Replies

Kevin,
Thank you for posting your springboard project, sharing how process thought informs and guides you and those you work with who have disabilities. You offer both a heartbreaking and a hopeful journey. You certainly capture life’s tragic beauty, as Whitehead would call it.

May your book inspire and inform others.

With gratitude, Rolla

Dennis,
Thank you for posting your springboard project. Thank you for your kind words. Thank you using process thought to guide your adventure.

Journey well, Rolla

Douglas,
Thanks for your generous comments. I’ll try to get back to offer more of a summary of Kojin Karatani’s Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. It’s a short book but brilliant because he illustrates how the Ionians were really a diverse group of people who developed city-states. Some came from Greek tribes, others from Persian tribes, etc. For instance, the Pre-Socratic Thales was Persian… Two principles guided them: Freedom and Equality. That’s the crucial point. They did not have the slave systems of other areas. They fostered experimentation, inventing the wine press and other practical instruments that reduced labor, etc. Isonomia as a term means, no rule, which really means no one ruling over others. If you don’t like what the community you’re living in is doing, you have the freedom to move.

I’ll try to come back to this but I really encourage you to read his book.

Charlie,

Thank you for posting your Springboard Project: Denise Levertov. Also, thank you for directing me to her work. I’m inspired and will carry her forward in my walks in the forest when I recite poetry to trees.

I’m so happy that you wrote and shared a poem she inspired you to write.

With appreciation and gratitude, Rolla

[Rolla Lewis]

Hello Matt,
Thanks for the response. I love the Whitehead Word Book. I have not been able to get any friends or family to read it, or anything by Whitehead for that matter. I have directed a number of folks to Jay McDaniel’s What is Process Thought? Jay’s very accessible overview. I get more process-relational dialogue going when talking about fiction, like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future, or Ursula LeGuin’s works, or David James Duncan’s Sun House. In an exchange with Duncan, he told me that he never drew upon Whitehead, but more on Eckhart, Buddhism, and Eastern spiritual traditions. He invited me to share more about Whitehead. Still and back to my point, with my own friends and family, I think fiction and poetry ends up being the entry point for talking about process-relational thought and practice. Oh yes, I also had a wonderful conversation with my family about Andea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humbolt’s New World.

Of course, when I use the term “process-relational thought and practice,” I expand it as far back as the Pre-Socratics and Daoists, and even forward to deep ecologists like Arran Gare and Freya Mathews, and Dialectical Social Ecologists like John P. Clark. I like the big umbrella, even if there are some challenges.

I like the idea of having folks who dedicate their lives to exploring Whitehead, and I have a dream of helping more folks to find both shelter and community under this big umbrella.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by Rolla Lewis.

Bill,
Thank you for the wonderful reflection.

Bill, Always a pleasure to ride along with your thinking.

As a gardener, I try to see “suffering, letting go, and experiencing cessation” as part of a regenerative process, where I have to empty myself of expectations, like when my lettuce bolts because of the heat. I suffer loss (no lettuce), let go, experience cessation by putting the bolted lettuce into the compost, and replant.

Replanting obviously cultivates hope, but I think my expectations are informed by life beyond my control, which I empty myself of, knowing that the heat could make the lettuce bolt again, or if those variables beyond my control are just right, the garden might generate more lettuce than I can imagine and I’ll be able to share my bounty with family and friends. Even when abundant, when the lettuce runs its course, there is suffering that it is gone, letting go as it perishes into memory, and experiencing cessation that season is over and winter coming. Even there, there is hope that the corn salad I plant is hardy enough to offer gifts beyond the variables I cannot control…. These are thoughts that should probably compost for a bit before trying to force them up here, but sometimes you play in the compost…

Mark and Benjamin,

Thanks so much for responding and thinking about the post I tossed up. Although a bit tongue-in-cheek, when referring to granola munching hippies, I do think there are ideas and activities that occur unseen yet emergent in popular culture and other ideas and practices that are developed dialogically (or in the case of the example I’ll offer, dialectically) with others. I don’t know if any of this will stick or even make sense but I’ll go pop corn for a few paragraphs and leave it there.

