Orientations and Web of Relations
When we meet, it seems part of the question is always: what is your context? To know another in part means to know, and feel, how we are each situated. How we are connected to our world and webs of relations, and the debts we owe, beginning with the land we walk, the stories we grew up with, the traditions we keep, the people we love and know and have been loved and known by, the shapes and particularities of our bodies, the currents of desire that move through us, the familial and social and cultural milieus we create and are created by.
I am from the hills. Of Appalachia, of West Virginia. Though I found it hard to fit in with the human culture there, which seemed arrayed against my very gay male body, I recognize that much my way of seeing, of knowing, the gait of my step and the shape of my speech was originally shaped by those hills, those clouds, those trees and raccoons and rivers. Like so many modern people, I carry a grief of disconnection from that place of my origin and my ancestors. I miss them and I honor them.
For the past decade and a half, I have lived in Santa Fe. I have been profoundly influenced by the trees, the stones, the mountains, the birds, the hares, and the coyotes I have shared this space with for so many years. I could only learn what I learned and see what I have seen about myth and the deep patterns of life here on this land where the bones and skulls of animals lie stark upon the ground, where arroyos (mostly dry riverbeds who infrequently but dramaticaly rush with water) hold the collective memories and archives of generations.
I experience myself as an able-bodied white gay cisgender man. These many identifications, though awkward, are the awkward way our culture is attempting to address the fundamental problem that shapes almost all human consciousness: the intensity of Othering. It seems to me we can expect more and more situating as we continue to need to emphasize difference because of the reality that some groups have developed all these categories of separation and everyone is still living inside them. We need much deeper myths than the harmful stories of separation that developed out of selfishness and greed: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and others
In the 1990s I worked in environmental activism and poverty alleviation. My work remains inspired by the Deep Ecology movement I first encountered during that time, especially the work of eco-philosophers such as David Abrams. Ecological consciousness — the experience of ourselves as creatures among creatures, equal to and deeply dependent upon all other living beings and lands — is the only possibility of meaningful human survival worthy of the great gifts our fellow animals, plants, stones, and seas freely offer us. I hope that my works contributes to the urgent need to reclaim the human gift of storytelling and use it to weave ourselves more into relationship rather than to use it to separate and enclose ourselves from our fellow relations, Other-ing the animals, plants, and many humans we share space with. There is a terrible resonance between the eradication of biological diversity on our planet and the eradication of intra-psychic diversity in the inner worlds of Soul; and so to dignify, restore, and protect cultural and biological diversity on our planet goes hand in hand with dignifying, restoring, and protecting the the creatures and the wilds of our internal diversity.
I was also an activist in the queer/LGBTQ community in the 1990s. My work in astrology and myth is deeply indebted to the remarkable outpouring of post-structural critical theory produced in that time and earlier; and most recently to the inspiring body of Black feminist writing that follows a trajectory from Audre Lorde to Sylvia Winter to bell hooks to Jayna Brown and Saidiya Hartman. The work of these women to express the miraculous achievement in consciousness that Black people rendered by the system as inhuman and Other provides a profound inspiration to all of us who face a world where we are now encouraged to feed all living beings into the relentless machines of commodification, losing the experience of personal subjectivity, and denying it to all beings, even to many parts of ourselves. I am grateful for the leadership that comes and will continue to come from those who have been most marginalized and ‘Othered’ by the anti-life systems of dominance and stories of superiority that have all but destroyed Eros in our world. I hope to support and empower that leadership further to the extent that I can.
In the astrological world, my deepest debts are to my friends and colleagues Brian Clark, whose work embodies a marriage of the lyric of technique with the music of imagination that I hope comes to characterize more of astrology; and Demetra George, whose scholarly and oracular gifts have brought so many ancient traditions of technique and myth into life in our modern world. I was initiated into astrology by my grandmother, Patricia ‘Pat’ Godby, who shared my rising degree in Cancer, and whose wisdom was in part passed to her by her own grandmother, my Great-Great-Grandma Cumby, who was a well-known tea leaf reader in southern West Virginia in the first decades of the 20th century. For the first two years of my life, I lived in a home where they both lived, along with each of their daughters including my mother. Five generations, a matriarchal lineage of psychism, all in one house, was the world of the wild I grew up in.
In the world of psychology, my deepest debts are to my personal guides and mentors in the field, Gary Esteban Grimm, Jim Fickey, and Rosvita Botkin, and Katherine Ninos. Archetypal and Jungian approaches to the psyche have likely influenced me most: James Hillman, James Hollis, Sylvia Perera, Jacqueline West, Donald Kalsched, and others. I have been very influenced by the relational and interpersonal turn in contemporary psychoanalysis, such as the work of Phillip Bromberg and Stephen Mitchell; as well as the beautiful works on play and attachment by Donald Winnicott.
