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EarthPsyche

“The context for defining sanity in our time has reached planetary magnitude” Written in1995 by Theodore Roszak in his introduction to “Ecopsychology”, the essays in the book by diverse authors emphasize the need to take the planet into account in our psychology. I discovered the book in 1998 on a bookstore remainder table. Almost thirty years later we haven’t begun to integrate our dependence on our environment into our approach to our psyche What has it done to our personal psychology to repress our connection to our home planet for so long, collaborating with a system that leaves a stand of trees in front of a clearcut forest. In one of the essays psychologist Sarah Conn suggests that our “materialistic disorder” grows from our loss of relationship to a larger context creating an emptiness that needs filling. Our environment flows through us all the time in the food and air and water but also the many processes that unfold in and around us. The imbalance in our world is visible. Air quality today is 243. Unhealthy begins at 150. A dirty orange thickness of smoke flows across the street dusting the green with pollutants. We can see the distress in the air. In our lungs and in our mood, we feel the planets distress. We have to breathe. Studies since the 70s have shown that crime goes up, depression and anxiety all go up with the rise in air pollution. We have allowed our individual selves to think we’re separate too long. Maybe we should consider ourselves as a where. William James referred to ‘I‘ as a pronoun of location. Our dependence on our earth habitat underscores how much a part of our being it is. Without gravity we’d float off into space. Instead, we’re held by the earth, systems within systems. This kind of complexity needs to be shown not explained. Visual philosophy refers to the use of imagery to show the important relationships. Balance and imbalance, harmony and proportion can be seen and tie us to a larger context. We’re never free of the world around us. We breathe it, feed ourselves, move around on it. Gregory Bateson once said that the unit of survival was not the individual but individual in environment because without the environment, we won’t survive. Lewis Thomas thought of “fittest” as referring to what fit best into the environment. Our psychology should include our relationship to the earth, starting with where we are. Fire, floods and monster storms won’t let us ignore the planet any longer. We need to extend our psychology to include our relationship to the earth. What is it now and how might it evolve in harmony with the ecosystem? Seeing the many ways our ebb and flow is part of the larger ebb and flow enables us to harmonize rather than disrespect the cycles, patterns a resources of our home planet.

Judgment

Control Imagery

I felt kinship looking at the crowd already gathering at 10:30 Saturday morning, some photographing the curtain closed over a Kennedy Center wall. The removal of a name from a wall never felt so important. I’ve felt each of his desecrations in my heart physically, appalled that I could actually be seeing giant machines tearing apart the east wing of the White House, where the First Ladies’ offices once were. How did none of us know about this until we saw the event as it happened? Why no debate and discussion? Seeing some of this rescinded is an important reclamation of an image. The Kennedy Center was a memorial to JFK and to the importance of art and culture, so the removal of the name cleans the illegal tag off our national symbol, off values we thought were foundation to our country and instead to create a gilded homage to weakness, changing the imagery of Washington. His image and name all over the capital rubs our nose in what he’s done to the achievements of our best values. It’s consistent with authoritarian aesthetics. Architecture is the medium of power. Giant architecture like an out-of-scale ballroom or a massive arch are meant to make us feel small, overwhelmed by the power of the state The aesthetic of authoritarianism eclipses beauty with statements, names plastered over what held meaning. Rounding up and banishing people from the country is part of the imagery of control. As an article by Cristina Awadalla points out, the physical abuse of particular people and the masked thugs that carry it out are part of the imagery, an intentional spectacle of violent control. Kate Wgner’s column in the May issue of The Nation, points to the warehouses we put people in as ”the clearest expression of fascist architecture in our time.” A cage fight in front of the White House celebrates the culture of violence. Illegal use of the military as props (who had height and weight requirements to be there) also conforms to authoritarian control of imagery. Distrust of truth by repetition of falsehood, and demonizing those that disagree lays a foundation for building the brain chemistry of hate, focusing disappointments and resentment on outsider groups in rallies that celebrate insider status. To not do what the authoritarian wants is one form of resistance. Having that name removed from a place it never belonged resists the insistent force of the authority. Some of the banners have come down. That satire is effective is obvious when media sites are attacked because of comedians pointing out injustice and absurdities. Political cartoons cut down the powerful and refuse obeisance. Art, music, and comedy all display the persistence of human spirit and and grow under pressure. The is our counter-control imagery.