First, about 25 years ago Don Cupitt came out with The New Religion of Life in Everyday Speech. It is a short book, and I like it better than the one he wrote later titled Life, Life. In both he looks at the word “life” in everyday speech and how it has become the sacred object. As an example of how life has displaced God, he shares something like: Think about being at a funeral. If the person offering condolences says something like, “She loved God,” every one is going to look around, confused or projecting their own meanings. Where as, if that same person says, “She loved Life,” those same people would look around and shake their heads in agreement, etc. God talk evokes diverse responses, some of which are deadly to those who do not see God the same way. Cupitt points out that we no longer have funerals, we have celebrations of life. We tell folks who are obsessive about getting things right to “get a life.” We encourage our friends and family to “live life dangerously,” slipping Nietzsche into everyday talk. My point is to listen closely to the word “life” all around you.

I think Cupitt is on to something when he shows how life talk is very much woven into our everyday language. Folks use life idioms and language as part of our daily conversation. It is not coming from on-high from philosopher kings, but bubbling up in our daily conversations. It is relational and immanent. Although they don’t cite Cupitt (who is informed by language philosophy (a different club)), Arturo Escobar, Michal, Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma push the life talk forward in Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (2024). For them, they frame biology and social life as embedded in webs of relationality. Given that they cite Whitehead and other panpsychists, I will risk it to say they are expressing an emergent panpsychism. The same with Michael Hogue’s American Immanence: Democracy For An Uncertain World (2018). He traces some threads within the US culture that embrace immanence (which I align with panpsychism) where democracy is viewed as an “associational ethos of vulnerable life” (p. 174). There is ontology of internal relatedness already woven into the culture and being expressed and developed more explicitly now.

That is what I am thinking in some rough way when I talk about taking Whitehead to the masses. I’ll share more on that after my second point.

Second, panpsychism and politics meet in Dialectical Social Ecology, which emerged from the philosopher John P. Clark, an anarchist who founded the La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology. John might debate me on being called a panpsychist, but his books The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism and Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community are really about engaging the world and creating community as a panpsychist. In fact, his Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisee Reclus has a key quote by Reclus that guides John, “Humanity is nature becoming self-conscious.”

Where was I? Oh, yes, getting to Whitehead or more broadly panpsychism to the masses. This brings up, immanence and panpsychism that is woven into US literature, be it Emily Dickenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalist tradition, or the literary adventure and advocacy in the West. I’m thinking John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown as a very explicit example. Or the new one by David James Duncan, Sun House, which is about recognizing place as living and people as capable of living in partnership with the places where they dwell.

The world will always be at the edge of uncertainty. We have to learn how to surf that uncertainty. Or as they do in Sun House, lean into the uncertainty and understanding that there is a lot of death and destruction in the world, but we can do what we can WITH others to make the places where we dwell better places for ourselves and even the land we are part of, as well as the animals who live there.

Sorry for the rush. My grandkids are pulling on me.

This is such a lovely conversation. te’a, I’m hearing a very supportive learning community respond with compassion and ways to carry the conversation forward. Thank you, learning community!

Doug, I agree. The change in necessary. Panpsychist connection to nature and being part of nature has deep cross cultural roots, i.e., the Daoists, the Pre-Socratics, Native American cultures, etc. We have deep strands of immanence in the USA, probably thanks to Native Americans. Still, Emerson and the Trancendentalists, William James, and the contextualists (aka, Pragmatists) influenced Whitehead’s ideas, which are not easy to describe to anyone other than those familiar with him. You have to be part of a club, so to speak. So yes, understanding Whitehead is a secondary benefit. How to we foster a popular discourse that really helps more people appreciate and see themselves as part of a living planet? I actually think immanence is part of the lived culture in the USA. In fact, Michael Hogue takes a bit of that view in his American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World, a fun read and not as difficult as Whitehead.

Tom,
Thank you for your openness, vulnerability, and creativity. Glad to have you in the group and to hear more about your story.

Your Fools Mission and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry remind me of Robert James Duncan’s Sun House, where one of the characters creates a faith community in Portland based on the teachings of Meister Eckhart and the beguines practices in the middle ages.

Tom, thanks for your kind words. Both my San Quentin bound students are tragic for different reasons. Here is not the place to tell their stories, or maybe I’m not even the person to tell their stories either.

I’m glad to have you in the class and witnessing your active engagement and encouragement of others.

