Patricia Damery's Blog, page 8

Arrival of the Uninvited Guest

Arrival of the Uninvited Guest

Today I submitted my application for a two week residency next fall at Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes Station, California. I worked over the weekend summarizing my project, a manuscript that has been resting in the dark ground of my imagination over the last year. I had to write a one sentence description as well as a brief, 500 word summary.

It took me all weekend. The title has changed from The Uninvited Guest: Fire and the New Consciousness, which I still like, to The Uninvited Guest: Finding a Path to a Conscious Activism. Who knows which will prevail, or if either will, in the end. The notes I made last summer seem much less relevant to what I am thinking now. As I wrote, I was amazed at how much developed underground, like a seed that needs protection and nourishment before its sprout is ready to meet the light of day.

Writing a book is such an organic process— at least for me. I know there are people who plan what they write in advance, but I have to give my imagination full reign and take the wild ride.

And it has been wild, too: the emotional roller coaster, the surprise of the groundswell of public concern for our Commons (my husband and I are not alone), the strong influence of special interest groups. My one sentence summary reads:

I am writing a book about the necessary shift in consciousness needed to address the challenges of a changing climate, specifically with regard to land use, community and local government regulation.

That sounds so calm, doesn’t it? It doesn’t begin to explain the story, which is told in little incidents: a phone message alerting us to the fact our lives were about to be turned upside down. The beauty of an oak savanna threatened by vineyard aspirations—which turned out to be a catalyst for me. A verbal confrontation by a winery owner in the hall of the Board of Supervisors’ meeting that caused me to pull my scarf over the “Vision 2050” button on my lapel.

There’s a larger story the book addresses, and I have no idea how it will come out. I do know that these issues we are facing in Napa County are only a microcosm of those in our country and world. Does production rule? Do the wealthy have all the say? What about the environment? Can we develop a compassionate, kind attitude to human and non-human needs alike, quickly enough to mitigate the changes in climate that are already well upon us? And what shift in consciousness required?

Those are important questions that wake me in the night until I promise I will attend to them, but not at 2 am, please! So it proceeds, this new project!

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Activism: Ego Challenges

I remember sitting on the splintery, wooden pews of our country church, listening to those scripture readings.  The minister’s monotone voice competed with the drone of the microphone, “Look at the birds of the air… Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?” (Matthew 25: 26-30).

Our farming fathers were duped by the interpretation of this scripture. They were Irish men who loved the earth, trusted her rhythms, knew the poetry of wind and work. Within a decade or so of those quiet Sundays, corporate farming ate their farms, making it impossible to make a living on anything less than thousands of acres and GMO seed. My father trusted this regime, felt it necessary to feed the people of the earth. He was more interested in plowing and planting than politics, and we all, the small farms of America, have paid ever since.

I wish we had been taught another interpretation of this passage, an interpretation of what Jungian analyst Ed Edinger calls the ego-Self axis, or the ego’s proper relationship to the Self. What are the matters of the ego and what are the matters of the Self? The more I am steeped in these questions, the humbler I feel. Our culture is so ego oriented, thinking we have control and dominance over so much, and I am embedded in this culture.

But really, ideally, the ego is a servant of the Self, helping navigate, and I believe, very much involved with the creation of soul. More like a farmer, really, a farmer of soil, a farmer of soul. Soul work necessarily involves ego.

If there is too much ego agenda, we are cut off from what Carl Jung called  “the Self”, impoverished. The Self is of the realm of Spirit. We need vitality of Spirit; our purpose here on earth is to incarnate the energies of Spirit, grounding the divinity of Self.

The challenge, however, is mind-boggling, and the more I am confronted with land use issues, the more I am confronted with the arrogance of land ownership, including my own.

A spiritual ritual leader reminded me this week that we do not own land. That the spirits of the land are independent and open to us, but we only serve them. Trying to dominate— we do at our own peril, as we are finding out with climate change.

This week Donald and I are doing ceremony to feed the spirits of our ranch, of the meadow, of the creek, and the mountainside. For seven days we burn a special incense to feed the Nature Spirits, and on Thursday morning, a Tibetan lama will preform ritual in our home and on the land.

