The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life

{Note: for the time being I would like the following letter, which I wrote to a member of an intentional community in Costa Rica, to serve as my introduction to the Idea of Tree of Life Development as an aspect of integral science and healthy culture. Hopefully I will go into more detail in another entry in this blog at another time. -I-P}

Dear Mr. Brooks

My Name is I-P Odori. I live at Twin Oaks and am a friend of Steve Bloom whom I understand you know as having visited your community in Costa Rica this past February. At various times, usually on rides from Twin Oaks to Charlottesville, I have had occasion to share aspects of my Vision, by which I mean my Diagnosis of and prescription for our Collective predicament, with Steve. One of the things he keeps saying in response is that I should get in touch with you, sound you out about it and see if there isn't any way we could collaborate or help each other. This came up again just this afternoon on the way home and I promised him that I would begin a letter to you this very evening. And so I am.

What I am going to try to do in this letter is see just how concise I can be about my vision and about what it might have to do with you and Puntamona community. In attempting a relatively brief outline I will probably leave a great deal unmentioned that I would have liked to include and that you might have found interesting. To compensate for this I refer you to the good amount of supplementary materiel that you can find in the archives of my two Blogs: Integralscience.motime.com and Lifedancelog.motime.com.

I'll start by quoting the advertisement for a workshop I gave at NCOR (National Conference for Organized Resistance) in Washington this past January:

For more about the details of these four aspects of healthy culture (healthy cosmology, identity, ritual and infrastructure), I again refer you to my two blogs. The part of my Vision of healing that I want to describe now--and the part that seems especially relevant to such a community as yours--has to do with the way I envision Healthy Culture as it relates to human settlement patterns and to what is called "Development".

The Tree of Life

The Tree of life is a metaphor for what seems to me to be the demographic and cultural sine qua non of any truly sustainable way for an intelligent life form to inhabit a planet. Roughly speaking, this metaphorical tree is comprised of healthy Wilderness "roots", healthy Agrarian "leaves", and sustainable Urban "flowers and fruits". The Trunk and Branches represent the paths, trails, streets, and roads and waters, of an appropriately propotioned inconnecting transportation infrastructure.

Wilderness

The roots and ground of the Tree of Life are in wilderness, the indigenous sensibility, and an intimate, relatively unmediated relationship to wild places and beings. It is for lack of experience and familiarity with this humble and intimately indigenous way of knowing and being in and with wild nature that we are alienated, not only from nature, but from Spirit and from our own bodies which are the part of Nature that we are most concretely. Any agrarian or urban culture that lacks such a sensibility and experience of wildness is effectively cut off from its roots and ground and so doomed to dissociation, alienation and eventual self-destruction. Such dissociation is a big part of the reason for the sad state of rural as well as urban America today and is responsible in large part for the very existence of the suburbs. A way of life that does not involve and integrate the wild and the so-called primitive aspect of the world will never be a sane and healthy life.

It is all right therefore-it is in fact necessary-that there be people in the wilderness; it is just that they must be truly Wild People, truly initiated into an indigenous way of life. The archetype of this kind of initiatory and healing relationship with wilderness is the vision quest, but it also includes wild crafting and hunting and gathering generally.

I happen to know of various primitivist groups (one that is even called "Wild Roots") that are very enthusiastic about such a way of life. However, in every case I know, the enthusiasm is informed by the dissociated "Apart-ness" cosmology that rejects and refuses to see the need or possibility for the integration of this primal existance with the rural and the civil. In most cases the "Baby" of real neighborliness and true civility is thrown out with the "bath water" of our sick-cultures corruptions of these things. So far as I can see, such "wilderness roots" must doom themselves, without a trunks and leaves to nourish and be nourished by.

Countryside

For the ground and roots of a tree are not all of it or course, and cannot exist alone either actually or metaphorically. It is not at all realistic that the predominantly Urban population of the world could, or even should, disappear into the wilderness as permanent neo-primitivists. The ground and roots of a tree nourish its trunk and branches, and also its leaves and it fruit. In the Tree of Life development metaphor, The Leaves represent a healthy Agrarian or country way of life that is fully integrated with and supported by Wilderness on one side and equally integrated with and supportive of sustainable relatively "urban" life on the other. If only as a halfway house and reclimatization chamber, the purpose and destiny of rural community is both wilderness outreach and urban outreach.

As we have said, a rural way of life dissociated from wilderness is prone to the disrespect and exploitation of a nature reduced to alienated "I/it" relations of ownership regarding the land and its creatures. With its "cultural immune system" fatally weakened by this hostile estrangement from wildness, it is only a matter of time till such a culture falls victim to the shadow aspects of the necessarily sick urban culture it has unconsciously abandoned itself to. And the Urbanism will necessarily be sick precisely for the lack of the most essential function of the country life; namely a gentle and responsible introduction to wildness and to the art of integrating both it and civility in a sustainable rural lifestlye. Thus rural dissociation from wildness is both a cause and effect of its dissociation from true urbanity. Rural cultures failure to meet the challenge of true xenaphillic civility is a provincially suicidal denial of relationship and responsability, since city dwellers alienated from country life will inevitably destroy it and the wilderness as well along with,ultimately, itself.

