Introduction: How to Love Black Snow

1 Introduction: How to Love Black Snow David W. Jardine Despite the likely alien and awkward feel of the concepts involved, we might, when hearing a sutra, experience a quite innocent sense of wonder ‐‐ a brief moment of almost childlike, delightful surprise, perhaps colored by a subtle tone of promise and potential. In line with the teachings set out in this book, we might say that just such a brief clearing within simple, unprepared wonder is what constitutes the awakening of faith in the Great Vehicle. From the "Translators' Introduction" to Ornament of the Great Vehicle Sutras: Maitreya's Mahayanasutralamakara (Doctor 2014, p. vii) Now little riverbed stones impress upon my bare feet the aggregate intelligence of form and fit, particular trees stand tall in my memory as pedagogically significant, the cheap yellow paint on my pencil peels and reveals flesh – what kind of mushrooms are these? From somewhere deep within the inquiry, beneath the words –how is it possible! ‐‐ a world approaches. From Chapter One, "this is the mystery: meaning" This book is worth every moment of while it takes to read it. It must be read as carefully as mushrooms that always just might be poisonous even if delicious, just might be nourishing even if acrid. We are in a fix ‐‐pedagogically, ecologically, in body and mind and otherwise ‐‐ and it’s going to take some doing to even start undoing this fix. The object of concern in this beautiful book is grave and imminent‐‐the tear of flesh that is surely coming in these ecologically sorrowful times. Michael Derby's book is rife with soaring, awakening insight into the often ignored, often trivialized and Romanticized, nature of our ecological intimacy, our Earthly Being beyond the confines of the all too human. And it couples these insights with detailed and careful thought to the pedagogy of these matters and to long and tangled histories of human images and thinking in which we have "b[ou]nd ourselves without a rope" (Loy 2010, p. vii). Read this book slowly and repeatedly. That is what it needs and deserves. If you read it too fast, the pull of the gravity and imminence of our circumstances will only increase. Read slowly, the pull starts to lessen and we can then slowly start to see where we are, what has happened to us and our kin, what we have done, what we might now do. Hurry will only lead to panic that is distracting and of no use. It will only tighten the knots and the tangle and the confusion. Here, right off the bat is one great gift of this book. We hurry. And that last sentence can be read too fast. We hurry, and when our circumstances become dire, we react by accelerating, with little or no understanding of how our hurry is profoundly complicit in increasing our panic, thus increasing our hurry, and so on. It is no accident that Buddhists characterize the deepest human afflictions as caught up in a Wheel. The spell of this ever‐accelerating wheeling must be broken. Great and increasingly loud and monstrous hallucinations about how we might Save The Earth 2 (capitalized, and then in all caps, and then bolded, and then in a bigger pitch, and on and on) must stop. This just increases the spellbinding. In its stead, awakening, brief clearings, little riverbed stones and particular trees. This book has been of great use and great remind to me in understanding a school I visited last week, listening to and watching French Immersion Grade One children couple together found words and posting them for all to see ‐‐ and then up goes this accidental couplet, neige/noir, "black snow," and how we all gasped a bit at the beckoning incomprehensibility of it: the feel of a world approaching, of aggregate intelligence, of language living instead of dead, and of the warm presence of us huddled together over this classroom happenstance. So momentary, but just because of this, the true weal of words is felt approaching and whooshing overhead. We duck and giggle. In brief. Neige noir. I must remember this. This isn't a big deal, this. It's a small one. One among many pleasures in this book is that, read the right way, it is full of such clear and clearing messages about commonplace and everyday events inside and outside of commonplace and everyday classrooms with commonplace and everyday children and adults and the territories in which they might meet their more‐than‐human kin. It is about how we might make schools not just livable and sustainable but beautiful and wise. It is not just about poetry (Chapter Three) or about metaphor (Chapter Four) but demands that: here, where it seems impossible that one life even matters (Wallace 1987, p. 111) here, we seek the feel of mycelial pulls: right now, in the midst of things, this and this (p. 111) This book asks me to stop over things, to stoop, to think. "With this bird" (see Chapter Four). I am so relieved to say that this book is not about "environmental education" as some sort of subject area (usually a sub‐division of Science Education or Outdoor Education or both) among others inside or outside of schools. This literal minded image of environmental education simply abandons the rest of our human inheritance and of the lives of teachers and students to countless ecological disasters, one worksheet after the other. Instead, this: All of our thinking and being and imagining is ecological. All knowledge entrusted to teachers and students in schools comes with place and inhabitation and faces and tales ‐‐fields of wonder that call for the sort of thinking proper to such fields and their cultivation and care. This is an ancient Aristotelian reminder of mensuratio ad rem: thinking which finds its proper measure, not in the methods of human approach, but rather in the thing being thought: Thinking is not a means to gain knowledge. Thinking cuts furrows in the soil of Being. About 1875, Nietzsche once wrote (Grossoktav WW XI, 20): "Our thinking should have a vigorous fragrance, like a wheatfield on a summer's night." How many of us today still have the senses for that fragrance? (Heidegger, 1971, p. 70). From the beginning of Chapter Two: 3 Occasionally, we may happen upon the fruiting bodies of this living, subterranean entanglement (if we live, or make time to go, or are taken to the places where fungi still bloom, and if we pay attention) and only then do we become aware of the vibrant webwork beneath us and, perhaps, if our earthly connection has not been severed or schooled out of us, we are reminded of the interdependent ethos of a “humus filled” existence. We, too, are fruiting bodies, as is Pythagoras and Andromeda and Coyote, and place value, and this is no more and no less a metaphor than it is of fungi. Coyote always arrives with earthly connections and subterranean entanglements. And when you place something in a place, that place itself is not just an empty, abstract spot, but has a value (Latin valere, two meanings of which are "be strong, be well" [Online Etymological Dictionary]) that affects how to think about what happens to what has been placed there. Change the strength and well being of the place and things in that place change. My work could not have become what it did had I not lived in these Foothills. Place value. Simple! Mathematics and its Roman and Arabic numeric roots as forms of ecological awareness, of locales and ancestors and relations and imagining. As a Grade Six student once told me, of course Roman numerals have no place value, because Rome was an Empire, and every place it went was Rome‐‐"the vibrant webwork beneath us." "The way we treat a thing can sometimes change its nature" (Hyde 1983, p. iii) and we mustn't simply go outside (although we must, we must) and abandon everything left inside the school walls. This is the tough, exhilarating work that this book asks readers to practice right in the midst of the circumstances we face. Here. Grade One. If it can come to be treated the right way, for its fragrances. If we don't treat it that way, our sense for this fragrance becomes uncultivated, unpracticed, dimmed and distant. Its loss of fragrance and our nose for it rise and fall in concert. Thus, this book lays out a bit of a rescue mission, to learn to read even little Grade One word searches as eco‐poetic, eco‐pedagogical gestures, to become studied and still enough to stop panicking and let ourselves remember how both right‐angled triangles and the curves of vines around a tree both become more radiant in each other presence. Hans‐Georg Gadamer (2007) calls this, in an indirect way, an experience of beauty. Each reads the other out into the open, and releases it from its literal self‐absorption and self‐containedness. In each other's presence, each becomes exquisite and irreplaceable in the fullness of things and their ways. Treated properly, each is radiant, lighting up the dependently co‐arising place of its residing, its strength and well‐being, its place value. MOVE "We should apply this to every phenomenon" (Tsongkhapa 2005, p. 182), our "selves" included. Mycoremediation (Chapter 7). Inoculation (Chapters 5 and 6). Home‐making and re‐indigenization (Chapter 9) ‐‐ perhaps overall we are dealing with the ability to read properly, with a honed and practiced sense of place and proper proportion, with enough studied memory and experience so that the "resonant ecology of things" (Chapter Ten) can be sensed ringing in the air. We must allow ourselves the hard labor of this repeated and perennial task of recovery, of waking up, again., in search of brief clearings. 