I wonder: if I spent as much time taking care of my relationships with the Nature Spirits and the land, how would my life be different? How would it impact my activism? Collectively, if we all tended these relationships with Nature, how would it inform the laws we make and fight to preserve? Could it move land activism beyond power struggles?

 

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Land Use and Spirit

Land Use and Spirit

When was it that we stopped considering Spirit of Place first, and use of the land only in concert with Spirit?

My family came from Ireland and Wales a couple of generations back, and land was and continues to be a presence that endures, like a good mother. Everything stems from her and through her. Tending to that spirit of her means being rooted in time and space and feeds our very souls.

But when land became economic opportunity, many of us forgot this relationship. In fact, many have never had it! This is stunning to me, having grown up on a farm. Relationship to the land was our sustenance. My father’s return to the fields in spring brought a release of tension in him. My mother always said that he returned to himself when he could return to the fields. I remember being put to bed at dusk in the spring and listening to my mother play the piano as she waited for my father to come in from plowing and disking and harrowing and planting.

C. G. Jung knew this place in the psyche and addressed it. He worked with Spirit of Place in his own beloved Bollengen. In a 1950 interview with Swiss geographer Hans Carol, he stated:

Every man should have his own plot of land so that the instincts can come to life again. …We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these preemptive layers in our psyche. The farmer is still closer to these layers. In tilling the earth he moves around with a very narrow radius, but he moves on his own land.  …We need a relationship with nature.  …Individuation is not only an upward but also a downward process. Without any body, there is no mind and therefore no individuation. Our civilizing potential has led us down the wrong path.  (Jung Speaking, pp.203-204)

The big issue these days in the Napa Valley is that relationship to the earth and lack thereof, and it is playing out big time. As corporate and investor interests move in, viewing our lands and watersheds as economic opportunities for making and marketing world class wines, Nature takes a back seat. Many of us feel this is destroying the golden goose, and that it is critically important that we act now to protect the land and the watersheds. As that saying goes, Nature needs an attorney!

In my so-called retirement, I have found myself editor of Napa Vision 2050’s online newsletter, Eyes on Napa. We are following our county government’s response to the economic pressures of the powerful wine and hospitality industries which would turn our county into a Disneyland for the Wealthy, our children and our workers no longer affording to live here. Tourism rules! Every study being done warns about this trend. It is time for citizens to wake up and attend to what is happening.

Please help us by signing up for our twice monthly newsletter using this link, and, please pass it on to your interested friends. We need to garner citizen support if our relationship to the earth is not to be further defined by corporate interests. Our civilizing potential has led us down the wrong path. This is one step on the right path.

Link for May newsletter.

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Another First: May Day-ed!

Another First: May Day-ed!

I was napping in the back room when a loud rapping came at the closed door. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! It was hot and we had been out to the Napa Home and Garden Show, so I was pretty out of it when this rapping occurred.

Knowing my young grandsons were out and about, I drifted back into a sleep. Almost immediately again:  Bam! Bam! Bam!!  

“Grandma’s sleeping,” I called, as I sank back into the floaty space of afternoon slumber.

When I woke 20 minutes later and opened the door to rejoin the world, a cone of flowers lay at my feet! And suddenly I was five, having just made a May Basket out of paper, having just filled it with May flowers, certainly some from her garden, and having just hung it on my grandmother’s door knob. She always received it with surprise and delight, standing there on her back porch, her surrounding yard full of volunteer blue bells and butterflies.

Sometimes the baskets were woven paper, sometimes cut-outs from patterns which we colored and glued in Sunday school or during art in first or second grade. The custom stems from my Irish roots and Beltane, and all the wild things that Beltane celebrates: the burst of spring in its flowering trees and plants after months of snow and ice, Beltane fires and fertility, courting and bawdy customs in the fields I will not delineate here, but which we all know about.

May Baskets carried these customs forward in secret gifts announcing love interests. In a deep way, I suspect that was very much at the heart of my giving these baskets to my grandmothers. I loved these grandmothers deeply and reveled in giving back to them. It is a spontaneous, clandestine act, perhaps an early initiation into the mysteries of the giving of Santa Claus or the Easter Rabbit.

