Future Primitive

Geoff Oelsner has built a following as a performer both of his own songs and of poems which he sometimes sets to music or chants and recites to the accompaniment of guitar, harmonica, dulcimer, autoharp, harmonium, and the shruti box (a drone instrument from India). He has released 2 CD’s of original songs, Morning Branches and Ordinary Mystery with musician friends, including Kelly Mulhollan and Leslie. Geoff has published a collection of his poetry, Native Joy: poems songs visions dreams (1963-2003) (2003, Trafford) and his work has been featured in several other books, including Writing Poetry from the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne (Sourcebooks Inc., 2007). His new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature (2012) is now available from Lorian Press.

A Buddhist meditator since 1974, Geoff founded the Buddhist Meditation and Spiritual Support Group in 1995. As a licensed certified social worker in private practice of psychotherapy in Arkansas since 1982, Geoff also utilizes poetry therapy with selected clients in psychotherapy. He is committed to sharing the healing and inspirational power of poetry, music, and story with the community.

A long time environmental activist and researcher, Geoff co-authored a book titled Fighting Radiation and Chemical Pollutants with Foods, Herbs,and Vitamins (1992). He is presently involved in several environmental initiatives, including the Psi-Sci Alliance project, which brings together established climate scientists with highly qualified intuitives to innovate new approaches to addressing and ameliorating climate change.

www.geoffoelsner.com

Geoff Oelsner speaks with Joanna about his deep love and connection with the natural world, transpersonal experiences in Nature, the emergence of a spiritual form of environmental activism…

Music: “The Sacred Hoop” (from Morning Branches) by Geoff Oelsner.

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Dr. Robert K.C. Forman is a professor of comparative religions, (CUNY), and founder of the Forge Institute. He routinely gives lectures, trainings and workshops around the world. He was the co-founder and is executive editor of The Journal of Consciousness Studies, which has become the principle journal in the field. He is also the author of ten scholarly books on spirituality, mysticism, consciousness and world religions. His latest book is Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be: A Journey of Discovery, Snow and Jazz in the Soul .

Robert speaks with Joanna about his experiential understanding of what is enlightenment, the similarities and differences between spirituality and psychotherapy, the whisper of the personal call, “jazz in the soul”, feeling the unity with Nature…

http://enlightenmentaint.com/
http://www.theforge.org/site/content.php

Music: “Main theme from When Almonds Blossomed” (from Giya Kancheli: Themes From The Songbook), by Dino Saluzzi, Gidon Kremer, Andrei Pushkarev

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Kami McBride has inspired thousands of people to use herbs in their daily lives for health and wellness. She teaches experiential herbal programs in reviving the art of home use of herbal medicine. Her work is centered in sustainable wellness practices, creating self-reliance and revitalizing our relationship with the plant world. She is the author of Herbal Kitchen.

www.livingawareness.com

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Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist.  Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S. in Mineral Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. He has also taught creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison and Eastern Washington University.

www.derrickjensen.org

Derrick speaks with Joanna about words and action for social change, abuse as identity in the dominant culture, the importance of naming the unspeakable, putting nature first, “to speak truth about power”, preparing the transition towards a sustainable culture…

Music: “Ancient Trees” (from On the wing) by Stephan Micus

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Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D., is a philosopher, dancer, and scholar of religion who lives with her partner and their five children on a farm in upstate New York. After earning a masters degree in Christianity and Culture from Harvard Divinity School and a doctorate in Theology of the Modern West from Harvard University, LaMothe taught at Brown and then Harvard Universities. She received fellowships for her work in religion and dance from the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and the Center for the Study of World Religions; and is an award-winning author of several books, including What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire, Nietzsche’s Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values, and her latest, Family Planting: A farm-fed philosophy of family relations.

www.vitalartsmedia.com

Kimerer speaks with Joanna about our basic human impulse to connect with one other and the natural world,, attuning to the bodily self, the “sting of impossible desire”, thinking and bodily movement, the rhythms of nature, ecstasy and natural birth…

Music: “End” (from Ibero-Caucasian Style) by The Shin

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Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.   With her husband, writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, she has introduced the concept of Daré, meaning Council, to North America.

