In this article, I address the relationship between Deep Ecology, Ethics, our identity and compassion.
Since recognizing my story, I unveiled distinct faces and the way in which they reflect Deep Ecology on me.
Starting from the resonances of people who read the first article in the Deep Ecology series, I draw broad lines of the accompaniment I develop as a Transition Doula – the echoes of the Earth to which I compassionately seek to respond.
Deep Ecology, Ethics and Identity
Living Deep Ecology, integrating it into our lives, as a fabric that permeates it, is an ethical process, a moral choice, with practical and visible effects, in what the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater (1995) considers to be the center of Ethics – the search for a “good life” – for us and all beings.
I learned from a German professor that Ethics begins with recognizing the landscape that permeates us internally, the matter that gives us shape, and it is from this awareness that we open ourselves to other perspectives. As I discussed in a previous article, our identity is dynamic and changes with the transitions we experience.
What contours does my identity take? Does my identity kaleidoscope encompass humanity, the Earth, the cosmos? What are the values on which I base my life, my daily choices?
Our identity is deeply social, shaped from a young age by social learning (Albert Bandura) and continually rebuilt in the relational web in which we move. We are social beings, we learn by observing and mimicking others.
In conversation with my friend Raquel Cajão - nurse midwife who has accompanied many families in the context of home births in Portugal - we talked about how much this dimension makes us more aware of parenthood and the responsibility one feels when accompanying a growing being. A common thread in various religions is this dimension of testimony, as a central vector in processes of personal and spiritual change.
The Faces of Deep Ecology in My Life
Deep Ecology permeates the being that I am, tangled in the woven identity, sewn into the community web in which I grew up.
In the Alentejo experience, intimately telluric, I ‘ve been learning to look at all the phenomena of our lives as integral parts of cyclicality that we share with nature. And this seed in me out spread its roots into the Earth, across the world, in search of water to satiate it and light to nourish it.
The story of my life is populated with gifts and the faces that helped me find the thread of Deep Ecology. This article is also a tribute to their lives and specific choices, which embody “The Great Turning” that Joanna Macy speaks of.
How I discovered the concept of Deep Ecology
Beyond the concrete life that lurks in the margins of the conceptual universe, the formal concept of Deep Ecology crossed my story in 2019, at the Terra Mãe Festival, in Fafe.
At this stage I was looking for a new configuration to serve the world and the first clue arrived precisely with a workshop that I attended on Deep Ecology, with Nuno Silva. Death kept echoing in my days, with a reassuring presence, I already had a direction, even if I couldn't catch a glance of the new landscape to manifest it. But I knew what to search for. So, from then on, I was extremely attentive, until, in my Women's Circle in Porto, I came across a training on Dragon Dreaming, which included the Deep Ecology model. That's how I met Ravi Resk – an incredible social designer, facilitator of new collaborative processes and social technologies – and got into this model, in a sustained way, and with concrete tools.
Later, on the end-of-life doula course, I met Ana Sevinate, a fellow countrywoman with an Alentejo soul, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in psychosynthesis, member of Ecopsicologia Portugal. Sisters in Deep Ecology, I asked her to accompany me, in the practical aspect of the course, triangulating from this model the support I developed in grief suicide.
In fact, this was the moment when I found a configuration - we like to put our lives in little boxes - but this dimension only spread so quickly in my life because it found cultivated and very fertile land from so many years of creating rich, brown soil, that breathes. The fallow time helped the land choose the seeds it needed.
The woven fabric with which Deep Ecology is dressed grew within me in a context of deep connection with the cycles of nature. Even so, there were phases in my life when I felt sad for having little sensitivity to technological matters, in which I watched my cousins, who grew up in urban contexts, flowing so freely.
I learned to be grateful and value the heritage I inherited, which allows me to recognize the symphony of frogs croaking as pure sacred music. And these treasures that we collect throughout our lives, like laughter, also spread naturally through contagion, a good contagion, one which moves in a spiral.☺
The contagion of Deep Ecology
I have been learning practical Deep Ecology throughout my personal diaspora… In conversations with Nuno Carvalhal, from Matosinhos, a dazzled lover, profoundly knowledgeable of Nature and its own language, a creative person on how to live Deep Ecology. I think Nuno was the first person to introduce me to Permaculture.
And, on one occasion when he visited me in the Algarve, he lived in his van and, among other things, he would take a shower with a small plant spray bottle, consuming an extraordinarily small amount of water. Christine and Joachim, two German friends from Bamberg, who I met while trekking in the beautiful volcanic landscape of the island of Santo Antão in Cape Verde. Through them, I touched life in tune with Nature, in the smallest of options, from choosing clothes, cosmetics, travel options, to food. I entered an incredible natural nutritional and gastronomic ecology, super organic, nutritious and tasty food, and I realized what it was like to live vegan from start to finish.
With Pedro Maia and Magda Rouxinol – From the Terra Culta Project in Castro Daire – I received the seed of Vipassana, the meditation technique that radically changed my life. Still with them, I learned several practical tools for daily life and got to know lots of projects that make Deep Ecology an everyday reality, such as Auroville, in India, through the eyes of Ana Roots and Tiago Rouxinol.
With Manuela Neves, from the RELIGAR Project – Casa das Libelinhas, in Foz de Arouce – an incredible space to ground yourself in Nature – I have become deeply intimate with the Earth and its cycles, through touch, massage, yoga or circular dances.
