An April 2^nd, 2011 posting to the Eugene Permaculture Listserv.
	The localization of romance.
	A quick trawl through the book-pile of a friend gifted a glance at Derrick Jensen’s How Shall I Live My Life: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization, (PM Press, 2008), a collection of Jensen’s interviews with assorted luminaries such as Thomas Berry, Vine Deloria, Kathleen Dean Moore, and so forth. I zeroed in on a conversation with David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, a work that many people I deeply respect consider one of the seminal ‘awakening texts’ of recent decades. (As an aside, I seem to recall a couple of pages in Abram’s book which, if obliquely, nevertheless provide a definitive Kabbalistic rationale for what we commonly term ‘permaculture.’) Anyways, what tickled me most about the Jensen-Abram dialog on this occasion was their brief tangent around what might be word-caged as the ‘localization of romance.’ I’ve previously written, briefly, about healthy community as an emergent property of individuals each settling coherently into local landscape, but only informally among friends have I discussed my intuition and experiences (try exploring a relationship with the world with someone actively settling elsewhere from the downward pull claiming you, for example) which suggest to me that a co-evolutionary characteristic of the ‘new intelligence’ arising among us will inevitably involve the merging of lovers’ hearts in local geography or, put sappily, “love that is true and sheltered grows from and blends with the land.” It was refreshing therefore, to see a direct correlative in the Jensen-Abram conversation confirming their own insights into the immense challenges faced by modern relationships isolated from the sanctuary of an authentically local life. Here’s what they have to say, with a few thoughts of mine, to follow: David Abram: I think I share a similar intuition, which I might put a little differently. Our senses have co-evolved with the whole of the sensuous world, with all these other sentient shapes and forms, all these other styles of life. Our nervous system emerged in reciprocity with all that rich otherness, in relationship and reciprocity with hawks and waves and storm-clouds and waterfalls, with an animate, living land that spoke to us in a multiplicity of voices. I mean, human intelligence evolved during the countless millennia when we lived as gatherers and hunters, and hence in a thoroughly animistic context, wherein every phenomenon that we encountered could draw us into relationship. Yet suddenly we find ourselves cut off from that full range of relationships, born into a world in which none of those other beings are acknowledged as really sentient or aware. We abruptly find ourselves in a world that has been defined as a set of inert or determinate objects, rather than as a community of animate powers with whom one could enter into relationship. A dynamic or living relationship is simply not possible with an object. The only things you can enter in relationship with, the only other sentient beings around, are other humans. Yet the human nervous system still needs the nourishment that it once got from being in reciprocity with all these other beings and entities. And so we turn toward each other, toward our human lovers and friends in the hope of meeting that need. We turn toward our human lovers demanding a depth and range of otherness that they cannot possibly provide. Another human cannot possibly provide all of the outrageously diverse and vital nourishment that we once got from being in relationship with dragonflies and swallowtails and stones and lichen and wolves. It’s just not possible. We used to carry on personal relationships with the sun and the moon and the stars! To try and get all that, now, from another person – from another nervous system shaped so much like our own – continually blows apart our marriages. It explodes so many of our human relationships, because they can’t withstand that pressure.’ Derrick Jensen: That reminds me of something I wrote in my book A Language Older Than Words: “One of the great losses we endure in this prison of our own making is the collapse of intimacy with others, the rending of community, like tearing and re-tearing a piece of paper until there only remains the tiniest scrap. To place our needs for intimacy and ecstasy – needs like food, water, acceptance… – onto only one species, onto only one person, is to ask quite a lot of our sex.” David Abram: Indeed. Our intimate relationships become increasingly brittle. We finally turn toward our lover and say “I really care about you, Darlin’, but I’m somehow not quite feeling…met. I’m just not feeling met by you in the ways I feel I should be.” Of course not! Another person cannot make up for the loss of all that more-than-human otherness, and it is this that makes all our human communities intensely brittle and violence-prone. I don’t think we have a hoot of a chance of healing our societal ills and the manifold injustices we inflict on various parts of the human community, without renewing the wild Eros between ourselves and our sensuous surroundings – without “falling in love outward” (in Robinson Jeffers’ wise words) with the living land that enfolds us…Do you really want a healthy and lasting relationship with your sweetheart? Then instill it with a wider affection for the local earth – with an active affection for the local critters, and plants, and elements – and that will hold your relationship and nourish it and feed it and keep you and your lover able to be fluid with each other, since there are so many other beings who witness and contribute to your partnership. Clearly, such insights suggest that the romantic impulse can be consciously (un)earthed in the integrative shelter of a local embrace. What might women and men discover, together, in the shared experience of raising food well, for example? As it happens, the experiential insights of the paradise gardening movement confirm that when we open individually to the infinitely subtle and penetrating intelligence of local patterns and forces in this way, wittingly or not, we accept a profound invitation to explore the most vital coherence of our senses and thoughts in congruence with the embrace of Nature. With the first small step of conscientiously digging in, we begin harmonizing the music of our lives to the larger influence of natural patterns and rhythms, and to the foundational tranquility at its silent, invisible heart which reclaims and calms us. In felt terms, you might say we come in from the exile of loneliness to the sanctuary of a larger Belonging. Call me an unrepentant romantic but I believe the magnificent experiment in beauty and truth that is the contemporary dance of the sexes has barely begun assimilating itself to this vast supportive process, the genius of the Universe localized into a genii loci, the genius of the local. It has certainly been my experience that where the profound personalization of my own identity integrates with a particularized habitat, the infinite surge brings me into depth-resonance with other women and men also on the path to a ‘homecoming to wholeness’, wherever they are settling. But what unfolds when two hearts become wedded intimately to a shared journey into the same piece of ground? Upon that threshold where Gaian lovers seek inclusion and compensation with the deep ecologies of landscape and all that lives, do we ultimately come home to a circle of Belonging where the distance from isolation to intimacy is bridged by Creation’s love for us, as much as ours for it? n
	April 4, 2011