We all need Maria Batalla's 'Attachment Therapy' in order to cope with chaos and disorganization of climate change and the performative work cultures we are now enduring.  Maria has a practice at the Urban City in Aalborg Denmark. Hjulmagervej 58, 9000 Aalborg For enden af Hjulmagervej – i hjertet af Aalborg I am told the Moldy Fox hangs out there too. You can reach her at MariaBatalla@outlook.dk. Maria applies John Bowlby's attachment theory to family therapy and to coping with Gaia changes.

I did an 'attachment' session with Maria and it was life changing. It is a way to form secure attachment during the insecure situations of changes in work and Nature we are all experiencing. You can learn more about Attachment Theory at this website. Watch the YouTube video  by Dan Siegel M.D. on the relation of Attachment Theory to the Planet. He gives a brief overview of the 4 S's (Seen, Soothe, Safe, & Secure) and how these ways of the caregiver relate to our having three kinds of Attachment (Avoidance, Ambivalent, & Disorganized) that can explain why people avoid climate change, are ambivalent about 6th Extinction, and are disorganized in becoming a steward of the Planet. And his video gives us a way to understand the neurophysiology and biology of the 'inner storyteller' how our cortex has 300 million years of evolutionary programming to recognize immediate signs of threat. That cortex sends neurotransmitter signals to the limbic system of the brain to activate adrenaline hormone, and this sets off the reactive responses in the brain stem for our body to go into one of the four F's (fight, flight, freeze, or faint).  This works in animal brains too. I once put the wrong horse blanket on a mare. She sniffed, caught the scent of a stallion that was not there. Her limbic system shot adrenaline everywhere, and here brain stem signaled the faint response. In a nanosecond of smelling the wrong blanket on her, she leaped, flipped upside down, and landed on her back with all four legs pointed in the air, completely fainted. The problem for storytelling, is climate change, the degradation of fresh water by pollution, etc. are not things we can see the immediate threat by our cortex, and so it is too easy to flip into denial, ambivalence, and sit back and expect the status quo to deal with something far off, like 6th extinction, and shifts in Anthropocene weather patters of drought and flooding. 

    I want to use Attachment Theory in a rather radical way, by showing you how 'doomsday' (6th Extinction, Apocalyptic) storytelling is related to particular hormone and neuropathways associated with particular kinds of attachment during times of change, uncertainty, and restructuring of our workplaces, and the Anthropocene we now live in. And how to work on a different kind of storytelling, not from the 'dark side of communication' that can activate different audience response. We need to work on Human-Gaia attachment styles of care, love and stewardship, because the majority of  people have Avoidant, Ambivalent, and Disorganized Attachment and outright denial of climate change at a time when we need to work together in societies to bring about positive climate action of care and stewardship.

    We all know that the current path humanity is on is not sustainable. Our safe haven planet is no longer secure attachment. Dark Ecologists tell us to do 'dark side storytelling', and get beyond our romantic attachment because the planet was never secure, and that there was no equilibrium system, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts, and it is just another Romantic Petrified Narrative if we cling to spiritual Gaia, to treating our planet as a living entity, in the face of the Anthropocene that demands critical reflexivity on our blame, all the human consumer and production activity since the Industrial Revolution that has brought us into this dire and dangerous situation.

    I would like to suggest that we look more precisely at 'storytelling science' (Boje & Rosile, 2019) and how the brain reacts to a seen threat that is immediate and one that is unseen, invisible, that sneak up on you, and its too late to respond. More than that, how we can use storytelling to develop our awareness of presence. (Siegel, 2018). To have 'presence' in our storytelling  means using it to develop the audience's open awareness,  'receptive awareness', or call it 'mindful awareness' of the state of the planet. We have a dozen years to make a turn to preparing in advance a new pathway to a different future than the one our world's institutions are on. I wrote about this in a book about 6th extinction storytelling (Boje, 2019b) and another on the fresh water situation (Boje, 2019a). The United Nations predicts that by 2050 five billion people will be in severe water shortage, up from 3.6 billion people in water shortage today (see article in Guardian, 2018).  You would think that with UNICEF storytelling, 6,000 children dying every single day of water-borne preventable disease, humanity would recognize the threat and leap into immediate action, but the storytelling is all wrong for that to happen. Doomsday storytelling tuns people off. The temporal horizon is too far off from their neurobioogy to do anything but shrug, or give a 'feel good' donation to UNICEF. The kind of radical change the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals calls for, is far from adequate to the task of getting the water and climate practices of the world's institutions to do much more than put up 'feel good' metrics of progress, and end up when 2050 rolls around, being 'too little, too late' to make a difference to 6th extinction. And its not how attachment theory is tied to storytelling.  We have known, for example, since 2012 that billionaires, politicians, banks, and Wall Street speculators have been buying up fresh water rights around the world:

"Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. Wealthy tycoons such as T. Boone Pickens, former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan and other Filipino billionaires, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world" (Global Research, 2012)

 The doomsday predictions are 'water wars', international upstream and downstream, cross-border 'water conflicts' and not near the kind of love, peace, cooperation, and stewardship care to change water capitalism so every human being, and all the species of the world have water equality, water democracy, water justice (Shiva, 2002; Barlow & Clarke, 2017). Fresh water is being actively commodified and privatized, so it will be accumulated by those with the wherewithal to afford it.

The world is in imbalance. Our planet is in a bad condition, the climate is changing, biodiversity is dwindling, the atmosphere is getting warmer and the consistency of the oceans is changing, making them sour. We humans believe to being able to dominate nature, which might be a great delusion. As I like to say: I am you and you are me and we are the world. We are nature" (Princess Gaia, Jun 12 2019).

    What can storytelling do about the path that humanity is on and how to change that path to one of stewardship, care and love for the planet? We can show the 'hidden miracles of the natural world' (Louie Schwartzberg YouTube). We can show Bill Nye's YouTube, The Planet is on F_cking Fire. It's entertaining,  or 16 year old, Greta Thunberg's 2019 YouTube 'Our House is on Fire,' storytelling to World Economic Forum. In 2018, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned, we have less than 12 years to correct our mistakes, and stay within the 1.5C temperature rise (Guardian article).  This is a critical tipping point, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience.

"If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm), it could push the Earth’s climate over a 'tipping point', finds a new study. This would see clouds that shade large part of the oceans start to break up" (Carbon Brief article).

It is time for a new storytelling path to a future for all

    John Bowlby, the founder of Attachment Theory, drew upon ethology, cybernetics, information processing, and developmental psychology to go against Freudian psychoanalysis and its dependency attachment notions. He worked for a while with Melanie Klein, and here 'Grounding' in object-relation theory, but quickly disagreed with the fantasy drive explanation of Freudian psychoanalysis. There is a relational ontology lesson in Attachment Theory. People do grow up in actual families and have real family experiences, that are constitutive of family narratives and living stories.  Bowlby became a member of the Tavistock Institute, and is a role model for doing interdisciplinary work. Mary Aimsworth became one of the colleagues. She did naturalistic observation field studies and had a pension for narrative interpretation. She was a disciplined scientist and made sure to sample experiences in different places and times. 

    You see, I hope, that the attachments Human-Gaia are more than just ego-superego, and have everything to do with how we in families are part of society, its cultures, and its social-technology and economic-dominated-science networks, and how in Ethology, there is an imprinting tied to the planet, its ways of signaling which capitalist behaviors are worth continuing and which ones lack any kind of Terrestrial Ethics (we will get to that). Bowlby, Aimsworth, Siegel, and scores of their colleagues moved away from Freudian Dependency theory and developed Attachment Theory, including how ethological concepts of sign stimuli, social relations, economic circumstances, and our attachments are changing so very quickly.

    Let me take Attachment Theory a step further in this essay, by making connections to 'storytelling science.' In this essay, I will explore how our kinds of attachments in our ways of storytelling are related to particular hormone and neuropathway activations.  For example storytelling about empathy, trust, bonding, and generosity raises Oxytocin (the love hormone) has powerful hormone effects. By telling stories anticipating how to handle upcoming reorganization or climate changes, how to build trust, how human bonding and Nature bonding can be established in the face of adversity, and how generosity among humans learning to listen, to tune into Nature can affect here-and-now stress levels, is a positive use of storytelling during a time of major upheaval, uncertainty about the future, and is all about learning and using the power of storytelling. By using another kind of storytelling,  Dopamine different hormone effects: focus, motivation and memory. In anticipating each episode as a set of cliff hangers, an adventure storytelling takes over the audience brain/body chemistry.   What appears to be happening is during times of stress, errant managers are brewing a 'Devil's Cocktail' of Cortisol and Adrenalin, by doing modes of storytelling that suddenly and abruptly, often without participation, announce major organizational changes, such as restructuring, relocations, movements of personnel, changes in work routines, budget deficits, reengineering processes that have been longstanding sources of success, and so on. This raises Cortisol and Adrenalin hormone levels and associated neuropathways of flight/flight, fear/anxiety, and the effects can be intolerance of change, irritability towards leaders and managers implementing such changes, uncreative meetings, critical reactions, impaired memory (dwelling on all prior failures of such changes), and making bad decisions in the face of uncertainty about the future.

