Nature connection through film

These notes accompany two films that I have made. They are an attempt to punctuate why my connection to nature is so important to me and try to find a way to share this. I write attempt because I believe that we as human beings are ever-evolving, ever-revealing and ever-growing, and so is our relationship and connection to nature. It’s not a circular movement, but more like a spiraling one which adds one more dimension. We come back to places that are familiar but slightly different. What can we co-learn from lighting a campfire? https://youtu.be/NyBPVkhQjOY Following a stream towards the sea https://youtu.be/r7W7vF2dqzI

Stone Scissors Paper. A Trilogy of Papers

This is a trilogy of papers about land and people and the ecology they create together. Leah lives on the coast in South Wales. Lisen lives on the island of Gotland in Sweden. Gail lives in Yorkshire in the north of England. What connects us and our writings is the land, its history, its place in industry and what we do and don’t see. The cuts in the land reflect the cuts in our minds, unnegotiated edits in our stories, and disconnects in political discourses. This trilogy of papers documents some of these cuts and joins. We speak about the land we walk on and the stories told about it. We point to scars in the landscape and ask how they connect with those in the lungs and on the wrist. The landscape of the present holds clues about its past and its future. And the timescapes in the writings evoke a necessity to connect time and place, human and non-human colonising and liberatory methods and live with a maddening, flickering lenticularity (Pillow, 2019).

Panmorphic Crisis: Cultural Rupture and Systemic Change

The systemic community has cultivated a talent for living with perturbation and a graceful approach to not knowing. In this extremely unsettled era of what I am calling panmorphic crisis so much is in urgent need of our attention. In this paper, I discuss some of the many systems in play creating this panmorphic crisis and discuss the impact of changing temporality. Our existing approaches to therapy and the training of practitioners may not be enough to see us out of one era and meet the needs of a new, emergent world. To create a state of preparedness to change may involve some degree of fundamental overhaul structurally and theoretically. I go on to consider approaches to disruption and consider the homeostatic pull towards restorative positions. Crises create opportunities for not only exploring ideas and practices which we take for granted but also for re-organising the cultural foundations on which we build worlds with each other. I reflect on how the myth of return-to-normal is a dangerous agenda when the culture being restored is infused with historical social injustices. In order for systemic therapy and training programmes to make changes that are culturally relevant, we need to study and alter the impact on our work of colonising and pathologising practices and theory. I discuss systemic liminality, its limits and the impact of disruption to our cultural rhythms. Later, I propose the concept of Stolpersteine, stumbling blocks, to help us encounter hidden histories and our prejudices, and offer some questions for us to consider in our undertaking to decolonise and depathologise our practice and theory to meet the challenges of transmaterial living systems.

Re-Membering and Naturing my Life and Work in a Fifth Province

This paper will outline my own systemic journey of engagements and movements in and away from a more natured inclusion in my life and work. Looking back, I can see that from childhood my life was filled with sustainability practices in that I had parents who planted much of our food and never threw away anything that might be useful in the future. In my team, the Fifth Province Associates, one was a farmer’s daughter and grew up with a deep knowledge of our countryside and the other was an ecological and climate activist. How had I managed not to put all this together into a more coherent systemic roadmap before now? I thank Roger Duncan (2018) and many of my colleagues here in this issue for re-minding me of what I already knew and experienced, and how it could be recycled as it were for a possible more useful future (Simon & Salter, 2020; Palmer, 2014; Santin, 2020; Triantafillou et al., 2016; Edwards, 2020). They have facilitated me to re-member experiences around nature practices, the possibilities for love and colonisation in our practices, the co-creation of an indigenous Irish therapy practice and my experiences of a deep spiritual practice which I have seen over and over again to foster resilience and equanimity1 not only in my own life but also in the lives of clients and those in our Sangha. In the Irish language, the word for resilience, athléimneacht is interesting. Athléimneacht directly translated means jumping (across/in) a ford, an open space or a hollow between two objects. I resonate with this translation as it points to a liminal space so important in Celtic consciousness and of course a fifth province space. Maybe resilience or athléimneacht has been called forth as a need in all of us by the sudden advent, fear and stress of a world in panmorphic crisis (Simon, 2021).

