I experience the world emotionally. Reason may kick in to confirm or change my emotional response, but the emotional response is the first and most permanent reaction. I have matured to trust my emotions.
I have a strong emotional reaction to the ways the things we make meet our natural environment. Lately I have been focusing on how trees are treated in urban environments. Take a look the next time you are out walking in the city. You’ll find trees are treated many different ways where they meet the ground. I see each case as a small expression of our relationship to nature. Paving running right up to the tree trunk! A tree girdled by the hole in an iron grate! Trees in the city seem like animals in a zoo. People tell me this is “a proper urban use of natural elements.” Hooey! This is just the tip of the iceberg of my larger opinion of plants’ treatment in the city. These symbols of our attitude toward nature are very important to me. I wonder whether others share that opinion.
My emotional response to the world is the source of my motivation for undertaking any difficult endeavor. Let me be clear here: Motivation is rooted in emotion that originates from within me and no amount of prodding from another person can really motivate me, past satisfying their demands minimally, unless it sparks an emotional response. I wish people concerned with getting others to be more environmentally responsible would focus on that prime motivator more often, instead of spending their time crafting sticks. We have to deeply believe, at an emotional level, in what we’re doing, that it promises a better existence for us and our loved ones.
Finally, I believe the solutions to our present troubles lie in the relationships we make with each other and with the Earth. The objects we make, the social and economic systems we perpetuate, and the technologies we develop are products of those relationships. I feel we must get to the source and do work on the relationships themselves. I need to know the other in the relationship, I need to appreciate their differences and create common ground, and I need to value them as an individual. This applies to people and not-people; I see the Earth as a collection of subjects that is not limited to humanity.
I did not come to these beliefs about emotions and relationships quickly. I have slowly stripped back the layers of the onion. I now see that the most meaningful things in my life were the result of emotional decisions I made and the importance of my relationships to others and my environment. Some of these flew in the face of reason. When I moved back to my family home it had been vacant for 20 years. No one said salvaging it was the sensible thing to do, but it is the most important thing I ever did. Now who I am is intertwined with this place, the energy of it: family and rural life, history and connection. I am an extension of it and it of me. Loving a place and caring for it as yourself is one heart of our future, not just for me, but for us all.
I presently feel somewhat isolated by these beliefs. The world does not seem to be going in my direction. The world prefers efficiency, disposability, centralization, and placelessness. It’s not that any person I talk to prefers this; the mechanisms exist beyond any one person and behave inhumanly.
I am further isolated by the type of discussion I would like to have. I would like to focus on seeing the world in emotion and relationship, and many others would prefer to work on the same problems from the world of technology and empiricism. I do not disagree with the value of the empirical, but I do disagree with the almost complete absence of the subjective and emotional in such discussions.
Given my assertion that we must discover more healthy relationships between ourselves and this planet, we should be doing work directly, explicitly, on those relationships, and teaching others how to come to a new relationship.
In order to be actionable, this talk about the importance of emotion and relationships has to be grounded in something. I admire the thinking of Buckminster Fuller, not especially his vision of the future, with flying cars and geodesic domes, but rather his opinion that you cannot talk about abstraction purely, that it must be grounded in the physical or in experience for it to be understandable. When he talked about theory, he always included what he called “artifacts” that evidenced the theory. The things he designed: domes, houses, cars, were artifacts, or physical representations, of his view of the universe.
I agree with Bucky. If I can characterize these emotional reactions and relationships I am interested in, then it should follow that I can create artifacts of these relationships. In other words, I should be able to create a house, a piece of furniture – almost anything – that speaks of and teaches about a particular view of the relationships between ourselves and our universe. And I think I can find other types of artifacts of these relationships through stories about things I see. I can express that relationship to you bit by bit, artifact by artifact.
As you’ve grown to know me on this website, you know I do not care for things that can be simply defined. I like wiggle room. Good things happen when we are wondering; exploring what lies in that room of wiggle. Even so, here is a short definition of what I am up to:
“Investigating a dynamic and perpetual relationship with each other and the Earth and creating artifacts of that relationship.”
Seems like there is plenty of wiggle room there.
More to come…
-Pete
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