Tag Archives: healing

“Artivism”

UPDATED: I was floundering in one of my unfocussed days, typing a million disparate thoughts, unable to make them meld properly. This is, perhaps, partly to do with the inherent abstract nature of art and the subjectivity surrounding it. I want to say something, but I am unable to find the right words in the right order. I’ve not rewritten, but I’ve tweeked a few lines to make them more cohesive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we use art in activism lately. We create signs for protests, write songs and stories, make documentaries…. City streets are littered with graffiti – everything from murals depicting a civil rights event to simple written messages.

Continue reading “Artivism”

Regenerating Life and Love: The People

I am going to pivot a bit on this one – bail on the format I was previously using (see my first three in the Regenerating Life and Love series: Intro, the Environment, and Animals and Fungi). When it comes to Mount St Helens, it is true that tourism, the logging industry, and other human activities have resumed in the area, but I am not certain how I feel about some of our resilience in the aftermath of this particular catastrophic event. When we speak about systems in nature regenerating life, we often look at them in terms of returning, recovering, and perhaps even overcoming (a forest fire might open up coniferous seeds to yield new forests or a species returning to spawning areas after an oil spill). We like things we can measure and track over time. Useful as that might be, it tends to also ignore the grey spaces of regeneration and healing. And for the human factor, this might be the most important bit.

Continue reading Regenerating Life and Love: The People

Regenerating Life and Love: The Animals (and Fungi)

At the risk of forging through the gate this week with another complaint about the human species, I want to lead with a personal frustration I have when I hear individuals reduce the importance of a species that is going, or has gone, extinct with a flippant toss of the hair, followed by a casual “who cares?” This is often embedded within a conversation intended to discredit environmental programs that favor a small endangered organism over that of human interest. Well, I’m pretty sure I speak on behalf of the organisms at risk of becoming extinct that they care. They probably care a great deal. Moreover, we should all care. Perhaps, if we just took the time to realize their worth….

Continue reading Regenerating Life and Love: The Animals (and Fungi)

Regenerating Life and Love: Introduction

This morning I woke up thinking about the concept of healing. Specifically how nature has the ability to recover from disasters, and how, in some bleak cases, it might not. I set out to research nature’s restorative and regenerative abilities, only to find that, regardless of how I arranged and chose my search terms, the internet consistently thought I was asking how nature heals us. Humans.

Continue reading Regenerating Life and Love: Introduction