Cities

I am well aware that, in their present forms, most cities are parasites on both the countryside and the Wilderness as are almost all suburbs. Yet it is clear to me that, unlike suburbs, cities have the possibility of becoming places of true civility, where the great diversity of human beings can be welcomed and integrated as variations on the great Theme of Individual-Personhood, where a Healthy Culture and Tree-of-Life-enabling  world order must be established, and where the coming-together of the human beings with each other and even with nature must also begin to happen.

The cities I envision as the true Flowers and Fruits of our Tree of Life will ultimately be extremely different from the gross monstrosities that we call cities today, and yet it is in such places that we must begin alter the flawed "genetic information" that has thus far produced, not the Tree of Life but the pathological cultural neoplasm that we erroneously call modern "Civilization". It is in just such places, even as they are, that we must begin to dance the dance of healthy culture and true civility and share the map as well as become the guides for our eventual return home.

Trunk, Branches, Stems

Of course all of these parts must be connected to each other to allow for the flow of life between them. Such a system of transportation will necessicarily be generated--by processes of varying degrees of "formality" and scale, through the varying acts of inner and outer comming-together that constitute a living healthy culture. 

In particular, I believe that liberated and restored waterways will once again function as major part of the pysical body of the Tree I am describing...


Intentional Community: a vision of healing

Like any vision of wholeness the Vision of the Tree of Life is Holographic. By this is mean that the macrocosmic vision of Global healing can be prefigured and invoked microcosmically in the structure and life of a human community and even in that of an individual human being.

For example: Imagine a rural community that also has a house--a kind community center/residence--in the city and which additionally has access to or owns (in the form of a land trust), a piece of relative wilderness. Such a circumstance already allows the integration of wilderness, countryside and city--and their corresponding and previously incomplete cultures--that i am describing as the only sustainable form of human development. The practice of Healthy Culture (healthy cosmology, identity politics, ritual, and infastructure) in the context of such a situation would manifest the Tree of Life in microcosm and would constitute a living and overwhelmingly inspiring example of the way forward for humanity in the coming centuries.

Imagine further the scenario of an addict--a drug addict, an alcoholic , or really just any ordinary alienated modern person--living in a city where the urban outreach wing of such a community can be found. Such a place would form the center of healthy cultural activism in its neighborhood and in the larger city that could function as an open door to healing for such a person, who might eventually find him or herself visiting the rural aspect of the community, with its fresh air, organic food, and meaningful work and ritual. Perhaps in such a place that person would be inspired to experience the further mental and physical detoxification of a vision quest. Surely the potential for transformation and healing is strong in such experiences when they are rightly presented and understood. And even if such a person should subsequently have to return (due perhaps to population or resource considerations) to his or her previous situation, they would still have the support of the urban branch of the community and the possibility of visiting the countryside and wilderness again and find renewal.

Such a process of integration, which would conceivably also go in another direction for those equally trapped in the incivility and "nonindigenous-ness" of small town or suburban life, would already be a presaging and exemplification of the healing that must inevitably be exponentially increased if the human race is to have a future worthy of the having.

The Tree of Life, Healthy Culture, Puntamona...and me.

Perhaps you can see now what I am getting at, by way of a proposal, with all of this. As I understand it, the situation of yourself and your community approaches that from which a microcosmos of the Tree of Life could emerge. I have presented this outline of my vision of that tree (which is both an aspect of and an effect of Healthy Culture) in the hopes of inspiring you to take advantage of this situation.

Of course what is missing from my presentation of this vision is a detailed description of the Cosmology, Identity Politics, Ritual and Infrastructure of Togetherness which constitute Healthy Culture and without which a single Tree of Life (let alone the Global Forest of such Trees that I ultimately intend) can never be, since only such culture contains (among othrer things) the "genetic information" neccessary for its unfolding. There is much (though not yet enough) about this on my web logs and there will be more. But the proper sharing, cocreation, and transmission of this culture is not really something that the internet can accomplish-even though e-mails between yourself and myself would certainly help matters. What will inevitably have to have to happen, if you become and remain interested in all this, is a non-virtual series of encounters between us which will hopefully culminate in that Culture coming alive between us as we both discuss, practice and modify it together.

Seeds

It is the Culture of Apartness, as we carry it within us and transmit it across the generations through formal and informal education, which has enabled the mutual dissociation of wilderness, country side, and the city in our minds and in our way of "life", just as its leads us to divorce subject from object, self from nature, Living from dying, and the Good from the True and the Beautiful. I feel that only healthy culture--which again is not only a cosmology, but an Identity Politics, Rituals, and an Infrastructure--can bring both the Tree and ourselves back to Life in a sustainable way.

And only the seeds of such a healthy culture  (seeds that both produce are produced by such Trees of Life) are worthy (if it must happen at all) to be sown beyond our present home on earth to any other in the distant future.

Conclusion.

The lack of healthy culture has created the meaninglessness and alienation that must culminate in our permanent estrangement from wilderness, countryside, true urbanity, and from our real selves as Individual-Persons. I invite you to join with me in the project of living another possible future and of inspiring the world with the beauty, meaning and intrinsic joy in even the attempt at such a thing.

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Sincerely

I-P Odori