Why You Should Buy, and Read, GROUND
Good medicine for these times
I have just finished writing and editing the second book in the Autonomics trilogy, GROUND: How Humanity Disconnected from the Living World, Why it Matters, and How to Fix It.
I really want you to read it. I want to share the ideas in it with you. I want you to understand them.
Not simply because I have poured a great deal of energy, effort, and care into it, which I have, but because it is good medicine for these times.
The seeds of The Neurobiology of Connection, which came out last November, and were the inspiration for this Substack, were planted in 2013. I have been tending and watering them since first meeting Darcia Narvaez in San Francisco in the summer of that year. The decision to create this Substack was, essentially, an editorial decision that allowed me to get feedback on the writing from a much larger community: there are several thousand of you subscribed to this newsletter from all over the world.
The second draft of each chapter of that book was first published here. The gift that this gave me was interaction: I received, on average, about 20 comments per chapter, many of them insightful, many of them affirming, many of them challenging. Out of this call-and-response arose the book. It was, therefore, a community affair. It came through me, but it came out of an emergent dialog with all of you.
GROUND has a different origin story, and it was not possible to build it in call-and-response in the same way because it did not arrive in sequence, as did The Neurobiology of Connection.
GROUND was seeded more recently, probably beginning in July of 2020 during COVID, although I did not know it at the time.
It possibly owes its existence to a trip we took to visit the Mokelumne River that summer, which flows west from the Sierra Nevada, and eventually drops into the Central Valley. This was during COVID, we badly needed a vacation, needed to be able to drive there, and I needed to get my feet on the ground and my hands in the earth. We needed space, and sky, and air. We needed to breathe.
We rented an Airbnb on 35 acres next to the Mokelumne River, less expensive than this might sound. My daughter and I drove there in our VW E-Golf, with a 100 mile range. The trip, which was 150 miles, took us about 8 hours. My daughter, ten at the time, told me she would never drive anywhere with me out of town in that car ever again (we had to recharge three times on the trip, for two hours about 10 miles from our final destination.)
On arrival, we found bear tracks right next to the house, and I spent ten days off-grid, with no email, walking the property, and sitting in the river. The water, the sky, the ground– all of it did something beneficial for us, unwound the early coil of fear that COVID had created, and I remembered that I needed to get my hands in the dirt regularly when we got home. My body remembered this. It became obvious.
This led, stepwise, to us leasing the property in the west of the county that has become our eco-reserve. It led to me be learning to be an arborist and forest tender, to thousands of hours of clearing deadwood, to chainsaw work and pruning and days upon days in the forest, finding home.
This process coincided with us being asked to work with the Founders of Extinction Rebellion, the ecological social activist group born in the UK, to support the wellbeing and resilience of their activists.
Our work became, in the broad sense of the word, political. Life affirmatively political.
During this time I gradually removed myself from a Brazilian spiritual group I had been involved with since 2006. I had come to perceive that the group was becoming a cult.
I was trying to understand something that I could not yet put into words, but that I was experiencing, again and again, namely:
Institutions and organizations and cultures that were self-declaredly conscious, with missions like, ‘using digital technology to transform human consciousness’, and ‘establishing light, peace, and love on earth’ were enacting, in the places where the rubber met the road, behaviors that I could only understand as death technologies.
What was the layer in human consciousness that was causing us (modern humans) to replicate a domination paradigm in organizations and institutions whose stated purpose was to dismantle domination?
I was having a very front row seat (splash zone, I mean– like I was getting soaked) as I got to watch
The psychedelic healing movement frothily mate with late-stage capitalism
the Brazilian spiritual group I was part of get co-opted by Bolsonaro’s authoritarian regime, to the extent that some of its Founding leaders, old men in their 90s, showed up at military offices after Lula was elected, attempting to foment a coup
A world-renowned medical school steal a previous version of our work in broad daylight, and then come back and try to do it a second time
A world-renowned executive coaching and leadership development firm lie to my face about the entire premise of working with us
The Managing Director of a $100 million fund created to use digital technology to transform human consciousness deceive the founders of the fund about being in cognitive decline for several years, and waste nine months of our time inviting an investment offer and making us jump through inane and time-consuming hoops before forgetting everything he asked us to do and not reading a single document he asked us to send him
Beneath all of these phenomena I began to suspect that there was something deeply physiological– something down in the basement of the operating system of the modern world, that was categorically amiss.
This is the subject of the book.
What has happened, in the story of the modern world, that has engendered a domination paradigm as a fundamental response that is so deeply baked into modern culture that we cannot see it, feel it, or remove it?
That is corrupts nearly every relationship and social structure that we attempt to build?
The book is not easy. But it is medicine for this moment, a period of time during which some of the richest people on earth proceed with pillaging the commons (both biotic resources and the commons of ideas) with a rapacity that we probably haven’t seen since ancient Rome.
It is a summons to awareness, a call to the deep belly, a holistic neuroscience text, and a cultural archeology.
I obviously could have sold the book to a traditional publisher, but I want to create a complete experience for readers. I therefore want to design the look and feel of the book, choose the illustrations, the typeface, the layout, the visual style. Everything about this book is hand-made, a work of art, a curation.
Because we do this ourselves, we do not have a whole marketing department working on it, we have not hired someone to game the algorithm on Amazon.com to juice sales.
I also choose to publish the book ourselves, because we want to be SOVEREIGN.
And this is really what the book is all about.
What does it mean to stand on your own two feet? What does it mean not to sell out?
So I invite, and ask you, if you are interested in what we are up to at Hearth Science, to please purchase a copy of GROUND. We can ship both paperback and hardcover books to the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. If you order by December 5, these should arrive in time for the holidays.
We can offer bulk discounts to folks interested in purchasing 5 copies or more (email us at support@restorativepractices.com with ‘Bulk Orders for GROUND’ in the subject line for our bulk pricing rates, and instructions for placing a bulk order).
On December 15 we will also release a digital version of the book for those outside of these three countries.
Thank you sincerely for your support of our work…
All illustrations are spreads from GROUND
GROUND: How Modernity Disconnected from the Living World, Why It Matters, and How to Fix It
406 pages
5.5 x 8.5 pages
full-color illustrations
