New Half-Time Option!

The IMA program is happy to announce a half-time option, starting next fall. New and continuing students will be able to enroll in the IMA program for six credits instead of the twelve awarded each full-time semester. This will enable many people to better balance their studies with their work, family and community life. Half-time students will come to the residency and then send in three packets at the beginning, middle and end of the subsequent semester rather than five full packets (every three weeks). This option has been requested by students in the IMA student, and we're happy to offer it. To learn more, please contact our program director, Ruth.Farmer@goddard.edu, and also see our website.

February Residency Wonders in Workshops

World Café: Making a Difference: An IMA Community Event. Setting ourselves up in world cafe format (small tables for intimate conversations on important issues), we'll explore these questions: What makes for real and significant social and political change? How do we know that our research will influence change? How can our research change our angle of vision? How can our angle of vision effect strategies that will make a difference? (What kinds of questions do we need to explore to figure that out?) What does it mean to “make a difference”? (What is activism? What about the work of listening, sharing, really deep research? How might our findings change the way others work?) What do we feel we need to know, do, or be, given the state of the world and our professional/academic goals? (How can we create small, but always significant means of contributing to change that are both healthy and sustainable?).

Embodiment Colloquium, with IMA Faculty Members Ellie Epp and Lise Weil. The embodiment colloquium is an informal gathering held every residency to investigate and promote the new field of embodiment studies. Come with tales about your semester's adventures in embodiment.

Scholarly Personal Narrative with visiting IBA Faculty Member, Shelley Vermilya. Writing for our lives, writing from our lives, writing to understand our lives, and writing our lives to understanding our living. This is what memoir offers. Writing memoir for degree fulfillment requires a curiosity about our life experiences and an honest ability to examine personal experiences with academic awareness and acuity. How do we do examine experience, achieve a balance of creativity and critical writing and not tip over into catharsis? If we do tip into catharsis, how to we bring our work back to academic credibility? We will think about how research in various academic disciplines can offer a context in which to place our experience. That context will offer new ways for us to understand our experience. Our experience in context may provide us with new meaning and the academic credibility we seek.

The Many Faces of Place, Part 1 of 2; with IMA Faculty Member, Ralph Lutts. Join us for a discussion of place and your place-related studies. The concept and experience of place informs many areas of study and practice from environmental studies to anthropology, local and regional social change, local food and currencies, architecture, memoir, local history, and many more. This workshop will examine the many ways in which place can become a part of your studies. Come to the workshop ready to discuss your present or planned place related studies and practice. We will explore ideas related to place, use your work as examples, and explore innovative ways to use place to anchor our lives and work in the world.

Jung: A Three-Part Workshop with IMA Faculty Member Francis X. Charet. Jung: The Making of a Psychology of Consciousness. This three-part workshop will explore the rise and development of Jungian psychology using the film The Wisdom of the Dream and discussion. Areas that will be covered: the methods Jung used to explore the psyche, the theory of the collective unconscious, complexes and archetypes, the practice of interpreting symbols, dreams and their relation to myths and to the meaning of life.

Speaking Bodies: A Three-Part Workshop with Faculty Member Ellie Epp. Part I: How language happens: the recent science of language. Is non-language necessary to language? Could there be 'meaning' without a physical world? How can language have evolved? What are the evolutionary precursors of language in animals? What changes in primate brains have allowed language to develop? What happens in bodies when we use language? Is language somehow an encapsulated function, or does it draw on the whole of the brain, the whole of the body? We know language is social, but how should we understand the embodiment of social interaction among speakers? This first session of the Speaking bodies minicourse will set out an integrated way of understanding language as part of human bodies, which in turn are parts of the physical earth. Is non-language necessary to language? Could there be 'meaning' without a physical world? How can language have evolved? What are the evolutionary precursors of language in animals? What changes in primate brains have allowed language to develop? What happens in bodies when we use language? Is language somehow an encapsulated function, or does it draw on the whole of the brain, the whole of the body? We know language is social, but how should we understand the embodiment of social interaction among speakers?

Learning as Fluid Play: Breathing and Moving to Keep You and Your Study Alive with IMA student Mary Abrams. The human body is a cellular organism, primarily water. Water molecules need variation of rhythm and movement for living vibrancy. As fluid living organisms we utilize information within our structure combined with information exchange with the environment to obtain new ‘nutrients’ of information for living. Breathing, learning and studying are expressions and functions of information flow. This workshop includes an overview of how the human body is fluidly resonant with all living systems, instruction, movement demonstrations, and explorations using breath/sound and movement inspired by Continuum. Changing body rhythms heightens awareness of sensation and movement awakening our capacity to move more freely on all levels -- thinking, feeling, and action.

