How to read Learning How Land Speaks
Learning how Land Speaks is an account of a series of co-operative experiential inquiries exploring questions of the kind, What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? Posts include both the ideas that have informed these inquiries, narratives from experience, and reflective sense making.
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 five posts that draw on the theoretical perspectives we have drawn on in these inquiries
Living Cosmos Panpsychism is a summary of our primary philosophical orientation.
Outside is Inside draws together experience and sense making from the perspective of biopoetics
Kincentric Geography and Re-Indigenization: Coming Home to Family shows the influence of indigenous wisdom.
Gaia’s Living Water shows the significance of water from the perspective of Gaia Theory
Co-operative Inquiry outlines our learning process.
Kincentric Geography offers a view of the land and its beings as kin
Experiential Evidence for a Sentient World, along with Cracked open with Love and Monte Gottero, illustrate the learnings from our co-operative inquiries exploring living in a sentient world. Other posts focus on different aspects of experience: Loosening separate identity; Thresholds and Liminality; The poetics of a sentient world. More such narratives will be posted exploring synchronicities, ontopoetic gestures, the quality of inter-relationship, the use of traditionally religious language, the importance of embodiment, praise, pain, and grief.
Practices and Protocols offers an overview of 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 Engagement with Place and in future postings exploring greeting, gift giving, rituals borrowed from different traditions, intensive water watching, pilgrimage, artful practices, the inquiry group itself.