Orientation time. Come here for an overview of the forum.

“Lamplighting,” a term I took from my hopeful Assembling Terrania Cycle of near-future fiction, means bringing light to a dim, confused, or unclear situation by offering new ways to perceive it, especially from the standpoint of: What is happening under the surface here, in the depths? Sharing lived wisdom, reimagining a dilemma, raising enlightening questions, suggesting fresh alternatives are examples.

In 2000, Lali Mitchell, Matt Cochran, and I were graduate students working on how the presence of places–not only natural ones like rivers and regions, but also built environments–showed up inside us in various ways, including moods, conflicts, dream figures, and the like. We realized we are always in the style, presence, or discourse of the features of the lands where we are.

Loreosophy is my pocket philosophy, a compass for navigating strange and confusing times. The name reflects this philosophy’s emphasis on story and imagination. It is a philosophy not for abstract theorizing, but for living. There are ten principles and ten practices; the principles are variants of the Ten Lamps, a philosophy conjured up by Simeon Mackenzie, protagonist and narrator of my novel Heartlander.

Folklore, which includes myths, folktales, fairytales, and legends, was never an explanation for things science now understands. Instead, it operates as a kind of collective psychology, showing us the underside of our social life. Folkloric motifs return to life all the time, inside us as well as outside, as our collective depths try to talk to us about what we need to learn, take into account, stop doing, or adapt to. Jung and other reflective people have given plentiful examples of this in action.

“Gnoesis” is the third and final name for the esoteric and ecospiritual branch of my work. For a while I called it Terragnosis, but an ibogaine company in Canada lifted the name after I had used it for several years and trademarked it. I then called it Tellusgnosis (see the second edition, last chapter, of Terrapsychological Inquiry), but that always sounded clumsy. So I changed it, combining gnosis (direct and deep experiential knowing and seeing below surfaces) and nous (often translated “mind” or “intellect” but meaning something deeper and more imaginative).

Although all my work is about loreologizing, loreology deserves its own category here because it involves a methodology for melting down the literal stuck parts of our guiding stories (personal or collective) into lore, ready for alchemical reshaping and expanding into new “loreways” forward.

It has been said for some time that we need a new big story to live in, collectively. But I think the German Idealists and the Romantics were more accurate: we really need a new mythology / worldview. At this point, a planetary one.