Since moving the world headquarters of the Cascadia Poetics Lab to Rainier Beach in July 2017, I have become enamored with Mapes Creek, or what the First People of this place called dxʷwuqʷəb – place of loon. It pops up out of the ground south of legendary Kubota Garden, gets sent through ponds and up to create waterfalls, passes through Sturtevant Ravine and then flows mostly through underground pipes before the last 440 feet of it is daylighted in Be’er Sheva Park.
At 8:45 on the morning of Saturday, April 27, 2024, we’ll gather with people from various traditions to learn about their perspectives on nature and water and how it is regarded and/or venerated. In addition to Ashley Townes, other speakers will be Kosho Itagaki, a Soto Zen priest and chief priest of Eishoji, a Soto Zen training facility in Rainier Beach, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, a Soto Zen Priest and docent at Kubota Garden, Reverend Judith Laxer, a licensed, Ordained SHES (Spiritual Healers and Earth Stewards) Minister and Priestess, Armaye Eshete and Nagessa Dube of Serve Ethiopians Washington, a group that has been cleaning litter and non-native species from the creek’s riparian zone in the park. The skunk cabbage is out now and the creek looks beautiful. Plan to meet near the restrooms. If raining we will be under the new shelter near the restrooms.
Tetsuzen Jason Wirth will also discuss the creek, and efforts to protect it, in the context of ecological reason as articulated in a new essay published in the journal Research in Phenomenology, entitled: “Affordances: on Luminous Abodes and Ecological Reason.”
This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up? (READ MORE.)
Nagessa Dube will talk about indigenous traditions in Ethiopia as related to water and nature. This should be a remarkable event. I am grateful to work on such an important task in the neighborhood in which I live and with such dedicated, committed individuals.
Speakers
Dr. Jason M. Wirth
is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy. He is an ordained priest in the Soto Zen lineage. He is co-editor of Cascadian Zen, a collection of poems and essays dedicated to awakening the mind to bioregional thinking in general and to Cascadia in particular. He is a Founding Editor of Watershed Press.
Nagessa Oddo Dube
My name is Nagessa Oddo Dube, a legal professional with degrees in law from Addis Ababa University (LLB) and Seattle University (LLM). Previously, I served as the Deputy Attorney General in Oromia state of Ethiopia. Currently, I am the program manager at Serve Ethiopians Washington, where I am dedicated to advocating for environmental justice. Additionally, as a former prisoner of conscience, I remain committed to my passion for civil rights and social justice.
Rev. Judith Laxer
is a modern-day mystic who believes that humor, beauty and the wonders of nature make life worth living. The Founding Priestess of Gaia’s Temple, keynote speaker, teacher of the mysteries, and author of Along the Wheel of Time: Sacred Stories for Nature Lovers [Ravenswood Publishing], Judith dedicates her work to restoring the balance between feminine and masculine energy in our culture.
www.judithlaxer.com,
Ashley Townes
salmon recovery.
Armaye Eshete
Kosho Itagaki
is a Soto Zen priest. He is the chief priest of Eishoji, a Soto Zen training facility located in the southern part of the city of Seattle and also operating director of the Northwest Zen Community. After training at Saijoji Soto Zen monastery under the Rev. Suigan Yogo (located in Min-ami Ashigara, in the Kanagawa Prefecture) and Hoonji Soto Zen monastery under the Rev. Amafuji Zenko (located in Morioka, in the Iwate Prefecture), he received Dharma transmission from the Rev. Saikawa Dosho. After working for seven years as the resident priest at Zenshuji Soto Zen temple on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, he moved to Seattle in 2006 and founded the various facilities and programs that comprise the Northwest Zen Community. Eishoji received its name from the Rev. Donin Minamizawa, abbot of Daihonzan Eiheiji, in 2010 and moved into its present location in 2012.
This looks wonderful!
Looking forward to harvesting the wisdom that will be on display