On the road to Vancouver Island, starting research with the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region Research Institute in Nanaimo I had to pass through New York City reconnecting with soul friends and family, sharing fires, teas, food and walks in nature. This has been amazing – a bit under the shadow of doing more than wanted computer work preparing the application for ethics review of the research in Vancouver Island, but extending the stay in NYC allowed for enough time and thought exchange with dear friends and connecting with new wonderful people (working on compost and the waste stream situation in NYC. The flight from Germany to NYC took me over the great Atlantic Ocean letting me peak down on to the ice shelves and mountain peeeeaks of Greenland. Hard to say how big the single ice shell is floating there in the open. We are probably 10km high up in the air, while flying over this piece of ice.
Heart’s calling for a stop in California
The next stop was my heart’s calling place of California. Epic, magical, just the right place, as before – it keeps calling me. The landscape and nature feel deep and home. Flying in from NYC I overlooked Yoemite and Tioga Pass bringing back memories from the train and bike travel in 2017, going up Tioga Pass from the desert side of the Sierra Nevada, winding up into Yosemite. Places that made me cry several times, they touched me so deeply.
In San Francisco I was most warmly welcomed by Robin, who has been good friends with my good friend and room mate Ben – they had met during an ecosystem restoration camp in Spain and through the tragedy of the accident that Ben had the past summer, we had connected beforehand. It was great to meet someone who is already sort of familiar and so welcoming. Taking a road trip along the west coast I was amazed by the landscape and the Redwoods – once cut, a redwood tree has several trees growing in a circle around the old trunk, creating a very special space in their center. It feels like standing in a chapel of wise ancestors. They clearly caught my heart there.
Looking at the landscape I saw a lot of heat scars, dead trees even right by the coast… the past five years certainly have come with heat and wild fires, drought and renewal. It leaves me with a mix of feelings of sadness, despair and motivation to help regenerate. Listening to the radio in the car it seemed time hadn’t moved on – same old classics, as if the world was still like 1970 – but the radio shows do talk about how to save water, how to deal with waste and what to make out of Ukraine and Russia.
The Bay Area seen from Panoramic Viewpoint in Samuel P Taylor Park
Going further up the state and over Robin would take me to his place of calling and doing, Concow, near Chico, which has seen several wild fires in the past decade. One of them being the Paradise fire / Camp Fire from 2018 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018) )The landscape and the scene has a slightly post-apocalyptic touch. Simple, humble life styles, car-dependent, back country style, surrounded by mountains where forests used to stand strong, rocks have ancient marks from grinding oaks – times when one could imagine there still being a creek near the rocks, where indigenous people gathered to make oak meal.
Concow Meadows Research Station –
Please take a look at their website and thought process:
— https://www.concowmeadows.org/ —
The intention of this little camp with yurts and colorful flags blowing in the wind is to plant a seed for regeneration of these burnt landscapes. Keeping down the “fuel”, i.e. cutting of branches that hang low and could catch and keep fire burning, taking out certain brushes and installing some simple irrigation. Nutrient circulation is to be part of that, but cannot be spoken about openly. The political sphere is one that supports Trump, no masks required in the stores – it is actually rather relaxing. People meet people. Mixed feelings.
Reservoir near Concow – bare hills in the background
It feels dangerous to acknowledge that but actually my nervous system relaxed when walking in stores and seeing people’s faces without masks, even though I still had a mask on myself.
For April 3, we drove back to the coast, to visit Occidental Arts and Ecology Center to find out more about their humanure practices and to meet Maurizio from the SAND (Science and Non-Duality) Community in Occidental. We spent a really wonderful morning together, speaking about the relevance of trauma, of course, about our common friend and acquaintance Ben and his injury and just connected on a very human and personal level. I recommend everyone who hasn’t seen it yet, to watch the movie “The Wisdom of Trauma” with Dr. Gabor Maté, which was produced by Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo.
Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Occidental, California
Leaving California – on the way to Portland and the Oregon Coast
After Chico the next stop was taking the Amtrak train up to Portland, Oregon and visit the kind folks who hosted me in 2017. The sea and the beach are wonderful. The clearcutting of forests looks like a razor had gone across the hills. It makes my heart crinch and gives me a feeling of overwhelm… there is Concow where fires took away the forests, and it feels dramatic, and then there are clearcuts, which have a more direct sign of human impact. If I had to weigh them, the latter feels worse, I have to admit. At the same time, I have not talked to forest management and don’t know what are the strategies they are pursuing with this. It is the coast, which is usually rather wet and home to stretches of temperate rainforests, which appear sacred and very special especially when you come from a place like Germany, which has seen layers and layers of cultivation and degradation and rejuvenation of land and spirit, I find it is still often lost in its search for establishing a deeper connection to the land and essence of human life and being again.
Plastic Ocean
Walking along the lowering tides of the beach near Canon Beach I discovered hundreds and hundreds of particles of plastic washed up along the shore – just like in the documentaries. It was another reality check.
DEEP ADAPTATION
The past twei years I have spent exploring the question of how to handle these dramatic changes that are happening to our world – I am still lost in translation, but found a branch of seeds in the Deep Adapation movement. When we did our global analysis in the first semester of my master’s program Global Change Management I felt nobody wanted to speak about the elephant in the room, that if it looks this dyre and things are moving mostly in an unwanted direction, why does nobody talk about systems collapsing and how to be in such ciscumstances and conditions? DEEP ADAPTATION dares to actually look this scary prognosis into its glooming eyes and searches for what may help us to cope with the effects – on a personal, collective, spiritual and physical level. The guiding questions are four R’s:
“Deep Adaptation offers four questions to help guide our inquiry into what kind of adaptation may be appropriate for our lives:
Resilience: what do we most value that we want to keep, and how?
Relinquishment: what do we need to let go of so as not to make matters worse?
Restoration: what could we bring back to help us with these difficult times?
Reconciliation: with what and whom shall we make peace as we awaken to our mutual mortality?
With these ideas – and with the values of compassion, curiosity, and respect – we are embarking on a collaborative journey of understanding.” (from the Deep Adaptation Website, April 7, 2022 – https://www.deepadaptation.info/the-four-rs-a-framework-for-inquiry/ )
I have found this to be helpful when combining it with integrating the body and speaking about our fears from the heart in group settings. From my experience, this helps regulate the nervous systems of those sharing and witnessing and builds a feeling of being held by connecting on a deeper emotional level. This is nourishment for the soul and the body and one walks out feeling nourished.
Social Presencing Theater
The practice of SOCIAL PRESENCING THEATER integrates our bodies in the expressing of our feelings and helping us access a deeper understanding of the situation that we feel stuck in and lets new perspectives and solutions to emerge.
Why Clear Cuts? – The systems thinker kicks in and sees there are several factors to this and if time comes, a systems map will be created to help understand better and support new perspective and angles on this path.
The rest of the month of April will serve to become acquainted with my physical research environment and the people that call the area around Mount Arrowsmith their home.
When a redwood tree gets cut the roots around the cut trunk sprout out and grow a circle of new trees. This was once a giant tree…
Sending much love out from this long-intended and wished for journey and filled with trust and excitement for the what’s to come and grow in the next months.
—
Jenni Ottilie