Page 37 - ECOlogic Book

bioregional spirit . . . it can be expressed in numerous ways.” All traditions
can find resonance here.

We can go home again. Thomas Rain Crowe speaks of loyalty to a particular
place. “A place in nature. A place of geography where one’s heart and inner
machinery are filled with the silence of reality, and we are at peace . . . that
place . . . where one gathers into one’s body the unconscious knowledge of
the ancient history of that place, the religious, cultural background of what
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has, in fact, gone before . . .”

More than an idea of place, to Rain Crowe’s mind, “The sense of surrender is
the key to the difference between a true sense of place and a posture of
pretending that incorporates the idea of a “sense of place” into one’s life.
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The idea,” he says, “must come down, and rest at peace in the body.”

The concept that we are woven into the web of life; that we participate in
the life-processes of the biosphere, is perhaps too abstract for the human
mind to grasp. By concretizing this idea in a particular place, we give it life.
We can grasp it. We can feel it. We can live it.

In the EAC July workshop with Eugene Freisen, Thomas Rain Crowe, and
Glen Vales, Thomas suggested that we each ask ourselves the question,
“Why am I here?” and write the answer with our non-dominant hand.
Expecting a more ultimate kind of answer, having to do with the purpose of
my life, I was surprised and moved by what got written. “You are here,” my
left hand wrote “because this is the place that cares for you.” This was
completely unexpected and caught me off-guard because for some time, I’d
been toying with the idea of moving away – to Canada, maybe, or West
Branch. Someplace quieter, closer to the natural world. I now realize that
there is in me, as in everyone, a deep longing to go home, as Starhawk
says, “ . . . to a half-remembered, half-envisioned place we have never
been; a place where . . . there are people to whom we can speak without
having the words catch in our throats. Where a circle of hands will open to
receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us
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whenever we come into our own power.” “Home,” says Ojibwa Wilfred

31 Rain Crowe, Thomas, “You Must go Home Again”, in Fall, 1984 Katuah

32 Ibid.

33 Starhawk, quoted in Home: a Bioregional Reader, Van Andrus, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant & Eleanore
Wright, eds., (New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 1990).

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