I’m committed–personally & professionally–to a new way of connecting, ‘being’, & interacting on the internet, one that honors the earth and is not disconnected from our bodies, and I would love to hear from any of you about your own ideas & perceptions about this, or any thoughts you might share to expand my understanding.
One of the things David Abram said in his Bioneers session was of particular interest to me in relation to this. He was talking about the need to rejuvenate our sense of place through a rejuvenation of oral culture, and said that while the abstraction of the digital culture many of us are immersed in is inherently global, oral culture is inherently local, and that the former only makes sense and is not destructive when it is rooted in the latter. What I was wondering about was what an internet looks like that is rooted in local oral culture...
I’m interested in the alchemy of creating sacred space that is grounded in the earth and expressed in cyberspace, and so I was also very intrigued with his connection between air & breath, depicting air as the ‘mind’ of the earth... I was wondering if/how that might extend to ether, the element in which cyberspace exists on the imaginal plane, the fire (electricity) that is its energy source, the earth that each of us are standing upon when we interact through the solid matter of our computers, and water in the sense of a circulatory emotional system that flows within and between us.
I shared this thought on an ecopsychology list I’m part of, and my friend there, Uri Cogan, reminded me that it was Buckminster Fuller (or was it Marshall McLuhan? he wasn't sure :-) who likened the “ever-growing invisible, electric web of communications that humanity is wrapping around the earth since the invention of the telegraph to the developing nervous system of an embryo.”
He went on to say expand on this "embryonic" model of human development, comparing humanity's development to an embryo, that “after all its cells had developed into specialized, local parts, and having devoured the last of the nutrients inside its "nearly closed" system of its eggshell, it arrives at the "magical moment" of integration as a chick; breaks the shell and emerges to a new reality that would have been utterly inconceivable to it mere moments before.”
It feels like we’re breaking onto this new reality en mass these days, and I want to do all I can to ground my part of this brave new world in a love of the earth and the beauty we perceive here.
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