HOME-CENTERED

Electronic connectivity to people and places enables a new social form of the Geographic/Cosmological Imagination in which we again reside at the center of it All. Finally, humanity is superseding, hopefully in time, the worldview of the de-centering Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution which promoted the literally "eccentric" view that we reside OUTSIDE everything: nature, our bodies, the Earth (i.e., living ON the surface of the globe of the planet, instead of "dwelling" IN the spherical World).  


From the perspective of our lived experience (the lifeworld, including electronic connectivity), we dwell from an experiential center--the center of the World. The global view looks to exploit the spatial substrate of the planet, even to escape from it, and creates an "Earth alienation." The spherical view looks outward from the center, similar to Medieval cosmology. 


Science, psychology, and cosmology are coming together to "re-place" the alienation of the last four centuries. Now, we can again live here and now in this spacetime. Call it Home.

PRIMAL SACRAMENT

From "War and Peace," I remember only one passage: Prince Andrei, blown up by a shell at Austerlitz just as he was observing an absurd argument between two soldiers over a mop: "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn...how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky. How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last!"

It was a life-changing perspectival shift.

Out of a nearly 1,000-page tome I always remembered Prince Andrei lying wounded on a bloody battlefield in total silence (probably blown temporarily deaf) gazing in rapture and peace at the expanse of blue sky above (thus war and peace coinciding at the same moment within the same person).

When I remembered that scene yesternight, I recalled Schweikert's epiphanic and synoptic gaze back to the whole of the blue-marble gem Earth.

The two humans in different centuries gazing outward/inward to Earth as home--and really to/into themselves as Earthbeings. One, Andrei, hugs a portion of Earth. The other, Schweikert, wants to give Earth-Home a motherly embrace.

The conceptual blending occurs as each understands himself as a integral part of a whole. Therein lies the experience of the Primal Sacrament.

BECOMING EARTH

To continue thoughts on the experience of Earth from the ground in "War in Peace" and from extra-earth space of the astronaut experience: the feminist theory of "agential realism" breaks up the ordinary, Cartesian dichotomy between subject and object and posits that material entities in a relationship are not discrete and do not exist ontologically prior to the relation. Thus Prince Andrei and Schweikert experience Earth not as an object but as only constituted in relation. They are in "Earth-relation."

This is a theory of reality that I use in theorizing spatial cognition: We are constituted as in relation to the space (the places and landscapes) we "observe" and in which we live. We are embodied, embedded, and cognize place/space as inseparable knower and known. This is the experience of Prince Andrei literally embracing Earth, and Schweikert who feels he must embrace Earth to bridge the subject/object gap.

But, this does not seem to be the condition of postmodernity, in which people experience profound dichotomous relations of subject and object, in which the world is "pictured" (Heidegger) as "out there," separate from the observer. Therein lies much of the malaise of the current human condition and concomitantly that of the planet. Existentially we live as separate, discrete beings who observe and relate to matter and ourselves as beings rather than as "becomings" in embodied/embedded "intra-relation" to the Universe.

To use the words of the Beatles, we must get back to where we once belonged--the place which we only thought we left.

THEOLOGY OF THE DAMNED

The usual calculus for industrial efficiency leaves out the "externalities" such as hidden environmental costs--to human health, local and global ecosystems, and to other productive enterprises.

How efficient is a coal-fired power plant if the total gamut of costs is excluded? Costs such as the ecological destruction to the strip-mined areas and to lives of the people living there; acidification of lakes and streams, with loss of fish stocks and recreation; acid-rain damage to forests and crops; the increase in lung ailments (such as lung cancer, emphysema, and asthma); and additions to the build-up of greenhouse gases which is altering global climate and which will cause unfathomable human and ecological disruption and costs?

The true costs of using my computer and the light bulb above it are not solely the bill I pay to the power company. Economic costs to the producer and the monetary costs to the user are not the whole picture of accrued costs.

So-called "efficiency" depends on how it is measured, for whom, and why.

It seems to me that part of the spiritual crisis in America is not comprehending our impact upon the Earth. To the extent that we think it is somehow godly or biblical, and make it part of of our theology, to willingly, gladly, participate in a system that has as its very basis the destruction of Creation seems terribly wrong. It is a theology of (over)production and (over)consumption--and Earth be damned.

LACHRYMAL CYCLING

Tears are fragrant nectar bathing

the Earth, the place

that provides upwelling springs of water

that fall again to Earth as ever-recycling,

renewing tears that revolve, replenish,

return to my eyes, then again return home

to my place

on Earth.

WATCH THE SUN STAY FOR A MOMENT

Our Sun stays (the etymological meaning of solstice) for a moment on the horizon (December 22) and at its lowest midday point in the sky before heading back toward the high sun days and my birthday on the opposite point of its movement: 21 June.

Perhaps we should return, as I have done many times, to celebrating the solstices, when our star changes its apparent direction in relation to our existence here on the surface of Earth. Surely this would renew our reverence for the crucial natural elements of our very existence and survival here on our home planet.

Earth and Sun--it's a dyadic relationship, of which we are the observers and celebrants.