How to Read Learning How Land Speaks

Learning how Land Speaks is a series of posts sharing the theories, the experiences, and the practices arising from a series of co-operative inquiries exploring Living in a Sentient World. I have tried to write each post as a stand-alone piece, and then linked key words in the text to posts and pages that go into more detail on each topic. As I post new pieces I intend to add new links to older pieces. My intention, then is that each reader can find their way through the set of posts following their own interests, going into more details as they wish.

Our aim is to create a richly interconnected text that reflects our learning from nearly four years of panpsychic co-operative inquiry. We hope to create a text that does not need to be read sequentially but can be picked up at any place, each post read independently. Hypertext links allow the reader to move seamlessly to related posts for more detail if they so wish. Earlier posts will be edited to add appropriate links to later posts. You, as a reader, you may chose to read sequentially or pick your own way through the posts.

About Introduces me and my primary colleagues in this series of inquiries

Introduction provides an overview of our work with both narrative and ideas

There are then posts which provide orienting ideas and theories; that describe our approach in the co-operative inquiry method; and offer narrative descriptions of experience, and which draw together practices and protocols we have found helpful

Ideas

Key perspectives are provided in Freya Mathews’ posts on living cosmos panpsychism, and Ontopoetics Part I and Part II.

Other important ideas include

Stephan Harding and Gaia theory, see Water Gaia;

Andreas Weber’s biopoetics, maybe best represented in Monte Gottero, Inside is Outside, and The Invisible Work

Sandra Wooltorton’s Kincentric Geography. Both Freya and Sandra bring a profound learning from the Australian Indigenous perspective which is represented in Seeing, feeling and hearing the World.

Approach

Learning How Land Speaks has drawn on co-operative inquiry as an approach to learning and developing our undersstanding of living in a sentient world. The main article is Co-operative Inquiry; further posts are The co-operative inquiry group, The co-operative inquiry group revisited and A Cycle of Inquiry Part 1 and Part II. Co-operative inquiry and Living Waters is also explored in published articles including Voicing Rivers through Co-operative inquiry, Extending Co-operative Inquiry Beyond the Human: Ontopoetic inquiry with Rivers and The Sacred as Immanent in a Sentient World article and video

Experience

Many of the remaining posts offer narratives of the experience of those engaged in the Living Waters co-operative inquiries. Posts that gives a sense of the range of participant experience is Experiential evidence for a sentient world and Loosening Separate Identity. and Ontopoetic Experiences. Other posts explore particular themes of shared experience, such as Engagement with Place, Gifts, Thresholds and Liminality, The poetics of a sentient world, A shower of rain, Cracked Open with Love, and others. Artful and visual ways of reflecting on experience in Serpentine Dance and Hydroglyphs.

There are accountss of experience directly authored by participants: Water Nymphs and Voices of the Natural World

Practices and Protocols

We have also endeavoured to draw together the many ways we have learned to approach the world as sentient and communicative; in particular describing our understanding of ceremony. Different aspects of practice are described in Practices and Protocols, Engagement with Place, Gifts.