Disruption

World in a Face

Reflecting on Paul Ekman’s study of facial expressions, it occurred to me that there is an enormous amount of information we receive throughout the day that goes largely unrecognized. Since we recognize thousands of expressions its likely we notice a wide variety during an interaction with someone that accumulate into a sense of our overall impression of what their mood was that day. Then I wondered about the range of expressions a parent makes in reaction to their child. So much focus on behaviors is leaving out the background of smiles shifting to concern or irritation hidden by smiles. Ekman’s book details how we assemble a sense of the feeling with the unconscious perception of micro-expressions. After reading about this, I recorded a debate then watched it in slow motion and was astonished at what showed between the controlled expressions. To what degree are our insecurities seeded by the flow of reactions we see on a parent’s face? Facial expressions led me to some of my current passions. It was Bjorn Borg’s facial expression filling the screen that first sucked me into watching tennis, his look of intense almost predatory focus. What it took to be there showed in his face. To be so close to that moment with him felt nearer to holy than any other word that comes to mind. I’m always inspired by tennis. Resonating with that level of dedication strengthens my own. The danger comes when we try to label facial expression. Our own confidence or insecurities often misinterpret the look on someone’s face. When I first started teaching, I was very insecure and interpreted students’ expressions in a variety of negative ways. Then one lunch hour I walked through the student lounge area and saw a student whose look I’d interpreted badly, wearing the same look in a group of her friends. The look was not personal. She did look sad. I understood the feeling but not the meaning. Looking at art can help us fine tune our perceptions with universal feelings, the heart of being human. Art drawn from the depths of an artist sensitizes the viewer to their own depths, providing a safe space to reflect on what’s often hidden. A non-clinical way to unlock personal psychology, we gravitate toward what calls to us in that moment. Resonance with facial expressions is stimulating each viewer’s understanding of that feeling, no words involved. The last few times I’ve been in the Baltimore Museum of Art the African masks stirred something deep in me that had been available but neglected. In the room of eighteenth-century portraits, I gravitated toward the ones that showed a sensitive soul trapped in layers of privilege. The communication in a facial expression can cut through the superficial and show a meaning that isn’t said.

Overwhelm

Beauty Heals

After a bad couple of weeks, it can be hard to get out of the turbulence of worry and obligation that continue to afflict the mind when it seems like the troubles will just keep coming. So when my brother suggested a trip to Longwood Gardens, even though most of me wanted to hide at home to avoid any more possible mishaps, I agreed, knowing it would be good for me. And it was. So many tulips in differently shaped and organized beds, kinds I’d never seen before and some so strange you wondered what was evolution thinking. Every part of the garden was perfectly kept, the arrangements of different flowers and plants flowing in harmony. Never throughout the day did I think about my troubles. Time in nature is known to be healing, and the careful cultivation of these gardens was inspiring. Beauty takes a person out of themselves, diminishing self-consciousness and cleansing the mind for a time. Tulips have always been special to me because of my memories of my grandfather being with the family when we would go to Sherwood Gardens in tulip season after church. That was when he was minister at St John’s Methodist Church nearby and he was the magnetic north of my heart, how I wanted to be. He had what I know now know is equanimity and a sense of humor, beautiful in temperament and behavior, a demonstration of the connection between beauty and goodness. So often discussion of beauty is confined to physical appearance, an arrangement of features, what Ram Dass would call the package, not the essence. Krishnamurti said a lovely face without love is ugly. I’ve seen people with perfect symmetrical features twist them out of shape with a snide expression and people animated by joy to glow. Perhaps it is the lack of love in the hearts of so many that allows people to thoughtlessly destroy beauty, of the earth, of relations between neighbors, of justice. Justice depends on correct proportions which is also true of beauty. Beauty my underlie our moral judgments, determining the unjust, unfair and destructive, ugly. Vanity blinds individuals to their ugly actions and choices. Beauty stimulates the beauty within because that is what recognizes it. Art builds sensitivity to beauty. We connect to the feelings expressed in an image and grow in our responsiveness. AI can make amazing images but can’t replicate human feeling. Only artists can keep the depths alive to educate our feeling nature, sense of appreciation and awareness of the feelings of others to move in harmony with our world.