Deep Donkey and Dadirri: asking Creatura out to play

This article is based on the premise that we are currently awakening to the full systemic impact of the emerging global ecological crisis which is already having a devastating effect on the ecosystems of the earth and also a highly destructive impact on psychological well-being. The ecological crisis has coincided with the painful awakening to the social and environmental destruction that has resulted from the legacy of a colonial world view of nature and culture. These events now demand a radical and deep adaption of our view of nature and culture. It is becoming clear that we are facing not only an ecological break down and a narrative collapse, but also a breakdown in how to make sense of what we are facing. This article explores how systemic psychotherapy and Gregory Bateson’s work on the gnostic ideas of pleroma and creatura, can provide a framework to support the Decolonial Turn but also an EcoSystemic Return. This article uses the children’s game of Donkey and the Indigenous Australian practice of Dadirri to playfully explore how we might overcome Bateson’s notion of epistemological error when engaging with systemic practice, Indigenous nature practice and quantum physics. The article suggests an imaginary game of Deep Donkey to overcome the destructive legacy of Cartesian dualism at the core of western culture and to begin to open western imagination to an intra-subjective dialogue with nature. I suggest the game of Deep Donkey could a helpful practice in realigning western thinking with sophisticated and long subjugated Indigenous ecological and cultural wisdom.

Rewilding systemic practice

This paper is written in the context of the current ecological crisis affecting physical and mental health, social, economic, and political contexts, at local and global levels which calls for the disruption of old ways of thinking, living and moving towards the future through collective action. One way of responding as a systemic and family psychotherapist, has been my experience of rewilding my systemic practice with individuals, couples, and families in the UK since taking therapy outdoors. I will offer some examples of ecotherapy as part of my own personal and professional journey in “coming home” through nature, becoming an outdoor designer of therapeutic space and a minimalist wild therapist. I invite us all to re-think and re-create a therapeutic space which, by its very essence, is wild, meaning boundaryless, infinitely spacious and unpredictable. It can open up opportunities for creativity, for using metaphors to explore meanings beyond words. Nature becomes not only the context in which I practice but my co-therapist or even the primary therapist. Together we can enrich the therapeutic process through moments of magic and facilitate change using a wild reflecting team. In my experience of ecotherapy, voices from the wild carry unique messages, for example, birdsong can provide unexpected voices, useful interruptions or disruptions that can enrich the therapeutic process. Such a wild reflecting team can also be a daring metaphor to welcome the unexpected and unfamiliar into our systemic practices and relationships, to include new emerging and marginalised perspectives which may bring us all more in touch with our wildness, lost indigenous ways of relating and shape our futures through collective action.

The systemic crisis of climate change: clinical and political reflections (2013) and The EcoSystemic Return: clinical and political implications (2021)

In this special issue on the EcoSystemic Return, we have the honour of our Revival Paper being the 2013 paper by esteemed systemic ecology activist from Ireland, Philip Kearney. This paper is a reminder that the systemic community did not heed warnings about ecology issued by Gregory Bateson in the 1960s and 70s. In 2013, Phil Kearney reminded us again. The original paper is followed by a fresh piece of writing for this special issue. Philip Kearney reignites his passion and anger, his critical analysis and call to action for this protracted phase of climate change complacency. Sincere thanks and appreciation to Jim Sheehan and colleagues of Feedback: Journal of the Family Therapy Association of Ireland for permission to re-print the 2103 article which had the vision to provide a platform for this important work.

Where did the Eco go in Systemic Practice?

In this paper, I argue that, although the systemic therapy community adopted some of Gregory Bateson’s ideas, we neglected his ecological concerns, and his thinking about epistemology and ontology might have shaped our practice even more than the comparatively few concepts we took. With rising concerns about the impact of humans upon the environment in the era in which we live, described as the Anthropocene, along with the posthuman turn, perhaps now is the time for us to look both backwards and forwards to deepen our understanding of Bateson’s message; to acknowledge the continuing importance of his thinking and influence upon the posthumanities.

Aspects of Reading

As a tutor and a teacher on various psychotherapy and supervision courses over time, I became aware of the need for a structured framework that would guide discussions on the literature during the sessions with students. The feedback from tutors and students has encouraged me to continue to use it and particularly emphasised its potential to stimulate self-reflexive thinking. The Model is presented as a format for reading papers, discussing the material with others, and giving an account of reading such as writing a critique or a literature review. The purpose of the ‘Aspects of Reading’ is to enhance possibilities for learning by highlighting different positions a reader can take during these activities. Abstract As a tutor and a teacher on various psychotherapy and supervision courses over time, I became aware of the need for a structured framework that would guide discussions on the literature during the sessions with students. The feedback from tutors and students has encouraged me to continue to use it and particularly emphasised its potential to stimulate self-reflexive thinking. The Model is presented as a format for reading papers, discussing the material with others, and giving an account of reading such as writing a critique or a literature review. The purpose of the ‘Aspects of Reading’ is to enhance possibilities for learning by highlighting different positions a reader can take during these activities.