Biography
Ricky Ray is a disabled poet, critic, essayist and the founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art. He is the author of Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019), Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020) and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020). He was educated at Columbia University and Bennington College, and his awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, a Liam Rector fellowship, and a Zoeglossia fellowship.
Paper Abstract
In the vein of nondual/animist spiritual traditions, this lecture draws on the logic of immanence and transcendence, and uses the tools of the lyric essay to reveal natural and cultural history as two facets of a singular story about the ecological self, or Earth, whose identity pervades and eclipses our own. Contrary to the notion of humanity inhabiting the Earth as something other, the vision explores humankind as continuous with the Earth and posits human wellbeing as a function of hers. It traces our common existence from the birth of the Universe to the present, wherein physics evolved into chemistry, and chemistry into biology, turning the Earth into a animate entity who nurtures and pushes her creation into ever more complex and intimate modes of being. As we evolve, we test her creative limits via the seemingly opposing tendencies of creativity and destruction, but if the integral perspective teaches us anything, it's that the tension between creation and destruction is the hallmark of transformational existence. This tension manifests physically between a species and its ecosystem, and spiritually between consciousness and its encompassing cosmos, luring the organism into awareness of its overarching or Earthly self, whose patterns and pathways hold the keys to symbiosis. Geology teaches that geophysical forces may be deeply destructive before they become symbiotic, and that we may be the inheritors of such a tradition, in the manner that volcanoes established the carbon cycle, and trees established an oxygen-rich environment for life's proliferation. Perhaps a similar ability resides within us, an ability of the Earth herself, to shift from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, and not only stave off ecological collapse, but pave a path toward an even more intimate stage of Earthly flourishing.