Restorying the Earth

Restorying with Drew Dellinger

The New Story Summit was held at Findhorn in Northern Scotland last week, and some of the story activists in attendance have been heading home via Edinburgh. Drew Dellinger came through last Tuesday and I had a chance to hear him perform his poetry and share his reflections on Western culture at St John’s Church. Drew is a protege of the late great ecological theologian Thomas Berry, of Dreaming the Earth fame, carrying on the task of resacralizing the Earth through writing, speaking and activism in a Berry-sort-of way. Drew spoke passionately about the toll of Western culture’s insistence on the materiality of all things (“no thing is actually a thing”) and of our need for a deep, poetic and sacred vision of our beautiful planet.

Drew is carrying out restorying work in some very concrete ways. He is currently working on a book tracing the threads of ecological thinking through Martin Luther King’s life and work. This is not “ecological thinking” in the modern materialist sense, but rather in the deeply spiritual even cosmological sense that Drew argues is so desperately needed today.

By coincidence, I’d covered the historical origins of the Environmental Justice movement on Monday in the first year undergrad course I teach on global health. I had taught that history in the good old modernist style: African American communities observed that toxic waste facilities were more often located next to them than next to other communities and cried for justice. I’m sure these observations did play a large part in the development of the movement. However, what Drew’s restorying work uncovers is a deeper, more cosmological, more longstanding thread of ecological thinking, of the resacralization of the Earth, in the Civil Rights movement. Some of this New Story will be threading its way into my teaching on the Civil Rights Movement and environmental health activism next year.

Drew’s overall message was that dream, story, art and action are the tools we have on hand to return the sacred into our lives. To paraphrase:

“Art is how we communicate

Art is how we connect at a heart level

Art is how we transform consciousness.”

Friday Findings: to share or not to share

On my breakfast table: Bee Journal, by Sean Borodale (which happens to be the book for our autumn Green Book Club meeting)

Read about Sean Borodale’s writing while walking technique in this interview

Another inspiring article by Charles Eisensteing in the current issue of Resurgence Magazine

Lewisham’s re-purposed phonebox: bring a book, take a book

Other micro-libraries: The Little Free Library Organisation

A search engine that protects your privacy: duckduckgo

How ethical is your online life? Ethical Consumer Magazine reports

What I did with the unripe pumpkin salvaged from my garden.

My Canine Familiar

Dogs were the first animals to bind their fates to humans. Some neo-pagan types have a hard time forgiving them for that, putting cats forward as the eco-feminist companion animal of choice. Despite growing up with cats whom I loved dearly, and having plenty of neo-pagan, eco-feminist leanings, I confess that I always wanted a dog.

Alice Walker’s book, The Temple of My Familiar, was one of those books that came into my life exactly when I needed it. It called to me across a library floor in Victoria, BC, a turquoise jewel on a book rack. Reading it helped me find my way back to myself during a particularly dark time. As I remember it, the only aspect of the book that didn’t captivate me, was Walkers’ dismissal of dogs.

In popular culture, witches have been accompanied by familiars since, oh, the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the word “familiar” conjures up the image of a black cat. However, cats have not always been so singled out. In fact, history even counts a certain white poodle named Boye, companion to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, amongst the ranks of influential familiars.

In folklore, familiars were conceived of as supernatural creatures that connected people to the spirit world. Walker and other contemporary authors have re-interpreted familiars as animal companions who re-connect people to the rest of the natural world. There definitely is a certain magic in living closely with a non-human other. Puppies belong more to the wild than to the human realm. Much of what fills my time these days is training Piper into being less of a wild creature so that he can live safely among humans and their artefacts. Much of Piper’s time is spent luring me out of my human habits, showing me the world hidden in front of my eyes.

One late night of house-training, Mike texted me to tell me they’d seen a hedgehog scuttle along the pavement outside our front gate. The next night, when it was my turn to be on duty, I too encountered the hedgehog, this time he was squatting on our garden path. We’ve lived in this very urban neighbourhood for 4 years and I never knew we shared it with hedgehogs.

Besides needing multiple outings to relieve himself, Piper is also less than interested in walking at a steady people pace. At the slightest provocation, he’s apt to sit on the ground and stare. Thanks to this particular habit, last weekend I found myself standing in one place on a bridge over the Water of Leith for long enough to see a flash of iridescent blue and to witness a kingfisher diving.

Piper rips open the human trappings of my life with his sharp little puppy teeth and lets the wildness in. Is there any other definition of familiar worth having?