Wesley and Sabien, aged five and three, squealed with delight as I expressed genuine, happy surprise. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, cones of flowers rested at almost every threshold, announced by a loud Bang! Bang! Bang! Each time, I opened the door, expressing happiness, and, yes, surprise!

“Should we tell her the secret?” three year old Sabien asked Wesley as they helped me water newly planted flowers. “No, no, no!” Wesley said, able to contain the mystery that grandma almost certainly knew nothing about.

So I had my first experience of being May Day-ed this year, my first experience of receiving a lineage of mystery and delight.

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Earth Jurisprudence: UN Harmony with Nature Project

Earth Jurisprudence: UN Harmony with Nature Project

Starting Earth Day, April 22, 2016, I am participating in a two month Virtual Dialogue on Earth Jurisprudence with the UN Harmony with Nature project.  Those of us participating are from various disciplines: Earth-centered Law; Ecological Economics; Education; Holistic Science; Philosophy/Ethics; the Arts, Media, Design and Architecture; and Theology/Spirituality.  My own discipline spans analytical psychology and Biodynamic farming, Jung and Rudolf Steiner, so I have chosen “Holistic Science”.

The focus of this dialogue is “on how to reshape human governance systems to operate from an Earth-centered perspective, so we are all guided to live as responsible members of the Earth community”.

We are given four questions and two months to answer:

1. What would the practice of your discipline look like from an Earth Jurisprudence perspective? How is that different from how your discipline is generally practiced now? What are the benefits of practicing from an Earth Jurisprudence perspective?

2. What promising approaches do you recommend for achieving implementation of an Earth-centered worldview for the discipline selected?

3. What key problems or obstacles do you see as impeding the implementation of an Earth-centered worldview in your discipline?

4. What are the top recommendations for priority, near-term action to move your discipline toward an Earth Jurisprudence approach?

As called for in General Assembly resolution (70/268), the summary report will be submitted to the 71st Session of General Assembly in August 2016. The report will be published and circulated among Member States and other interested parties, who will then be invited to reflect on the report online. The aim of this Dialogue is to “ensure that people everywhere have the relevant information and awareness for sustainable development and lifestyles in harmony with nature”. Please follow this dialogue at United Nations Harmony with Nature 2016.

This is so much of what is at the heart of what some of us are working for in Napa County! This is not about a test of wills: development versus the environment; the Wine Industry versus Environmentalists. It is about living— and farming— in ways that Nature is recognized as an entity with rights and needs of Her own. Let’s face it: our continuing tenure on the earth may well be dependent on this shift of attitude on our parts.

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Private Property Rights and the Commons, Ego and Self

Private Property Rights and the Commons, Ego and Self

Earth Day, April 22, 2016

Recently I became editor of Eyes on Napa, the newsletter for Napa Vision 2050. This citizen watchdog group is composed of representatives of 14 different citizen groups who are concerned about what is going on in their neighborhoods. My own group, Dry Creek Road Alliance, formed when a neighbor proposed a custom crush/event center next door in the Ag Watershed protected lands.  In Napa we have a unique protection in place, the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve, established in 1968 by the Board of Supervisors and the Planning Commission. The preserve specifies two categories of agricultural protection: The Ag Preserve (AP) or valley floor lands, and the Ag Watershed (AW),  or the fragile, hillsides, often forested and with inconsistent  or non-existent water supplies.

The focus of Napa Vision 2050 is protection of the Commons, or of resources held in common by a community that we depend on for wellbeing. The concept goes back as far as Roman and English law, and is gaining interest again as climate change forces the point: yes! we are interconnected. What we do on our own land affects our neighbors, and especially when it concerns soils, air, water, and watersheds. Any project, whether it be a winery, vineyard, hotel, or residence, takes community resources: water, roads, housing for workers, schools, traffic, air quality. At a recent Forum on Tourism, Community Planning Consultant Eben Fodor demonstrated how development projects viewed economically rarely include the costs to the tax payers for maintenance and expansion of infrastructure and the environmental costs. Furthermore, the economic benefits to the community are exaggerated. Most of the increased wealth goes to out-of-county investors.

