Dom-an reflects on how she has nurtured resilience and regeneration through combining the healing powers of music and community. Dom-an belongs to the Kankanaey Indigenous peoples living west of the Chico River in Sagada, Mountain Province Cordillera, Philippines.
Raw Food for Thought
The Raw Food for Thought Series transcribes spontaneous confessions and bold conversations on how people relate to our changing world and contribute to creating it everyday. Words from anyone are in the raw, to open new lines of thinking and celebrate all that is.
Renuka Ramanujam calls for the powerful force that can be unlocked by bringing art together with action in different domains, fostering the resilient relationships we would like to build with the planet and each other.
“Refusal to Heal aims to reveal the parts of the human psyche that want nothing to do with healing back into society or a life that will not change. […] Resigned to the shadow, these parts of us seek relationality, unconditional being, truth, and a conversation no one dares to have.” Rūta Žemčugovaitė
“I feel that my ability to cope with the modern world is slowly disintegrating. I feel a thinning veil between me and the reality of the world: the multi-crisis we are facing, the daily encounters with human and non-human suffering, dying ecosystems, and disappearing species.” Rūta Žemčugovaitė
“Healing is not seedless. Healing is a ripe fruit, fallen on the ground, torn and bursting open—allowing its seeds of vulnerability to be absorbed into the soil, and its sweetness shared with other living beings.“
Emily Joy is a socially and environmentally engaged artist, participating in the Re-storying Landscapes in a Changing Climate project. She discusses her recent community art projects, and explores how emotions of loss and grief expresssed in community can serve as a catalyst for care in a time of climate crisis.
Cooking for me became a way to connect to happiness and to life – my first conscious exercise. You have to eat to be alive, and if you cook, you can give yourself the things you and other people love. Being very connected to the core of life is what cooking and eating means for me.
Konkankoh, Indigenous Elder from Cameroon, discusses what it means to be conscious with food based on his youth and experience with the Ndanifor Permaculture Ecovillage.
The Earth is reflecting back to us that it is reaching certain limits and that the path we have been taking has no future. But I don’t see a kind of breaking point, more of new relationship patterns emerging here and there, connecting and forming new resonance fields. At some point it will have become a totally different system.
“Now that we have this climate crisis on us, there’s so much human and other-than-human loss. So we need new skills and we also have to change our understanding of the power of grief and see it as a politically mobilizing force…”
A big part of our struggle seems to be aligned with intentional amnesia, or a community or society choosing not to acknowledge or see even the tribal communities as existing…
In India, there is so much fantastic imagination about times that are not present times, that are not necessarily past times either, but almost parallel time periods. Now in my expanded understanding of what futures thinking is about, I see all of it as future fiction, if not science fiction…
Everything came from curiosity. I was always curious about how the taste of fresh food would compare with that of the food I get at the supermarket. And since I had rented a house with a garden, I thought: ‘Why not?’, ‘Why not just start it?’…
We need to deindustrialize the food system. That’s radical but it is what I believe. And when I say deindustrialize, I’m not saying de-tech it… It’s about using technology to help us farm with nature, not against nature. We need to start farming regeneratively, which means…
Following Satish Kumar, personal transformation comes from the heart and not the mind. How could anyone shift from a consumerist mindset to a conservation mindset without falling in love with nature and recognizing oneself in nature? In other words, having a deep transformative experience is necessary for our hearts to open up…
Emergence to me are the phenomena that can fill a void, previously overlooked by my own assumptions. It is the opportunity to notice something unnoticed, to appreciate something unappreciated, and to do something differently than anticipated.