"Although by now the twenty-first-century mind should be well aware of the interdependent links between earth degradation and widespread depression, our behavior has not yet caught up to our awareness. In a fog, in a hurry, and apparently in a hungry search for purpose, we continue to consume dwindling resources in the form of plastic paraphernalia, marketplace fashion, and endless other artificial and personal prescriptions for life. This is psychic numbing, denial, alienation, and depression wrapped into a single package, a single pattern of unintentional and unconscious misbehavior~ a pattern we might call overconsumption or addiction. Most insidious, this effect is cumulative, leaving us increasingly blind, autistic, and misguided in a self-perpetuating geography of human invention, a shiny and seductive world of mirrors. Saddest of all, we have forgotten that we have forgotten. We are too far from the richness of sensory, sensual experience to remember, much less taste, what it means to be fully awakened and engaged. We no longer know what a depth of sensory awareness is. The outcome of our forgetting is a sleepy, comfortable denial of our loss."
- Pg 70 from 'Sight and Sensibility - The Ecopsychology of Perception',by Laura Sewall,Ph.D. 1999
"To limit our faith to the visible facts is to call our world a done deal- no mysteries left, no revelations to be discovered. Our recovery must weave the unseen realm of psyche into the material moment, restoring our faith in the embodied irrational, the blush and subtlety of maybe, the meaning of mythic. The mystery of mind must be called into the light of day, unabashedly rejoined with the visible world- which without our gift of imagination is too easily reduced to stuff, nonrelational and ultimately uninteresting. Recovery must begin with noticing what's truly there, with looking into and between, with revealing what has been left unseen, and with an offering of wonder and imagination."
-Pg 93-94 'Sight and Sensibility - The Ecopsychology of Perception',by Laura Sewall,Ph.D. 1999
What if all levels of our Governments created a 'Ministry for Sensory Awareness', how might this impact our Local and Global Economies?
The sight of the tree beings are an important signifier for all of us. The trees are well adapted to find their way in the fog... but it is as if we humans are lost in it... that story of Lauren and was it Jeffery Kennedy? flying their plane into fog and not knowing what was up from what was down speaks of the inherant danger for all of us who have lost our bearings in our lives. Your article is timely, if we can't sense what is going wrong how can we sense what is going right? Ah to be as those trees, to be shrouded and yet to be absolutely confident and at home in the fog of our existences...
ReplyDeleteYes.. Aho!
ReplyDeletewhat magical photos and music.
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