4 Frankly, there is great joy to be had here, but it has got an ecological sting: "Everything is teaching you. Isn't this so? Can you just get up and walk away so easily now?" (Chah n.d., p. 5). There are two intertwining paths in this book, one more immediately pleasing than the other. More than any other book in recent memory (I might put Don Domanski's Bite Down Little Whisper [2013] alongside here), this book feels and writes and speaks up out of the lift that comes when we step aside from our heavy inheritance and undo its cloak and instead wander, wilder, with stones underfoot and the duty of noticing. It is equally easy to recoil, as it is to rejoice in the deep experience of our conspiracy with trees and other terranean and subterranean entanglements. Coming to still enough to experience for myself such dependency is, as Michael shows in great detail, deliciously, properly and repeatedly humiliating. With practice, you get used to it. "It is somewhat difficult to establish, but once you are used to it, it will be like meeting an old acquaintance" (Kongtrul 2002, p. 67). In such meetings, our hearts become undone. This book thus speaks about acts of true teaching and learning in ways that lift and open the heart despite its sorrows, but not in order to turn away to some vaguely stupid Ecological Romance or equally distracting Ecological Panic. No, this lift allows those very sorrows to be sung in words and harmonies with Ravens and stones and trees, and not just suffered in silence and isolation. Neige noir and our huddling over it. "Oh sorrow" (Seidel 2014, p. 112). "Hush, child" (Latremouille 2014, p. 30). Do not panic. Deep ecological stillness and experience ‐‐persistent, repeated, generous, patient, persevering ‐‐ are vital to beginning to undo our fix, but they are not sufficient. There is another trail in this book that gives heart and courage. It stares dead‐on, articulately, and in great detail, into the inheritances of thinking and imagining that have helped get us into this fix. How have schools become so often so deadly and boring and afraid? How has literacy lost its ear for orality? How have the wise ghosts of the land underfoot become lost from memory? How has beauty fled, and why, and what happens if we raise our kids in a world without ears, without ghosts, without beauty? This is the second path, which is at once the same path. We need to study in ways that win back our living from its entanglements in unearthly fantasies and fears. Undoing ourselves from the fix we have inherited is going to take some doing. Our study of our circumstances is going to have to be as complex and as difficult and as entailed as those circumstances themselves. There is no way around this and its great ironies. We humans, having disgraced and desecrated the more than human world (and, to our shame, the human one as well), have an all too human task facing us. We must seek wisdom. We must think clearly and without fear and consequent animal panics. As per hermeneutic insight, seeing the world and our fix only in light of and as an outcome of its imminent and grave impingement on us blocks us from seeing it as it is, as it stands there, in its own repose, "over and above our wanting and doing" (Gadamer 1989, p. xxviii). It takes wisdom to escape our selves and the world that then appears only in light of those worried selves and our projections and fears and repressions. We must break our reflection in the water. We must come to, not in 5 order to turn away from the spell, but towards it, now, finally, a bit awoken and more alert. "You can't get anywhere without reading a yak's load of books" (Tsongkhapa 2004, p. 219). One must cultivate "an attentive ear for the language in which the thinking experiences of many generations has been sedimented, long before we begin to attempt our own thinking" (Gadamer 1992, p. 18). Part of the work here in this book, is unraveling how our current ecological concern is, at least in part, a function of how so many of these generations have cocooned themselves (and therefore us, our language, our inheritances, our schools, our teaching and learning) and long‐since lost an Earthly measure of things. And so many of these