Lecture: Friday 17 February 7-9pm
Amidst a tempest of climate disruption, social disarray, creature extinctions, ecosystem collapse and other mayhem, too few leaders have perceptual skills, sufficient imagination, or a strong enough compass to navigate the riptides of enormous change. Perhaps we need help from intelligence that is older and far more than human. What if the membrane between the planetary psyche and human imagination is permeable, allowing for Earth to press its own longings into our human awareness – both as individual persons, and as a species? On Friday evening – through poetry, thought experiments, and other fascinations – we’ll explore foundational ideas that suggest the possibility of a planetary psyche that might be participatory with the individual (and collective) human psyche.
Workshop: Saturday 18 February 1-4pm
On Saturday, in the experiential workshop, “Imagination and the Reanimation of the World,” we’ll consider the possibility that all beings and presences are alive, intelligent, and saturated in subjectivity. We’ll explore how we might make ourselves more permeable to their dreams, as well as to what Thomas Berry called “the Dream of the Earth.” We’ll engage practices that can help erode our customary psychic habits enough to allow greater receptivity to the voices, images, and wisdom of our fellow inhabitants and of the planetary organism. We’ll consider – as poet A.R. Ammons writes – how to become more “available / to any shape that may be / summoning itself / through me / from the self not mine but ours.” Wild revelations that seem to emerge from something that is not quite – or not only – human may help us find our way through a necessary sea change in our relationship with Earth.
