Center for Ecozoic Studies

THE PASSING OF FRANK COOK

I think for those who do not know Frank, his website provides only a little insight into who he has been for many. (http://www.plantsandhealers.com/about.php). Better is this image, which only begins to capture a little of Frank.

Another way to get some small insight into him is to see his description of the workshop he was to hold in Maine beginning this past week:

August 23-28 Applied Nature Studies: Wild Plants as Medicines, Teas, and Foods at the Humboldt Field Research Institute near Steuben

During our week together we will pursue an experiential approach to encountering the world. We will initially discuss the context of the phenomena that we are studying--be it plants, mushrooms, seaweeds or the land forms we explore. Our aim is to pursue a holistic understanding of nature bringing together such diverse fields as botany, mycology, fermentation, permaculture, ethnobotany, and ecology. Once we have achieved a degree of understanding we will take frequent trips into the surrounding ecosystems, and learn the techniques for collecting from the wild. From these gatherings we will process and ferment wild foods and natural medicines. By the end of the week the participants will have been exposed to many of the qualities of complex ecosystems and ways in which humans can study and connect with their environment. We will encounter some of the challenges facing humanity and ways to apply our understanding of nature to address them.

My wife, Sandi, and I met Frank on such an occasion—in our case at a “Wild Foods Weekend” at Pickards Mountain outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina (now Pickards Mountain Eco-Institute led by Megan and Tim Toben). For a weekend, with the help of Frank Cook and mushroom expert Alan Muskat, we foraged. We had heard of hunters and gatherers, but had no practical idea of what that meant. I now know it means is that if you know plants, a forest will supply all you need for wonderful teas and vegetarian dishes. (We did not hunt for animals.)

I learned about plants that were the precursors to the plants one finds in a vegetable garden. As wild foods they have a special flavor. I learned in a new way that Earth is abundant. I learned that the roots of mushrooms extend like a vast net through the forest floor and they serve as signal systems. They are the Internet of the forest.

Frank was a person like me who grew up in modernity, but he made a journey to recover the connection with Earth that indigenous people have. He taught me a lot about intimacy with Earth and deepened my awareness that Earth is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Until Frank’s death there was a sense that Frank was on his journey and I was on mine. When he died, I felt he took so much with him that was irreplaceable. What Frank had been doing, what I had depended on him doing, he couldn’t do anymore—at least not in the same way. The task of knowing plants more deeply, of being one with Earth passed on to us.

In my last conversation with Frank, I asked him how to learn the language of Earth, how to talk to a tree. He said to sleep on the bare ground underneath a tree at night.

This I will do. It seems both threatening and appealing. I wonder what the tree will say to me and I to it.

Herman Greene

THE PASSING OF BRIAN GOODWIN

Schumacher College of England has announced the passing of Brian Goodwin:

“On 15 July our dear friend and colleague Professor Brian Goodwin died peacefully in hospital with his wife Christel at his side. Brian had not been well for some time. He fell from his bike on his way to the College and then found it difficult to recover following surgery due to his underlying health problems.

Memorial Celebration

We will be hosting a Memorial Celebration for Brian on Sunday 20th September.

His two most recent books are important:

As reported on Amazon:

“This remarkable book is Brian Goodwin's biological testament, summing up the work he has been doing throughout his career since the 1960s along with the many major scientific advances since that period ... In understanding nature more deeply, we understand ourselves more profoundly. This book is a brilliant articulation of this process, pointing to the emergence of a new culture of co-operation and harmony.' -- David Lorimer, Scientific and Medical Network Review, Summer 2007 'Goodwin's book holds in it the excitement of new beginnings. It reads like a primer for the Great Work. It has a breath-taking range of scholarship that takes the reader on a journey of discovery through cultural history, scientific history, paradigm change, modern systems theory, chaos theory, evolutionary biology and a new field called biological hermeneutics.' -- Edmund O'Sullivan, Resurgence, November-December 2007.”

“Arguing that Darwin's theory of natural selection cannot explain the emergence of distinctive species, British biologist Goodwin proposes an alternative theory of evolution. He views organisms as dynamic systems, themselves the primary agents of creative evolutionary adaptation and change that occurs in a matrix of relationships with other members of the same species.” Publishers Weekly

MY TRUE IDENTITY

About fifteen years ago, like many creatures of my species, I was floating within our North American culture attempting to be a good person and citizen. Without really knowing it on a conscious level, however, my perpetual personal crisis has been one of identity. This was, until I came across the work of Thomas Berry.