    This kind of new 'storytelling science' of how our storytelling modalities affects audience hormone levels, and affects organizational attachments  to avoidance, insecurity, disorganization, ambivalence, and separation distress is the new cutting edge of how sociomateriality and neurological chemistry are entangled in situations of organizational change and restructuring.

    We turn now, to another frontier. How does Attachment Theory and neurological physiology relate to Gaia-Storytelling, to our attachments to the natural world?

We are engaged in Gaia-Attachment relations that needs lots of psychoanalytic work:

1.  Avoidance: Most people are in avoidance about their complicity, the complicity of human activities in what is happening to capitalism behaving within planetary limits. Denial is where most people are at. They do have an embodied sense that their future is no longer secure, that life for their grandchildren will have less and less Terrestrial support. Repression, even lashing out against proposals to rein in the multinational corporate excess, is part of avoidance. There is grief and mourning of the situation, as people seek some substitute in so many superficial relationships, because the security of Gaia appears so unavailable. Some are what Parker, another Bowlby colleagues called 'numbness., and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross called 'denial.' We can go from Denial to Anger, then Bargaining, Depression, but how are we to have Acceptance of some many species, already gone. We need to awaken from Avoidance, to a new identity, not just accept the situation, as it spirals ever-downward, out of control.

2. Ambivalent Lots of Insecurity about the futures that are arriving. We have ambivalent attachment to Gaia. We know the catastrophe is coming, yet do nothing substantive about it. We are upset and sorrowful as limits to natural resources are being exceeded. We feign a bit of recycling, or do some composting, but know it is not going to be enough to avert the extinction events coming our way. We keep hoping that the care and love of Gaia will return. As the CO2 rises again and again, the fresh water becomes scarcer in commodification, and the polluting industries and the casino capitalism speculation markets continues to suck up all the money that could be for productive intervention, we feel ambivalent in our attachment to Gaia. People are showing Ambivalence to Mother's Earth's exhaustion. Slavoj Žižek tells of us two types of Disavowal (Verleugnung), often translated as denial (see YouTube):

Type One Disavowal: If we accept our guilt and complicity in the arriving catastrophe of global warming, the scarcity of fresh water, the drowning from more and more plastic garbage, and so on, then we can also rationalize that we have capacity as human agents to intervene, save the day, by changing our daily life practices. We don't have to be an impotent bystander, what Mikhail Bakhtin (1993: 3) calls the 'special answerability' observer of life who does not intervene. In Trumpland, citizens are rejecting the reality of their sensemaking because the stakes are so high, and to even think about the climate warming is a very traumatic association. Rather that disavowal of the trauma, we can become embodied, engaged in 'moral answerability' (1993: 3) taking the emotive ethical act, to be that one person in the eventness of Being that can intervene in the moving once-occurrent situation, and not helplessly being the victim of our own stupid practices, or too frozen in fear and anxiety to act. Here our ambivalence comes from not knowing what to do to change, and the sheer horror trauma of contemplating the sixth extinction (Boje, 2019a) because 'There is No Planet B.' That climate train coming our way at 100 mph through the tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel is that oncoming train, too fast for us to jump out of the way.

Type Two Disavowal: We become neurotic, obsessing on futile activities, token recycling practices, sorting plastic drink bottles yet knowing most go to land fill or blow around until they float into the ocean to join the spiral motion of five ocean gyres. Or, we buy Starbucks coffee, because it claims to be from responsible coffee bean plantations. We cut back on our meat consumption, to once or twice a week, or even become vegan. We join a zero waste coop, and shop for bulk food with mason jars in hand. This is fetishness-disavowal, rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic sinks, keeping ourselves too busy to think about it. I know that global warming is already here, and why don't I do anything about it? Because, I must not really believe it, so let's do what Exxon does and the Koch brothers and hire junk science professors to write articles about the 'climate debate.' In Trumpland, climate warming is just another debate, and I reassure my conscience by becoming chair of the sustainability council, monthly meetings, as we notice there are few bins to recycle on our campus, and most students just pitch their aluminum cans and plastic beverage bottles into the abundantly convenient trash bins. 

