REBLOG RE: ENSHITTIFICATION
Reblog of a post by Jeremy Williams of The Earthbound Report. From my perspective, the book offers another valuable insight on the (among other evils) anti-contemplative tendencies prominent on the Internet.
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: book reviews
August 26, 2025
BOOK REVIEW: BOURNEBRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS
Highly recommended, especially for readers interested in local initiatives to address the climate crisis. Bournebridge over Troubled Waters (1) is a sequel to Tony Emerson’s Unlikely Alliances, which I reviewed in October 2022 – (https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2022/10/27/book-review-unlikely-alliances/). Although the new book stands on its own, I think it works best after reading Unlikely Alliances, now republished as Creating Hope in the Valley of the Bourne. The setting continues to be a fictional community on England’s south coast.
In the new book, we have reached the year 2030. The publisher’s blurb describes it as ‘a story of love and friendship’ as well as commitment to climate action. On my reading, the ways in which people do ‘love and friendship’ are integral to the action itself.
This is shown in a group of leading characters who gradually assemble together in an old rectory building. This is less by design than the need for decent housing and a belief that larger dwellings should be fully occupied. But the rectory evolves into a strong base for its residents’ flourishing.
In many ways they are a diverse group. But they all, sometimes with a little tlc, reveal themselves as naturally affectionate and ethically grounded. The culture of the house nurtures these co-operative qualities. It is a creative and supportive place to live. As part of the life of the house, the residents develop a system of peer mentoring for their work in the wider world. There’s also a concern, for some of them, about a progressive Christianity that honours the world and the flesh and is ecologically aware. I am reminded of Matthew Fox’s use of the term ‘original blessing’.
As was the case in Unlikely Alliances, the government is committed to climate action. The earlier book describes their Climate Action Plan, which has put serious wealth taxes in place, rationed fuel and food (especially meat), placed restrictions on air travel, created a Civilian Community Service Corps to provide training and jobs for the unemployed and 2 years national service for school and college leavers. Housing policy is not all about new build, but also addresses better use of existing resources.
The fields covered by our band of rectory activists and their colleagues include agriculture, hospitality, renewable energy, relevant university research, transport, housing, trades union development, clothing (new and renewed), second hand shops, and renovation, repair and maintenance services of various kinds. These are practical needs and also model a cultural shift away from throwaway consumerism. All of this work is depicted as dynamic and gaining momentum.
Temperatures are continuing to rise, and there is an unprecedented level of flooding to contend with. At the same time, vested interests and violent climate deniers, branded as ‘True Britannia’, continue to undermine the Climate Action Plan. Life goes on. Lovers get together. Children are born. Older people die and are lovingly remembered. Music is made. Rugby is played. Hospitality is exchanged. Events are organised and enjoyed. People maintain contact with family members further away, travelling throughout Britain and Ireland, though rarely further than that. It is not clear what the future will hold, but there are some grounds for optimism.
When I finished reading Bournebridge over Troubled Waters I felt as if pitched back into my own timeline. It’s as though my 2025 couldn’t be the one that led to their 2029-2034. I didn’t feel that way even when I read Unlikely Alliances in 2022. My reading of books like this seems to depend not only on who I am but when I am. If I become timeless, I can respond to these books as parables reminding us that we have the power to be better than we are. We just don’t use it enough. That’s a call to respond to whatever the outward circumstances or likely outcomes.
(1) Tony Emerson Bournebridge over Troubled Waters UK: The Conrad Press, 2O24 (www.the conradpress com)
October 25, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: ELEGANT SIMPLICITY
Highly recommended. Satish Kumar (born in 1936) published Elegant Simplicity: the Art of Living Well in 2019 (1). It begins with a foreword by Fritjof Capra and a preface by the author Let’s be Simple which quotes the 1848 Shaker song ‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘Tis the gift to be free. The book summarises the author’s personal story as well as discussing his values. I have written posts based on some of his other work before (2). I especially recommend this book to anyone interested in knowing more about Satish Kumar’s practice (grounded in Jain spirituality and Gandhi’s non-violent activism) and his influence on deep ecology, creative arts and education.
Elegant Simplicity has a summarising quality, looking back on decades devoted to sacred activism in different forms. It is divided into fourteen chapters: Each is preceded by a brief and relevant quotation from another thinker. The chapter then becomes a meditation on the quote:
1 My Story: Beginnings – ‘True happiness lies in contentment’ Mahatma Gandhi.
2 Simplicity of Walking – ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking’ Friedrich Nietzsche.
3 Life is a Pilgrimage – ‘Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart’ Abraham Joshua Heschel.
4 Elegant Simplicity – ‘Any fool can make things complicated, it requires a genius to make them simple’ E. F. Schumacher.