generations have demanded of those they met that they, too, must lose such measure and its language, its culture, its places. These circumstances are complicated, historically, culturally, philosophically, linguistically, spiritually. They involve colonialism, gender, dreams of heaven and progress and monstrous hopes for mastery over the world, and on and on and on. They include institutional codifications and market economies and media distractions and the "you're either for us or against us" logic of much political wind. We can step away, momentarily, from this tough work, as I often must, seeking the relief of Ravens and wood to split and tomato seedlings on the sill. But simply stepping away leaves our path still blocked. This is why this book leans heavily into the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions of inquiry‐‐Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (see especially Chapter 5), and my old love, Hans‐Georg Gadamer (see especially Chapter 6). I've taught a graduate course in the University of Calgary's Faculty of Education on Gadamer's Truth and Method over twenty‐five times, and it has proven to be true, over and over again, a hermeneutic adage: “[the world] compels over and over, and the better one knows it, the more compelling it is. This is not a matter of mastering an area of study” (Gadamer 2007, p. 115). This tradition, at its best and most vital, lends its attention to the life world, the world as lived, the living world. This tradition ‐‐part of the very Eurocentric orbit that has cause so much of our fix ‐‐ seeks the break of the spell, seeks the Trickster who knows the trick, seeks waking up, it seeks beauty and repose, it seeks to understand "what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing" (Gadamer 1989, p. xxviii)‐‐ all out from constructivist cocoons and somnambulant projects and delusions. Here is where this book becomes slightly magnificent, because the author does not wish to simply swallow whole this tradition of phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophy because it, too and of course, contains sedimented and hardened elements of precisely the unearthliness that has gotten us into the fix we are in in the first place. What the author makes crystal clear is the need for what he brilliantly calls "ecohermeneutic inoculation." From the first pages of Chapter Five: Ecohermeneutic inoculation in this respect is a deliquescent move – at once critical and remedial – that compels a tradition to reveal what it knows, what it has yet to teach, and where it needs to reconnect in order to remain in resonance with the world and our lives as they are now lived. In this sense, an ecohermeneutic imagination is . . . concerned with . . . “salvaging” and revitalizing these philosophic substrates to bring them to bear on ecological pedagogy in a more‐than‐human world. 6 I do adore the fact that I had to look up the word "deliquescent." This is one of the leisures (Latin schola) of study. Unidentified words, like unidentified mushrooms, come to be experienced ecstatically, as a trail with beckonings along it. And, as with mushrooms, getting the etymology wrong can make us lose our way: "from Latin deliquescere 'to melt away,' from de‐ . . . + liquescere 'to melt,' from liquere 'to be liquid'" (On‐Line Etymological Dictionary). This is why we learn to spell. Because if we don't, the spell gets lost, the threads of ancestral memory gets cut, and we no longer have any aid in finding our way. We become lost, and, because of our loss, we eat mushrooms that are deadly. It is an ecological disaster. Yes. Wait. Here. Got it! Deliquescence. Hermeneutics "makes the object and all its possibilities fluid" (Gadamer 1989, p. 367) so that we can experience its living arising and living place in our lived experience and that of our dependents: All this has as its aim not simply philosophical erudition and the like. The aim of such meditations and work is the cultivation of the intimacy and immediacy of the experience of everyday life, here, as this next child draws breath over a text, here, where reading aloud and learning to pronounce can too often be treated as simply ordinary and commonplace. Not only is "wherever you are . . .a place of practice" (Tsongkhapa 2004, p. 191). Tsongkhapa also insists (and this is a feature that distinguishes the Gelug tradition from other Buddhist lineages and makes ripe its affinity to hermeneutics), the purpose and object of study is precisely the deepening of practice itself. After all, "why would you determine one thing by means of