Misguided Energies

Speculating on Consciousness

After reading an article in Scientific American about 29 competing theories of consciousness, I was both glad attention was being given to this important aspect of human experience but also felt strongly that more radical speculation is still necessary. As J. Krishnamurti said in one of his dialogues, “An intelligent mind is a mind that is not satisfied with explanations.’ Encouraging speculative thinking might build a rounder picture of a subject by interlacing what might have been considered tangential into a more three-dimensional view, a bigger picture. Even outrageous ideas, too wild to be credible, might spur ideas in someone else that use some of the same thought or relationships. The article had an information graphic that showed at a glance which theories focused on which aspect of consciousness and to what degree. How much I understood just from the diagrams helped me zero in on the ones with particular interest. This suggests to me that approaching consciousness with more visual mapping of relationships could offer more scope to understanding. Visualization is useful in showing how it all works together, the interlacing of information with the changing weather of mood and emotion. Linear explanation is not enough for the complexity of the subject. Perhaps we are one frequency band on a cosmic spectrum that includes all frequencies. One person that experienced a Near Death Experience said it was like slipping to one side, not going somewhere but still being there on a different frequency. The final words of a guru to disciples imploring him not to die and leave them comes to mind. He said “Don’t be silly. Where would I go?” Sri Aurobindo and others have suggested that consciousness has layers, planes attuned to particular kinds of awareness. The ability to shift states of awareness not only exists within an individual but could be expanded into a whole mind awareness beyond the personal. Speculation is needed in a time when the range of ideas and opinions has narrowed to only a handful of choices regarding the big ideas of being. Anything beyond mechanistic explanations has been taboo. Maybe let research examine older ideas, where consciousness enters the mind going back to Descartes and the Pineal gland, this singular center that regulates cycles. There’s been a suggestion that there is a regular wave that runs back to front in the brain. What might that be doing? Or opening channels with the universal ideas beneath all spiritual traditions o see if some of the metaphors cast light on areas science can investigate. Allowing a looser play of thoughts that doesn’t dismiss what’s outside current dogma could create space for more ideas with insight into consciousness.

Low-Grade Anxieties

Perceptual Changes

I remember often telling drawing classes that shutting one eye would flatten the scene making it easier to see the clear boundaries of objects without the competition of two views. What we used in the Illusionism class to create the appearance of reality were spatial signals that needed just one eye and were processed preconsciously. This was brought to mind by the illusions I’m working on in my painting. My sensitivity to spatial illusion is stronger. With only one eye the whole world is flat so the effectiveness my illusions is becoming more real enabling me to push them further than I’d envisioned. I knew I was successful when I caught myself holding the brush sideways to work on a plane that appeared to slant back from the painted surface. I’d fooled myself. The illusion of the slanted plane affected my behavior before what I know reached consciousness. This turned out to be a problem. My primary spatial reality is now based on one eye. The illusion I paint looks as real as reality. As the illusion gets stronger, I make more mistakes. Too often as my instincts turn my hand to the perceived angle of what I paint the result is a long mark where I’d pushed the brush sideways against the surface try to go deeper into the pit believed to be there. Before the mind is conscious of it, the body responds to the environment it sees. What I like about illusionism is its power to stimulate at that level. The unconscious adjustments that occur automatically are what creates the feeling of a scene. Without that feeling of space and separation between things, I’ve made many accidental marks with my brush on furniture that I thought was farther away. Coming to grips with all the difficulties of losing half of my vision, I’m also discovering some interesting new sensitivities particularly in my work. I’ve been able to take the illusions further than I could see before. Details look sharper, mistakes easier to spot. I’m grateful for these unexpected benefits and open to the possibility there may be more. My brain has been hard at work compensating, creating a sense that I see a whole scene even though most of the left side is missing. Filled out with what it does see and has seen recently it’s a relief not to be aware of the void depicted in the drawing below. It’s still greyed out and inaccurate but not empty grey. The brain’s remarkable ability to reprogram itself, to adapt its circuitry to the existing situation begins its adjustment immediately. Learning is what’s its plasticity is made for. This situation is giving me plenty to learn.