5 A Society of Artists – ‘This world is but a canvas to our imagination’ Henry David Thoreau.
6 Yoga of Action – ‘Life is a process not a product’ Brian Goodwin.
7 Learning is Living – ‘Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself’ Thomas Dewey.
8 Right Relationships – ‘We are all related – relationships based on obligation lack dignity’ Wayne Dwyer.
9 Love Unlimited – ‘There is no charm equal to tenderness of the heart’ Jane Austin.
10 Power of Forgiveness – ‘It’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.’ Maya Angelou.
11 Dance of Opposites – ‘Life and death are one as the river and the sea are one’ Kahlil Gibran.
12 Deep Seeing – ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one’ John Ruskin.
13 Union of Science and Spirituality – ‘Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality’ Carl Sagan.
14 Soil, Soul and Society – ‘We live in an interconnected world and in an interconnected time so we need holistic solutions to our interconnected problems‘ Naomi Klein.
Fellow activist and author Vandana Shiva describes Elegant Simplicity as “the distillation” of Satish Kumar’s ideas and actions. “It shows the intimate connections between the inner and the outer world, soil, soul and society, beauty joy and non-violence. It indicates that the solutions to the big problems of our time – climate change, hate, violence, hopelessness and despair – lie in thinking and living with elegant simplicity, reducing our ecological footprint while enlarging our hearts and minds”.
For me, Satish Kumar is an inspiration rather than a direct model. Even in the conditions of the early 1960’s I would not have walked, or aspired to walk, from New Delhi to Washington DC without carrying any money. Yet Satish Kumar and his companion E. P. Menon succeeded and made a huge public impact at the time. Their peace pilgrimage gave oxygen to the campaign for nuclear disarmament. No state gave up its arms, but treaties limiting the numbers and testing of nuclear arms became normalised for some decades. Satish Kumar’s initiatives in deep ecology and education, especially the ‘small school’ and Schumacher College, have changed lives. Directly and indirectly, his influence has awakened many people from the dystopian trance of our dominant cultures. Satish Kumar is a widely revered elder: a peaceful warrior for a more liveable, generous and creative world.
(1) Satish Kumar Elegant Simplicity: The Art of Living Well New Society Publishers (https://www.newsociety.com): Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: 2019
(2) See previous posts:
NEWS OF A DEATH
TWO VIEWS OF THE DIVINE
OUTDOOR WALKING MEDITATION
NOTE: “Satish Kumar (born 9 August 1936)[1] is an Indian British activist and speaker. He has been a Jain monk, nuclear disarmament advocate and pacifist.[3]Now living in England, Kumar is founder and Director of Programmes of the Schumacher College international center for ecological studies, and is Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. His most notable accomplishment is the completion, together with a companion, E. P. Menon, of a peace walk of over 8,000 miles in June 1962 for two and a half years, from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., the capitals of the world’s earliest nuclear-armed countries.[4][5] He insists that reverence for nature should be at the heart of every political and social debate.” (Wikipedia)
June 17, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: STOLEN FOCUS
Highly recommended to anyone interested in states of attention, how culture shapes them, and the implications of this shaping. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: How You Can’t Pay Attention (1) shows that our diminished capacity to focus is a collective cultural issue and not just a matter of individual willpower. In this book, Hari identifies 12 causes of ‘stolen focus’, developing these themes partly through telling his personal story and partly through conversations with experts in the relevant areas of knowledge. The causes are:
1: Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering. If we go too fast, and switch between tasks to rapidly, we overload our abilities, and they degrade.
2: Crippling of Flow States Fragmented focus interrupts flow. “Fragmentation makes you … shallower, angrier”, whereas “Flow makes you deeper … calmer”.
3: Rise in Physical and Mental Exhaustion The average amount of time a person sleeps is reducing, damaging our focus. If we stay awake for 19 hours straight we become as cognitively impaired as if drunk.
4: Collapse of Sustained Reading Fewer people are reading books, especially novels. Yet they train focus and encourage empathy. “Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.”
5: Disruption of Mind-Wandering, seen here not as a form of distraction but as a way of slowly making sense of the world that supports creativity and long-term decisions. Distractions undermine this process.
6: Tec That Can Trap and Manipulate You Big Tec’s business model depends on ‘engagement’ (eyes on screen) to facilitate exposure to advertising and the harvesting of personal data, to be used by the Tec companies themselves and also sold on to other would-be persuaders. Internet services are designed specifically to serve ‘engagement’ in this sense. Traffic is more readily stimulated by exposure to angry rather than calm content. Hence ‘surveillance capitalism’ engineers reactivity, anger and division.
7: Rise of ‘Cruel Optimism‘, a term for offering, in upbeat language, simplistic individual solutions to major social problems – like obesity and addiction. Internet addiction agitation and associated cognitive decline are looked at in the same way.
