March Against Monsanto May 24, 2013

March Against Monsanto everywhere tomorrow – including Boulder, CO at noon with me.

It’s enough already. If Monsanto were a character in a Dr. Who episode or cowboy story, they would have been put away as irredeemable bad guys long ago! Time to make life imitate art.

Want to learn more about why you should care? For a quick overview, check out my earlier blog post about GMOs: Just Say “NO” to Monsanto

For more in-depth understanding, here’s a link to a full-length film which you can see free on YouTube, Seeds of Death.

After I march for food security, I’m going up north a bit to call a wedding dance. It’s a deep love of life that leads both. Carry on in joy, everyone.

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Fall Has Sprung! contradance May 3, 2013

I had a blast calling at the “Fall Has Sprung” contra dance fest in Grass Valley, California.  Held every year in early November, this dance runs 12 hours long, from noon till midnight!

There’s potluck food and comfy bleacher chairs available the entire time, so participants can dance some, have a snack or meal, rest, dance more, go outside and schmooze a bit, do a community chore like taking out some garbage, drink some water, then dance a whole lot more.  Dance, rinse, repeat.

It is a super fun event that I’ve enjoyed going to several times as a dancer, and it was an honor and a delight to be invited to call for it this year.

What a luscious combo: calling 1/3 of the day with amazing bands, and getting to dance the other 2/3 to other amazing bands and great callers, for and with a hall full of zesty dancers.

This year, the bands were Hot Cider, KGB, and Raz de Marée, a.k.a. Tidal Wave, and the callers were Joyce Miller, Frannie Marr, and me.  Many thanks to the Foothills Country Dance Society and their stellar organizers, Eric Engels and Lisa Frankel.

This particular dance you’ll see in the video is “Square Affair” by Becky Hill. It is driven by music played by KGB, a  fabulous Seattle band consisting of Julie King, Claude Ginsburg and Dave Bartley. I found them to be not only breathtakingly good musicians, but also super easy to work with.

Video by dancer John Seto.   Music by KGB.   Calling by Tina Fields.

Happy May Day May 1, 2013

… from Boulder, Colorado.

Sigh.

One of my colleagues said today that it feels like we’ve slipped over the line into Narnia, where it’s “always winter but never Christmas.”  (–C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

Cue the music here:  ☆*♥¸.•*¨`*•♫♪♫♪   Someday our Spring will come…

Caliban, Prospero, and the Animate World April 30, 2013

Two types of relationship with the animate world, as seen in The Tempest‘s characters.

Which do you most resonate with?

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In his new article, Prospero – Shakespeare’s Shaman, Robert Tindall proposes the interesting idea that Prospero’s island in The Tempest can be seen as “a metaphor for the realm of the transpersonal unconscious.” And he offers up Caliban and Prospero as, in essence, models for two types of relationship with the animate world.

[Edward] Tylor’s theory of spiritual evolution is dramatically realized in the characters of Caliban and Prospero, who both perceive the cosmos as vital and sentient, yet from different ends of the spectrum. In Caliban’s naïve animistic consciousness, trees, streams, stars, are all alive, filled with music and strange wonder, and his most haunting evocation of that sentience comes in the lines:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again.

I like Tindall’s descriptions here, but personally feel leery of the idea of spiritual evolution: it smells of musty old linear hierarchical thinking. Caliban’s relationship with the place is much more primal, indeed – but is it lesser? Need these two go together?

The way in which these two characters are often portrayed, like in the images below, subtly gives us the message that it is lesser indeed. And there’s a scary bit of western egoic chutzpah evinced in Tindall’s line,

… Prospero’s magic perfects God’s creation.

This pairing of primal connection with lesser, and a more complex relationship involving the will to control with being somehow superior, unconsciously whispers in the collective western psyche. It echoes early European explorers’ views of indigenous peoples they encountered whilst seeking gold and land to colonize. These ancestors were taught by the Church to view our species as caught between the angelic and demonic realms; the latter, of course, being rooted in the earth and the former in the aether.

Moving forward in time, contemporary industrialized western culture as a whole tends to overvalue the cognitive mind, neglecting the gifts of other ways of knowing like kinesthetic, emotional, and spiritual – the very ways that can lead to a deeper relating with one another, with our own bodies and souls, with the numinous, and with the wild planet. Exiled, people both shy away from, and hunger for, these.

Tindall may well agree with this.

Could it be that Caliban, with his indigenous visions and uncanny local knowledge, represents that mythic line, that symbiosis of human and animal that Euro-Americans simultaneously abhor and secretly yearn for? Is not the island itself, stranded half way in a dream, the shamanic realm where powerful magic and discourse with spirits and supernatural beings is possible?

