Tela de la Vida

Joanna Macy (good name) writes about deep ecology and ecopsychology. I read her book “Council of All Beings”. After being in Guatemala for a couple of days, I felt moved to use an adaptation of the exercises in her book to interact with children in surrounding schools to highten awareness of their relationship and role in the natural world.

I called the dynamic-interactive workshop “Tela de la Vida” The workshop took about an hour and was applicable for people of all ages.

The idea of the workshop is to help children have a felt knowing of what it means to be a part of the ecology of the earth. Each person in the workshop chose an element of nature to represent and to speak from the perspective of that element of nature.

For example, I might be an earth worm. I would hold a sign that said “Earth Worm”. I would take an end of a ball of yarn and speak for the earth worm perspective. I would say “I am an earthworm. I live under the soil. I create tunnels and help digest micro nutirents so that the palnt roots can access them. When chemical fertilizers are applied to the soil, I die. The plants and soil are hurt by my death.”

The children were asked to take ten minutes to think about their creature and to imagine what it would be like to be that creature. What would they  need to survive? What would help them? What would hurt them?

After the child had time to think about this, an adult coach would support them in exploring their role.

One by one, each child would talk about their natural element. I would hand them an end of the ball of yarn and thank them for the vital role they play in keeping the earth in balance. As the yarn was passed from person to person standing in a circle, a web would be formed.

Once the web was formed, I had other adults play the role of a disrupting factor to the delicate balance of the web. I had an adult come in and unconsciously throw garbage around. Then we all talked about who would be effected by this uncounsious human action. One by one, if the element the child represented was effected, the child would let go of their peice of yarn and sit down. As we traced the full effect of harmful actions, every child would feel the impact of sitting down and the distruction of the web.

Throughout the workshop, we talked about the role of humans in nature as being the caregiver, garudian and custodian. At the end of the workshop we identified four things the children could do to help the web of life be stable.

These girls are doing their part by looking for any garbage that may have blown into the woods to be put in it’s proper place. 

Before I left Guatemala, I had the opportunity to train a young man named Cesar on how to conduct the workshop. Together, we made any adaptations that might make the workshop more culturally appropriate. Cesar is committed to ecology and to being a leader in helping Guatemala regain a more healthy relationship with the Earth. He was delighted to carry on with the workshop.