i.e. LESS predictable to me, by the time you leave this room, i have done my job.”
That’s a great way of saying it, helping learners become more independent, enriching the compost in the wild place between their ears, and raising their own and our richer crops of better questions!
Our human self-image isn’t really about creatively exploring a wilderness, though. Functionally that indeed is much of what we do, of course. Our self-image, though, is more frozen on the poles of “more” or “less” in feeding our own wants. The vision of “sustainability” around the world is then framed as little more than a self-negation “less not more”.
I was also thinking of that this morning as defining our problem with our “taker” self-image, and that neither of the poles of being more or less of a taker makes you a “healer”. A healer has to start with “do no harm” and study the many ways symptom response can add to bigger crisis conditions. That requires then exploring the wilderness of relationships you’re immersed in for how to avoid that.
That’s not simply the idea of reducing one’s takings for selfish use, but adds learning to use your takings for better use. Maybe the problem isn’t our takings, but that we haven’t learned how to become more unpredictable in discovering their use for healing?