If the island is a metaphor for the realm of the transpersonal unconscious (where Shakespeare, who wrote three of his greatest plays simultaneously, no doubt resided for much of his creative career), Caliban, we suspect, is the genius of the Earth — “You earth, thou” — the impulses arising from the depths, the wild vitality, the Dionysian trickster, which still sparkle in the Bard’s work.

And he offers a beautiful alternative view of how the cognitive mind might be put to more skillful use. Where might the state of this world be right now if the field of natural science had remained separate from the damaging philosophies emerging from the so-called “Enlightenment” – for example, the ideas that nature needs to be controlled and that all physical matter is, in essence, dead? And how can it be made different if based on a radically different view of the world – an animistic one based on respect rather than conquering?

If Caliban is mother nature’s son, Prospero is her shaman. As a Renaissance magician, Prospero has a similar mode of perception as the savage Caliban — he releases spirits imprisoned in oaks, calls forth mutinous winds and, above all, creates visionary worlds that enrapture their beholders — yet his apprehension is aesthetic, not raw or sensual. In Prospero, Shakespeare gives us a glimpse into one of the directions that science, as we now know it, was developing in his time (and would have kept developing if not for the interventions of the Inquisition, Galileo, and Descartes).

…Rather than splitting the atom, Prospero catches rides on the movements of the stars.

Two types of relationship with the animate world, as seen in The Tempest‘s characters.

Which do you most resonate with, and why?

Personally, I’d like to work toward a world where our species’ Caliban and Prospero natures can dance together in tandem: the raw and sensual with the aesthetic and visionary.

Now that would make a paradise island.

Purr.

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To read Tindall’s full interesting article published April 18, 2013, go to Psychedelic Press U.K.:  http://psypressuk.com/2013/04/18/prospero-shakespeares-shaman/

Geno 2.0 April 25, 2013

“Gogo and the Ancestors” – painting by Marietjie Henning

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What did you blow your tax refund on?

This year, I spent mine on some really cool things, including a mad jaunt to attend an old friend’s birthday dinner over a thousand miles away, and participation in National Geographic’s ancestral genome tracking project.

Regarding #1, hanging around people in their late 90s of age has paradoxically made me aware of how very short life is. And what is more important than friends? Someone I’ve known since my teenage years wrote to say that what he really wanted for his big birthday coming up this year was to simply share a fine meal with his beloved friends. So I’m blowing a big part of my yearly ecological footprint budget to just go back to my hometown to be with that crowd for a long weekend – wonderfully creative, eccentric, smart and kind people I’ve known most of my life and love dearly, but now rarely get to see. This choice feels good to my heart. I’ve had to miss a lot of events recently because of the demands of caring for my aging folks. When I too am old, I don’t want to feel like I blew my chance to celebrate my people, but now it’s too late.

The rest of this post is devoted to #2, National Geographic’s genome project.

Human DNA. Image from fastcoexist.com

I’m adopted, so taking part in Geno 2.0 is a really big deal to me.

I only know what minimal information about my immediate ancestry was kindly written down for me at birth. I have never seen an echo of my own face in another. When someone asks something like, “where did you get your musical ability?” I can only point to nurture, not nature. That works in part for music, sure, but not for the curly hair.

For the individual, participation means you get to find out what percentage of your deep ancestry comes from various parts of the world. Is that wild hair Eastern European, Welsh, or perhaps African?

“The results give you an unprecedented view of your lineage. You will discover the migration paths your ancient ancestors followed thousands of years ago, and learn the details of your ancestral makeup—your branches on the human family tree.”

The test even includes markers for Neanderthal and Denisovan genes!

According to their materials, because Neanderthals “were still alive and well in Eurasia” when modern humans were first migrating out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago, it’s likely that if you have European ancestry, you also have some percentage of Neanderthal. That big Indo-European migration carried more than just stories about snakes.

I’d never heard of the Denisovans, who Nat’l Geographic says split from our current human lineage around 500,000 years ago. But they were there in Eurasia too. “It seems that our ancestors met, leaving a small genetic trace of these ancient relatives in our DNA.”

The way the project works is this: you capture some DNA by swabbing your cheek, and then send it in. At the lab, they test for nearly 150,000 ancestry-specific markers on your mitochondrial DNA. As this is passed down each generation from mother to child, it can “reveal your direct maternal deep ancestry.”

For males, they will also examine markers on the Y chromosome, to reveal direct paternal deep ancestry.

Being a woman, I admit I was feeling a bit bummed at not being able to learn about my biological paternal side too. But they help out with that, and thereby get their thickest data:

“In addition, for all participants, we analyze a collection of more than 130,000 other ancestry-informative markers from across your entire genome to reveal the regional affiliations of your ancestry, offering insights into your ancestors who are not on a direct maternal or paternal line.”

