“We are moving in wider circles, we are opening our circle.”

– Rising Appalachia

When the two sisters who comprise Rising Appalachia sing their song “Wider Circles,” they speak of starting from the center and moving outward, and trace with their hands an outward spiral that grows ever larger. I imagine them starting biocentric ways of living with and loving life on earth and gradually including a greater part of the habitats in which they sing. As a philosopher of methods engaged in emerging integration across modern boundaries, I try to think differently, and to share my thinking. I dream of leaving town and the wild turkeys and deer who have taken refuge in it, and going to a former primeval forest to restore it and to embrace its health and mine. I dream of atoning for my pioneer ancestors’ vitacide, for their destroying healthy habitats and imagining that their “use” of the land improved it.

With emergence, we include more and more parameters—more dimensions, perhaps—of the human experience, from flesh to energy to sensations to perceptions to understanding to awareness to interbeing. We consult the biogenesis of life on earth, the possibilities that remain, and the most promising ways to live to enable this cycle of evolution to continue.

Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of loving her living surround and wondering if it can love us back. In this series, we look at more integrative ways of giving the much abused body of life good reason to do unto us as we do unto all life.