With the people of Cooperativa Integral MINGA, from Montemor-o-Novo, as a community we seek to live in a logic of degrowth, in a locally based economy, which promotes sustainable development. With the vast community in the Algarve, I touched the plasticity of experiencing Deep Ecology through dance, on sound trips, meditation retreats, singing retreats, in forest schools, in vegetable gardens managed by children, or in the traditional Cooperativa do Graínho - a rural and unique community- who have learned how to preserve ancestral knowledge, continuing to spread it among new generations. At Quinta de Vale da Lama I fully immersed myself in Permaculture and, from this family of cuttings, I immersed myself in fermentation with Hugo Dunkel, Maria Quintino and Onur Malay.
With the people at Associação Terra Sintrópica, in Mértola, I learn new approaches and I’m moved to see the story of regeneration sprouting from the earth… among many other people and communities…
May we all continue “spreading seeds”, as Joana Rosa, a Madeiran woman who has dedicated herself to taking care of the land, told me once.
Echoes of Deep Ecology
Several people let me know how much has touched them to read the perspective and proposal of Deep Ecology, how much it made them reflect on the way they live.
They mentioned topics such as the superficiality of their lifestyle, the distance from Nature and the excessive focus on the technological dimension, the frequent closure in the face of experiencing losses and the inherent grieving process, the rarity with which we allow ourselves to stop, the importance of being in silence, and welcome transitions in life. I listened to beautiful stories – like the one from Ulises - who found a sheep in pain, and as he felt helpless, he sang to it, and the sheep cried.
Deep Ecology and Compassion
In the Work that Reconnects approach, change begins in our hearts, in the emotions that arise when we are confronted with the rawness of the ecological and social crisis we are going through.
Buddhism states that “Compassion, loving-kindness, and altruism are the keys not only to human development but also to planetary survival. Real change in the world will only come from a change of heart. What I propose is a compassionate revolution, a call for radical reorientation away from our habitual preoccupation with the self. It is a call to turn toward the wider community of beings with whom we are connected, and for conduct that recognizes other interests alongside our own” (Dalai Lama and Patrick McDonnell: 2023). And he adds, “There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday, and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to love, believe, do”.
Compassion has this triple dimension:
The deep recognition of suffering;
The personal commitment to get involved in this reality to change it;
Concrete action - embracing this reality on which we are interdependent, as illustrated in Cristiana Oliveira's beautiful photo, Hugs from Liquidâmbares.
The support I propose as a Transition Doula is one of the settings in which I feel called to serve compassionately.
Transition Doula: Echoes of the Earth that I seek to respond to
I am very in tune with the American painter Georgia O’Keeffe -“To see takes time”- and the type of accompaniment I propose is an invitation to pause, in the midst of the turbulence we are going through, to see, deeper. To seek in the inner landscape the deep root that anchors us to life and makes us, like a plant, rise towards the light and a greater meaning, where we can live with gratitude for the gift that life represents, absorbing with joy the beautiful poem by António Ramos Rosa - “I am alive and I write sun”.
It is an invitation to connection, through spirituality – a spirituality of regeneration – that helps us reconnect to the whole of which we are part, from our relationship with Nature, a relationship that is intrinsically very ancient and very deep.
It is an invitation to a broad approach that looks at our needs from an integral perspective.
It is an invitation to look at life, changes, transitions as cycles, which can be crossed within the logic of the Deep Ecology Spiral and from a perspective of ecological reciprocity. Just as Lee shared with me in a contemplative circle- “The way you take care of yourself is the way you take care of the world.”
It is an invitation to embody compassion, in the concrete contexts in which we live, from the deprivatization of our pain and the amplification of our community and support networks, of the idiosyncratic refuges that each one needs, because in incompleteness we open ourselves, beyond arrogance of the individualistic self-sufficiency that corporate capitalism encourages.
It is an invitation to ritualize life and each of the deaths it involves.
It is an invitation to look at our death as a process that also reveals life and transmutation.
It is an invitation to make a future memory of who we are.
*I dedicate this article to Naomi Shihab Nye, celebrating her life and legacy of kindness and embodiment of Deep Ecology.
“When the world goes mad”, by John Roedel
When the world
goes mad
become wildly kind
to everyone
everyone
everyone
everyone
my love,
~ you can’t control much
but you control how
you treat others
in these breaking news
heartbreaking times
when nothing feels certain
let your raw kindness
be a certainty
allow your compassion
to become a North star
stumped up in
the sky for
others to follow
back home.
References
Lama, Dalai; McDonnell, Patrick (2023). Heart to Heart: A Conversation on Love and Hope for Our Precious Planet. E-Book.
Savater, Fernando (1995). Ética para Um Jovem. Editorial Presença.
I suggest you check the link pages:
Associação Terra Sintrópica- https://terrasintropica.com/en/
Cooperativa Integral MINGA- https://mingamontemor.pt/
Plant-Based Flow, by Onur Malay- https://plantbasedflow.com/
Quinta de Vale da Lama- https://www.valedalama.net/internship-on-the-farm/
Raquel Cajão- Parto em Casa em Portugal - https://raquelcajao.com/
Wild Zymu, de Maria Quintino- https://cooperativadaterra.pt/en/wild-zymu-en/
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