Tasmanian author Eleanor Vaughan, has released her fifth book, Eirenikon: Dictionary of a Reimagined Culture, under the name Annie March.
A fledgling glossary exploring the whole, healed, holy, ecozoic culture I dream of bequeathing my grandchildren – all of them – sea-eagle eggs, Huon pine saplings, spawning phytoplankton, clear rivers running free…
Excerpt: Chapter 21. TRANSFORMING
LEXICON
apocatastatistics the study of possibility of salvation/enlightenment for all sentient beings
aptosis a petal transforming even as it falls; programmed cell death
enantiodromia the dynamic tendency of the psyche to divide into opposing energies and personalities which are constantly reversing (Greek)
entelechy the dynamic culmination of purposive flowering; the entelechy of an acorn is an oak tree
eucatastrophe an unexpected, sudden, favourable outcome to a chaotic situation
gwairli a graced failure; crack admitting light (Thalassan)
heretic one whose beliefs do not conform to social or religious norms (haeresis the act of choosing; a set of principles: Greek)
heyoka a holy fool who upturns the accepted order, mocks authority, breaks down the barriers; a sacred opening which allows healing and transformation (Sioux)
kahawaii small stream that can move boulders (Hawaiian)
liminar an edge-dweller (limen threshold: Latin)
mandorla in Western art, the mandorla is the almond-shaped aureola framing Christ or Mary. Jungian Robert Johnson has reinterpreted it as the space between two overlapping circles which binds together something torn apart, enables the reconciling of two irreconcilables. As transformation happens, the overlap shifts from a sliver of new moon to the two circles becoming one. In the Hindu tradition, the mandorla is the yoni (vagina)
maverick one who doesn’t conform, a rebel, a stray
metamorphosis radical change in form, as in acorn to oak tree, tadpole to frog; shamanic ability to shape-change into another form
metanoia a radical change of mind or heart
morphallaxis regeneration in a changed form
…I am done with great things and big things; great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible, molecular moral forces that work from individual to individuals, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water.
– William James
Theory of Dissipative Structures – Transformation Theory
According to Ilya Prigogine’s brilliant theory, dissipative structures are open systems, maintained by continuous dissipation and consumption of energy, as water simultaneously flows through and creates a whirlpool: a flowing wholeness, highly organised and always in process. The more complex the structure, the more energy is needed to maintain connections, and the system is very vulnerable to fluctuations. Because the connections are sustained by the flow of energy, the system is always in flux. Paradoxically, the more coherent and intricately connected the structure, the more unstable it is: increased coherence equals increased instability. This very instability is the key to transformation: the dissipation of energy creates the potential for sudden reordering. Movements of energy create fluctuations, which, if they reach a critical size, perturb the system; elements of old patterns connect in new ways. The parts reorganise into a new whole. The system escapes into a higher order.
Peter Levine, in Waking the Tiger, uses a whirlpool as a metaphor for trauma trapped in the body/mind. The psyche responds by generating a counter-vortex. Connecting the two in a figure-of-eight – gently, slowly – enables the trapped energy to dissolve, resolve and the whirlpools to release back into the current.
If I knew how an oak tree gets into an acorn and back out again, perhaps, just perhaps, I’d be approaching wisdom.
What ultimately causes a paradigm to change is the accumulation of anomalies.
– Thomas Kuhn
And when we design ecologically we preserve diversity, work on solar income, live harmoniously within larger patterns, eliminate waste and account for all costs. Designing ecologically requires a recalibration of human intentions with biophysical realities in ways that enhance the regenerative capacities of both human and ecological systems.
– David Orr
Neurofeedback – a tool of personal and cultural transformation? Seventy years of drowning not waving; crippled with unremitting, at times paroxysmal fear; periodic descents into the hell of clinical depression; steady-state exhaustion; no technique nor therapy left unturned. And now, after three years of neurofeedback (which doesn’t make change happen, but enables the brain to harness its innate neuroplasticity), I’m robust, resilient, confident, authentic, spontaneous, energetic; I sleep like a baby; anxiety is vestigial. Reborn (almost) as I embark on my seventy-seventh year? Alleluia…
What causation is involved when the Berlin Wall suddenly falls down, Apartheid comes to an end, peace blooms in Ireland?
I’m fascinated by the ways that in fiction (in the hands of a skilled and ethical writer, another name for truth) it’s invariably a mythic transaction that precedes outer change: in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, the Ring must be destroyed before peace can take root; in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, the mending of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe underpins and catalyses the healing of the realm; in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, the Signs must be rejoined and the Grail found in order to restore hope to humankind. Patricia A. McKillip explores this exquisitely in The Tower at Stony Wood: a woman, by embroidering in a tower the images she sees in her mirror, is an unwitting, potent agent of liberation and transformation.
Eirenikon: Dictionary of a Reimagined Culture is available through any bookshop.
For more information, see https://www.anniemarch.com/eirenikon