Beginnings

On this August evening, I'm house-sitting with my partner in Lebanon, NH, writing a dissertation chapter on Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and feeling the wetness sink in to my bones from almost 36 hours of straight rain. Hunkered over the dining room table with my companion machine (a laptop), my sweets (chocolate - my lady is in the woods), and my procrastination (a piano and a pile of Brahms, Bach and Chopin), I look out the leaded glass window to a tall hill of ferns, firs, and late season snapdragons. It is this image you see behind me in the photograph alongside this post - a scene quite different from the lovely brick wall our Manhattan apartment's windows frame into steady, unchanging blocks of brown and grey. It is always a gift to be able to change frames, especially if they involve the colors green or blue.

I've thought about creating this blog for quite a while now. I'm slowly making my way into claiming the identities of "professor" and "academic," rather than the more digestible and performable mantle of "student." Part of this practice of self-naming is to bring out into the open some of the questions and quandaries that continue to pester me as I make my way in the fields of literary and cultural criticism. For the past couple of years, the most pressing, audacious and often silenced quandary over which I've muddled is the state of spirituality in higher education. When I speak of critical spirituality, I believe this is in service of re-invigorating the spirit, the soul, and even the divine as key components in understanding the realms of academic thought and pedagogy that I call my home. To make spirituality critical is to salvage the concept of spirituality from 1) the commodification and shallowness that popular culture forces upon us, 2) the disdain and snickering that can emerge when we dare to speak its name in the classrooms and lecture halls of our secular universities and 3) from the fear-mongering and hatred that religious fundamentalism brings. To inhabit a critical position of spirituality is therefore to consider how social phenomena such as faith, Being, mysticism, and mindfulness emerge in the context of our desires, our systems of representation, and our ecological and communal lives. I'm not sure how I'll be addressing these issues in this blog, but I imagine my posts to emerge from the everyday experiences I have on the streets of New York, where I currently live, on my more rural travels, and in my research and scholarly conversations.

This blog's somewhat simple and less than distinctive name is formed from the combination of ecology and spiritual "Ecospiritual," but it holds many other unvoiced identities within: queer, feminist, Christian, Buddhist, Midwestern, musician, caretaker, healer. All these different selves that cohabit within seek a central goal: to restore a more hopeful, sustainable, compassionate and communal way of life to our society. And it seems to me that spirit is central to this process too.

So for this first post, please take a look at a note of positive news: The passing of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia this summer, which follows Ecuador's Rights of Nature that passed in 2008. When feeling down after reading the recent profile of Michelle Bachmann in the New Yorker, feel free to read the text of the Universal Declaration. Despite my dis-ease with the discourse of rights in feminist circles, and with the recent passing of the "right" to gay marriage as thousands of children remain parent-less because gays and lesbians cannot legally adopt, it does seem to alter the framework when we consider trees holding similar (not necessarily equatable) inalienable rights as white men. Although I am not a specialist in Bolivian or Ecuadorian politics, it does seem likely that the passing of this historic legislation may have been influenced by indigenous forms of eco-centric religion. Bolivia's current president Evo Morales is the first indigenous citizen to be elected to this position in the nation's history. You can find other positive news here. It's a little hippy-dippy, but a helluva lot better than Fox.

Oh and here was what my Friday night looked like -- in honor of Surfacing...