Reason - In Search of Grace : an ecological pilgrimage.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

In Search of Grace

Peter Reason tackles huge themes with clarity and intelligence. Through his own private pilgrimage he asks, how a modern citizen can live on good terms with the rest of natures glorious republic? And what can we do to honour the four-billion-year-old miracle that has given us all the gift of life? This is an important and challenging work.

Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country and Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet

Peter Reason puts to sea in a purposeful wandering. This man in a boat is on an ecological pilgrimage and apart from having the skills and temperament to avoid capsize and deadly rocks, to weather storms and just not drown in a wild ocean that has us landlubbers shaking in our boots, there is work to do. How do you explore a deeper connection with the wild, the more-than-human world? How can a spiritual response to Nature support the pragmatic prevention of those destructive impulses that are causing such a dreadful state of affairs in the natural world? How do you articulate an experience of those unexpected and spontaneous sacred moments? This account from the liminal edge between these notions goes much further than anyone contemplating a sightseeing voyage would dare.

Paul Evans, author of Field Notes From The Edge: Journeys Through Britains Secret Wilderness

In an age of ecological crisis, perhaps humanity itself needs a pilgrimage. Perhaps we need to seek out the truth of who we are and what we have done, and leave a space for some kind of transformative grace to enter. Peter Reasons journey may show some of us the way. His book is both brave and necessary.

Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake and Beast

In his years at the University of Bath, Peter Reason rose to prominence as a brave pioneer of Action Researcha participative approach to scholarly and whole-life inquiry that refuted narrow reductionism. Now, in this meditatively written and richly interwoven account, he takes his inquiry further. Sailing his boat around the seas of Celtic lands, he gleans insights into these our troubled times, as glimpsed through the cracks of a deeper grace belonging to this planet Earth.

Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul and Poachers Pilgrimage: An Island Journey

How do we create a new healing relationship between the human and the more-than-human world and discover a new sense of what it means to be a responsible species? These are urgent questions for us all, if we going to learn how to change from destroying the planet to restoring it. Peter Reason is a poetic story-teller, a courageous pilgrim, a questioning philosopher and an explorer of the emergent, who beautifully and generously shares his moments of grace at home and at sea.

Professor Peter Hawkins, author of Leadership Team Coaching

First published by Earth Books, 2017

Earth Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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Text copyright: Peter Reason 2016

ISBN: 978 1 78279 486 8

978 1 78279 487 5 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954749

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Peter Reason as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

Other books by Peter Reason

Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea

Stories of the Great Turning (edited with Melanie Newman)

Leadership for Sustainability (with Judi Marshall and Gill Coleman)

SAGE Handbook of Action Research (edited with Hilary Bradbury)

Human Inquiry in Action

Participation in Human Inquiry

Human Inquiry: A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research (edited with John Rowan)

Moments of Grace

To recover from ecological disaster, we humans must transform our sense of who we are, so we experience ourselves as part of, rather than apart from, the community of life on Earth.

Moments of grace occur when a crack opens in our taken-for-granted world, and for a tiny moment we experience a different world that is nevertheless the same world. It is a world that is not fixed in form, but forever changing: no longer divided into separate things, but one dancing whole.

Pilgrimage

A pilgrimage is a journey of moral or spiritual significance, undertaken in response to deep questions and a yearning for answers from a realm beyond the everyday. A religious pilgrimage can be described as a search for a holy realm and a direct encounter with that which is sacred. An ecological pilgrimage can be seen as a search for an experience of deep participation with the Earth and her creatures.

Its all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story A radical reassessment of the human situation is needed

Thomas Berry

The Dream of the Earth

Early one winter morning I pulled up the blinds and looked out into the dark. Our house stands high on the hills on the south side of Bath with a panoramic view over the city. From the top floor window I traced the streetlights that spread across the floor of the valley and meandered westward toward Bristol, where they cast an orange glow into the sky. Beyond, on the farther side of the River Severn, another patch of lightsprobably the little town Chepstowshimmered delicately through the dark.

I stood for a few moments gazing at the lights, remembering how our visitors the previous evening had been drawn to the window and looked out at the lights with wonder. What a fantastic view! they said. Its like coming to land in an aeroplane. And it is a spectacular scene: the orange sodium lights follow the lines of the streets, interspersed with bright security lights, occasional intense blue from advertising signs and the flashing lights of pedestrian crossings.

A recent news report came into my mind: photographs of Earth at night taken by a NASA satellite showed something similar but on a grander scale: the blue night-time glow of the atmosphere studded with artificial light. Bright clusters covered much of North America, Europe, and Japan as well as big chunks