Hello Christie,
I’m excited to hear about how wonder was your dissertation topic. I wrote an article years ago titled Mindful Wonderment, where there was an invitation to slow down, listen more deeply before defining direction and conclusions when conducting research with a team– in this case integrating social justice into graduate education programs.

Yes, wonderment all the way. Mindful wonder as a practice.

Looking forward from learning from you.

Thanks, Rolla

Mark,
Thanks for wondering out loud with me. My wife embodies process without the labels and intellectualizing. I fell in love with her when we worked together at a scientific study center in Mexico where international visitors, scientists, and artists came. She was co-director and caught my attention when she engaged folks at our large 20-person dining table in English, Swiss German, German, French, and Spanish. She made mono-lingual and multi-lingual people feel welcome and invited. She bridged cultural and linguistic differences. She and the director (the only Swiss) would speak to each other in Swiss-German they would model how exclusive language could be; their focus was always on bridging cultures and helping others recognize themselves as participating in cultural and biological life. When conversations would drift into the philosophical and abstract, she would invite conversations about the relational and action-oriented. How does that make a difference in the lives of others? As a Swiss, she spoke directly to topics and called out bullshit, but in ways that invited mutual respect and ways that offered the verbose and pompous pathways to dial it down– apologizing, shutting up, etc.

After 44 years with her, our conversation continues. She is the one who suggests novels to get me out of my nonfiction ruts; I am forever grateful to her for introducing me to Richard Ford. She and I garden, she had final word on flowers and I have final word on vegetables. I could go on, but we came together in ways that cultivated finding joy in little things, not in weighing and comparing stuff. At the same time, we are keenly aware that our car, house, and garden are big things beyond those marginalized in our capitalist country. We recognize that moral blindness (Bauman’s term) is not an option. We are neighbors with those without homes living in our neighborhood, and we wrestle with how to advocate for local political actions to address needs and discuss the best personal actions to take. I’ve got no magic solutions there but our dialogue is genuine, and our personal actions mostly local. Our relational process is process-relational.

I don’t know if that addressed everything but that’s where I went. Thanks again, Mark for prompting thought– and the act of writing…. I’m wondering if my wife is my process guru. Maybe I’ll say I’m a Cornelian, emerging from a process tradition with roots in Daoism, the pre-Socratics, Swiss mountains, etc…..

Hello Bill,
Thanks for your kind and generous comments. You ask, “What do when we are stuck with experience as a private possession, though?” I don’t think “killing the ego” is much more than a linguistic gambit or a lifelong process. I think engaging WITH others via dialogue, dance, play, sport, relationships, etc. is a form of getting beyond being stuck in private experience. Even this, I have to think about what you are saying and I don’t even know what I am thinking or going to say until I open myself to you, writing down those thoughts. It’s a process.

In my years doing tai chi, we practice our forms individually and in groups, but the deepest learning comes from practicing push hands, where you “listen” deeply to the other and become attuned to them. If you drift, you can get popped, or if you push without listening you can find yourself moving into empty space.

Another example, I have been conducting lifescaping action research with an international team from Japan, Wales, Guatemala, Nigeria, Ohio, and Oregon; our focus was human and tree relationships. Our endo-methodology was initiated on a rather mechanistic design focused on eco-educational activities drawn from the work of Henryk Skolimowski and Joseph Cornell. The group met and one of the co-researchers wanted to dismantle the anthropocentric bias, and she suggested that we not start with any activities, that we move at a tree’s space to get to know our individual trees. That is to say, to be WITH our trees before we began to talk to each other about our trees. The shift was fundamental. I got to know my tree better. I introduced my tree to my 4 year-old granddaughter as Hemlock. Although my family has known Hemlock for 25 years, Hemlock has been around much longer…. The entire family talks about Hemlock. During Portland’s heatdome with temperatures over 115, I took action to hydrate Hemlock, who though burned in numerous ways, survived. My ego slipped as I focused on Hemlock’s needs, or hugged Hemlock with my granddaughter, who yesterday began exploring Hemlock’s gender. “Do we use him or her? Why not use both?” Hemlock has pollen and seeds. Our conversation dances. We see that Hemlock is committed to place in ways that we are not. We see Hemlock inviting birds to rest. We sit in Hemlock’s shade. My experience is not within my isolated being but in a contextualized becoming WITH Hemlock, my granddaughter, the birds, etc.