Your Calling, Your Livelihood, Your Life with IMA Faculty Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. A “calling” is a term often used to connote spiritual/religious vocations, one focused on serving God and/or a community through one’s work. Yet this term also speaks to what work, study, deeds and tasks we feel compelled to do in everyday life and for our livelihood, and when we engage in conversation with what's calling to us, we can find the pulse of our studies as well as keys to a meaningful way of making a living. To even hear your calls takes effort and deep listening (which, according to theologian Paul Tillich, is the first duty of love). We can also engage in arts and practices that help us test pilot, play act or further dwell within the energy of the call to see what it means for us.In this workshop, we'll enter into conversation, or deeper conversation, with our calling, dive down into some writing exercises to see what surfaces, and then discuss what we find as well as share resources, ideas, strategies and notions of how to follow the threads of what we love into work that infuses our life with greater meaning and joy.

Numen: The Nature of Plants, film with co-producer Ann Armbrecht. See this documentary film about the healing power of plants and the natural world and, in particular, about whole plant medicine as practiced in the United States. Featuring stunning footage of medicinal plants and moving interviews with leading herbalists, doctors, ethnobotanists and others, Numen provides a vision of healthcare rooted in the traditions of herbal medicine and offers concrete steps to improve individual and environmental health.

LanguageS, Language Loss and the Politics of Translation with IMA Faculty Member Karen Campbell. How does translation (and the lack of it into English) impact our appreciation of ourselves and others, our understanding of other ways of being? Is translation in fact possible? Do all the arts transcend cultural barriers? What happens when a language vanishes? These are some of the questions I will attempt to address. I’ll introduce languages embedded in their environments – and the significance of that for our scientific understanding of nature. Then examples of language “drama” including (mis)translation & scientific knowledge loss, for reasons ranging from colonial/postcolonial greed to contemporary need, profitability, to sheer unwillingness to imagine other ways of being as significant. I will also offer an experiential component – a chance for us to try translating visual images and poetry – so that the theory (and the challenges!) may become clearer.

The Art and Practice of Narrative Medicine with HAS Faculty Member Robin Rivinis and IMA Faculty Member Jim Sparrell. When we gather and tell our life stories we access memory, imagination, intuition, and we deepen sensory and somatic awareness and connection. We create structure for understanding and integrating our experience and as we build a conscious paradigm we shape our vision of how we want to live. Through the engagement of narrative values such as mindfulness, consciousness, playfulness, love of metaphor, curiosity, listening, and generosity we are able to resist generalization, homogenization, oppressive power structures, and reductionism. Instead we come into the potential of creative expression and invention of novel, revelatory, and eclectic personal and communal narratives. In this workshop we will identify some of the narrative traditions, such as oral history, poetry, psychotherapy, memoir, case studies, and literature. In exploring the emergent realm of narrative medicine we will include an overview of both current practice and a vision for the future, as well as exploring its relationship to other narrative traditions. We will experiment with writing in the spirit of narrative medicine practice.

The Feminism Question: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the “F” Word With IMA faculty Lise Weil. It is now some thirty years since the emergence of the Second Wave of Feminism in the US in the 1970s, and according to some, we are living in a post-feminist era. With the critical distance such an interval affords, it seems important to ask: what exactly did feminism achieve? What did it fail to achieve? How has our world been changed by this movement and in what ways has it resisted or reversed the changes it ushered in? Before we address any of those questions, of course, we will need to ask: what was/is feminism? It’s very possible that there will be as many definitions as there are people in the room. We all have our own experiences of feminism, whether it’s understood as a movement or a form of consciousness, and the workshop will be structured so that several different perspectives can be considered. I will start with my own story, which begins in the 70s in the northeast US where both feminist and lesbian culture were exploding and where in 1982 I founded the feminist journal Trivia: A Journal of Ideas. As a feminist editor in the 80s and 90s I was at the center of a series of political controversies whose legacies we are still living with today.

Goddard Faculty on Tour in Tucson

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, IMA faculty and coordinator of Transformative Language Arts, recently gave four readings and a transformative writing workshop in Tucson as part of her book tour for The Sky Begins at Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body and her fourth book of poetry, Landed. She read at Silverbell Trading Company, an art gallery owned by permaculturists Barbara and Keith Rose; two events organized by Temple Emanu-El on embodied, transformative writing through age and change; and with local writer Jefferson Carter in the Historic Y courtyard in a bioregional reading organized by the Sky Island Alliance, an organization that protects the varied ecosystems of sky islands, mountains rising from the desert where many species of plants and animals reside. She was also featured in several blogs -- one on the transformative power of storytelling, Telling Stories, and another on the power of writing, Jump Write In by MA-TLA alumni Debra Thornley. She also held information sessions on Goddard wherever she traveled. Finally, she made a new friend (photo on left) at the Sonoran Desert Museum.

Ruth Farmer: Engaged Education

Ruth Farmer, IMA Interim Director, has a long background in education. As she writes of her background in her Goddard profile: "My activism took root in North Carolina during the turbulent, liminal 50’s and 60’s. Fighting for social change and seeing it come into fruition – of a sort – gave me hope as well as faith. I have always lived in the borderland between pragmatism and idealism because I know that hearts and laws change at vastly different rates. This border existence is a place of learning. I live with the past and in the present, while envisioning and preparing for the future. I’ve marched, boycotted, written letters, organized conferences, donated money, and amassed thousands of volunteer hours. In these small ways, I help to improve others’ lives. In these small ways, I help myself to become a better person. I learn about the things that make this planet a more humane place." Listen to a podcast of Ruth talking about how innovative and meaningful education unfolds in Goddard's IMA Program.

