Tag Archives: uncertainty

Mist ecology, or, a thought for the new year

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This guest post is by Lindsay McLaughlin. You can read a bit about her on the “Denizens” page. In this story, Erin is the sweet, boundlessly energetic dog who came to the residents of Rolling Ridge out of the woods in October, a little more than a year ago. She has a bed and a place in every one of the community homes. They are her pack.

We have reached the turning of the year, at least according to the Julian calendar. It is the time of beginning again, the time of emergence and wonder. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” Traditionally, it is a hopeful time. But hope is tricky.

“Dark ecology” is a term I have just encountered, coined by Paul Kingsnorth. It is both a defiant affirmation of our living planet and a lament. Kingsnorth observes human techno-culture rolling on relentlessly over the wild Earth and asks, “Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?” Continue reading →

Extricating from the progress trap

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It is easier to try
to be better
than you are
than to be
who you are.
~ Marion Woodman

This wisdom reminds me that I’m conditioned to look outward towards improvement, rather than within towards healing. Seeing myself as inherently flawed and in need of betterment, I tend to believe I have to fix those flaws myself, without help. The trouble is, the more I dig, the more imperfections I discover. It becomes an arms race of flaws and fixes.

This is a personal illustration of what author Richard Wright calls the “progress trap.” I’m so caught in it that even the question, “How can I get beyond the story of progress?” carries within it the taint of progress. I want to make progress towards getting beyond the story of progress. Continue reading →

Winter solstice awakens possibilities of both/and

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Tonight is the longest night of the year. In the Baltimore / Washington region, we will have about nine hours of daylight and fifteen hours of night. There’s a magical simultaneity of this moving into darkness while also lengthening of days, as our hemisphere also begins to tilt back towards the sun. In a culture of either/or, today is a good day to entertain the possibilities of both/and.

In the spirit of everything being interconnected, we might choose to contemplate applying both/and to big problems we face today: energy, race relations, addiction and mental illness, the state of the environment, and the treatment of women in the military, for instance. It would make a refreshing change from the usual wrangling about right and wrong, good and evil, and putting forth expert theories about solutions. Continue reading →

Perfection is the enemy of the fun

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I am a recovering perfectionist. I thought I had cleansed myself by adopting the mantra, “it’s good enough,” but a recent dream showed otherwise. My perfectionism has gone underground, migrating from my daytime personality into a shadowland, though not only to sabotage my happiness. This re-revealing of an old truth encourages a new assessment of the ways that perfectionism works in my life, for good and ill.

Yesterday I went to a meeting of a group of design professionals and experts about alternative water treatment and stormwater system design, in the context of a new green building framework called the Living Building Challenge. It’s a deeper, more holistic and ambitious program than the LEED Green Building Rating System you may have heard of. Continue reading →

How does science explain a numinous presence?

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The film, “Rosewater,” is based on the memoir of Iranian-born journalist Maziar Bahari, who was held in solitary confinement for almost four months following the controversial 2009 elections. I haven’t read his book, but was intrigued that he was visited in his cell by his dead father (who had also been jailed for his politics, under the Shah), as well as his late sister Maryam, who was jailed under the revolutionary government in the 1980s.

Such a presence is not so uncommon, given the right circumstances. It appears when someone is in an extreme or unusual environment, such as mountaineering, shipwreck, natural disaster, mine accident, terrorist attack, space exploration, or the extreme isolation and loneliness experienced in solitary confinement. Continue reading →

Are we redeemable?

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Living under the regime of our current cultural stories gives us an ambiguous relationship with redemption. Take for example the certainty that we’re all going to die. We are so wedded to the material world that any version of an illness or dying story that brings in mystical or supernatural dimensions feels like a forced smiley-face fantasy, hopelessly naïve. The sanctioned story we have of death is that it’s a failure to be avoided, and ultimately, an inevitable slide into nothingness.

This is the aspect of old story that tells us that we are Alone in a Cold Universe. Death is a force greater than us, merciless and impersonal, to which we must inevitably submit. Such powerlessness has no place in a redemption story. Continue reading →

How can you balance an elephant on a seesaw with a mouse, and why even try?

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My entry into the world of sustainable design came out of an Earth Day talk by the architect William McDonough. For a long time, my why was a reaction against bad news: oil-coated ducks; mountains of trash in landfills; coal mines that leveled living mountains and shoved them into pristine river valleys; climate change; “Cancer Alley,” where they make PVC, a known carcinogen that’s in countless building materials.

I thought, we’ve got to turn this thing around, and we are smart enough: we have the know-how and technology to do it. In my lectures, after pictures of the bad news, I would show a diagram of a circle drawn with arrows, depicting closed loops by recycling materials. I would show case studies of buildings designed to use very little energy, heated and powered by the sun, sheltered by the constant temperature of the earth, roofed with gardens that birds could call home. Continue reading →

Failure is an option

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People who research creativity and innovation tell us that the willingness to risk is a critical factor. Fear of failure shuts down creativity. At IDEO, a world-renowned design firm, their motto is “Fail early and fail often.” In the art classroom at my son’s grade school was a beautiful, handmade sign in rainbow letters that said, “Mistakes are treasures.”

My own relationship with risk and failure is evolving. A child of a grand perfectionist, I learned early to do everything possible to avoid failure. I never knowingly took risks and resisted mightily when in situations so challenging as to be ripe for failure. It took sailboat racing to reveal the unique freedom that’s concealed within failure. Continue reading →

Leaving Birthdayland

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Today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday, so this painting is one of hers, done 20 years ago at Glacier Bay in Alaska. She loved the exotic landscapes of Alaska, the history and villages at the intersections of water, cultures, and time.

This is the second birthday from which she has been exempted. Once, a little over two weeks before she died, we sat in her sun-filled kitchen while she extracted cards from her Birthday Book. This was a 9 x 12 spiral book probably from Hallmark, with a page for each month in which to note people’s birthdays and a facing pocket to hold cards ready to send. She reused it year after year, because, after all, people’s birthdays never change. They are one of few constants in this roiling, shifting world.

My mother was a good patient who died peacefully at home, but she didn’t want to go. Continue reading →

Day of the threshold

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At this time of year, the Celtic festival of Samhain, meaning “summer’s end,” was held to mark the end of the harvest. It is timed at the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. The geometric neatness of this appeals to me, as does the consciousness of our relationship with the earth and the ever-shifting seasons.

The festival included a harvest bonfire. Everyone present would bring a bit of the fire home to their own hearths, so they would have light and heat in the coming darkness and cold. There is a beautiful communal aspect to this ritual, celebrating the one and the many. It’s a way of reenacting this fact of creation, that each of us embodies the one and the many. Continue reading →