Deep Donkey and Dadirri: asking Creatura out to play

Abstract

This article is based on the premise that we are currently awakening to the full systemic impact of the emerging global ecological crisis which is already having a devastating effect on the ecosystems of the earth and also a highly destructive impact on psychological well-being. The ecological crisis has coincided with the painful awakening to the social and environmental destruction that has resulted from the legacy of a colonial world view of nature and culture. These events now demand a radical and deep adaption of our view of nature and culture. It is becoming clear that we are facing not only an ecological break down and a narrative collapse, but also a breakdown in how to make sense of what we are facing. This article explores how systemic psychotherapy and Gregory Bateson’s work on the gnostic ideas of pleroma and creatura, can provide a framework to support the Decolonial Turn but also an EcoSystemic Return. This article uses the children’s game of Donkey and the Indigenous Australian practice of Dadirri to playfully explore how we might overcome Bateson’s notion of epistemological error when engaging with systemic practice, Indigenous nature practice and quantum physics. The article suggests an imaginary game of Deep Donkey to overcome the destructive legacy of Cartesian dualism at the core of western culture and to begin to open western imagination to an intra-subjective dialogue with nature. I suggest the game of Deep Donkey could a helpful practice in realigning western thinking with sophisticated and long subjugated Indigenous ecological and cultural wisdom.

Reconnecting systemic family therapy: How family therapy training can attend to the ecosystem and climate emergency, recommendations from a Delphi survey

“…In particular, Gregory Bateson's (1972Bateson's ( , 1979 linking of ecology and systemic thinking and rejection of the separation of humans from nature is viewed as foundational by many authors (e.g. Casey, 2002;Duncan, 2018Duncan, , 2021Kearney, 2013Kearney, , 2021Kearney, , 2022Laszloffy, 2009;Palmer, 2021).…”

“…Simon and Salter's (2019) concept of 'transmaterial worlding' 1 links a decolonising orientation with understanding humans as being in a relational process of planetary co-inhabitation involving human and non-human. This position also gives space for indigenous understandings and practices, which Duncan draws on (Duncan, 2018(Duncan, , 2021 and which embed humans with nature.…”

Family therapy and the ecology of parallel universes

“…It encourages us to challenge a strict scientific evidence‐based view of the world and persons and adopt a perspective that is akin to spiritual and Indigenous ways of knowing. As for Duncan (2021), this calls for an ‘imaginal knowing’ or knowing from the heart, where decolonised therapists are open to curiosity and the unknown and interconnectivity between all things: ‘The Decolonial Turn calls those who benefit from coloniality to let go of the objectification of different or “other” racial or identity groups and recognise all peoples are subjects. The EcoSystemic Return requires us to recognise the subjectivity of all nature; animals, plants, fungi, trees, rocks, viruses, carbon dioxide molecules and atoms – its subjects all the way down – nature is somebody’ (Duncan, 2021, p. 39) 4…”

Reclaiming the relationship with bodily knowing through movement in nature

“…In Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice we can find many texts that are an inspiration for, or part of, this necessary transition (For example, Simon and Salter, 2019;Duncan, 2021;Kearney, 2021;Palmer, 2021).…”