8: Surge in Stress and Triggering of Vigilance Research shows the top causes of stress for the working population of the USA to be “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organisational justice and unrealistic demands”. A cause of stolen focus is again linked to powerful external conditions..
9: Deteriorating Diets A widespread switch to supermarket bought processed foods has been “bad for our waistlines and our hearts” and is also “stealing large parts of our ability to pay attention”.
10 Rising Pollution We know that air pollution causes asthma and other breathing problems. There is also “growing evidence to suggest that this pollution is seriously damaging our ability to focus”.
11 ADHD and Our Response to It There has been a huge rise in diagnosed ADHD in school students in the last 30 years. It has been treated largely as a biological disorder, though this is now contested. Personal experiences and environmental conditions are being considered more seriously.
12 Confinement of Children – Physical and Psychological In the western world, children no longer roam free in their own world. Play is indoors and either supervised by adults or located on screens. Schools are largely concerned with preparing and drilling children for tests. This has serious consequences for both learning and focus.
In exploring ‘stolen focus’ and its causes, Johann Hari casts his net wide. In his conclusion, he talks about four levels of now-weakening attention: spotlight, when we focus on immediate actions; starlight, when we focus on projects and longer-term goals; daylight, which makes it possible to know what our longer-term goals are in the first place; and stadium lights, that let us see each other, hear each other, and work together to formulate and fight for common goals. Hari sees all of these lights being dimmed by stolen focus.
Hari advocates for an ‘attention rebellion’ in the manner of XR. Its three main demands would be: to ban surveillance capitalism, because people being “hacked and hooked” can’t focus’; to introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention; rebuild childhood around “letting kids play freely – in their neighbourhoods and at school” to promote a healthy ability to pay attention. He understands that this will be uphill work – the logic of economic growth demands more and more of our time devoted to producing and purchasing. Yet given the crises facing us, especially the climate crisis, we cannot afford the destruction of our attention and ability to think clearly.
This book is not just about big tec and social media. I like the range and quality of the information that Stolen Focus brings to the description and analysis of stolen focus. Hari is clear that self-help solutions – though they may help some people – are not enough. I believe that communities informed by deep ecology, spiritual and therapeutic insights can be oases of sanity and contribute to solutions. But without their being able to influence the mainstream, their impact is bound to be limited. Stolen Focus raises awareness very effectively. Whether or not an ‘attention rebellion’ is the right way forward,, Hari’s recommendations deserve to be taken seriously.
(1) Johann Hari Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022 (Kindle edition 2023)
See also: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/06/13/stolen-focus-speed-switching-and-filtering/
March 9, 2024
BOOK REVIEW: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DU FU
Highly recommended to anyone interested in Chinese traditional poetry and culture, and the way it is received in China today. I looked at an aspect of Michael Wood’s In the Footsteps of Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet (1) in my last post (2). This is a full book review. The back cover provides an accurate basic summary of its contents: “For a thousand years Du Fu (712-70 CE) has been China’s most loved poet. Born into the golden age of the Tang Dynasty, he saw his world collapse in famine, war and chaos. The poet and his family became impoverished refugees, but his profound vision and his empathy for the sufferings of humanity endured, and have endeared him to readers ever since. … Broadcaster and historian Michael Wood follows in Du Fu’s footsteps on a pilgrimage through the physical and emotional landscapes of his life and work”.
The book, lavishly illustrated, is divided into 24 chapters. Many of these are headed by place names. Michael Wood visited most of them on his own journey, talking with scholars and enthusiasts and also taking time to observe the very different China of today. The narrative is somewhat tilted towards the last 15 years of Du Fu’s life, when the War of An Lushan (3) displaced Du Fu and turned him into an internal refugee, constantly on the move, for the rest of his life. It is also seen as the period of his best poetry.
The first chapters of the book emphasise the easy optimism of Du Fu’s early years. A new Emperor, himself a painter, musician and poet, launched a cultural rebirth. He was a patron of libraries and scholars. He ruled a prosperous and peaceful country. Du Fu writes nostalgically of childhood years in which “rice was succulent … the granaries were full, and there was not a robber on the road in all the 9 provinces of China”. Growing up in the city of Gong-yi on the Yellow River, the son of an Imperial official, Du Fu looked forward to a successful life as both official and poet. “I’d read everything and I thought I was superb”. He went to Chang’an and took his exams for the Imperial service.
He failed them. “In the blue sky my wings failed me”. For some years he went on a series of family supported wanderings, honed his poetic skills and became interested in the Chinese version of Mahayana Buddhism. Returning to Chang’an he failed the exams again, but managed to get a lowly official job, married, and began to raise a family. He settled them in Fengxian near the capital, a place that featured hot springs. Although he had to be available at Chang’an, he visited often. At this point his poetry began to show a concern for ordinary people.