3. Separation Anxiety: What is Gaia doing? Is Gaia reacting to human activities, since the Industrial Revolution? As eight multi-billionaires have already amassed more than half of all the wealth of the planet, are are the major polluters (Boje, 2019a), their attachment has some 'separation anxiety' when the majority of us want equality, and some of us, to find ways to achieve zero-growth, even degrowth, to find a new attachment, with a lot less angst, an attachment that is secure within planetary limits. We have separation anxiety about how to consume less, how to get to work without a car, and how to get to an overseas conference without the plane ride. We have so much stuff that downsizing to a 1970s size home, or to a tiny home, seems impossible.

4. Disorganized: Despite all the predictions that the United Nations, or World Trade Organization, or the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund would tame the multinational corporation, and its control over politics, and so on, we seem quite disorganized. Our attachments to Gaia are so very insecure, not at all sustainable, despite all the narratives of its organizational accomplishment.  We need to organize a more secure attachment Human-Gaia, and stop the speciesism, and accept our role in posthumanism. If Gaia is actually disorganized, and not at all, a designer creation, then we have to rethink Gaia, more as chaos, more as one catastrophe after another.

What Can We Do With  Storytelling in relation to Attachment Theory and Neurological Brain Chemistry?

    It can work this way. Suppose we take Nature's aliveness seriously? The Gaia Ph.D. meets in spiritually powerful places. For example, a trip of a cohort of Ph.D. students and professors to the Brazil rain forest, to visit local shamans, and get first hand experience with Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK) can help bring new attachments, change hormone and neuropathways in ways that bring about new Human-Gaia relations, and different ways of Being-in-the-world. I am both a 'storytelling scientist' and a 'shamanic practitioner.' The two disciplines do not have to be incommensurate. I can be scientifically studying the results of shamanic work. For example, I can attempt to refute the results of my own and others' shamanic drumming, shamanic meditation, shamanic experiences in rain forests or the desert of New Mexico, and elsewhere. We can try to refute the hypothesis that Being in Nature, helps to restore hormone imbalances, calms the neurological pathways, frees up troubled minds for creative perspective. Does Being-in-Nature reduce fear, anxiety, and stress we feel at our uncertain and ever-changing workplace? It is a testable question. How does Being-in-Nature affect our physical well being? Does it reduce or increase our blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension, and our stress hormones? Cortisol is the primary stress steroid hormone. Cortisol increases glucose (sugars) in the bloodstream, enhances brain's use of glucose, and on the plus side increases available substances to repair tissues. Cortisol is produces in the adrenal cortex within zona fasciculata of the adrenal gland. Storytelling about Nature or just Being-in-Nature, both have been found to affect Cortisol levels.

    Adrenaline is the fight or flight hormone, and is produced by storytelling as well as by a stressful situation. Adrenaline storytelling can change how we fell stressed about change and uncertainty. It is the same feeling as suddenly seeing a care racing 100mph in your blind spot, while driving on the freeway. Your muscles tens, your breathing gets faster, your heart pounds faster, you get a surge of energy, and you start to sweat.  You enter fight or flight mode, focus your attention and awareness.

    I was riding my Harley Davidson on the 405 Freeway, headed north, doing about 90MPH, as were all the other cars and trucks behind and ahead of me. There four north bound lanes. I suddenly saw a yellow five gallon bucket bouncing around in the back of a pickup truck, and a young girl in the passenger seat, pointing at the bucket and looking directly at me. I wanted to slam on the brakes, but traffic had closed in behind me. There was a truck on my right, and more cars with no distance between them to squeeze the Harley into, on my left. Time stood still, and I could see every expression on the face of every driver and passenger, all around me. My heart pounded, my breathing was faster and faster, and I decided to 'fight.' I gunned the motor, and the Harley leaped forward at even higher speed, just as the yellow bucket leaped out of the pickup truck, and bounced toward me. As I swerved left, the bucket moved left, and as I swerved to the right, the bucket matched my move.  The bucket was upon me, about to be trapped under the bike, and topple me and bike over, to slide along the pavement.  Time kept slowing down. I could see the bucket rolling about, and with my right hand on the throttle, I stabbed at the bucket with my left hand, and grabbed the handle, and thrust the bucket up in the air over my head. People we cheering and waving from their vehicles. I carried that yellow bucket home and kept it as a trophy of my adventure on the 405. I also vowed to slow down. 

This is an adrenaline storytelling example. Norepinephrine is another hormone released from the adrenal gland. Its primary role, like adrenaline, is arousal when stressed, to become quite aware, awake, focused,, as the shift in blood flow is away from skin and other non-essential body areas, and into the muscles, so one can flee the scene. Obviously, in the Yellow Bucket storytelling, my norepinephrine hormone was not responsive. I was not able to flee from catastrophe, so I chose fight.