Impermanence

Half Light

Fail, fail again, fail better. Samuel Beckett When I lost all vision in my left eye in mid-December, everything got harder, and I was making all kinds of mistakes, but the overriding issue for me is having half the light. It’s like one of my windows is boarded up. I assume that down the road I’ll get used to this, won’t remember what full illumination felt like, but not yet. Pema Chodron used the Beckett quote as the title of a commencement speech published in book form with the same title. Understanding the importance of failure as well as success needs a broad view of failure. All my harshest life events felt like a failure at some level. Self-judgement chases me around like an angry terrier. Chodron defined failure as when things don’t work out the way you want them to and losing sight in one eye is a big one, not a part of my plan. I was painting a detail when suddenly I had trouble focusing, distracted by a series of flashing patterns made of light with big splotches of color bursting all over. It felt like there was a film over one eye distorting what was coming in. I tilted my head to the left hoping the film was on the surface and it would slide off. It didn’t. I thought if I lay down maybe the fireworks would settle. Most of it settled down into an empty grey area with one tiny patch of image coming in which gets smaller every day. The next day the ophthalmologist said a stroke in my eye had starved the receptors and the vision wouldn’t be coming back. Learning how to live with one eye wears me out. Just like expecting Michael to come in the door after he died, I keep expecting the vision to return, keep having the urge to save a certain part of the painting until I can see better. Daily life is darker, my sense of vulnerability stronger. Adapting will take longer than I originally thought. Loss of normal depth perception makes it difficult to judge how far my brush is from the painted surface and I lower it very slowly to avoid a big splotch. I still catch myself waving my brush over the work thinking I’m already there or making a mark where I didn’t intend thinking I was farther away than I was. Frustration over my many mistakes is daily. But I’m learning techniques to compensate. If I turn my head to the left my good eye can focus on the details. Unfortunately, the instinct to turn the head towards where I’m focusing keeps fighting my efforts. So I move the piece to the right. I begin 2026 and the rest of my life blind in one eye. The process of adapting to this is my opportunity to fail better. It’s challenging. I always look at life’s hardships as having something to teach me, I hope as I learn from this it will increase my compassion for other people’s challenges.

Bookmak 2025

Afterlife

When I was a very small child, I didn’t understand the fact of being a separate person. I repeatedly asked my mother “Why am I me?” who never really understood what I was getting at, but being a separate individual confused me, and I thought there had to be a reason. Though I never found an answer or an absolute reason for being, I have thought about the idea that being separate felt unnatural to me which feeds my current sense that we’re not as separate as we think, and that our consciousness may return to its original unity. In an interview about his recent novel “Secret of Secrets”, Dan Brown stated firmly that though once he was sure there was nothing after physical death, after researching this book he was convinced that individual consciousness survives the death of the body. He said that interviewing people that had had Near Death Experiences, they “walked the talk”, that the experience changed their view of death completely and restructured their lives accordingly. Having watched many videos of people talking about their NDE’s since my husband died, I’ve been impressed with their sincerity and desire to help others understand that we are more than our physical body. Sri Yogananda stated that “Death…is an experience through which we are meant to learn that we cannot die.” One reason I’m receptive to that idea is because I always felt that what looked out from my physical being was the same consciousness as it was when I was a child, an unchanged witness within that lies beyond this particular personality and physical body. No scientist has been able to locate a place for consciousness there. Basically, science can’t prove there isn’t anything after bodily death any more than that there is. In his novel Brown reviews the many factors that suggest a non-local consciousness and studies that support the idea of the brain as more a receiver/transmitter, a vehicle for consciousness to use what we learn, a portal to a larger stream of consciousness. In an article published in Frontiers in Psychology the authors suggest that none of the primary materialist theories explain consciousness as well as a non-local approach. To think of consciousness as fundamental, pervading everything, makes room for experiences that don’t fit materialist models. A growing number of scientists are looking at the intersection with quantum non-locality in their exploration of consciousness. What creates subjective experience is one of the hurdles a materialist model can’t get past. Art as the expression of subjective life is testimony to the importance of the qualities of being and not just the facts. Though the brain is involved in what we experience as consciousness, it can’t explain everything. Consciousness as the foundation of reality is an area to be explored that would benefit from more art to help us see it.