Here at the hot spring the emperor entertains his court
And music echoes around the hills.
Only the rich and powerful bathe here.
But the silk they wear was woven by people,
women whose husbands are beaten for their taxes.
In 755, even before war broke out, China was devasted by floods and a resultant famine. Du Fu lost an infant son to starvation and wrote that he was ashamed to be a father. Famine threatened again, on the road, after the rebel victory:
My little girl bit me in her hunger
And fearful that wolves or tigers would hear her cries
I hugged her to my chest, muffling her mouth,
But she struggled free and just cried more.
Michael Wood provides a map of the family’s subsequent movements, generally in the rugged, often spectacular and less populated west of China. They could never settle for very long, as political and military conditions remained volatile and unsafe. I describe Du Fu’s sojourn in Chengdu in my pervious post (2). Towards the end of his life, conditions seemed to be easing and the family began moving back east via the Yangtze river, in gradual steps. This gives Michael Wood the opportunity to describe his own experience of the hyper-modern city of Chongqing, though Kuizhou and the spectacular Three Gorges area are more important to Du Fu and his work. Wood says that, “in the Gorges, though it had been at great cost to himself, Du Fu’s gift was creative and imaginative freedom”. His output was prolific, and drew on a meditatively close encounter with nature.
Crescent moon stilled in the clear night
Half-abandoned to sleep, lamp wicks blossom
In echoing mountains unsettled deer stir
Falling leaves startle locusts.
By this time Du Fu was worn down by asthma, diabetes and years of hardship. Though he got a little further down river, he never made it to his original home. Nonetheless he was able to be defiantly celebratory:
Old and tired, my hair white, I dance and sing out:
Goosefoot cane, no sleep, catch me if you can!
Du Fu died at the age of 58 in Changsha in Hunan Province. Michael Wood went there simply to complete the journey, but was rewarded with a new lens on Du Fu’s work and the creative tradition he came from. He met Professor Yang Wu at the University there. One of her interests is “the living oral tradition of poetry and the possibility of reconstructing the ancient music that might have accompanied it”. Research on ancient poetry and music is an expanding subject in today’s China. Du Fu’s poetry has been preserved in Hunan oral tradition as well as in manuscripts. A local tradition of poetry clubs has survived the early Communist period. Now it is reviving and being encouraged. Professor Wu and her students have been busy with making replica’s of Tang dynasty instruments – for example the qin, a seven-stringed instrument with strings of twisted silk. They are finding manuscript records of early musical settings, and sound-recording local people’s singing. For me this adds another dimension to Du Fu’s work – where he can be understood , in part, as the lyricist for music that was performed in group and public settings.
In the Footsteps of Du Fu is highly informed and engagingly written. For me is also a beautiful artefact, though eminently portable, not at all a coffee table book. I rarely buy printed books now because the print is too small for me. But I was fine with this one and the illustrations are a joy. Another reason for my strong recommendation.
(1) Michael Wood In The Footsteps of Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet London: Simon and Schuster, 2023
(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2024/03/06/poem-welcome-rain-spring-night/
(3) In December 755 An Lushan, a Turkic general in the Imperial service, marched on China’s then capital city, Chang’an, from North China with a quarter of a million men. They inflicted a series of defeats on the Imperial army and occupied Chang’an in July 756. An Lushan was assassinated by his own son in 757 but the war continued for 7 years. Tang dynasty China, whilst nominally lasting for decades longer, was never the same again.
Personal note: Michael Wood’s introduction begins: “if you love literature of any kind, you will have had one of those moments when you encounter a book that opens a window onto a world you never dreamed existed. Mine was at school when I first encountered Du Fu in A. C. Graham’s wonderful Poems of the Late T’ang.” I had my own version of the same experience, and still have my battered old copy. Du Fu is transliterated in that and some other translations as Tu Fu. The price, in the top left corner of the cover (see picture) is 4/- (four shillings, or 20 pence in post-1970 UK money). I have never been a formal student or scholar in this domain, but modern English translations of classical Chinese poetry have left a deep impression on me. Another poem from this collection can be found in this blog at: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2016/02/04/poem-a-withered-tree/
December 19, 2023
BOOK REVIEW: SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
Beautifully written, and highly recommended. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (1) is a novella set in the small Irish town of New Ross in the cold December of 1985, “a December of crows”. New Ross is in many ways a strong community, but business is bad. There are closures, poverty and emigration. The central, point-of-view character is Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, adequately prosperous and very busy at this time of year. Born on 1 April 1946, he is a pillar of his community, a regular if tepid church goer, married with five daughters. The older of these are at St. Margaret’s, “the only good school for girls in town”.