She is the author of many books, the most recent: La Negra y Blanca (“a novel of the Conquest of the Americas and of hope, where wisdom leaks through misty realms between memory and imagination”).

www.deenametzger.com

Deena speaks with Joanna about the characters of her latest book “La Negra y Blanca”, grounded visions, the coming shift, making alliances and restoring a right relationship with the Earth and all beings, “the conquest never ended”, the helping guide of the ancestors, the process of peace-making, “the way of story”…

Music: “No soy de aquí ni soy de allá” (I’m not from here, I’m not from there) by Facundo Cabral

Deena’s Photo: courtesy www.deenametzger.com

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Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D., is a philosopher, dancer, and scholar of religion, who lives with her partner and their five children on a farm in upstate New York. A former professor at Harvard and Brown Universities, recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Center for the Study of World Religions, and award-winning author of three books, Dr. LaMothe is currently director of Vital Arts, a center dedicated to creating art and ideas that remain faithful to the earth. Trained in modern dance, Haitian dance, ballet, and yoga, LaMothe has choreographed and danced two solo concerts, as well as performing in a range of concert, conference, and liturgical settings. Her third book, What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire, uses personal anecdotes and cultural analysis to introduce her original philosophy of bodily becoming. Working with our desires for food, sex, and spirit, she describes a way of thinking and being that privileges bodily movement as the source and telos of human life.

www.vitalartsmedia.com

Kimerer speaks with Joanna about dance & philosophy, overcoming body/mind dualism through movement, desire as a healing impulse, sensory awareness, e/motions, the importance of touch, “remaining faithful to the Earth”…

Music: “Body and Soul” (from Ballads) by Derek Bailey.

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Dennis McKenna is an American ethnobotanist and ethnopharmacologist. He has authored numerous scientific articles and books, among them - The Invisible Landscape – with his brother Terence McKenna.

Dennis has spent a number of years as a senior lecturer for the Center for Spirituality and Healing, part of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minessota. He is now a senior research scientist for the Natural Health Products Research Group at the British Columbia Istitute of Technology in the Vancouver area.  He is a founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute and serves on the advisory board of non-profit organizations in the fields of ethnobotany and botanical medicines. He recently completed a project, funded by the Stanley Medical Research Institute, to investigate Amazonian ethnomedicines for the treatment of schizophrenia and cognitive deficits. At the Heffter Research Institute, he continues his focus on the therapeutic uses of psychoactive medicines derived from nature and used in indigenous ethnomedical practices.

http://www.heffter.org/board-mckenna.htm

Dennis’ kickstarter.com Project: The Brotherhood of  The Screaming Abyss

Dennis speaks with Joanna about the KickStarter project of writing a memoir of his experiences with his brother Terence McKenna as a collective effort, the noetic experiment at La Chorrera, teonanacatl and primordial language, following the call of the Mystery…

Music: “Tejido de sueños (Tissue of dreams)” from Nierika, by Jorge Reyes

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Tim Ward is the author of the newly released Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess. This is the first book that explores the Goddess from an explicitly male perspective, and how the loss of the feminine divine has affected men and women’s relationships. Tim believes it is in men’s enlightened self interest to work together with women to move beyond patriarchy, and this is the conversation he will engage his audiences in as he shares his experience of exploring Goddess sites and ruins of the ancient Europe throughout 2006-07.

Tim is the author of three previous books: Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess, Arousing the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India (where he first encountered the Goddess) What the Buddha Never Taught (about life in a Thai Monastery), and the Great Dragon’s Fleas (his search for living Bodhisattvas). He has lectured in colleges and institutions across North America, and all of his books have been used as texts in various schools and universities. Tim has a degree in Philosophy from the University of British Columbia, in his native Canada.

Tim now lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and their two children where he teaches communications courses for international development organizations in Washington D.C. and globally. (See www.intermediact.com for this very different side of his professional life).

http://www.timwardsbooks.com/

Tim speaks with Joanna about his life-changing experiences with the archetypes of the Goddess and the rising awareness of our interconnectedness with the Earth, “what the Buddha never taught”, a new non-patriarchal relationship between fathers and sons, our responsibility in the creation of a new ecological society…

Music: “Prayer to Goddess Saraswati – Raga Kalavati”  by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma

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This is a part two of our interview with Richard Doyle.

Click here to listen to part one of this interview.

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An award winning writer, Teri is the author/co-author of ten non-fiction books, including The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest (Random House of Canada) and one for young adults, The Canadian Junior Green Guide (McClelland & Stewart). Written in conjunction with the highly respected environmental watchdog, Pollution Probe, it became a Canadian best-seller.

