World-renowned leaders—Andrew Weil, M.D. and Michael Pollan—meet local change agents to unveil solutions for healthy living, green jobs, and social justice.

[Pittsburgh, PA] – September 22, 2009- The first Three Rivers Bioneers (www.3riversbioneers.org) conference takes place this October 16-18, 2009 at the Pittsburgh Project on the Northside. The Three Rivers Bioneers (3RB) conference is a leading-edge forum highlighting breakthrough solutions for restoring people and planet.

I listen to a lot of podcasts during my work day, but the latest episode of The Art of Storytelling with Children demands particular notice. You should listen to it. You should really, really listen to it.

I originally wrote this for the Fifth World Design Diary in April, but its combination of anthropological topics, oral tradition, and practical storyjamming techniques means that it probably has a lot of interest to readers of this blog, as well. This piece originally introduced a series; I present it here with links to the rest of the series on the Fifth World Design Diary.

Arnold van Gennep worked as an ethnographer and folklorist at the turn of the last century in France. He gets credit for founding folklore as a field in that country, but most today remember him for his 1909 work, Rites of Passage. In it, van Gennep described three phases to any rite of passage:

As I write this, Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 occupies the #9 slot on The New York Times‘ list of best-selling hardcover graphic books, where it has now spent the past four weeks. The comic portrays the adventures of “mice with swords”—what Variety called “a mix of Lord of the Rings and Stuart Little.” The Mouse Guard books don’t present a very detailed or intricate plot, or even terribly complex characters (though the Winter series has certainly done more on that account than the preceding Fall series); still, it has attracted a devoted following because it evokes, in its setting and in David Petersen’s gorgeous art, such a captivating world.

Last time, I wrote about the unexpected richness of roleplaying games—or more specifically, storyjamming—as part of rewilding, as a crucial, long-term survival skill. I found something else interesting at that unusual intersection: other people. Yes, other people, besides me, have an interest in both rewilding and roleplaying games, and even how roleplaying games can deepen, improve, and help our rewilding!

• The College of Mythic Cartography. You can’t talk about storyjamming without mentioning the man who coined the term, Portland’s illustrious Willem Larsen. I do take some pride in having a hand in pushing Willem to dust off his old teenage hobby and see the potential in it.

Last year, I made the trip across Ohio to attend the Second Annual Eastern Woodland Native American Gathering and Pre-1840 Encampment. Admittedly, I had a distinct focus on the former. It distinguishes itself from a pow-wow because they don’t dance competitively. The year before, people had looked up to see a pair of bald eagles in the sky, seeming to join in to dance with them. I made the trip almost like an animist pilgrimage, looking for some kind of profound experience like that. I danced with them, though to my shame, my much-abused body wouldn’t take so much activity and I left the circle early. An announcement came later, asking people not to do that. I think they meant me.

In my desk, I keep a piece of the Blarney stone. Well, if you read the fine print, it admits that it really just comes from the local bluestone, though the legends of the Blarney stone say it didn’t even come from there. As befits such a stone, contradictory legends give it mutually exclusive but equally fantastic origins, whether from the Lia Fáil, the Stone of Destiny on the Hill of Tara, or half of the original Stone of Scone, or hoisted from the walls of Jerusalem in the Crusades, or the pillow of the Biblical patriarch Jacob, and brought to Ireland by the prophet Jeremaiah. Why such a storied and powerful stone would end up, without any apparent honor or recognition, in the walls of a local lord’s castle, these stories do not say. But they do say that anyone who kisses the stone will have “the gift of gab.”

It gets lonely for rewilding folk out there. You can’t even discuss the things you hold dear, because more often than not, the people around you will consider you “eccentric” at best, and insane at worst. It can become deeply alienating. Even the most ardent person will feel doubt, even shame, beginning to take over. Great things happen when people with similar perspectives meet. I’ve seen the energy of that rare affirmation before. Such people can build off of each other’s energy, and start something really great. In exile, we’ve found ourselves with very few people we can really talk to. We want to help foster a local rewilding “scene,” a local network for sharing skills, ideas, and perspectives. If you live in the Allegheny, Monongahela, or Upper Ohio watersheds, please consider joining the Rewild Pittsburgh group I started on Facebook. From there, I hope we can expand and do more, but first, we need to find each other!

In “reading” these words, do you say anything? More likely, you read silently—or more accurately, subvocalize. Like microexpressions, reading, like emotion, still inheres to movement of the human body. It cannot take place solely in an incorporeal “mind,” our fantasies of such aside. We can fool ourselves into that notion only because we’ve reduced the motions involved to the most fleeting versions, giving the superficial impression that they barely happen at all.

William Golding’s classic novel, The Lord of the Flies, paints a grim portrait of human nature, illustrating how, without the constraint of civilization, we descend into savagery. Yet, in the end, the mere presence of an adult brings the chaos to an immediate end. So, ignoring for the moment how we can draw conclusions about human nature from a work of fiction, does this really tell us about human nature, or a world where we suddenly find our elders disappeared, and our traditions broken?