38 NATURE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS THERAPY
Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist Joanna Macy has long
been an activist for building the motivation and courage needed to
creatively confront the challenges of our times and to courageously
deconstruct the stories or myths that create and maintain these
challenges. Although perhaps useful for living and fitting in,
unquestioned allegiance to dominant narratives can have unintentional
consequences for personal wellbeing and for the wellbeing of our
communities and the Earth. It is not unusual to feel alarmed in the
face of current challenges or to become detached, removed, scared,
helpless or hopeless in response to the often politicized linguistic
frames of doom, cost and sacrifice thought to be necessary to effect
change (Stoknes 2015). Such distancing, says Stoknes, can lead to
doubt and dissonance, and denial can become a haven or refuge from
the pain of engagement.
In their book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without
Going Crazy , Macy and Johnstone (2012) identify three possible
patterns of responding to the ecological and social crises of our time.
Those who subscribe to “The Great Unraveling” are overwhelmed
by the magnitude of challenge and may feel disabled by despair
or inadequate and powerless to effect change. Those who respond
to the challenges of our time from a “Business as Usual” approach
may deny the severity or reality of ecological devastation and its
consequences and perpetuate an unsustainable status quo. Those who
respond with efforts to usher in a “Great Turning” imagine and work
for a collective effort to create a life-sustaining civilization and to
challenge status quo ways of thinking and behaving that cause harm.
This text is written from a spirit of supporting the narrative of the
Great Turning.Paradigm shifts: Recognizing our stories
We live in a time that calls for reexamination of the stories we tell
about our relationship with the Earth and with one another, a time
of paradigm shift. In 1962 physicist and science historian Thomas
Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2012 [1962]),