In my studies of ‘the new story’, I have learned that the human need to establish our identity in relation to our larger community is a strong driving force and so that is why we desperately glom on to that which makes sense to us in the vast offerings of possibilities. The situation becomes problematic when there is a dissonance between one and the larger community with whom one is connected, and certainly problematic when there is a lack of resonance with the individuals and the structures at place within society. How do we derive our sense of purpose and belonging when we feel out of place within our immediate community? Through the work of Thomas Berry the answer to this question came flooding into my awareness and continues to develop within me as the revelatory nature of life within a functional cosmology naturally gives rise to all manner of discovery. It is like looking at things through a new lens.

In my personal experience life’s innate drive towards further complexity became evident by being a biracial female coming out of a complex family situation where my mother and her two children joined with my father and his two children and together they created two more, one of whom is me. Adding rich flavor to our family stew was the fact that one of my sisters had down’s syndrome and my other of two sisters was albino. Divorce when I was six sent mother traveling to Mexico where we were exposed to the Latin American culture and language. Personal identity and sense of placement within a larger ordering was later challenged by my involvement with a group of individuals called Peoples Temple between the ages of twelve and twenty-one.

This was a group with an original purpose of helping the needy, racial equality and social justice—membership provided a sense of unity and security within a society that seemed to fall short of taking good care of its people. Although the ideals were good, the group dynamics became increasingly dysfunctional to the point that the group’s dissolution was the result of the forced death of over 900 people who were isolated in the jungle of Guyana South America on November 18, 1978, in a place we called Jonestown. My sisters and nephews died and I survived by strange circumstances that removed me from the place the day before. The entire experience has contained within it many lessons, a large one being insight into the immaturity of our species when it comes to how we live in groups and the drive toward domination and control of others, not to mention the planet.

Fifteen years after this I searched for meaning in life everywhere. The emptiness I felt was not only a result of a broken nuclear family, and then death of an extended family or tribe, but also by experiencing the lack of placement, and sense of belonging in the “family” of our society as a whole. There seemed to be no place that required my own unique talents because society dictated and defined what was important and what was of value. What I absorbed was that I was only of value to the extent that I could serve a corporate or private entity, which was something exterior to, larger, and supposedly more important than me. We naturally look to the community to discover where we fit and if those places where we are directed actually diminish who we are, we become isolated, depressed, and apathetic towards life. The emptiness that I felt came out of a deep disconnect from a larger, deeper kinship with the Earth community and I was without any fundamental sustaining sense of origin. I knew that humans had evolved from oceanic creatures millions of years ago, but still, this understanding had not totally informed me of my identity which held that I was this person with a particular personal history that needed to try and act normal within a society with skewed values, and to function within a society which operated outside of an awareness of the intrinsic value each individual as well as the rest of the Earth community.

What happened at this time was that I came across the largest most amazing gift. It was the work of Thomas Berry. On a tape which I coveted, and still have the handwritten paper that I transcribed the words on, Thomas Berry says,

We need a guidance, we need a vision that we must supply that somehow must be evoked from within ourselves through the powers of the universe, and we’ve got to feel that in us the destinies of the universe are articulated, are constellated. The stars speak in us, the galaxies, the shaping forces of the Earth, the whole of life’s development, is all contained in every part of our being. Everything that has happened in the whole universe story is present in the physical reality of our being . . . everything that has happened has shaped the human mind as it is, and our thoughts were born when the universe was born in the sense that we are as old as the universe and as big as the universe.

Over and over I read and listened to Berry on tapes, and subsequently read The Dream of the Earth and other published work, and as I did it was as though I began to awaken out of a long, long dream. The awakening that I was feeling was not only personal, but I felt like I was a part of the awakening of our species. This was the first time I had really experienced a sense of the sacred in my life just by merely existing. The message was felt viscerally, in my bones and in my heart. It coursed through my veins. It ignited my creativity in life in general. That is how I knew of its vital significance. I had not been religious in any traditional sense but began to feel what I could only describe as a spiritual experience where everything around me was imbued with sentience and light and deep meaning. Flooding through me was a knowing that we live in a sacred universe and a sacred planet which is a complex self organizing and self sustaining—with an immense and ancient wisdom. My sense of identity began to change. What happened was that I began living in two worlds, which is I guess, what happens when we live in between stories. Thoughts and activities, laws, ethics, etc., all exist functioning, however poorly, within an old story while my mind and emotions and personal reality had entered a new, larger more encompassing sensibility. This felt strange and I found it difficult to articulate to others as I tried to express what I was experiencing and failing to be articulate in the process. In a way our language was and is still inadequate. Long held mind-sets are also impenetrable and sometimes my enthusiasm was met with blank stares or something equivalent to a pat on the head.

Most significant for me now is that I now know that I belong and that we all belong, within the whole of the community of life created by and on this fragile ball set poised majestically in space. In a deep way I know that I am a planetary being, a cosmological being, a geological formation with an unfathomably long history. This is my true identity.

