Wild Genius | Résumé | Team & Ethics

Origins

The Wild Genius

The phrase "wild genius" is stolen from Professor Wade Davis, ethnobotanist, and life-long advocate for human diversity, who initially gained renown for his work on Haitian Vodou, recounted in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow. He says:

"It was the birth of agriculture—the moment we succumbed to the cult of the seed—that the poetry of the shaman was replaced by the prose of the priesthood . . .

Because of course the shaman’s role, was, by definition, to seek the catalytic release of the individual’s wild genius, whereas the priest’s role was to actually inculcate the collective into a religious ideology that could serve the organized, sedentary community.

So this modern world that we’ve moved through in the last 10,000 years—is just one thread in the human tradition."

Dr. Wade Davis, Emeritus National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence

Influential Teachings

Dagara (Burkina Fasso West Africa) shamans Malidoma Somé and Sobonfu Somé brought their cultural wisdoms around healing, ritual, and community to share with modernity upon the instruction of tribal Elders. Their books are now widely available and provide a unique insight to an indigenous sensibility prior to colonized modernity.

The Dagara cosmology conceives a medicine wheel that reflects and represents the constituents of nature, the Other World of spirit, and also human community, represented by the 5 elements of Earth, Mineral, Water, Fire, and Nature. It is informed by the perspective that, "without ritual, there is no community."

Dr. Malidoma Somé wrote the introduction to "Medicine Without an Expiry Date: Indigenous Remedy to Modern Trouble" by Randy Jones.

Dr. Malidoma Somé, PhD, Dagara Elder and Shaman

The Re-authorization of Self-authorization

Modernity spews complexity at the same time that it destroys actual diversity. The efficiency of mass production is now applied even to human beings. Yet institutional and economic trances (defended as "imperatives") has also had the effect of spawning rebelious interest in holistic systems like permaculture.

Ivan Illich noted the increasing tendency to rely on "experts" for every need that was formerly dealt with by common sense, the local vernacular, and self-authorization. His many books, including "DeSchooling Society," advocate for a reauthorization of vernacular culture. To actualize this requires robust skills of design and creating—as if to suggest a recovery of these age old skills, needed for the ongoing making of wild culture. We say this implies competency in the knowledge and application of wild ritual as a fundamental component.

Monsignor Ivan Illich, author, and "Errant Pilgrim"

A New Pattern Language of Healing

Architect Christopher Alexander developed a new system of planning and design, which is described in the now-seminal books "A Timeless Way of Building" and "A Pattern Language." Alexander and his colleagues believed that good design solutions were universal in principle, but unique in expression. He called this technology "a pattern language," an idea which has since been developed by others to create domain specific pattern languages of other kinds.Ward Cunningham, inventor of the Wiki, credits his conception of the idea to Alexander's work on the pattern language form.

One of our projects is to develop such a language based around the topics of ritual, cosmology, village intelligence, embodiment, rhythm, creating, myth and communication—topics which can broadly be said to relate to healing and the reclamation of real culture from the voracious destructive appetite of modernity.

Dr. Christopher Alexander, Emeritus Professor

UC Berkeley

The Spiritual Bypassing Trap

John Wellwood defined spiritual bypassing as the use of one’s spiritual beliefs, practices, and spiritual life to avoid experiencing the emotional pain of working through psychological issues. It can be seen as healthy when used in the short term to deal with acute stress, but may have great detrimental effects if used as a long term strategy.

We see the need to teach what can be called grief literacy that engenders skilled facilitation of grief, contextualized within the understanding that grief is a community issue. Grief relates to many broad social ills—a sense of homelessness, even amoung the affluent, loss of purpose, ancestral trauma, and breakdown of the kind of "communities of all ages" that is our heritage.

Therefore, we do work that includes embodiment and make ritual gatherings that affirm the human sense of welcome, and traditional sources of Eldership like myth and nature.