25-05-2010, 06:43 AM
"Today, I believe that we will not learn to live responsibly on this planet without basic changes in the way we organize human relationships, particularly inside the family, for family life provides the metaphors with which we think about broader ethical relations. We need to sustain creativity with a new and richer sense of complementarity and interdependence, and we need to draw on images of collaborative caring by both men and women as a model of responsibility. We must free these images from the connotations of servitude by making and keeping them truly elective."
"What we need today is [to] transform our attitude toward all productive work and toward the planet into expressions of homemaking, where we create and sustain the possibility of life. It may take another word to express the single responsibility that unites the homemaker, male or female, with the men and women who mine and plant and create industries and work for effective forms of exchange and for a peaceful world. Such a new term might be ecopoesis, using the Greek root for making that gives us the word poetry. Still, the making of words and rhymes is insufficient; the problem is with our understanding of the materialities that make life possible: the forests and the cooking pots, the necessary recuperation time of fields and workers, the private spaces of our lives where the spirit flourishes, and the woodlands that are still wild."
If it is true that the unit of survival is the organism plus its environment, a sensitivity to the environment is the highest of survival skills and not a dangerous distraction. We must live in a wider space and a longer stretch of time. In thinking about survival, we must think of sustaining life across generations rather than accepting the short-term purposes of politicians and accountants.
The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence. At present, we are steadily depleting the planet of resources and biological diversity; the developed world thrives on the poverty of the South. We are in need of another standing of global relationships that will not only be sustainable but also enriching; it must come to us as a positive challenge, a vision worth fulfilling, not a demand for retrenchment and austerity. This is, of course, what we do day by day when we refuse to accept the idea that we must reject one part of life to enhance another. Projecting a new vision is artistic; it's a task each of us pursues in composing our lives. One can write songs about sharing; it is hard to write songs about limits.
The visions we construct will not be classic pioneer visions of struggle and self-reliance. Rather, they will involve an intricate elaboration of themes of complementarity -- forms of mutual completion and enhancement and themes of recognition achieved through loving attention. All the forms of life we encounter -- not only colleagues and neighbors, but other species, other cultures, the planet itself -- are similar to us and severely in need of nurture, but there is also a larger whole to which we all belong. The health of that larger whole is essential to the health of the parts. Many women raised in male-dominated cultures have to struggle against the impulse to sacrifice their health for the health of the whole, to maintain complementarity without dependency. But many men raised in the same traditions have to struggle against pervasive imageries in which their own health or growth is a victory achieved at the expense of the other. We have perhaps a few years in which to combine these….. We must celebrate the mysterious sacredness of that which is still to be born."
Selected excerpts from Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson, Plume/Penguin, NY 1990.
"What we need today is [to] transform our attitude toward all productive work and toward the planet into expressions of homemaking, where we create and sustain the possibility of life. It may take another word to express the single responsibility that unites the homemaker, male or female, with the men and women who mine and plant and create industries and work for effective forms of exchange and for a peaceful world. Such a new term might be ecopoesis, using the Greek root for making that gives us the word poetry. Still, the making of words and rhymes is insufficient; the problem is with our understanding of the materialities that make life possible: the forests and the cooking pots, the necessary recuperation time of fields and workers, the private spaces of our lives where the spirit flourishes, and the woodlands that are still wild."
If it is true that the unit of survival is the organism plus its environment, a sensitivity to the environment is the highest of survival skills and not a dangerous distraction. We must live in a wider space and a longer stretch of time. In thinking about survival, we must think of sustaining life across generations rather than accepting the short-term purposes of politicians and accountants.
The fundamental problem of our society and our species today is to discover a way to flourish that will not be at the expense of some other community or of the biosphere, to replace competition with creative interdependence. At present, we are steadily depleting the planet of resources and biological diversity; the developed world thrives on the poverty of the South. We are in need of another standing of global relationships that will not only be sustainable but also enriching; it must come to us as a positive challenge, a vision worth fulfilling, not a demand for retrenchment and austerity. This is, of course, what we do day by day when we refuse to accept the idea that we must reject one part of life to enhance another. Projecting a new vision is artistic; it's a task each of us pursues in composing our lives. One can write songs about sharing; it is hard to write songs about limits.
The visions we construct will not be classic pioneer visions of struggle and self-reliance. Rather, they will involve an intricate elaboration of themes of complementarity -- forms of mutual completion and enhancement and themes of recognition achieved through loving attention. All the forms of life we encounter -- not only colleagues and neighbors, but other species, other cultures, the planet itself -- are similar to us and severely in need of nurture, but there is also a larger whole to which we all belong. The health of that larger whole is essential to the health of the parts. Many women raised in male-dominated cultures have to struggle against the impulse to sacrifice their health for the health of the whole, to maintain complementarity without dependency. But many men raised in the same traditions have to struggle against pervasive imageries in which their own health or growth is a victory achieved at the expense of the other. We have perhaps a few years in which to combine these….. We must celebrate the mysterious sacredness of that which is still to be born."
Selected excerpts from Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson, Plume/Penguin, NY 1990.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"