User Info
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
| My Groups: | The Great Turning | The Sporriors | Women's Earth Alliance |
Network [List] · [Visualize]
Areas of Focus
About
After being raised by the eastern Sierra Nevada/Great Basin bioregion, I earned a Ph.D. specializing in Ecopsychology. I've subsequently taught environmental studies, cultural studies, environmental education, and sustainability studies at various colleges, including nearly five years living outdoors in a tent fostering intensive learning communities for Lesley University's traveling Audubon Expedition Institute.
My academic work mainly centers on the relationship between cultural/spiritual belief systems and attendant ecological attitudes & sustainable behavior. I'm currently co-editing a book for the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness about strategies for making anthro & consciousness studies applicable to aiding a world in crisis.
Currently, I'm beginning a private (individual and group) 'cultural therapy' practice group. This work lies in the nexus between ecopsychology, bioregional literary, and animism/shamanism, with a particular interest in helping industrialized westerners become indigenous to these lands and waters we now live with. Methods include personal and cultural storytelling, hands-on bioregional literacy exercises, and spiritual practices to cultivate whole-systems awareness, joyful resonance, and, ultimately, painless sustainable behavior change.
Besides my work in the broad field of spiritual ecopsychology, I'm also a visual artist, DIYer, storyteller, pagan minister, community song-leader, contradance caller, mycophile, freegan, and incorrigible punster.




Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
~ Mary Oliver ~