But Bill is also something of an outsider. His father is unknown. ‘Furlong’ is his mother’s family name. She herself becomes pregnant at the age of 16, whilst working as a maid for the Protestant widow Mrs. Wilson, comfortable on a military pension and a decent sized farm. Mrs. Wilson chooses to keep her on and takes an interest in the boy. This interest continues after his mother’s sudden death when he is 12. Technical School leads to an opportunity at the coal yard where he works his way up and subsequently becomes the owner. When he gets engaged to Eileen, Mrs. Wilson gives him some thousands of pounds to establish himself. He enjoys being a family man and a good provider. The Christmas season, with its time at home, rich food and present giving is a welcome opportunity to celebrate.
Bill is naturally generous, refuses to judge people harshly and is prone to spontaneous acts of kindness, the “small things like these” of the title. The main action of the novella begins when he personally delivers a Christmas coal and wood order to the local convent, a powerful-looking place on the hill, where the nuns run both a “training”, or possibly “reforming”, school for girls” and a popular laundry business. There is some lack of clarity over the detail. They might be involved in arranging adoptions as well. Although a little set apart, it is one of the major institutions of the town.
Arriving in the dark at the covent coal house door Bill finds the bolt stiff with frost and has to force it open. There he finds a young girl, Sarah, who has clearly been locked in there for some time. She asks him to take her away or at least ask the whereabouts of her 14 month old baby who has been taken from her. The Mother Superior becomes involved and embarks on an unconvincing performance of compassion involving tea and cake for both Bill and the girl, and a story about Sarah’s incarceration as the result of a game with other girls.
Bill, going home, realizes that he forgot to ask about the baby. He recollects the numerous locks in the convent buildings and broken glass on the tops of walls. He is unhappy and misses his way home, fetching up in a remote spot he doesn’t recognize. In one of the novella’s occasional fairytale moments, he asks an old man with a billhook: “will you mind telling me where this road will take me?” The old man replies: “this road will take you wherever you want to go, son”.
On his return he tells Eileen and, separately, two friends his story. They are keen to talk him out of any public comment or further action. The convent is powerful. Other church institutions would rally round it. It is also his largest customer with the capacity to influence others. Bill has worked very hard to get where he is. Why risk financial disaster? But he is strongly affected by his encounter with Sarah. He finds himself becoming reluctant even to attend mass, let alone take the sacrament. He thinks of what Mrs. Wilson did for him, particularly since he is now fairly sure that his father was not one of her own relatives.
Late on Christmas Eve he goes back to the convent on foot, unbolts the coalhouse door, finds Sarah, and begins the walk through town to his home, “the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter”. On this journey, he also recognizes a “fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart … some part of him was going wild, he knew … never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this”. The narrative ends when he reaches the door of his family home. On the other side of that door lies the beginning of another story, and another day.
(1) Claire Keegan Small Things Like These London: Faber & Faber, 2021
The author has dedicated this story to the women and children who suffered time in Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalen laundries. In a note on the text she adds: “Ireland’s last Magdalen laundry was not closed down until 1996. It is not known how many girls and women were concealed, incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions. Ten thousand is the modest figure; thirty thousand is probably more accurate. Most of the records from the Magdalene laundries were destroyed, lost or made inaccessible. Rarely was any of these girls’ or women’s work recognised or acknowledged in any way. Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they could have had. … These institutions were run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish State. No apology was issued by the Irish government until Taoiseach Enda Kelly did so in 2013”.
September 6, 2023
BOOK REVIEW: FORGIVING HUMANITY
Forgiving Humanity (1) is an extended essay rather than a book. I found it easy to read and hard to work with. Author Peter Russell is highly skilled at distilling data and making his case. His conclusion is that the near term extinction of the human species is inevitable, and not unnatural or to be faulted. “We are coming to the end of our species’ journey, spinning faster and faster into the center of an evolutionary spiral.”
Russell points to what he sees as our our natural-born drive for exponential growth and development. A dance of genetic and behavioural change led us to an enhanced brain, bi-pedal walking, manual dexterity, and a shift in the position of the larynx to enable complex speech. Cultural evolution then led to organised hunting with the throwing spear and, later, the bow. Later still, at an increasing rate of change, came agriculture, metallurgy, the industrial revolution (from steam to atomic power in not much more than a century) and, most recently, the accelerating information revolution now leading to the rise of AI. Quantum computing is on the horizon.
The problem according to Russell is that exponential growth is inherently predestined to run out of control. This is “the curse of exponential change.” Exponential growth is not like the linear growth that we can more comfortably imagine. In the domain of economics, for example, 3% annual growth rate in the world’s GDP, compounded over 100 years, would lead to a consumption of energy and resources at 20 times today’s rate. Russell started thinking about this problem as a young and gifted mathematician at the end of the 1960s. On his analysis, we would be fatally fouling our own nest even without the specific problem of the climate crisis. Climate change simply exacerbates and dramatises our predicament, hastening the process of breakdown.