study and reflection, and then, when you go to practice, practice something else?" (2000, p. 52). And this is why Gadamer insists that hermeneutics, with all is philosophical erudition and study, is "a practical philosophy" (2007a) with both theoretical and practical tasks (2007b). All those complex philosophical and historical twists and turns that typify his work are meant, in the end, to make us more susceptible to the beautiful abundance of things as we walk around in the world. (Jardine, 2015, p. 246) "Texts are instructions for [the] practice" (Tsongkhapa 2000, p. 52) of precisely paying more intimate and proper attention to the resounding. Don't worry. Study, properly practiced, will not ruin the aesthesis of ecological reveries, only their limited and limiting naiveties. Study this book. It can help you become more alert and less afraid. It can provide the courage to face our circumstances full face, and crack the facade that seems so grave and imminent and that beckons us to panic and retreat or to fall prey to useless, however understandable, ecological hysterics. Come revel, then, and feel the amp of the sun increasing. I end this introduction with a sense of very strange relief. My own work is now being outlived, as Michael ventures into many places that I have not been and many I have trouble going to without too much ache. My work belongs to a different time and place even though I'm in conspiracy with Michael's words, and better for his help. This book, too, won't last forever. But it is, I believe, a good part of what is needed now. Bragg Creek, Alberta, March 2‐12, 2015. 7 References Chah, A. (n.d.). Everything is teaching us. Victoria AU: The Sangha. Bodhivana Monastery. Available for free download at: http://forestsanghapublications.org/viewAuthor.php?id=1 Doctor, T.H. (2014). Translators' introduction to Ornament of the Great Vehicle Sutras: Maitreya's Mahayanasutralamakara (pp. vii‐xvi). Boston MA: Snow Lion. Domanski, D. (2013). Bite down little whisper. London ON: Brick Books. Gadamer, H.G (1989). Truth and method. New York, NY: Continuum Books. Gadamer, H. G. (1992). Hans‐Georg Gadamer on education, poetry, and history: Applied hermeneutics. (D. Misgeld & G. Nicholson Eds.) (L. Schmidt & M. Reuss, Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York. Gadamer, H.G. (2007). The artwork in word and image: “So true, so full of Being!”’ In The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of later writings. (R. Palmer, Trans. and Ed.) Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 192-226. Gadamer, H.G. (2007a). Hermeneutics as practical philosophy. In The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of later writings. (R. Palmer, Trans. and Ed.). Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press,, p. 227-246. Gadamer, H.G. (2007b). Hermeneutics as a theoretical and practical task. In The Gadamer reader: A bouquet of later writings. (R. Palmer, Trans. and Ed.). Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press,, p. 246-265. Heidegger, M. (1971) On the Way to Language. New York: Harper and Row. Hyde, L. (1983). The gift: Imagination and the erotic life of property. New York: Vintage Books. Jardine, D. (2015). In praise of radiant beings. In D. Jardine, C. Gilham, & G. McCaffrey (2015). On the pedagogy of suffering: Hermeneutic and Buddhist meditations. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers. Kongtrul, J. (2002). Creation and completion. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Latremouille, J. (2014). Feasting on Whipsers: Life Writing Towards a Pedagogy of Kinship. Unpublished Master's Thesis, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. Loy, D. (2010). The world is made of stories. Boston: Wisdom Publications. 8 On‐line etymological dictionary. Accessed on‐line at: www.etymologyonline.com. Seidel, J. (2014). Hymn to the North Atlantic Right Whale. In J. Seidel & D. Jardine (2014). Ecological pedagogy, Buddhist pedagogy, hermeneutic pedagogy: Experiments in a curriculum for miracles (p. 11‐2). New York: Peter Lang Publishers Tsongkhapa (2000). The great treatise on the stages of the path to enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo). Volume One. Ithaca NY: Snow Lion Publications. Tsongkhapa (2004). The great treatise on the stages of the path to enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo). Volume Two. Ithaca NY: Snow Lion Publications. Tsongkhapa (2005). The six yogas of Naropa. Ithaca NY: Snow Lion Publications. Wallace, B. (1987). The stubborn particulars of grace. Toronto ON: McClellan and Stewart.