I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me —Treebeard
Preamble So what then is Edgewood Blue?
First Approximation
Sadly, my own case has been otherwise. The most satisfying poem I ever wrote consisted of two words only: Edgewood Blue – words I later applied to my home in Upper Clearwater. By design, Edgewood Blue was a scanning stand-in for the unwritten poem I proposed to live here from 1984 onward. And so indeed it has come to pass.
Even today, forty years later, Edgewood Blue still feels like a line from the poem I’ll never write – unless perhaps the place itself, Edgewood Blue, can be allowed to stand in.
And perhaps to some extent it can. For I must tell you at the outset that Edgewood was never intended as a homestead only. Right from the start this remarkable topographic blend of forest, meadow, wetland and pond seemed the kind of place that ought to be shared around rather than horded.
In this conviction, I have beavered – and toaded and ravened and deered and wolfed – to create within these ten acres an outdoor campus of sorts – a venue for Gaian learning and therefore, on that account, a place of respite in darkening times. In short, Edgewood Wild.
When I say that is Edgewood dedicated to Gaian learning, you mustn’t imagine I’m talking through my hat. Every day of our lives, my partner Curtis and I remain attentive to the kinds of decisions that sustain, rather than undermine, the capacity of the Living World to buoy organized human society. While we never proselytize, it’s a rare visitor who doesn’t, at some point, feel a certain unspoken invitation to reconsider some of the basic assumptions of modern western living.
What can I tell you? In broad outline, Edgewood endorses a balance between the rights and responsibilities of the individual. At the same time, we seek to enlarge humanism beyond its current narrow human-centred preoccupations to embrace, at a minimum, deep apprenticeship to the Living World. Consistent with this, we promote a basic level of Gaian literacy and, above and beyond all of this, try to help young people get a leg up on a future that no longer beckons as it used to.
These things being said, it also seems important to mention that Curtis and I are agnostic toward the tectonic forces now reshaping public discourse. Far from being left or right or centrist or woke or asleep, we’re simply Gaian, holding to the perhaps simple-minded belief that human polity must sooner or later realign around Gaian realities. Nor do we feel called to agitate for change at this level; for change is coming in its own good time and there’s nothing we can do about it; for change, finally, is what it means to have entered the Pandoracene.
So what then is Edgewood Blue? Edgewood Blue is simply the physical embodiment of Edgewood Wild – a place for thinking about, rejoicing in, grieving over, and adapting to a world that now calls attention to itself a little more stridently with each passing year.
Not a think tank exactly, more like a think bower.
Next up: me
