SEED OF GEOPOETICS: An International Network
The Healing Seed Center for Geopoetics is a sprig from the branches of the Institute of Geopoetics in Switzerland and the Scottish Center of Geopoetics. Here is the history of the Geopoetics movement.
Geopoetics: where the spirit of mind and body mingle with the spirit of the earth
Geopoetics is a trans-disciplinary, multicultural field of study. Geopoetics views the Environment as the whole of the cosmos and human consciousness, rather than differentiating between human life and world. This worldview resonates with the the ancient alchemy found in Taoism, Mystical Islam, Kabbalah, early chemistry, Platonism, early Christianity as well as the practices and spiritual archaeologies of tribal cultures and, now, physics. As a unifying field, Geopoetics applies to all structures and situations. It provides the ground of The Healing Seed.
Founder Laura Hope-Gill has devoted twenty years to studying the creative process. Her research has drawn her through the works of artists, mystical writings, the history of science and psychology. In the study of ancient alchemy (not the metal-to-gold kind but the matter-to-spirit kind), she found an early conscilience of inner and outer realities, a balance used by poets for centuries in metaphor and myth. It also provided a bridge to early scientific writings buried within those poems and mythologies, converging psychologcial states, astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry within a genre of writing no longer spoken of.
What is Geopoetics?
An Exploration by Institute of Geopoetics Founder and Poet Kenneth White:Some of the key elements of geopoetics are:
- It is deeply critical of Western thinking and practice over the last 2500 years and its separation of human beings from the rest of the natural world, and proposes instead that the universe is a potentially integral whole, and that the various domains into which knowledge has been separated can be unified by a poetics which places the planet Earth at the centre of experience.
- It looks for signs of those who have attempted to leave ‘the motorway of Western civilisation’ in the past in order to find a new approach to thinking and living e.g. in the writings of intellectual nomads such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Henry Thoreau and Patrick Geddes.
- It seeks a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world, and requires both serious study and a certain amount of de-conditioning of ourselves by working on the body-mind.
- It also seeks to express that sensitive and intelligent contact with the world by means of a poetics i.e. a language drawn from a way of being which attempts to express reality in different ways e.g. oral expression, writing, visual arts, music, and in combinations of different art forms.
- It involves the coming together of a network of energies in the International Institute of Geopoetics and its various Centres where disparate disciplines of knowledge can converge in a common concern about the planet and a shared project to develop an understanding of geopoetics and apply it in different fields of research and creative work.
International Institute of Geopoetics Inaugural Text
What marks the end of this 20th century, back of all the secondary discourse and all the palaver, is a return to the fundamental, which is to say, the poetic. Every creation of the mind is, fundamentally, poetic.
The question now is to discover where the most necessary, the most fertile poetics are to be found, and to apply them.
If, around 1978, I began to talk of "geopoetics", it was for two reasons. On the one hand, it was becoming more and more obvious that the earth (the biosphere) was in danger and that ways, both deep and efficient, would have to be worked out in order to protect it. On the other hand, I had always been of the persuasion that the richest poetics came from contact with the earth, from a plunge into biospheric space, from an attempt to read the lines of the world.
Since then, the word has been picked up and used, in various contexts. The moment has come to concentrate those currents of energy into a unitary field.
That is why we have founded the Institute of Geopoetics.
The geopoetic project is not one more contribution to the cultural variety show, nor is it a literary school, nor is it concerned with poetry considered as an art of intimacy. It is a major movement involving the very foundations of human life on earth.
In the fundamental geopoetic field come together poets and thinkers of all times and of all countries. To quote only a few examples, in the West, one can think of Heraclitus ("man is separated from what is closest to him"), Holderlin ("man lives poetically on the earth"), or Wallace Stevens (the poems of heaven and hell have been written, it remains to write the poem of the earth"). In the East, there is the Taoist Tchuang-tzu, the man of the ancient pool, Matsuo Basho, and beautiful world-meditations such as one can find in the Hwa Yen Sutra.
But geopoetics is not the exclusive domain of poets and thinkers. Henry Thoreau was as much an ornithologist and a meteorologist ("inspector of storms") as he was a poet, or rather, we might say, he included the sciences in his poetics. The link with biology is just as necessary, and with an ecology (including mind-ecology) well-grounded and well-developed. In fact geopoetics provides not only a place, and this is proving more and more necessary, where poetry, thought and science can come together, in a climate of reciprocal inspiration, but a place where all kinds of specific disciplines can converge, once they are ready to leave over-restricted frameworks and enter into global (cosmological, cosmopoetic) space. One question is paramount: how is it with life on earth, how is it with the world?
A whole network can come into being, a network of energy, desire, competence and intelligence.
We invite all those who feel concerned by such a project to get in touch with the secretariat of the Institute, at Chemin du Goaquer, 22560 Trebeurden, France.
For the Institute of Geopoetics, April 28th 1989
Kenneth White
