Learning to Listen / Land+Uncertainty

Approaching the land and patterns of creation by means of meditation and movement improvisation practice
An interdisciplinary proposition for inquiring scientists, engineers, artists…

To become one with nature — agriculture is an occupation in which a farmer adapts himself to nature. To do that, you have to gaze at a rice plant and listen to the words from the plant.
If you understand what the rice says, you just adjust your heart to that of the rice plants and raise them. In reality, we do not have to raise them. They will grow. We just serve nature…Giving up your ego is the shortest way to unification with nature.
– Masanobu Fukuoka

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Masanobu Fukuoka is the originator of ‘Natural Farming’ – a way of farming that does not plow the earth, it does not add prepared fertilizer or compost. There is no extensive weeding, and no pesticides or herbicides are being used.

Similarily, indigenous tribes all over the world have lived over hundreds of generations in intimate and interdependent relationships with their natural environment. They were, and are ‚tending the wild‘.

Addressing and challenging our perception of agricultural practices and progress, these approaches point at a particular life-philosophy and surely reach way further than farming.

Practicing meditation and using principles and exercises of partnering dance forms, we investigate the concept of ‚the other‘, as well as ‚the unfolding of the creative process‘, aiming at embodying deeper levels of ecological understanding and ecophilosophy.

Contact Improvisation is a dance practice of improvising and partnering, based on the physics of touch, balance, weight, momentum, flow and resistance.
It tunes our senses to be ready to respond in an ever-shifting dialogue of movement.
It is an endlessly variable experience suitable for all bodies and inquiring minds.

An ecosystem is called resilient if it is able to adapt to unforeseeable and sometimes drastic changes.
Adaptation, as well as the creation of agricultural systems that are resilient and regenerative, addressing and integrating the laws of land, air and water, seems mandatory in this time.

In order to implement this approach, besides adequate knowledge and experience, the ability to listen is key.
This is where an embodied understanding of meditation and movement improvisation find their place and function.
You definitely do not need to be a dancer to practice this.
An ability to be still, yet present and awake, to be able to focus and unfocus the mind, to observe, to let things unfold or interact, an awareness of the power of imagination, as well as its source, all this may help us experience the land and its expressions. Our understanding of ecological principles, interdependence and interconnectivity deepens.
Such practice supports an ability to respond intuitively and eventually adapt to sudden disturbances.
In one or the other form, these practices have been, or still are part of daily life in various cultures we recognize as sustainable.

By expanding our understanding of what dance may be, and by transcending a human-centered perspective of being and dealing with the world, we may discover how core concepts of meditation, as well as somatic and movement practices, relate to, inform and enrichen being and collaborating with the land.