This provides the organization with a lot of data about the entire sweeping human story. Geno 2.0 doesn’t tell you about health, neither genetic health history nor predictions about your personal health based on same; that’s a different kind of test. This one is larger in scope, and I suppose safer in terms of potentially being used in a political or financial sense against participants.

“This is not a genealogical study, and your DNA trail may not lead to your present-day location. Rather, your results will reveal the anthropological story of your ancestors—where they lived and how they migrated around the world over tens of thousands of years. The autosomal results will reveal insights into recent admixture over the past 6 generations—for instance, if you have one parent of Asian descent and another from Western Europe, this mix will be reflected in your results.”

I think one of the greatest things about this study is the potential it holds for eliminating the silly and dangerous idea of race once and for all. At the time of this writing, nearly 600,000 people from all over the world are participating. When we see that every one of us has, say, some mixed percentage of ancestors from Asia, North America, Africa, Europe, Melanesia, Polynesia, Aboriginal Australia, South America, the Middle East, Siberia, and so on and so on… well, who’s then left as the ‘other’? Who can anyone point to to categorically hate?

A final thing that’s neat about the Geno 2.0 project is that part of the proceeds from the sales of participation kits like the one I bought goes to support community-led indigenous conservation and revitalization projects.

Check out the Genographic Project here.

How much Neanderthal is in me? Stay tuned!

What happens if you wash your hands in outer space? April 20, 2013

This is just majorly cool: how water acts in outer space, without gravity to dance with.

Imagine you’re an astronaut. You’re orbiting the earth in a space station for weeks on end. At some point, you’re gonna want to wash yourself.  Or your fellow astronauts are really gonna want you to wash yourself. How to pull this off?

Obviously, a shower would create a potentially tremendous mess. Plus water is very heavy and therefore fuel-expensive to carry, so you wouldn’t want to waste your limited supply on anything besides precious life support.

Enter the special astronaut washcloth. It looks like a little condensed hockey puck. So you shake the thing out until it looks like a small towel, then get it wet to give yourself what my mother used to call a “spit-bath.”

What happens when you wring the washcloth out in this gravityless environment?

Watch and be amazed.

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One more thing that adds to the overall fabulousness of this: the experiment was originally proposed by high school students! Go Canada, supporting the curiosity of your young people.

From the YouTube video site:

CSA Astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a simple science experiment designed by grade 10 Lockview High School students Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner. The students from Fall River, Nova Scotia won a national science contest held by the Canadian Space Agency with their experiment on surface tension in space using a wet washcloth. Credit: Canadian Space Agency/NASA

CSA astronaut Chris Hadfield has made a number of interesting videos showing aspects of everyday life in space. Do check them out, and let yourself fill with wonder – plus perhaps a new appreciation of how gravity makes life so much easier down here.

Treegirl Spotted in Avatar Grove April 6, 2013

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My dear friend Julianne Skai Arbor made the news in Canada by making love with their old-growth trees!

According to the news article, the tree she’s pictured in here, known as the San Juan spruce, “is the largest spruce tree in Canada at 62 metres tall, with a crown that spreads over 23 metres. It does not have any official protection.”

I hope her action (and these journalist allies’ reporting of it) helps bring about an official policy from the government of British Columbia that will protect that magnificent grove.

We need these ancient wild places to remain unmolested for so many reasons. First, there are the physical gifts they bring: oxygenating our air for better breathing; providing habitat for countless animals, birds, bugs, and more. Then there’s the intangible side, of beauty and wonder. Seeing such giant trees close-up evokes wonder in tourists from all over the world, particularly those from heavily populated areas who might never have experienced anything like them, or even been in someplace that is silent. Finally, these forests can confer a quality that’s hard to articulate but known to nearly everyone who encounters them – the deep soul peace that comes with just being with these ancient giants. When people encounter such enormous and old trees — our primordial birthplace and heritage as a hominid species — something deep and rich inside, something rooted, wakes up. We can begin to feel healed of the terminal speed and interminable distractions of western civilization. This doesn’t easily happen everywhere. As Julianne observes, “The peaceful feeling of being surrounded by nature’s life force in an old forest is very different from feelings generated by a clearcut or tree farm.”

You can read the whole Times Colonist article here: The naked tree-hugger makes her way to Port Renfrew, by Judith LaVoie.

The photo, very similar to much of Julianne’s work, was taken by Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner and founder TJ Watt.

(As an aside, I must admit to feeling taken aback by the name of that British Columbia newspaper. It’s actually called the “Colonist”?! Sounds like a hard road to hoe there regarding relationship to place, esp. indigenous peoples’ views.)

To see more of Julianne’s naked photos with special trees (or to learn more about being a treegirl or treeboy yourself), go to www.treegirl.org

And if you’re interested in the idea of making love with the earth, see also Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stevens’ new work on ecosexuality. (I’ll write more on that yumminess later.)

You go, treegirl!