Eirenikon
Dictionary of a Reimagined Culture
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
Transformation is not lying.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy
Transformation seems to me a core universal principle: from star-dust to primordial ooze to Beethoven; wick, wax, flame; ice, water, steam; seed, tree, seed…
LEXICON
apocatastatistics the study of possibility of salvation/enlightenment for all sentient beings
aptosis a petal transforming even as it falls; programmed cell death
chrysalis how does the undifferentiated goo inside a chrysalis turn into a butterfly?
compost alchemy at the bottom of the garden; how to turn shit into roses
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
negative capability capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubt without any irritable reaching after fact and reason (John Keats)
polymorph an organism occurring in several forms
ratbag a term of high approval covering heretics, mavericks, heyokas, liminars, eccentrics
rutherford a unit of radioactive disintegration, equal to a million disintegrations a second
salvation the possibility of ultimate freedom, happiness; there is no individual salvation: whatever this is, we’re all in it together
salvific soothing, anointing, healing
selkie a creature that can therianthropically change from seal to human and back again by shedding/retrieving its skin
shapechanger one who has the ability to embody herself in other life-forms
syntropy the innate drive of living matter to self-perfect
ertium non datur the impossibility of predicting what will arise from the tension between opposing poles, of how dross might transform into gold (the third element is not given: Latin)
tonglen the Buddhist practice of breathing suffering into one’s heart, and breathing it out transformed into compassion
transduce to transfer power from one system to another in the same or different form
transubstantiation transformation of the essence of a substance
yeast minute fungi which induce fermentation; a catalyst of transformation
UNDERGROWTH
…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.
CHEVISANCES
Personal and cultural resistance to change.
Thinking safety lies in a ‘solid state’ universe, whereas flux is in fact the only constant.
How did a uni-celled bacteria in the primal ooze evolve into Beethoven?
The birdsong present in the egg…
We’ve reached the end of an evolutionary cycle. I want to live long enough to see what happens next.