The Cascadia Poetics Lab is a partner in the Engage, Educate and Discover at Mapes Creek project, spearheaded by Fish Ecologist Ashley Townes and neighborhood activist Shannon Waits, both members of the Rainier Beach Link2Lake committee. This project is funded through the King County Flood Control District’s WRIA 8 Cooperative Watershed Management Grants. We see this project as completely aligned with the mission of the Cascadia Poetics Lab: “Empowering people to practice poetry & deepen connections to place, self & the present moment. We believe that poetry is the nexus at which self-knowledge, bioregionalism and expansive creativity converge. Cascadia Poetics Lab is a vibrant community whose workshops, festivals, and opportunities for connection can open the door to transformative experiences.”
At 8:45 on the morning of Saturday, April 27, 2024, we’ll gather with people from various traditions to learn about their perspectives on nature and water and how it is regarded and/or venerated. In addition to Ashley Townes, other speakers will be Kosho Itagaki, a Soto Zen priest and chief priest of Eishoji, a Soto Zen training facility in Rainier Beach, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, a Soto Zen Priest and docent at Kubota Garden, Reverend Judith Laxer, a licensed, Ordained SHES (Spiritual Healers and Earth Stewards) Minister and Priestess, Armaye Eshete and Nagessa Dube of Serve Ethiopians Washington, a group that has been cleaning litter and non-native species from the creek’s riparian zone in the park. The skunk cabbage is out now and the creek looks beautiful. Plan to meet near the restrooms. If raining we will be under the new shelter near the restrooms.
Tetsuzen Jason Wirth will also discuss the creek, and efforts to protect it, in the context of ecological reason as articulated in a new essay published in the journal Research in Phenomenology, entitled: “Affordances: on Luminous Abodes and Ecological Reason.”
This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (READ MORE.)
Nagessa Dube will talk about indigenous traditions in Ethiopia as related to water and nature. This should be a remarkable event. I am grateful to work on such an important task in the neighborhood in which I live and with such dedicated, committed individuals.
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