Gathering Days

Gathering days are days when one can only eat things that one has gathered. The concept first came to me at my school in Laos, where I noticed many of my students were becoming increasingly accustomed to the market-bought veggies and meat constantly available. I realized how our school was inadvertently unhinging students from a living connection with the land, despite teaching the importance of this connection in class. Upon returning to Canada, I became aware of how much less I knew about the wild beings that live here compared to those that surround me and my hut in Laos. I could only identify a handful of wild edibles and didn’t really have an understanding of when and where they grow. I’ve decided to institute “gathering days” here in Canada. I will start by doing them once every lunar-month, two days before each full moon. This practice will connect me with the lifeforms around me, with their changes throughout the seasons, and with the presence of the moon (which immediately becomes unnoticed upon entering a city). Down by the lake, I’ve noticed a great deal of chicory, touch-me-nots, and wild carrots, which will serve me well with the crabapples and mullein tisane next Sunday. I will have to begin making preparations for the winter too.

a paradigm shift on the concept of paradigm shifting?

Metaphysical, ontological and epistemological frameworks destroy not simply by their being lived out as false beliefs. None of them are believed fully enough to be internalized into the workings of the body that completely. Rather, they destroy through the compromise they reach with the body, and by the incongruence between belief and action that ensues. This is another reason why “paradigm shifting” and some of the presumptions of “transformative learning” based on thought-down experiences are along not enough. To illustrate this with a simple example: when the paradigm of determinism swept over us as a culture, it did so incompletely, for even its staunchest allies acted out their daily affairs without ever really doing away with the causal “I”. Nevertheless, as a cultural phenomena, determinism became accepted in technological, futuristic and economic spheres, and in ethical considerations generally, to the extent that our actions based on abstract and reasoned modes of thought were lured by determinism’s enthralling logic. The assumption that changing thought alone is sufficient is erroneous for the same reason that ideal is generally: solitary power is placed on thought, which is in fact but a recent player in the game. The body, the heart, and the context have their own modes of being which, although interactive with thought, are certainly not subordinate to it.

eteragogy?

“Pedagogy” and “andragogy” are both inappropriate terms for an ecological perspective on our learning and teaching relations with others. First of all, there is no separation between ways of educating adults and children. More importantly though, these terms mislead us into perceiving education as a uniquely human affair. They cut us off from the rich and continuous learning interactions that go on between us and other life forms. Terms such as these have a self-validating nature about them: once we internalize that learning relationships do not occur between us and other species, then we go about our daily lives ignoring those very beings that would be in dialogue with us were we open to it. I have been toying with new sorts of words and think that something more like “eteragogy” or “heterogogy” (or perhaps even “biogogy”) would be more inclusive for reorienting education to being about all humans, all life forms, all interactions. "Etera" is Greek for "other" or "another". It refers to the interactions one has with every other interacting being -including with oneself. I accept that we often live our day to day affairs in a curious dialectic with ourselves: always within us one who leads and the one who is led. What is always at issue is the fact that I am in interaction with someone else, something "other" than the "I" who is conscious of this interaction.

I think it is suitable enough to keep the suffix “gogy” for now - when we interact with others, we really do lead them to believe or act in this or that way, whether we do so consciously, willingly, or otherwise. This leading may be in directions unanticipated than our original intentions.