By contrast, Cortisol, activates in minutes, in the face of stress this hormone activates to other hormones, (1) Amygdala of the brain recognizes a thormone (Dreat, sends a message to (2) the hypothalamus which releases Corticotropin hormone (CRH), that tells the pituitary gland to release Adrenocorticoctropic hormone (ACTH) that tells the adrenal glands to make more Cortisol. This Cortisol can be life saving, by maintaining fluid balance and blood pressure, while relaxing body functions not immediately critical to survival (reproductive drive, immunity, digestion, growth). However, the bad news, is in a long term stress situation at home, work, national emergency, Nature's climate change, too much Cortisol suppresses the immune system, increases blood pressure, increases sugar, decreases libido, produces acne, and contributes to obesity.

There are other hormones. We all know that when workplaces and families are under stress, the estrogen and testosterone hormones affect how we react. These two neurotransmitters need dopamine to lower the fight-or-flight reaction. 

How can we shake it off and move on with our lives? How can we control our reaction to change and stress?

In a situation of long-term stress at work or in our ecology, it can take anywhere from half an hour to several days to return our well being to a restful state. If situations do not subside, then our long term well being is in jeopardy.  We protect our self by adopting attachment styles of denial, avoidance, and disorganization. This has hidden consequence, since we are not developing secure attachments, being able to care for self and others, and to engage in creative problem solving.

Boje's August 2019 Keynote for the 'Dark Side of Communication' conference in Aalborg, Denmark

Title: The Dark Side of Water Storytelling

    It's the end time and it's all over. It's 2050 and all the United Nations predictions of the great water shortages have come true. Six billion of the 11.2 billion people are in severe water shortage.

    We will create two movies of the future. In the first 2050 Future movie, I will use dark side storytelling of teh fresh water cycle that activates your adrenaline fight-fight hormone response. In the second 2050 flight movie, I will activate your pineal gland with the love hormone. My purpose is to put you in command of your hormone activation through storytelling. It is all too easy to surrender to the dark side of communication, and create a fight/ fight vigilance for all the ways that the UN prediction of five billion people by 2050 dying in severe fresh water shortages (Guardian article by Jonathan Watts 2018), as a few multi-billionaire 'water baronds' hoard all the water rights (Global Research article by Joe Shing-Yang, 2012). Let's look at the first movie, created aout of fear emotion, and then at one that is created out of what I will call 'Gaia-Care' that activates the Love Hormone, Oxytocin, using 'quantum storytelling', how 2050 overcame the potential disaster of global water cycle privatization, commodification by Nestle, Coke, and Pepsi, and pollution by Big Pharm, Big Ag fertilizers and pesticides, the C8/GenX DuPont Teflon contamination of the water supply, and Big plastic nanoparticle pollutants of the global water system. How did they do this?

FIRST MOVIE: FIGHT/FLIGHT FRESH WATER CYCLE APOCALYPSE

    A few multi-billionaires, mega-banks, and their mega water corporations bought up every water right on planet Earth.

"Familiar mega-banks and investing powerhouses such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Bank, Barclays Bank, the Blackstone Group, Allianz, and HSBC Bank, among others, are consolidating their control over water. Wealthy tycoons such as T. Boone Pickens, former President George H.W. Bush and his family, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Philippines’ Manuel V. Pangilinan and other Filipino billionaires, and others are also buying thousands of acres of land with aquifers, lakes, water rights, water utilities, and shares in water engineering and technology companies all over the world" (Joe Shing-Yang, 2012).

