Native Intelligence

A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area-a space boundaried by mountains, rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change.

Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft-spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning

in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the center of a little cosmos-or a big one, if his intelligence is vast-and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky.  

                                                                                                                           (Duncan 72-73)

                                 Chart for Native Intelligence / Organized Innocence

QUOTE FOR CLASSES THAT HAVE STUDIED WILLIAM BLAKE:

Organized Innocence:  

“Organized innocence” is a perspective that perceives, values and hopes to re-establish the innocent perspective of faith that good prevails over evil, nature is in balance, and God is present in creating this balance, but it views this unity and coherence through an irreverent, experienced perspective.  It does not ignore the failings of humans and their institutions, nor the destructive powers of nature and nature’s God, but seeks to avoid any contribution to human / societal failings and environmental destruction from dwelling too long on the seeming imperfections in nature and God.  It is an innocent vision of a child informed by the wisdom of an adult. It is informed innocence.  In this perspective there is a harmonizing of adults, children, nature, and God that results in actions that contribute to the development of the innocent or organized innocent perspective in self and others.           

"Without contraries there is no progression."

"Expect poison from standing water"

-William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell   

“When reason denies the validity of intuitive or visionary knowledge or when moral obedience is fostered at the expense of the will, strength, or intelligence, the creative interplay of contraries is short-circuited and Man is alienated from Himself.”