Abstract
LIKE MANY IN MY DAY, I have from time to time sought counsel and insight in psychotherapy. Back in the 1970s when I was a young ecology activist in San Francisco, I had a few thought-provoking sessions with Sterling Bunnell, a Jungian psychiatrist and naturalist. Many years later, Gnosis magazine published an interview with him, which caught and has held my attention to this day. It was titled “Nature and the Numinous.” The conversation ranged widely and was revelatory and realistic, a learned man’s consideration of the cosmos and microcosmos, of evolution, extinction, climate change, and cultures; of human purposes and human prospects within the matrix of the living world. Each of us, of course, must glean wisdom whence we can. It may be idiosyncratic, but these thoughts from my long-ago shrink have stayed with me.
If times get tough, encourage and support the good; discourage and avoid the bad, protect the weak and defenseless.… Many good deeds done daily are seeds of a culture of life and love.
—Bob Waldrop, Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House
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Notes
- 1.
Bob Waldrop, “Building Community during a Major Disaster,” accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.energyconservationinfo.org/community.htm.
- 2.
Jay Kinney and Richard Smoley, “Nature and the Numinous: The Gnosis Interview with Sterling Bunnell,” Gnosis Magazine 33 (Fall 1994): 30–37.
- 3.
Kinney and Smoley, “Nature and the Numinous.”
- 4.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Works of Thoreau, ed. Henry Canby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), 672.
- 5.
Berry expressed this notion in various ways over the years. See, for example, Mike Bell, “Thomas Berry—An Earth Spirituality Out on the Edge,” Watershed Sentinel, January 6, 2017, https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/thomas-berry/; and Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World (New York: Plume, 2009).
- 6.
David Shi, “Prosperity, Depression, and Simplicity,” chap. 9 in The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 214–47.
- 7.
Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006), 80.
- 8.
David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (New York: Knopf, 2003) 97.
- 9.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Pantheon, 1996).
- 10.
Dan Flores, “Coyote Coexistence Is a Lifestyle California Should Export,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2016, http://touch.latimes.com#section/-1/article/p2p-87921025/.
- 11.
See chapter 1, “Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience,” by Daniel Lerch.
- 12.
Arthur Morgan, The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942; Yellow Springs, OH: Community Service, 1984), 282. Page reference is to the 1984 edition.
- 13.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1938), 11.
- 14.
Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 306.
- 15.
Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 306.
- 16.
Peter Berg, The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg, ed. Cheryl Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel (New York: Routledge, 2015), 139.
- 17.
Peter Berg, Envisioning Sustainability (San Francisco: Subculture Books, 2009), 162.
- 18.
Richard Waterstone, India (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 60–61.
- 19.
Sri Aurobindo, Bhagavad Gita and Its Message (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press, 1995), 38–39.
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Mills, S. (2017). Pulling It All Together: Resilience, Wisdom, and Beloved Community. In: Lerch, D. (eds) The Community Resilience Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-861-9_11
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