It's the end time, and the end game is brutal and nasty. I am writing the history of the future. Nietzsche would be proud. Remember the Day Zero that scared the bejesus out of South African billionaires. Rich folks heard about the possible water shortage and sunk 3,000 illegal wells on their properties.  When the real Day Zero hit in 2025, the municipality lost control of water rationing, and rich people suck 10,000 more private wells, deep ones, so no short straws could reach. Even if you could go deep, you need those expensive diesel pumps and the fuel to run them.
    Grace Ann and I made to 2050 but its not looking good. A grey battleship just came into the Tilos Island harbor. Some Greek billionaire took over the monastery on top of the volcanic mountain. Don't worry its inactive. His name is Horacio and he's got a harem up there, mastiff guard dogs that will chew off your leg if you get too near his blue gold cache.  Still everyday a desperate refugee family sends their eldest male to steal past the dogs. Impossible. You'd think the pile of severed legs and arms, chewed off, would dissuade another attempt. Wrong! They say on the third day your organs never recover, even if you hydrate with fresh water. But that is not the whole story. You learn to stay in a limbo state, a thimble of pee water every few hours, and just enough to relieve some mouth dryness, but the dizziness persists, and the hallucinations are more real than reality itself.
    Just today, I dreamed I found a secret, forgotten passage way, a tunnel beneath the monastery, safe from the hounds.  The penalty for harvesting rainwater is death. Still there are those who try. I tried it last month. I helped Jens get a rowboat up from the deep. It floated, but you had to keep bailing. We circled the point and the wind took us out to sea. Had to ditch it and paddle ashore. We set up ponchos in the sun, and got a pint of precious atmospheric vapor moisture.  Took most all day, and we had to dismantle three times, lest the spies catch us, turn us in for reward, and the hounds tear us imb from limb. We made it back paddling along, keeping the pint of dew out of sight. The guards, asked, 'you been poaching dew again?' You've been alive way too long. 'Just pee water, is all. We get it processed on the black market.' 'Good ole Dinosaur pee, its what everybody drinks anyway!.'

The mastiff dog is sniffing at Grace Ann's pant leg. Does he smell the dew? Surely not, or we'd be a bloody mess by now.

I lapse back into my daydream. I am tunneling beneath the last known natural spring on the island, and not that many left on the entire planet.  9.8 billion people in 2050 are searching for fresh water. Don't they get it? There was enough for 7 billion, in 2025 if everyone shared, but for 10.8 billion when eight billionaires are in control of most every fresh water source, all guarded. If I sell a pint of harvested dew water, I get executed on the spot, down limb from limb. But a multibillionaire has ten water corporations, each legally sanctioned by the WTO to sell water at the speculator's asking price. No regulation, except against the folks without water. Let them drink their pee water. I don't want to rant, it's a kind of an addiction to the dark side of storytelling.  The fight/flight adrenaline hormones kick in. What are you gonna do? Its the limbic part of the brain. Its better to day dream a love fictio, even a fabula of romantic love is a much better hormone. The limbic is connected to the brain stem, the hippocampus is such a rush, so fasticulus! Best to cultivate hormoes from the light side, that dark side is so dangerous a trip.

    My shamanic training is quite helpful in 2050. Shamans know hos to do stoytelling to to exorcise the dark side demons.  We excel at foretelling, at helping people restory their trauma about thirst, and it helps a community to have hope instead of dwelling on the dark side of communication. I've learned enough hydrology to test my shamanic dreams, my drumming raises the love hormone, Oxytocin. Just enough fictio with a bit of fabula, and that v-shaped storytelling formula does the magic work.  Shamans are show performers, the original storytellers before the politicians and the CEOs learned the trick. You have to be careful, rant too much, and the audience drops right into fight/flight hormone spikes. But, meditate on animal helping spirits that have coll fresh spring water, and that can create its own panic. People start looking for someone to sacrifice to appease the fresh water elemental spirits.
I'm falling again. I can't get up. Where is Grace Ann. Only she would care enough to kick me awake. There are fallen bodies, twitching all around them. My mouth is too dry to tell the story. I lapse into a comma. Some people believe in Gaia, others do not. Really, the truth is we as a human race stopped believing centuries ago, long before the industrial revolution.

    My friend Ernest Ramey died two days ago (June 6 2019). I just got the news yesterday. Shocker. What to do with his two big dogs, each 125 pounds, and unruly as Ernest. We put on about six plays about homeless veterans (https://veteranstheater.com). I got an email that someone, name unknown, has interest in adopting the dogs, or in if not, you know what a pound, the shelter, does to big unruly dogs. Ernest was an Army veteran, Vietnam War, just like me. He had been a welder after the Army, earning $24 dollars an hour, and now you get $8 and he's way too smart to work for chump change. I got this note from Chaplain Lawrence of the American Legion Post 10 in Las Cruces:

..I AM TOLD WAS IN LAS CRUCES..HE HAS NO LIFE INSURANCE...BEING A VETERAN. HE SHOULD BE BURIED IN FT. BLISS FOR FREE...IF YOU KNOW OF INFORMATION PLEASE SHARE IT WITH ME..DAVID, MY PHONE IS 575 800 9432...I WILL TRY TOMORROW TO GET WITH JR TURNER FOR THE FINAL DETAILS...I FEEL VERY SAD...