Russell is aware of systemic injustices in our socio-economic system, but this book does not explore political mitigations. He expects major breakdown in this century. A remnant population in reduced circumstances will carry on for a while longer. But this human triggered extinction event, which has already claimed many other species, will still be rapid in planetary terms. In the immediate future, Russell sees a likelihood of continuing technological breakthroughs for some decades, in the midst of extensive cultural breakdown and a diminishing global population. I am not certain that he is right, but I fear that he may be. And I find him hard to read, trying to imagine what it would be like for different people in different places, and stepping into their boots down here in the trenches where embodied human life is lived until it’s gone.
Whilst the earlier sections of Forgiving Humanity are presented as if from the perspective of a distant cosmic scientist, there is a later turn to human experience and how to live in the new conditions. Peter Russell becomes one of us and shares his long-held view of consciousness and its possibilities, especially the affirmation that: “beneath our day-to-day experience lies a deeper sense of being, unperturbed by the goings on in the world, and our hopes and fears about them … meditative and self-enquiry processes … lead to greater calm and self-awareness, and … the more in touch we are with our inner being, the more considerate, compassionate, and caring we become – qualities that could prove invaluable in meeting the challenges ahead.” I also like his idea of remaining in service to the earth whenever we can, continuing to do our best for it even when knowing that our species is waning and likely to wink out. The notion of persevering with restorative efforts allows for limited local successes, seems like a healing process in itself and preserves a sense of positive agency in hard times. I am sure that people will continue to work in these ways whenever given half a chance.
For Russell, psycho-spiritual practices and communities are a key resiliency factor for navigating through heart-breaking conditions. We need to “find the acceptance that allows us to move into the unknown with courage and an open heart”. Russell says that facing our collective extinction is like facing our personal deaths, only more so because we are looking at the end of our kind. He borrows from a well-known map of how to work through five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining and depression – to a final acceptance. I have to note some reservations about schemes based on normative ideas about how we work through distress. People are very different – though many, it is true, are reassured by maps of this kind. I would also not want these suggestions to be misunderstood as an injunction to put on a mask of serenity when something else is going on in our body/mind. For me, the deeper acceptance is to recognise and accept our confusion and turbulence, if confusion and turbulence are what is happening. The spaciousness of deep acceptance then keeps company with them, avoiding both the false mask of serenity on the one hand, and immersed identification with our distress on the other. Nothing is denied.
I am not sure about the suggestion of ‘forgiving humanity’. If I take ‘humanity’ as simply the name of a species, I don’t feel that it’s my place either to forgive or withhold forgiveness from a species of which I am a member. If I take ‘Humanity’ as an idealised abstraction, or construct, then there’s no-one there to forgive outside my own imagination. For me, working as best as I can at deep acceptance and loving kindness, accepting with self-compassion that I will likely be wayward and inconsistent in my endeavours, is the better way to go. It keeps me in the world of lived interactions with other sentient beings and feels like a more engaged and grounded aspiration.
Despite some reservations, I value this work highly and recommend it to anyone concerned with the issues raised in it. We need voices like this, who move beyond deep adaptation to face into the possibility of no adaptation. Forgiving Humanity offers a distinctive lens on the crisis we are in, and it does so in a concise, readable and sadly persuasive way.
(1) Peter Russell Forgiving Humanity: How the Most Innovative Became the Most Dangerous Las Vegas, NV: Elf Rock Productions, 2023
NB Peter Russell studied mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge but later changed to experimental psychology. After learning transcendental meditation (TM) with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, he took up the first academic post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation. He also has a postgraduate degree in computer science. In the 1970s he pioneered senior corporate management courses on meditation, creativity, stress management and sustainable development. Later he coined the term ‘global brain’ with the 1980’s best seller of that name in which he predicted the Internet and the impact it would have on humanity. I have reviewed a more recent book Letting Go of Nothing at:
June 14, 2023
BOOK REVIEW: STAFF OF LAUREL, STAFF OF ASH
“If our place is imperilled, so are our myths. If we heal the one, we heal the other … So said priestesses who long ago spoke in the voice of doves. So said the prophetic oaks they tended, who murmured to their suppliants through wind blown leaves.”(1)
Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth is an inspirational collection of interwoven contemplations on landscape and myth; on enchantment, disenchantment and re-enchantment. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in these themes.
Author Dianna Rhyan says of her own approach to writing: “assembled, these pages refused to assemble, and so altogether, they form a series of sketches, fallen like samaras*, whose order is ultimately undetermined. The priestess of Apollo wrote her prophecies on leaves. When strong winds came, they scattered all over her cave. Did she mind? Amidst the leaves, voices of winds and voices of trees, lost and found, thread their way.” This review shares something of the book’s flavour, rather than attempting a linear account of what is covers.
