Witnessing Women's Journeys of Attentiveness: Wild, Sage, Poetic, and Transformative

• In Event: Curriculum Scholars, Literature, and the Women Who Have Influenced/Inspired Us: Commemorating Dreams and Necessities

Abstract

Current times are fraught with the perils of climate change, overpopulation, resource depletion, and nuclear devastation/ war. As I continue research into complexities regarding the witnessing socio-environmental suffering along with possibilities for transformative learning, I seek to delve more deeply into the words of those wild women whose rigorous love and despair for the world has long invigorated my imagination. As Estes (1992) contends, “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species” (p. 1). She connects ecological flourishing with the restoring and honoring of the wild woman archetype -- with the “inimitable and ineffable force which carries a bounty of ideas, images, and particularities for humankind” (p. 26). In this presentation, I celebrate literary, mystic, and scholarly women whose writings have profoundly shifted my perspectives through their remarkable capacities to attend to, embrace, care for and transform the world. Honoring women’s novel contributions is thus acutely intertwined with critical insight into transformative engagement and a politics of engagement in an age of ecocide.

More specifically, I begin by drawing upon Estes’ work to elaborate understandings of the wild archetype, and introduce women whose work explores diverse awareness of deep attention as a transformative praxis. My theoretical framework thus pursues relationships among wildness, attention, and transformation. I highlight present-ness, penetrating poetics, imaginative, unconstrained wisdom, and commitment to transformation as part of a wild imagination. Moreover, I challenge commonplace assertions that attention, observation, witnessing are passive practices, and show how these women connect these practices with social action. Data includes brief reference to themes of attention-transformation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, three novels greatly influencing my thought. Additionally, I introduce philosopher, mystic, and activist Simone Weil (1952) construal of education as a “gymnastics of attention,” renowned American poet Mary Oliver (2016) who learned to attend to the natural world via her forty-year relationship with photographer Molly Malone Cook, and ecological activist Joanna Macy (2007, 2012), who asserts that being fully present to what is happening in self and world constitutes a radical transformative activity. Subsequent data sources, as I turn to curricular considerations, include educational theorist Maxine Greene (1995)’s emphasis on the cultivation of attention in aesthetic education and discussion of literature as a powerful means for exploring the human condition.

This qualitative, hermeneutically-informed (Gadamer 2004) presentation interprets wild women’s wisdom literature, and also briefly life-writes my own relationship with these authors (Hasebe-Ludt et. al. 2009). My conclusion highlights that, among other qualities, wild women’s attention is not orderly, controlled, finite, but rather attentive to the inner voice, wildly open, generative, inquisitive, and transformative. It also struggles, challenges, contests, resists, and follows a not predetermined way. Finally, it refuses narrow and divisive battlefield logics and profoundly loves and embraces the world, responding to the suffering of sentient and nonsentient life. This has significant and relevant implications for how we conceive of curriculum in standardizing times and how we might participate in transformative learning, solidarity-in-diversity, and social action in this climate of ecocide.

Author

• Claudia Eppert, University of Alberta