Two photos of Ruth: Bottom one is Ruth being introduced by now-alumni Cynthia Curley while being applauded by IMA faculty member Ralph Lutts

Ann Armbrecht: Thin Places and the Pilgrimage Home

Ann Ambrecht, IMA faculty member, writer and filmmaker, looks at the places -- thick or thin -- between cultures, and between humans and the earth. In her memoir, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, she writes about how studying the Yamphu Rai people in northeastern Nepal changed her view, and showed her more about the deep wisdom about living on the earth. Her film, "Numan: The Wisdom of Plants," looks at the healing powers of plants and the natural world. Ann talks about writing and teaching, and how both show her how we can open ourselves up to the possibilities for real change and deep understandings in the world. Terry Tempest Williams, author of Finding Beauty in a Broken World, writes, "Ann Armbrecht has written an intricate, smart, soulful story about the shape-shifting boundaries bewtwen culture and landscape; people and place....It is a brave rendering of what happens when we allow our intellect to bow to our instincts and recognize love for what it is: a transformative pilgrimage requiring great courage and generosity of spirit, including forgiveness."

Jaes Seis: The Dark Mother, Shamanism and Consciousness Studies

Jaes Seis, a current Individualized MA student, has found her other path in studying shamanism with a particular focus on consciousness studies and the dark mother archetype. Listen to her describe her study, which she began at Goddard. Experienced at shamanic work, leading workshops and offering counseling, she has worked around the world, including on a recent excursion to Peru. Her thesis on the dark mother looks deeply at how we define and explain darkness in our lives, and how darkness can be a force of transformation and of life itself. Click on the title for this blog to listen to a podcast of Jaes describing her work.

IMA Sponsors Continental Bioregional Congress

Goddard's IMA program helped sponsor the Continental Bioregional Congress, held Oct. 3-10 in Summertown, Tenn. at the Farm, an ecovillage that began as an intentional community over 40 years when Stephen and Ina Mae Gaskin led a caravan of buses from San Francisco around the country. The original caravan began after a group of interdenominational ministers set up a tour for Stephen to speak to churches around the country to create between understanding between small communities and their young people, who were becoming increasingly involved in social protest. What started as a speaking tour ended up as a vibrant community with over 3,000 acres of land, and approximately 500 residents, plenty of ecologically-designed homes and energy systems, and a variety of businesses (including publishing, chocolate manufacturing, tofu, solar panel, and midwifery through the work and writings of Ina Mae Gaskin, who wrote Spiritual Midwifery).

The Continental Bioregional Congress, founded in 1984, brings together people from throughout the Americas to explore ecologically-informed ways of living, including housing, energy, health, community and eco-community awareness, and the arts. Bioregionalism, which focuses on learning how to live from where we live, and then crafting lives in concert with our ecosystems, is well-described by bioregional writer Stephanie Mills:

"Bioregionalism recognizes, nurtures, sustains and celebrates our local connections with: Land, Plants and Animals, Springs, Rivers, Lakes, Groundwater & Oceans, Air, Families, Friends, Neighbors, Community, Native Traditions and Indigenous Systems of Production & Trade. It is taking the time to learn the possibilities of place. It is a mindfulness of local environment, history, and community aspirations that leads to a sustainable future. It relies on safe and renewable sources of food and energy. It ensures employment by supplying a rich diversity of services within the community, by recycling our resources, and by exchanging prudent surpluses with other regions. Bioregionalism is working to satisfy basic needs locally, such as education, health care and self-governance."

What bioregional offers is also very congruent with the IMA's place-based studies in its Environmental Studies concentration: "The work of the concentration bridges nature, culture, community, sustainability, restoration, justice, and action as areas of inquiry, art, and practice. By looking particularly at the concept of place as an integrating bridge between these areas, students can conduct interdisciplinary, individualized studies that bring greater meaning and a sense of wholeness to themselves and their communities."

The congress itself is a bioregional model in action, or according to many, a ceremonial village of learning about ecology as it relates to our home communities. Coming together in congress, participants educate themselves, share resources, celebrate bioregional arts, and represent ecologically-focused communities from north of Toronto to deep in Venezuela. Because of Goddard's support, which was ear-marked for scholarships for people from south of the Border, along with other support, close to 80% of the 162 participants came from Mexico, Central America and South America, where bioregionalism has particularly taken hold and launched many centers, ecovillages, traveling arts troupes and political, economic and social projects.

Pictures (from top): Stephen Gaskin between Fabio Manzini, ecological architect from Mexico, and Laura Kuri, the key organizer of bioregionalism in Mexico; a participant hanging around at the Farm; writer Stephanie Mills with IMA faculty member, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg; Leonor Fuguet, Venezuelan activist and eco-troubadour; some participants at the All Species Pageant and Ball; tending the fire after the congress was called together by Native American elders from the area.