I am currently a student in the masters program at the Sophia Center at Holy Names University in Oakland, California. This is a school that is rooted in the work of Thomas Berry. The program maintains an effort to examine the human role within an unfolding cosmos and Earth story, understanding that our survival as a species depends on our ability to grasp the reality of our inter-relatedness and interconnectedness with the rest of the Earth community (rivers, mountains, species of all kinds), all of whom developed over millions of years, and deserve a proper existence in their own right. It is a place where we are directly engaged with discovering our unique role in the great work of our time as we enter into a new cosmological era. My goal is to participate in the birth of an awareness that discards the view of creation as a resource, to objectify and use at our disposal, to adopt the mature approach which includes the rest of Earth community in our systems of jurisprudence. I believe it is imperative that all human endeavors be grounded in principles that foster the mutual enhancement of the rest of creation where the non-human world is not diminished in any way and is instead given full consideration. Thomas Berry has provided us with three guiding principles, differentiation, subjective interiority, and communion. These principles are natural laws that have governed the cosmos and Earth since the beginning of time and serve as a guide for the way that we as humans can conduct ourselves in our personal lives and in our larger communities. As we go about our affairs and agendas we can ask ourselves if we are honoring these principles.

I have an art studio at my home in Richmond, California, where twice a week, anyone who wants to come is welcomed to explore their creativity. At the end of 2010 I will be putting together an exhibit where various artists will display that which has been evoked within them as a result of stepping into the new story of our time and absorbing the new cosmology.

I shall be ever grateful for the work of Thomas Berry. It is the biggest and most significant gift I could have ever imagined receiving. It is a gift which opened up my world, grounding me in the awareness of my true identity and cosmological heritage. May we each live as one of the many stars in the cosmos, giving everything we have to our task in our own creative and authentic way before our final sacrifice to the ongoing journey.

Jordan Vilchez ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

KNOWING THE WAY BY WATER

The kayak is borrowed. I stop paddling almost as soon as I’m launched, studying the ragged edges of clouds as if they offered a map to the uncharted territory my life has become. I haven’t called it home for over 40 years, but the instant I’m afloat, the molecules in my body want to align with the molecules of paddle, boat and water, reconstituting that concatenation of elements in a certain direction, towards a certain spot on a certain nearby creek where, on a certain bluff, a house once stood.

Last week’s paper carried a story about a pod of whales beaching itself near the Cape of Good Hope. Hundreds of volunteers endured high winds and rough surf to try to push the creatures into open seas, but the whales kept swimming back to shore, and eventually the exhausted animals had to be shot, to prevent slow death by suffocation. No one understands such strandings. The whales could be sick, or following a confused leader, or attempting to rescue a stranded pod member sending off a distress call. Scientists think whales use magnetic fields and underwater topography to orient themselves, so a magnetic disturbance or peculiar coastline formation could bewilder them.

Now, I float amidst colored buoys and numbered channel markers, signs that mean something to someone but nothing to me. More significant is the cry of a baby osprey that scrapes the salty blue air near its twig-splayed nest. I recognize that familiar combination of morbid fear and importunate demand, and I’m tempted to turn my kayak towards the creek, the bluff, the collapsing house I keep wanting to call home, but the river’s waters sparkle and flow out to the bay, then out to the ocean, then out over the whole huge Earth, so I follow the river, knowing this liquid is the united sparkling of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Knowing each atom is the united sparkling of protons, neutrons, electrons. That each proton is the united sparkling of quarks and photons, each of which is a sparkling. Of. Something. That unites this kayak, this paddle, these hands that hold the paddle, the osprey’s open beak, the twigs of its nest, those trees along the shore, this whole huge Earth and, indeed, the universe itself. One united sparkling.

Home.

And if the old house is collapsing, I think that’s a good thing. Like those whales, we’ve been sick, following confused leaders, attempting to rescue something that’s beyond hope of repair. We all must contribute to the great work: finding a new orientation so we don’t end up stranded on a deadly shore, and in this uncharted territory, maybe those drifting clouds are a map, after all, with their hydrogen and their oxygen, their quarks and their photons, those mysterious inner somethings that teach us what we already know, in our sparkling bones: that beyond morbid fear and importunate demand there is a way for this glorious concatenation of elements we call Earth to align itself rightly and arrive home together as a single, sacred community.

Elizabeth Ayres, author of Know the Way and Writing the Wave, is the founder of the Center for Creative Writing. You can hear Elizabeth read on Internet radio: www.wryr.org, Monday evenings at 8:30 pm Eastern time, or catch more reflections on her "Encounters with Wonder" blog. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it