Human's as Time Binders

Post 282

Never have I read a book (listened) cover to cover and then simply skipped back to the beginning and started again… Carol Sanford’s ‘No More Gold Stars’ introduced me to this new behaviour yesterday

Equally, I have never finished a book and thought ‘I’ll do another lap just to absorb it deeper, and then I’ll do a few more taking notes to help me create a practice’

Over the last few months, the synchronicity I have experienced repositioning Smart Green Group’s place in the work, developing the Bioregional Institute, and all the other new initiatives that have emerged, including Mangrove Ventures, has been insane. A level I have never experienced before

I feel a sense of inner strength like cast iron has developed and a shiny new skin of Teflon has grown across my being with the universe as the Great Mother giving me a big hug and patting me on the bum to say ‘good boy, now go out and play with the others’ as a reward for the big boy decisions I have finally started making in life… Im now becoming someone worthy for the other kids to play with… I’m a big boy now

After my weekend of revelations and my self awarded reaching of ‘Level 3’ I was nudged by one of our emerging Elders to connect with Carol’s work and it clarified the exact things I have been struggling with, though needed to lean for myself.

It will also serve as a foundational text for the future work the Core and Field Teams will be doing for the Institute in the near future

But before I gush any further, I’ll digest it again today to order my thinking

This post is about a concept that Carol points to that struck me deeply in Chapter 3 originated by Alfred Korzybski from his book ‘Manhood of Humanity’ around our role on the planet (written in 1921 if the Manhood thing got you)

There are multiple useful ways to think about the planetary role of humans. For now, I want to focus on time binding, a concept introduced by theoretician Alfred Korzybski as part of his larger articulation of general semantics. Korzybski believed that the failure of modern people to understand the role of humans needed to be addressed because it was leading to social dysfunction and mental illness. He made a general distinction between the roles of plants, animals, and humans.

The role of plants is to bind energies—solar and hydrological energy, nutrient flows, etcetera— making them available to ecological systems in specific places. The role of animals is to bind space by moving physical material around and knitting it together at higher orders of coherence as places.

Humans bind time through their ability to remember and analyze the past and to project consequences into the future. They can pass ideas and insights along from generation to generation through a host of cultural means—such as storytelling, writing, dance, graphic symbols, and mathematical formulations. This gives humans a unique role within evolutionary processes as carriers of an accumulated wealth of complex understanding that is independent of DNA, where biological information and advances are usually collected and stored.

Sanford, Carol. No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves (p. 84). InterOctave, Inc. Kindle Edition.

Bind energy, bind space, bind time… this is such a beautiful way for us to reframe the way we see the living world, and even more important for regenerative developers, an excellent lens for us to image a place while doing a Story of Place for a project

This has struck me so deeply because I saw it in action on our project in Scotland, where Bill Reed and I were exploring the Tayside Bioregion for a client’s 21,000-acre hunting estate last October

Last days post here…

Being an active part of this Story of Place process with Bill and Joel Glanzberg, I got to witness the true genius of Joel’s depth of understanding of the living world (Joel and Pamela Mang were my teachers in TRP) that reflected this unique perspective that Alfred offered us all

Joel was able to see through all the noise that we gave him, absorb over 200 Million years of evolution of place, and then distil a potential essence of place for us to question and test as a team

If anyone has spent time with Joel, image his slow teacher voice that makes you feel like you’re in school again “Thats why the peat needed to grow on this barren rock in the North Sea Michael, to act as a sponge to capture and hold all the water and nutrients to support the animals as a value adding process”

From that, he was able to see all the geological, plant, animal, and human functions in a story that was not just about the region we were studying but the nested reciprocal value that was shared with the rest of the island, and was further able to anchor that around the patterns and importance of Salmon as a species that drives this evolutional ecological cycle. This was reflective of the Salmon as an animal that binds space across the region while linking it to the sea it is nested in

At the time, I couldn’t figure out how he got such a clear and high-level perspective of meaning from the details we had all worked on, but now seeing the three roles of meaning for plants, animals, and humans, I have a clearer lens to see this patterning through myself in the work that I would have missed

Carol in her book, then does what Carol does best and points out where Alfred had not taken the thinking far enough in terms of seeing each of us as individual time binders as nested wholes in the greater whole of our species, which is important as it allows us individually to start to ask ourselves the real question that we should be busying our days with ‘What is my role in this meaning of time-binding and how can I contribute to the greater whole of our species, as a nested system in the living world, as a fractal of the universe?’

No doubt more on ‘No More Gold Starts’ tomorrow…