The Commons is not a new idea in California. In the mid 1800’s miners acquired water for mining as they acquired mineral rights: first come, first served. In 1850 the first water law was the common law of riparian rights, which allowed miners to use moving water, but not to own it, because moving water belonged to the people.

When I think of the Commons, I remember a potluck at my friend Jan’s house. As we stood in line, Jan’s young daughter spotted her mother’s potato salad, her favorite dish. “How much can I have?” she asked her mother. Jan stated simply, “Look around and see how many are here, and then decide the right amount.”

This is an operational experience of the Commons. I often think of Jan as several of us line up for public comment on yet another project being considered at a Planning Commission or Board of Supervisor meeting. I wish these law makers— and applicants— would ask: who are your neighbors? I wish they would honestly consider how will neighbors and the community be impacted by noise, water supply, traffic, not just hire “experts” who tell them what they want to hear. More often than not, private property rights supersede and eclipse legitimate concerns about cumulative impact on the community. In fact, in our county, there is no process to consider cumulative impact.

As editor of Eyes on Napa,  I was surprised to receive an e-mail after the first newsletter from a professional in Napa stating only, “Communist!”

I wrote back: “Perhaps you are joking? Talking about the Commons is not talking about communism. It is thinking outside of ourselves and our own self interests, about the larger community, and the future generations of those after us.”

It is a paradigm shift, I know—one we each face if we are to mature. Collectively, we are also confronted with these questions through the challenges of Climate Change. Who is impacted by the decisions we make? by our life styles?

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that those most impacted by the shifts in our warming planet are the poor countries, but they are not alone.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC in the 2014 report.  Climate change is “already having effects in real time — melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and mega-disasters. And the worst is yet to come. Climate change poses a threat to global food stocks, and to human security.”

C.G. Jung said, “The experience of the self is always a defeat of the ego.” (CW14¶ 778)

So many times people come to Jungian analysis having to release ego agendas in order to embrace a larger, more compassionate sense of self.  Perhaps this is also true on a collective level, including land use issues. If the human species is to survive, we must step beyond private property rights and our own self interests and consider our impact on the Earth and on our own communities.

And then we must do something about it.

 

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Snake Mind: The Serpent and the Ally

Snake Mind: The Serpent and the Ally

Yesterday a beautiful garter snake stretched herself between two awakening lavender plants. She was quiet, absorbing the April sun and preparing to shed her skin. Although I stood within a foot of her, she did not move.

April is the month snakes return from their winter haunts in our area of California. Seeing snakes always stops me, brings me into the present. I used to panic. All my female relatives (okay, not all! Not my sister Judy, a biologist, who was disgusted with our reactions!) screamed when we came upon a snake, and would get the men to kill it. My novel Snakes came out of that time. I wrote down all the snake stories that I had heard growing up, and they wove themselves into a tale about our relationship to the earth.

Writing Snakes changed me. My panic turned to awe. The origin of the word “panic” comes Greek panikos  or the god Pan. Pan was noted for causing terror. Woodland noises were attributed to him. I have come to see that those mysterious “woodland noises” of whatever variety open us into mystery, and awe does that as well. Panic defends against this experience; awe opens us into it.

Synchronicity is the way of the serpent: that awareness of how like things happen together. To be in a state of mind to notice these synchronistic events is to be in what I have come to think of as snake mind.  It is a state of mind of presence— not thinking— but present awareness. In this state we grow soul. Awe opens us into growing soul, if we can sustain it.

On Saturday afternoon Carol McRae and I will present a workshop at the C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, “The Serpent and the Ally: An Experience of Connectedness with the Earth”. We will tell you about our trip to the Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, part of a system of “star” mounds built at a time humanity appeared to be in tune with the heavens and the earth and able to work with cosmic and earth forces to enhance life.  We will work experientially with Jungian analyst Jeff Raff’s ally to explore what this consciousness might be in our present time.

We present with our colleagues Frances Hatfield, Barbara Holifield, Leah Shelleda, and Naomi Lowinsky in the two day event in honor of Earth Day, April 23 and 24, 2016, Our Bodies, Our Earth: Dreaming Evolution Forward.  Please join us for one or both days!