Rhyan draws strength from wild and marginal spaces, especially the Cuyahoga River in north eastern Ohio. She describes her close relationship with the land but is all too aware of a sadness in its silence. The genocidal displacement of the people who once lived there has erased their stories about this land and their relationship with it. As a mythologist, she looks further afield for inspiration, especially ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and the early Greek speaking world. Even four thousand years ago, in the early Sumerian world, people had doubts about ‘civilisation’. We find the contrasting influences of the laurel, which blooms, and the ash, “a battle-earned artifact”.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2) the hero destroys a forest and its guardian at an early stage of his “futile immortality quest” and then goes out of his way to offend the Mother Goddess Inanna. In The Descent of Inanna, she herself must experience death, losing her identity and powers as she descends through seven gates to the Underworld controlled by her sister Ereshkigal. Asking, at each gate, ‘Gatekeeper, why is this done?’, she receives the reply ‘Silence, Inanna. Do not open your mouth against custom. The rules of the Great Below are flawless. You may not question what is perfect.’ Rhyan’s reading of this ritualised and repeated reply finds a new order in which free nature, and the Goddess perceived as its embodiment, need to be rigorously controlled. She comments on the way in which perfection “deadens” and rules “disarm”. For three days Inanna hangs dead, a carcass on a hook. But the upper world needs Inanna in order to reproduce itself and flourish. The Wisdom God Enki sends emissaries to Ershkigal to secure Inanna’s release. She does not stay dead.
Rhyan also draws on Greek sources from different periods. One of them, from Sophocles’ last play, Oedipus at Colonus, is about the final days of Oedipus, after he has blinded himself and been been exiled from his erstwhile kingdom of Thebes. These misfortunes follow the discovery that he has (unwittingly) killed his father, married his mother and thereby, as a source of pollution, caused a plague in the city. He is told: “seek no more to master anything”.
Oedipus is now a pauper, wandering in a wasteland. Letting go of his civic and social identities and surrendering to this fate, he survives. He is reborn as a child of nature on the goddess haunted mountain Cithaeron. For his awakened inner vision has guided him to the place where he was once, as an infant, left out to die. The compassionate nymphs who nursed him then are perhaps looking out for him once more. He has journeyed from palace to periphery, freed from all power and self-determination. At that point, he is given a new role, as guardian of the sacred grove at Colonus. It is a place beloved by immortals, a place of lush growth, where the nightingale sings, and with “cool waters” that never fail. Here, as this new version of himself, he will live out his days.
Late on in her book, Dianna Rhyan says: “if we look over our shoulder, not only what we threw away as detritus is following us. What we had despaired we had lost forever, long ago in the depths of ancient ages, is following us too. We require myth, intensely alive myth, to see it. It is very good at not being seen.” I see her as making a great contribution to making ‘intensely alive myth’ visible once more.
(1) Dianna Rhyan Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: Moon Books, 2023
(2) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2023/05/30/
*Samaras: here, the winged maple seeds found in the author’s local woodlands.
June 3, 2023
BOOK REVIEW: THE TORCH OF BRIGHID
Highly recommended for anyone interested in Brighid, Celtic spirituality and the evolving culture of modern Paganism. In The Torch of Brighid, Erin Aurelia eloquently describes her flame tending path as a devotee of the Goddess Brighid. For her, this is a path of celebration, contemplation, creativity and deep personal change. Her book shares the fruits of a remarkable journey.
The author makes clear that she is not reconstructing a past Pagan practice. No such practice is known. She references a Christian history dating from 480 CE, where nuns maintained a sacred flame at Kildare in Ireland. This was documented as still in place in the later 12th century CE by Gerald of Wales in his History and Topography of Ireland. It was repressed by the English King Henry VIII – who also ruled Ireland – as part of his violent religious revolution of the 1530s and 40s. On 1 February 1993, flame tending was revived both by Catholic Brigantine sisters in Kildare by the neo-Pagan Daughters of the Flame in Vancouver, BC. Both groups were influenced by Gerald of Wales’ description.
Erin Aurelia has been a flame tender for 20 years. She began in the Daughters of the Flame and then founded her own Order, the Nigheanan Brigde Flametending Order, going on to lead it for eight years. The original model involved moving through cycles of twenty days, in which nineteen flame tenders take a day each to tend the flame, leaving the Goddess to take care of the twentieth. Erin found that she wanted an intensified practice and a closer fellowship with other Brighid devotees. During those years, she writes: “Brighid inspired me to develop guided meditations to use during vigils, seasonal feasts, and lunar phases”. Later came “the template for a whole new way to practice flame tending: the way that the flame tending cycle matches with the twenty letters of the traditional Irish tree ogham alphabet, in which each alphabet letter is denoted by a tree and infused with esoteric meaning”. She describes herself as “enthralled and excited” by this discovery, which lead on to daily communing with Brighid and a fuller development of her work.