I camped in a tent to see what it was like in the dead of winter to live that way. The dew froze my sleeping bag. Now in 2050, I wish I had that dew. I'd scrape it gently into a glass bottle, and live another day. I taught Ernest how to restory, and he completed two seminars in Core Shamanism. In return, he taught me about remote control helicopters. I am not much good at it. My Adrenalin takes over and I over steer, and the darn things goes out of sight. These days I sleep rough all the time, without a tent or a sleeping bag. Grace Ann and I still in love. We almost, along with James, and Chaplain Lawrence had the university and the city convinced homeless veterans and homeless students needed a Tiny Home village. Sleeping in tents is OK, but when it gets 18 degrees in winter or 135 degrees in summer, its intolerable. Those romantic hormones are necessary to get through tent life, Oxytocin, is such a rush!. Who'd thought we be living long enough to be century old. I could sure use Ernest and Chaplain Lawrence, about now.Lawrence was a tunnel rat in Vietnam, and Ernest is good with big dogs.I can hear the barking and that light at the end of the tunnel, is not a good omen.  Let the dogs gnaw on our old bones.

SECOND MOVIE: 2050 FUTURE 2.0 ACTIVATING GAIA-CARE OF THE FRESH WATER CYCLE

    I am on Tilos Island. It's June 9 2019. I found out volunteers are going to the smaller beaches to clean up the plastic pollution.  I volunteer to go with Andreas to help. Plastic pollution, the breakdown of plastic into nanoparticles circulates in the water cycle, contaminates the food chain. I meditate on the beach that is clear of plastic, and contemplate how 2050 has solved the fresh water crisis.  There are things happening here-and-now that are solutions to nurture leading to sustainable future fresh water supply for all species, not just humans, and certainly not just the  richest humans. I have learned to activate te love hormone, Oxytocin, so it stimulates the pineal gland, the size of a grain of rice in the limbic part of my brain. I can choose to live by stress, and become hyper vigilant to the dangers all around me. Or, I can activate the living by love, serenity, and coming up with creative solutions to the fresh water crisis in 2019, so by 2050 its not a problem anymore. That would mean humanity has changed its values, and its daily habits of how water is treated.  I am a shamanic practitioner, and I meditate by drumming to activate the theta waves in my brain. The theta waves, carry along the gamma waves, and get me out of my alpha wave state of fight or flight response. I know from quantum storytelling I am inseparably entangled mattering with storytelling, and I can make a conscious intention to be part of the solution.
    Last year, in Scotland, giving a doctoral seminar, the night before it, I am trying to sleep. But, the Scottish love their whiskey, and the clubs are on the first floor, and I am above all that bravado. I keep waking up, into an alpha sleep of half awake, and half dreaming. I decide to play my drumming music, and I am seeing the fractal patterns, very ancient ones, and they are staying with me, for much longer than every before in my life. I have learned to just surrender, to enjoy the patterns, and not get all analytic about it, and let my monkey mind relax. Since I am tired, it is easier than usual. Each time the drunken chaos awakens me, I go back into shamanic meditation,and the images stay longer. My only intention then, was to see what I can see of them, and be what I can be, from the experience. Now, today, I am more focused, and I want to see into the future, and trace back how in 2050 the fresh water cycle is absolutely sustainable, and none would dare to take ownership of aquifers, rivers, lakes, and streams. None would prohibit rainwater harvesting.

    I don't live my living story life as a linear plot. I am not a three dimensional being. I live a dynamic antenarrative that is not only nonlinear, I am on spiral-fractal, one that soaring higher and higher with each whorl. People who have never studied spiral fractals just shake their head when I try to explain it.  The man is shouting interrupts my meditation: "Very sweet melons from Tilos!" He is a farmer, and comes to get the tourists to buy direct. I hear the crashing waves, and the farmer moves on:  "Very sweet melons from Tilos!"  I have tried them, and he is right. I go back to creating my bond with the morphic field of Gaia, tuning into her higher frequencies. I seek the coherent theta waves of the drumming, 220 beats per minute will do it for me. My intention: To make a contribution to 2050-Gaia-Water-Care.   I am doing antenarrative processes, making a 'bet on the future' by foretelling a movie script. I can see myself in the theater in 2050, viewing the movie, and celebrating with joy and gratitude all the solutions that came into being to make for fresh water cycles revered by humankind. I am having an experience of my future self in 2050, while sitting in the shade of an umbrella on the Tilos beach in 2019. Gaia-Care starts to unfold, and play out on the movie screen.