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Ag or Business Community?

Ag or Business Community?

The following is a Letter to the Editor of the Napa Register posted this last week about the sold-out April 1, 2016, Forum on a Tourist Economy. What is interesting to me are the negative comments (comment section of online newspaper) that come when you question capitalistic agendas. It is time that we all question these assumptions in ourselves and in the decisions that our governing officials are making at every level of our government.

One of the biggest take aways in the recent Napa Valley Vision 2050 Economic Forum was a statement  from Boston University professor and researcher Samuel Mendlinger. “We need to face the reality that Napa Valley is no longer an agricultural community,” he said, “but a business community. Only then can we ask the right questions.”

My husband and I are farmers—growers, as they say now— both from Midwestern farming families. I love the rhythms of farming, the culture and the intimate relationship with the earth, and I will continue to. The truth of this statement about our valley is not something I have wanted to accept— and yet it’s been hanging there, just off in the wings.

Privately, I discussed this more with Mendlinger, and with more specificity. We delineated some of the differences in these two approaches and the frictions that develop, frictions which only cause more polarization. For instance, in an Ag community there often are spoken and often unrecorded agreements between neighbors (easements, agreements on water usage, etc.) which are held to in good faith. When land becomes economically interesting, and those wealthy enough purchase land that has been handled in these older ways, trouble ensues. Often these people’s wealth comes from business, seldom agriculture. Neighbor agreements no longer work because it isn’t on the newcomer’s radar, and too often, concern. There are simply different rules in business.

In the Napa Valley I have watched newcomers move in from out-of-county or state, and not consider that spoken agreements might exist. Even when easements have been recorded on titles, the county does not consider them in the permitting process.  Consequently neighbors are forced into battles with each other, fighting it out in the Planning Commission, appeals to the Board of Supervisors, and in our courts. Yes, it causes friction! —in part because we are operating in different paradigms: the “old” ways of agriculture and and the “new” ways of business. Could we find a happier medium?

And this is just one of the several challenges of outsiders moving in, viewing land as a business venture versus an agricultural contract with the land. Napa Valley is fighting the wrong fight in not recognizing this shift. Polarization only gets worse and any real problem solving, impossible.

If we can accept this shift, though, then maybe we can start formulating the right questions, which address not so much preserving agriculture, as protecting— and improving— the environment and the serious challenges we are facing with climate change and wine industry successes– to our watersheds, water, the social fabric, housing, traffic patterns.

This does not mean ignoring our Ag Preserve and Ag Watershed lands. It means recognizing, like it or not, the 2010 revisions to the WDO (Winery Definition Ordinance) have made these Ag zoned lands venues for intensified business activities.  How do we address this so business interests do not eclipse environmental, social, and fiscal considerations?

This too was a strong message in the Forum Friday: the importance of strong citizen groups in communication with our governing officials, and governing officials who listen. I applaud our county officials for the public hearings and times of public comment, for their willingness to engage with the public. I applaud the forums where all sides have a voice. It is important that these officials make decisions with a broader perspective gained by this discourse. This could just be a process whereby we find workable solutions that address the environment in all its dimensions: watersheds and water, economic health, and tourism in balance with a healthy community.

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Seeking Common Ground

Seeking Common Ground

Okay, I will be be honest. The blog denigrating me and my most recent Letter to the Editor in the Napa Register impacted me more than I wanted it to. I know character assignation is a way to diminish an opponent’s position, and I (smuggly!) console myself: I must have hit the mark.

But I also have to ask myself: Was I unnecessarily provocative? I am a proponent of common ground. Finding common ground means not provoking the other— doesn’t it? So I started thinking: what are the conditions that promote common ground?

Just this last week our neighborhood group spoke with Supervisor Alfredo Pedrosa around another issue, but the common ground topic came up. Pedrosa stated how important common ground was and lamented how much it is lacking in the land use issues of our county. There was an implication that the citizen group Napa Vision 2050 was in part to blame, that they had been given a seat at the table but had come up with no constructive suggestions. (I am in this group.)

