MAPS
The first day of class, I tell my students we are beginning a journey. It is as dangerous as any unfamiliar terrain and equally disorienting, like exploring New York City would be for a rural person or camping in the desert for a city dweller. Very few of us know much about our body and its relationship to the earth. We need landmarks to guide us, maps on the journey as we learn its ways.
Map drawn by Anya Brickman Raredon, age nine.
FOREWORD
JOHN ELDER
In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold writes, “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.” He invites his readers to recognize the life and unity of our planet, rather than to see only a conglomeration of raw materials. For our usual assumption that “soil” is just a “resource,” one more commodity in the marketplace, he wants to substitute a more inclusive and participatory perspective on the “land.” Such a shift broadens our sense of community and prepares for a more mindful and ethical relationship with the rest of the natural world.
In Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide, Andrea Olsen approaches the human body in a way that recalls Leopold’s understanding of the land. The essential insight, for her as for him, is that human beings are included in the living circulation of the earth. “What is out there is in us,” she writes, “and what is in us is out there.” This is not just a metaphor for Olsen. She shows that, through becoming more attuned to the structure and processes of our own bodies, we also have the opportunity to register the balanced wholeness of the world more vividly. Such heightened awareness may move us past abstract concern for “the environment” to a more immediate and physical Identification with the earth.
The Middlebury Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies takes a bioregional approach. It assumes that nature and culture are best understood in relation to each other, and that their wholeness is most evident within the concrete specificity of a particular bioregion. Andrea Olsen contributes something new and valuable to such a project. She reminds us that a particular watershed must be physically entered, as well as enacted, through our work, our art, and the rhythm of our daily lives before it can become more for us than a mere idea. The body grounds this living “circuit” for her. The vital energy flowing into a human being from the surrounding landscape may surge back out into the world through mindful participation in natural processes.
In fulfilling its role as “an experiential guide,” this book leads its readers through the conduits of the senses. The patterns that organize our own bodies are also found in the other organisms who are our evolutionary kin and in the living earth itself. The Gaia Hypothesis can be tested experimentally, like any other hypothesis, when a researcher systematically collects, refines, and interprets data through the evidence of his or her own senses.
The experiential core of Body and Earth is complemented by the centrality of stories to this distinctive curriculum. Standing at a fertile edge between dance and the environmental sciences, Andrea Olsen often expresses her insights through resonant stories of connection with nature. Tales of the vanished farmscape of her Illinois girlhood and of her family’s annual migrations to Florida become performance texts through which her body can remember its former homes. They also become openings through which she and her readers, including the students who will use this book in environmental studies courses, may move more alertly into the landscapes they currently inhabit. Exercises and stories are complemented, in their turn, by the beautiful photographs associated with them. Such images help to assure that Body and Earth will be experienced on aesthetic and emotional levels as well as on an intellectual plane. In its pursuit of balance within diversity, this is a book that begins and ends in wholeness.
PREFACE
BILL MCKIBBEN
If you were trying to identify the most useful quality for people’s lives in the twenty-first century, I think you could do worse than settle on “grounded.” We’ve spent the last fifty years in a consumer fantasy world, ever more disconnected from neighbor, from work, from our own bodies. This has caused myriad problems: the pervasive sadness that goes with the loss of communities, the steadily rising global temperature that comes from subcontracting all effort to fossil fuel. Even the alienation from body—and hence from spirit—that comes from spending every hour in front of some screen or another. It’s as if we’ve evolved, very quickly, into a new species—we’re the first of our kind to have no practical need of our neighbors, the first of our kind for whom obesity is normal, the first of our kind to figure out, inadvertently, how to wreck the planet on which we live.
And so we need an antidote. And I think Andrea Olsen has one. The rediscovery of connection, connection of all kinds. To the ground beneath our firmly planted feet (I’ve never met anyone who stands as solidly on the earth as Andrea, with that dancer’s taproot unshakeable firmness.) To the parts of our own psyches that we’ve allowed to become alienated, the parts that need quiet and reflection and the constant brush of the natural world that we actually evolved over long time to enjoy. The deep connection to deep satisfaction.
Relearning those lessons won’t immediately solve climate change, of course. For that we also need politics and protest (work that Olsen has helped with in important ways). But we also need people who remember what they actually need from the planet, who can feel the richness that comes from practices like the one described herein and hence have little need of the riches laid out at the shopping mall. There’s a real strength here, but it may come at a price—the price of realizing that the life you’ve been told to lead isn’t all that you need and deserve. This is a quietly subversive book, arguing implicitly that one way of being human must yield to a way both older and newer, a way that can endure, a way that matches chemistry and physics and psychology. This is a trail guide, which will give you the courage to get off the couch and start exploring. It doesn’t tell you exactly where to go, but it sure as hell points you in the right direction.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to honor my teachers and colleagues:
Janet Adler, for her insight into the discipline of Authentic Movement.
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, for her explorations in experiential anatomy.
John Elder, for his reflections on place-based ethics in college education.
Caryn McHose, for her articulation of evolutionary movement.
Anne Love Woodhull and Gordon Thorne for their commitment to art in the heart of community.
John M. Wilson for his cross-cultural perspectives in dance.
Portions of the text have previously appeared in The New England Review (“Farmstories”), Orion (“Notes on a Sense of Place in Dance”), Contact Quarterly (“Being Seen, Being Moved: Authentic Movement and Performance”), Whole Terrain (“Dance and the Environment”), and through Station Hill Press (Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy). Appreciation to all the editors involved.
Iranian silver kneeling bull holding a vessel. Southwestern Iran, Proto-Elamite period, ca. 2900 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1966. (66.173). All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Shayna Rae Peavey. Photograph by Bill Arnold.
ENTERING