What This Is
Silvaticus Mundus is a regenerative design project that operates on multiple scales:
- individual (soul care)
- groups/organizations (cognitive permaculture)
- ecosystems (ecological restoration for the homes and urban contexts)
The driving force behind this project is that contemporary society is dominated by machines, but your life doesn't need to be. In fact, life can't be dominated by machines, because the two forms of energy are fundamentally at odds. Today, this tension is undermining the very integrity of the Earth's web of life, and this manifests in a wide range of distress and dis-ease: individual illness; chaotic and unsafe social conditions; political conflict; food supply instability; war; climate dysregulation; and pandemic levels of depression/anxiety, among many other challenges.
The root cause of these symptoms -- literally and figuratively -- is society's orientation toward serving the advance of machines and technology, rather than living ecosystems. Thus, the solution is to restore an ecological manner of living where our energies serve primarily to support the life-giving ecosystems of which we are a part, rather than serving an economic order that seeks a literal cancer-like growth.
Soul Care
"Soul" here is defined as something's "eco-niche" -- one's unique functional role/place in the larger community of life. It is not necessarily spiritual or mystical. Rather than transcendence, soulful living is all about immanence: being more thoroughly grounded in the tangible world. Soul care is cultivating ecological cognition.
How it Works - The Method
First, we set up a consultation: a conversation that surveys your current cognitive landscape. Through this dialogue we establish a "lay of the land" of your situation; a general sketch of the key factors, challenges, limits, and opportunities of your current cognitive ecosystem. From this, we discuss what practical steps you can take to rebalance and redistribute resources of your ecology to maximize holistic balance, efficiency, and resilience.
To aid this process, I guide you through a Life Sector Analysis. This is based on the permaculture design strategy of a zone and sector analysis -- a holistic assessment of the various components of a given ecosystem. Which areas of your life are thriving? Which are merely surviving? What's present, what's absent? What needs more attention? Where might there be "weeds" growing in your cognitive ecosystem? This analysis provides a systemic perspective on your situation and helps identify strengths, needs, gaps, and available resources.