Many of us disagree with this assessment. Napa Vision 2050 has accomplished a great deal in my book, and again, I refer you to my Letter to the Editor. Many of us feel that the wine industry has several of our elected officials in their pocket. How do you find common ground under these circumstances when a powerful industry is controlling the show?

That is really the question! I turn to my Jungian training here. Carl Jung maintained that holding the opposites was our only hope of finding that third solution that transcends opposition. However, both sides have to be heard and acknowledged, even if this act is polarizing for a while. It just has to be conscious holding of the opposites. This is true within the individual human psyche and it is true collectively. And as one of the comments to my critic’s blog stated about the blogger’s written attack on me, “I just saw a video of a man getting punched in the face at a Trump rally, and it pissed me off. Next time I will take a walk before rising to the bait. I suggest you do the same.”

So again, I ask the question about the process of finding common ground, when to speak truth even if it provokes, when to “take a walk before rising to the bait”. It is as if I am distilling the question for the essence of how we can all live together on this planet…

I would love your thoughts.

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Elizabeth Herron: The War On Trees

Elizabeth Herron: The War On Trees

Finally, watersheds have advocates!  Workers are getting signatures to put the Water, Forest and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative on the November ballot. The Initiative will give enhanced protection to our watersheds,  forests, and oak woodlands.The wine industry is poised to stop the initiative  before it gets before voters. Consider donating even a small amount to move this initiative into the public eye. It makes the voluntary protection of forests and oak woodlands, key to the health of our watersheds and water supply, mandatory. Please make sure you sign the petition if you are a Napa County resident. If you have time,  volunteers are needed to collect signatures. Contact jplaudatosi@gmail.com to donate or to volunteer to collect signatures.

 

To celebrate the beginning of the collection of signatures, I offer this guest blog in the form of a poem by eco-poet Elizabeth Carothers Herron. Elizabeth’s writing includes poetry, articles on art and ecology, the role of art in society, and the importance of natural systems and biodiversity in the physical and spiritual well-being of individuals, communities, and the planet. The following poem is in memorandum for the many strong, healthy trees which have been felled for vineyards and winery dreams.

 

The War on Trees

Drinking tea in bed on a rainy night (the cat

curled next to my hip), I lean

to the warm cup on the bedside table

 

and then, like the glimpse

of a young girl running through a far woods,

almost beyond sight, almost lost, caught

with the surprise of a sharp pain —

a thought, a memory

 

like waking at night and tripping

over the stool left mid-rug, losing your balance

in the dark. And so we fall

 

toward what hurts – all the losses, and listening

to the worrying, the constant effort

to make up for old failures.

 

Still I wasn’t quiet. I didn’t quit fighting.

 

Under the alder branches, hummingbird nest a thimble

of lichen in leaves, now you see it now you don’t sway

of spring. Going back and seeing

they’d cut them, my beloved alders, guardians,

of the path to my door.

Where did the hummingbird go to make her nest?

 

Ten times four seasons – prayers

of leaf buds unfolded into pairs of green wings

as if for a while the bare branches were filled

with tiny green birds fluttering in the spring breeze.

catkins with their blessing of pollen

smeared the sidewalk chartreuse.

 

(the tea cup warm in my hands, the sleeping cat)

 

All the slain trees I’ve loved — Why this war? The lies

told to cut them down. The arborist knowing to say

one is diseased so others can be saved.

And what of the souls of trees?

 

What of their generous spirits, welcoming

branches open to the rain, the wild waltz to winter winds?

How they cooled the house through hot summers.

 

What is this war on trees?

 

The thought of some things hurts so

the mind stumbles

and falls into the still-howling self —

what is beloved and taken by malice or caprice.

Some trees.

 

Now two hawks swim through winter oaks, gone in a blink.

Fifteen years here and those alders from the old place

come back and back. (the cat purring, warm)

 

Was I so lonely?

The great tenderness of trees.

 

How the alders grew, and the ginkgo by the kitchen —

so slowly yet one day it reached the second story window,

my writing room, and how I watched its leaves toss

in October, a shudder of yellow fans

and then the puddle of gold they made around its trunk.

 

The quiet comfort, the small steady joy of some trees (some animals).

“Tombstones” Napa Vision 2050

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