After completing two books on the environment, Teri began to focus much of her writing on topics related to creativity and contemporary spirituality, subjects of deep personal interest to her. Teri first began studying yoga in her twenties in Paris with a teacher who had lived in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram for more than twenty years. Several years later she traveled to India to meet Gopi Krishna – considered by many to be the world’s leading authority on kundalini. Since then she has been a student of the philosophy behind yoga and has been involved in researching the link between creativity, inspiration, and mystical experience. Both her latest book, The Divine Feminine Fire: Creativity and Your Yearning to Express Your Self (Dreamriver Press), and The Fiery Muse deal with this topic; she has also written a number of articles and spoken widely on the subject.

Her workshops on creative writing and the link between creativity and spirituality have met with great success, and she now divides her time between leading workshops and writing.

She is an active member of PEN Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the Institute for Consciousness Research, and she was one of the founders of the Kundalini Research Network in the United States.

http://www.teridegler.com/

Teri speaks with Joanna about the serpent power as an evolutionary force of transformation, longing & fear, Shakti/Shekinah/Sophia, creativity and the Divine Femenine…

Introductory music: ”Amazon Beginnings”

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Richard Doyle earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He was the Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow in History and Social Science of the Life Sciences at MIT in 1993. Professor of Rhetoric, Doyle holds appointments in English, Science Technology & Society and the College of Information Science and Technology at Penn State University and was Visiting Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric in 2003.

Doyle teaches courses in the history and rhetoric of emerging technosciences – sustainability, space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary contexts from which they sprout. Professor Doyle has published two books: On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, 1997) and Wetwares:Experiments in PostVital Living( Minnesota, 2003) – in a putative trilogy about emerging transhuman knowledges. These knowledges and practices, linked to molecular biology, artificial life, nanotechnology, psychedelic and information technologies render the experiential distinctions between living systems and machines frequently dubious and often indiscernible. This excited and confused rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational universe nonetheless broadcasts a clear message: humans, in co-evolution with the technical matrices transforming the planet, find themselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as urgent as it is experimental.

Continuing his collaborative work on the “transhuman imperative”, Doyle ( aka mobius) has now completed the trilogy with a scholarly book about archaic and contemporary psychedelic media technologies and the evolution of mind: The Ecodelic Hypothesis: Plants, Rhetoric and the Evolution of The Noösphere, currently in press with University of Washington. Other current projects include a book, Admixtures: Dialogues After Genomics with Anthropologist Mark Shriver. The Admixtures Project has grown The Penn State Center for Altered Consciousness, currently investigating the genetics and phenomenology of legally altered consciousness with the help of a flotation tank.

Doyle directed the Penn State Composition Program from 2004-2006, and serves as Expert, Wetwares and Human/Machine interaction for international organizations and a volunteer to the Penn State Center for Sustainability. More about mobius’ work and teaching can be found by browsing his web site.

Richard speaks with Joanna about language and the ecstasy of creativity, ego-death as a revelatory practice, eco-humility, Timothy Leary, freedom & Imagination…

Introductory music: “Amazon Beginnings” (At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, soundtrack) by Zbigniew Preisner

You can listen to PART TWO of this interview here.

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Amanda Seyderhelm creates her life from the inside out. As a writer and life coach she specializes in coaching creative people who want to uncover their Big Dream and start living it.

“My biggest ‘wake up’ was in 2002 when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  This was my body and soul speaking up for me, and I was initiated into an intense healing journey.”

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Natalie Goldberg is the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (1986), which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Natalie is also a painter and her watercolors are exhibited at Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a poet and has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops.

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Miriam Sagan is the author of over twenty books, including a memoir, Searching for a Mustard Seed : A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story (Winner best Memoir from Independent Publishers, 2004). Her poetry includes Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat), and The Art of Love.

Sagan directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, and has taught at the College of Santa Fe, University of New Mexico, Taos Institute of the Arts, Aspen Writer’s Conference, around the country, and on line for writers.com and UCLA Extension. She has held residency grants at Yaddo and MacDowell, and is the recipient of a grant from The Barbara Deming Foundation/Money for Women and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency.

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Ruth Gendler is an artist, writer, and teacher committed to the transformational potential of the arts. Her experience with the rhythms of creativity is evidenced by a diverse background in art, writing, publishing, teaching, and lecturing. She is the author of The Book of Qualities and Notes on the Need for Beauty and the editor of Changing Light: The Eternal Cycle of Night and Day. The Book of Qualities, now in its 40th printing, has been adapted as a two act theater piece and translated into German, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as being widely excerpted in literary, psychological and educational publications.

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Tina LeMarque Denison is an artist and author who documents primordial memory, myth and archetype using paint, digital photography, mediated imagery, and mixed media.

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