     I have the keynote on 'dark side of water storytelling' to give in Aalborg in August, 2919. I see myself on the stage, after the audience quiets, I tell the apocalyptic storytelling and activate their Adrenalin hormone, the fight-fight is easy to stampede.  Then I switch to the love hormone, movie script of how in 2050 the fresh water cycle was so very cared for, and humanity had a great relationship with Gaia.  Its basic neurosciences meets quantum storytelling (see Mysticism to activate your pineal gland - Joe Dispenza interview with Lilou Mace or Law of attraction - the quantum way Joe Dispenza interview with Lilou Mace, Getting the Wake up call - Joe Dispenza interview with Lilou Mace). As Dispenza puts it "You cannot go to a new future, holding on to the emotions of the past."  I have not done a Dispenza Placebo seminar, but did do a dozen core shamanism seminars, and several quantum 'Matrix energetics seminars with Richard Bartlett. There are many paths to 2050 fresh water cycle integrity.  To me, its about doing restorying, to let lose of the emotional traumas of the past, and by embodiment create a new future, a new living story.  You have to detach from the past self, and restory the little wow moments into a new future, one that in quantum storytelling is already present, and we can begin noticing it here-and-now. Gaia-care is a future arriving, already present, and when I pay attention to that new story, detach from my fear and anxiety, then it gets easier to manifest. Yes, we are storytelling animals, and that means we are prone to fight-flight hormone reactions. We respond to stress with vigilance for our own survival. 
    My colleague Russell Taylor sent me a YouTube link today June 9 2019). He looks at fresh water ecology communities. The planet is an ecosystem that we humans live in.

An Example of Inadequacy of the 'Circular Economy':

We can also test the popular sustainability storytelling quite fashionable in 2019, for its greenwashing  attachments. It failed to produce anything about fresh water. It was patently obvious by 2025, it was our attachment to a dream, a future that would never be 'real.' The circular economy definitely needs some Attachment Therapy and hormonal storytelling science. Can Circular Economy learn anything from Nature? Is Circular Economy an another form of denial, an avoidant attachment, so we keep from confronting the escalating climate change?  Circular Economy is one more 'petrified narrative' of how better technology will save us all from the arriving future catastrophe, but the 'good news' because after years of spinning this savior narrative, the grand narrators are now comfortable talking about extinction, planning in advance to avert it. The problem is that without changing the game of capitalism to stop how it uses up ecological resources faster than they planet can replenish them (grow new forests, replenish fresh water aquifer levels, etc.) then the recycling in circular economy, keeps generating and growing even bigger economies, mining and pumping, more and more natural resources, past planetary carrying capacity limits. However, as you know the living story webwork of what people's relations and attachments actually are to the planet have become something else,  not in a good relationship, and quite an ambivalent attachment, event a denial attachment, and the planetary limits are being exceeded in ways that already means the extinction of most marine species, many land species, and will become our own end.  Can Circular Economy rein in hyper-capitalism so that the limits are respected? Yes, if and only if, planetary limits are not exceeded.

Bruno Latour (2017) constructs a secular storytelling of Gaia. Gaia is only the living system with agency, active, animating, retroacting, and grounding, but no spirit. By contrast, Lauren Greyson (2019) explores the ecophilosophy of vital enchantment. That is one of the relational ontologies (one way of Being of the world) that we would like you to explore in a transdisciplinary Gaia Ph.D. There are some other relational ontologies to explore (Boje, 2019b), while grounding your research in an awareness that 'there is no Planet B' (Boje, 2019a) and that means once we pollute Gaia's fresh water, what will we do (Boje, 2019c)? We have a small 's' 'storytelling science' paradigm to share (Boje & Rosile, 2019) that you can download from this website to get a feel for what we are asking you to participate in.

Grasping by embodiment, 'what is the beyond', is an an antenarrative question that gets us beyond the duality if culture world and nature world, and beyond a Gaia living world that is still disenchanted in the name of secular science and technology.

"The Earth is – like us – a living being. This would mean, since everything is related to everything, that the world survives with our existence and that we will live or die with it. Mother Earth, in the hypothesis, is considered to collaborate together with the organisms living on 'her' and the biosphere surrounding 'her'. This makes 'her' a living being, as a whole"  (Princess Gaia)

James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, co-developed The Gaia Hypothesis naming it after the Gaia legends of the primordial goddess in Greek mythology. The biosphere, its temperature, salinity of ocean water, atmospheric oxygen, the hydrosphere of water that nourishes all life is being affected by human activities, mostly by corporation practices (including corporate agriculture, multinational water corporations, pharmaceutical corporations, and so on). For example, ' Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020' ( Dumit, 2012). Taylor (2011: 175) says a full-fledged bioeconomy is likely in the becoming stages.