She found the process transformative, and learned that “growth is not only made through obtaining wisdom, but by implementing it. And Brighid showed me that I can effectively implement it by embodying her own skills as Shaper, Healer, Seer, and Transformer. Through embodying her skills, I became empowered”. In the narrative of her own journey, Erin shows her willingness to innovate, take initiatives, lead when called to do so, and also step back from leadership. Her relationship with ancient culture is to be inspired by it without being bound by it. I see her as modelling the best of modern Pagan practice in these respects.
Erin provides extensive information on her flame tending vigils, and how to set them up. She shares prayers, meditations and path workings. She includes her unique approach to ogham work, and also her own way of working energetically with the traditional ‘three cauldrons’ (of warming, vocation and knowledge). She shares her ways of working through the four Irish fire festivals from Imbolc (1 Feb.) to Bealtaine (1 May} to Lughnasadh (1 Aug.) to Samhain (1 Nov.). She has an Imbolc advent practice centred around the four Sundays prior to Imbolc – because it starts the year in this tradition and is specifically dedicated to Brighid. Her book is a powerful addition to the growing literature about Brighid as a much loved Goddess.
November 28, 2022
BOOK REVIEW: THE CIRCLE OF LIFE IS BROKEN
Highly recommended. Brendan Myers’ The Circle of Life is Broken (1) is subtitled “an eco-spiritual philosophy of the climate crisis”. Myers is a Pagan identified author and a professional philosopher who teaches at Heritage College, Gatineau, Quebec. His Paganism is naturalistically oriented, and animist in a sense that “the things of the natural world are in some hard-to-express manner alive and spiritually present”.
The book begins with an view of the Earth from outside, through the loving eyes and words of astronauts. “It is as if the Earth as a whole was only discovered in 1968, when Apollo-8 astronaut William Anders shot the famous Earthrise photograph; the image of the Earth coming out from behind the edge of the moon”. This ‘overview effect’ is balanced at the end of the book by an invitation to immerse ourselves more fully and awarely within the world, through the practices of a weekly green sabbatical and an annual ecological pilgrimage.
Between this beginning and ending there are three main sections, each addressing a ‘root question’. Each question is rigorously explored, before receiving a carefully formulated answer.
The first question asks: what is the circle of life? A key understanding is that ecologists today do not see the Earth as “an aggregate of individuals competing for resources and survival”. Rather, they “are teaching us to see the Earth as a complex system in which everything is directly or indirectly involved in all the life around it, and in which symbiosis and cooperation, across multiple levels, keep the system as a whole flourishing”. This is the circle of life that is now breaking down. “It isn’t simply changing form. It is also short-circuiting; it is falling apart”.
The second root question asks: who faces the circle of life? This concerns humans and how we deal with realities of a higher order than our own. The exploration includes a look at how people see the world at different life stages. Myers wants to know “what becomes of the human reality when cast in terms of the encounter with the Circle of Life as the ultimate reality?” He notes that the Circle goes almost unmentioned in the history of Western philosophy, and also explores a perceived a tension between our ‘being-ecological’ and our ‘being-free’.
The third root question asks: can the circle be healed? Myers quotes a saying of the philosopher Hegel: “the owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering”. When things are bad, new ideas and possibilities can emerge and philosophers especially are challenged to think big. Myers looks at the political and cultural obstacles to any healing process, with good sections on ‘eco-fascism’ and the ‘gatekeepers of human nature’. He also makes a number of specific positive proposals.
Although written in plain English as far as possible, The Circle is Broken is not a book to read in one sitting. Myers’ thinking is holistic, with room for scientific information, complex argument, deep feeling, contemplation and engagement. It is written with love and a sense of wonder, generously drawing on personal experience. I think of it as a long-term companion, a gift to anyone concerned with the climate crisis and creative responses to it.
(1) Brendan Myers The Circle of Life is Broken: An Eco-Spiritual Philosophy of the Climate Crisis Winchester UK & Washington USA: Moon Books 2022 (Earth Spirit series)
(2) For other posts about Brendan Myers’ work, see:
https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2015/05/22/the-worship-of-the-gods-is-not-what-matters/ (Reblog from Naturalistic Paganism)
BOOK REVIEW: THE EARTH, THE GODS AND THE SOUL
BOOK REVIEW: RECLAIMING CIVILIZATION
ETHICS AND ‘CIVILIZATION’
BRENDAN MYERS: A FOREST ENCOUNTER
Contemplative Inquiry 