Nudge

Recognition

Seeing depends on recognition. We need to have seen something before to know what we’re looking for, to lock on to the sense of known. Even when we can’t identify something right away there can be a feeling of familiarity that draws focus. After more than a decade since neuroscience’s discovery of the importance of feelings to thinking, it is finally being acknowledged in media. Feelings come first, providing incentives regarding what needs attention. Feelings accompany vision as an initial assessment of what we’re seeing. They are far more nuanced than words can express, think how many different ways a beautiful day or a wild ocean can look. If we’re looking at another person, the inner mirroring of face and body language help us feel what another is experiencing. Besides our experience of our surroundings, we have art to show the deep movements of the heart. Artists throughout time have shown what’s it’s like to be human, to appreciate beauty, shudder at horror and gasp at what’s ugly beyond human understanding. Art is our vehicle to witness what’s not within our own experience and enlarge our understanding of feeling and intuitive judgment. Looking at the art that attracts you trains that sensitivity. Building faith in our response to what we see can strengthen our moral judgments to hold up against the flood of verbal justification. Realizing the importance of visual judgments could guide us in better understanding what is happening in our world. Vision shows what’s harmonious, what’s in conflict, where something valued has been defiled. Many of us felt heartsick at the demolition of the east wing of the White House, a place that belonged to the country, not an individual, and provides a recent example of how what is wrong is felt. The machine bites off a piece of building we care about and we feel it in our chest. Likewise, we recoil at human beings being thrown to the ground, treated with disrespect and carted off to cages. Destroying small boats and the people in them without evidence of wrongdoing is another ugly scene in our current reality horror show. The words and explanations don’t carry the weight of witnessing and feeling the truth of what we see. Understanding how powerful our vision is in seeing right and wrong, goodness and cruelty, comes with the responsibility to look. In a world full of distractions, it’s too easy to ignore what’s actually happening around us. Making decisions about where to give our attention is the first step in active awareness.

Joy in Action

Loss of Care

In the early stages of my grief after my husband died, I was grateful for texting because answering any question, especially about how I was doing meant falling apart. The distance and detachment of texting allowed me to communicate without losing control of my emotions. But the level to which this detachment now pervades modern consciousness worries me. Connecting to my last post about the condition of modern attention, I was struck while recently in Ireland, by a column by Joe Humphreys in the Irish Times focusing on the same direction. Referring to the work of an Irish based study group, Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, who draw on the work of Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, Humphreys asks, “What, after all is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?” It’s an important question. What we notice is what we care about, good and bad. With the lack of attention to our environment, the concern that should be generated by what’s being eroded isn’t there. Our image of our world is being blinkered by one small device. The loss of care, of feeling for our surroundings is a casualty of the phone-based lifestyle. The detachment I appreciated when grieving has become a pervasive default state, the full range of emotions flattened by the same inexpressive text. I think to myself of what I wrote about a friend’s piece last month and how deeply expressive each of the fonts of each of the layers of words were, adding a tone of voice and emotional attitude. What she’d done with the style of each font felt like a master orator’s persuasive tones in a monologue. The option to illustrate, in that piece, an open-mouthed reptile near the bottom added anxiety to the whole. It's not the words that are the problem. There is privacy in writing by hand as well as a level of intimacy that is hard to achieve with technology. Sometimes a letter arrives, and I know instantly who it is from, handwritten, hand drawn and collaged, the appearance says more than the words themselves. It’s a multidimensional depth of expression which is why letters are kept for life, expansive personal messages that say they care in every part. We don’t realize how much is lost when we only email and text, all content regimented, made uniform by the mechanism. We make more of ourselves visible when we write by hand. Taking time to look, to notice the world around us, seeing the needs of others and the condition of the environment build care for them. Thinking about how we express ourselves to others offers a choice of how much care we want to give.