“Animism” courtesy of Max Braun
How do we anticipate?
The Climate Anticipation Project gathers existent and emerging anticipatory communities into networks of anticipation for the hard seasons ahead.
The Climate Anticipation Project connects anticipatory communities across the spectrum of spirituality, ecological justice, and regenerative ecology.
Venus of Willendorf
Mural by Giovanna Alvarez aka @giovanna_alvarez_art seen in the Wynwood Arts District of Miami, Florida.
The Christian ethicist and theologian Larry L. Rasmussen describes anticipatory communities as those:
“...home places where it is possible to reimagine worlds and reorder possibilities, places where new or renewed practices give focus to an ecological and post-industrial way of life. Such communities have the quality of a haven, a set-apart and safe place yet a place open to creative risk. Here basic moral formation happens by conscious choice and not by default (simply conforming to the ethos and unwritten ethic of the surrounding culture). Here eco-social virtues are consciously cultivated and embodied in community practices. Here the fault lines of modernity are exposed.”
The anticipators are those who create the prophetic edge against the threats of ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. In anticipatory community the very idea and practice of community is brought to the common tool-shed and repair-table to be fixed up again for the sake of each and everyone's Earthy and spiritual flourishing.
The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
The anticipators are the practitioners of regenerative ecotheology. The anticipator understands that the ecology of our human-being is always already entangled with the ecology of our Earthy-being. To experience regenerative intimacy is to fall in love again with the Earthiness of one’s being. The anticipator always honors and learns from peoples and cultures who have not forgotten this love and intimacy, always foregrounding their knowledge as the keepers of the inner flame of anticipation.
Worship (Puja) of the Ganges River, Varanasi, India. Image courtesy of Jose Pereira
This is cutting-edge common sense. The anticipator knows that every element is holy. Every element is full of divinity. Regenerative intimacy is the element which can help us to repair our political and cultural systems and structures, as it also repairs our relationships to the body politic of Earth and allows us to participate with Earth in practices of regeneration. Regenerative intimacy is taking the indigenous worldview, where we understand that, as we learn from one of our dear teachers Robin Wall Kimmerer “the ecosystem is not a machine, but a community of sovereign beings, subjects rather than objects. What if those beings were the drivers?”