Photograph by artist Ann Madden, created during a walkabout pilgrimage experience with James Inabinet.
"Marsh Awakening."
The odyssey of life is very much like the road to La Terre Bioregional Center in Kiln, Mississippi—replete with the siren song of a new Buc-ee’s shining from the off-ramp, rolling seas of green pastures, and opportunities for characters along the way. But the destination is clear: from the winding and wavy roads of the main country highway, you’ll turn onto a gravel road and voyage and voyage until you pass into the enveloping arms of La Terre, into the pines, into the blessed shade of the woods, of the forest. And much like the road that brought you to our archetypal "wise man," James Inabinet, so too his story winds and carries you from island to island of insight.
To pilgrimage is to seek; to be a pilgrim is to ask questions. Inabinet moved into the woods back in the early 1990s, after being apparently blacklisted from the oil field for refusing to dump toxic waste into an estuary. His awakening had happened in college, standing in the marsh within sight of Lake Pontchartrain, setting up a duck blind. There, in the cold of duck season, knee-deep in water, watching the sky, he could see five or six waterspouts approaching—a storm like he had never witnessed before. As he stood, almost removed from his body, watching the wind tear at the marsh grass, the water turned mean and choppy. He could suddenly see how small he was in the world, how it was moving with or without him. Snapping back into his body, he gathered his gear and abandoned the black freezing water, turning towards the safety of home.
Safety now looks like the woods themselves, a distant throw from the vision of Lake Pontchartrain. After a tour beneath these impossibly tall pines, gentle in the wind of a cold December morning, around Bayou La Terre, everything is very quiet and very alive. It looks like no place in Mississippi I recall ever seeing. We wander through the pottery studio, past a lovingly crafted map of the land, around the permaculture garden where winter greens are growing, into the small, warm, bright weaving studio where Inabinet and his wife work together at the loom to create soft, hand-dyed scarves and wraps, where his philosophy and art books sit behind glass the same as pillars, protected witnesses maintaining ready wisdom. All right, boys. To the oars, to the sails, let the story begin.
“Universal flourishing is what I’m after.” Inabinet describes his life’s purpose as the discovery of the human "niche," or rather, lack thereof.
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“I used to go there and sit in the goldenrods, where the goldenrods were all around me, and a hawk came down, right in front of me. It came down and went up with a mouse, and so this mouse just gave his life, right? Still, I felt a peace and love feeling, because I was still in the midst of flourishing, even though an animal was giving his life to be a part of the ecosystem. Humans are the only animals that don't create a niche. Squirrels bury acorns; they plant trees that are part of what they live on. They feed hawks. They feed owls, a fox, a raccoon, if he can get him, and so that's being part of the ecosystem. They inhabit a niche in the ecosystem, which is like a job. If you took them out, there'd be a hole. The ecosystem becomes something entirely different if they're not there. For flourishing, humans need to enact their own niche, and that means to become integral and functional in the ecosystem within which we live. That's what I've tried to do since I moved here, was to create a human niche in these woods.”
Inabinet mourns that society doesn’t do much of a job in teaching us how to be humans. It removes us from our instinct, from deeper inner knowing, and instead points us to an hour commute in stop-and-go traffic amid gas fumes to sit inside under artificial light. He speaks of the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, which translates to “repairing the world,” and of Thomas Berry’s 1988 philosophical work, The Dream of the Earth.
We are sitting inside the house that Inabinet built over many years. It is warm and dark and raining gently outside. He has a pot of soup on the stove and it’s faintly aromatic. Where we are sitting inside almost feels as though we are outside, replete with the soft light of a sleepy, rainy Sunday, and I feel like I am already dreaming.
“We must repair ourselves first,” he says.
That's what it’s all about, to prepare oneself and to get on a path that repairs, making one aware of where we are and what's happening around us.
“An Earth Dream,” he explains, “is a spontaneous creation of the imagination, a creation of the imagination in collaboration with place. If you're there with the idea that this place can teach me, you will start to get ideas that will just come to you. It didn't speak to me. But because I'm in this reciprocal relationship, it has helped me with the idea of how to enact a human niche.”
Inabinet’s "Earth Dream," his "Niche," involves helping others find theirs. He invites artists on "Walkabouts," a notion inspired by Aboriginal practices in which the ancestors, in the beginning, walked out on the formless landscape. “Everywhere they sat or drank water or fell or laid down became the land-forms,” he says. “And now contemporary Aborigines walk those old dream lines and song lines and myth lines to keep the place their spiritual home . . . We don’t know where those lines are; we have to go find them, to make the place our spiritual home.”
“An Earth Dream,” he explains, “is a spontaneous creation of the imagination, a creation of the imagination in collaboration with place. If you're there with the idea that this place can teach me, you will start to get ideas that will just come to you." - James Inabinet
When Inabinet leads these walkabouts, he is accompanied by groups of artists, storytellers, musicians, and more. First, perhaps there were only eight, then twenty, then fifty. They walk along sidewalks, in the woods, in people’s backyards, experiencing, noticing. He leads exercises that approach the landscape with the same kind of energy that a hawk, mouse, bear, or horse might bring. To see like a mouse is to experience everything very closely; to see like a hawk is to have an aerial or sweeping view; to see like a bear is to look inward as in hibernation; and to see like a horse is to view the world with collaboration, as with their rider. He guides artists through a unique meditation process that involves the Hawaiian Ho'oponoponoprayer, which goes: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.” Artists walk from leaf to tree, to blade of grass, to sky, to anthill, reciting it.
“You begin imagining and being brought back,” Inabinet describes of the experience. “Then you sit down and get really quiet and think of nothing. A lot of times, you get this flash of insight. You get this warm feeling that just emanates. The artists translate that experience into art, which is part of their ‘Earth Dream’” His goal, ultimately, is for everybody to have an “Earth Dream.” Then, collectively, we will have created an “Earth Myth.” “A myth has more power than an individual dream,” he says. “Out of that, we may start to imagine a way out of this mess.”
Inabinet has observed more participation, and more depth, with every session. His hope is that over the course of six more sessions taking place over the next three years, culminating in a two-week intensive retreat at Horn Island, they will have, through collaborative imagination, elicited an “Earth Myth.”
“And then the art we create may articulate it, and then people might be moved by it in ways to inspire them to live the collective myth,” he explains. “That’s my dream.”
The Sunday morning yawns and the sun appears as the clouds move on. We are there and Inabinet is telling stories and explaining revelations. The distant shore of a collective “Earth Dream” on this boat of stories, on this lifetime of trying just to understand, is within view. We are sailing on. There’s no map, but we keep dreaming together.
On May 3 from 5 pm–9 pm, Inabinet and his wife, Peggy, will open their property at La Terre to the public for the annual Under the Flower Moon arts installation, held in conjunction with the Hancock Arts Council. Artists, writers, performers, musicians, and storytellers are invited to visit La Terre to experience a walkabout via “Nature and Art: Pilgrimage to Ocean Springs”—which can be initiated by appointment by contacting Inabinet at jbinabinet@yahoo.com.
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