Different ways of using the website and reading the eventually book

One of the many advantages of a website like this is that you can dip into it at any point and find a short chapter or a slogan or a quotation - something to think about, and perhaps something to act upon.

This website is many things but it is also a book-in-progress designed to be read from front to back or from back to front. You could easily read the last appendix first to get the worst news, the challenge, the main reasons we need to reconnect with nature and with each other soon and deeply; Bateson's "wheels of destruction" will scare you and and you can proceed from there to figure out how you might throw some sand in the wheels. You could start toward the end of the middle with Lux's poem about the voice in your head. You could start with Section 7 "What is Being Done" to get some idea of what different people are doing currently to help children get moving and grooving. Or you could start with Section 8 to find ideas and plans for the future. Start with any Section and go around in circles. Or read a chapter or two from each Section and then go back to the beginning. Or. . . . start at the beginning because the "Wombdrum" may be the best and most important chapter, and the 2nd chapter has all the information we need to reshape our contemporary lives, while 50 chapters later all of Section 8 is becoming too repetitive and the very last chapters are especially vague, 'spiritual', speculative, theoretical, academic - probably not likely to inspire much action at all.

One of the reasons you can start anywhere is that every chapter, no matter how "far out" or "oversimplified" or "too cute" it may seem, is saying the same thing! Every chapter is some kind of variation on the theme of children's liberation via performance skills. We're just saying that same thing over 60 different ways. We hope visitors to this website will send in a chapter to replace one of ours , or will send in a chapter that could be part of a sequel: here's still another idea or a description of an imperfect process that might help to get more children moving and grooving through the rest of their lives. Eight Goals and Four Axioms

• to bring each child to the fullest possible creativity and expression
• to reunite the arts in rites of passage and everyday dramas
• to reunite arts and sciences into one celebration of life in nature that some have called "joyous science" (froliche wissenschaft in German, Gaia scienza in Italian)
• to maximize participation in nature and eliminate alienation from nature
• to increase the number of poets per capita to 100%
• to decrease the number of suicides, homicides and people in prisons to 0%
• to make recruitment into armies 100% impossible
• to conserve diversity of species and promote diversity of cultures

Because English is an "analytic" language relative to the less known polysynthetic-agglutinative languages of the world, it's words-concepts and grammatical constructions are better at separating, differentiating, describing discrete qualities of things. This book-in-progress has had to be written against the grain of English in particular and language in general because grooving is mostly pre-symbolic, prelinguistic, pre-poster-us as in "he's a poster child for primitivism." Almost everything can be made "symbolic" as in "this style of grooving really stands for or symbolizes these values or that lifestyle," or turned into a poster, advertisement, commodity, thing. So I try to use English here in the spirit of pre-symbolic, anti-poster, ad-busting, anti- commodification, deconstructing-of-reification but without a lot of negating of the negation. I try to be positive, playful and simple-minded most of the time: Here's what kids could be grooving and why we ought to help them do more of this. Some of the philosophical positions/axioms/definitions/worldhear-worldshareechological- orientations taken, and sometimes taken for granted, in this book are:

1. Civilization, cultural devolution and ever deeper alienation (from nature, body, society and self) are still spreading all over the humanized earth, justifying the destruction of the speciation and smothering human potentials, especially in children.
2. Life before learning. Biological evolution has given us a triune brain that requires joyful integration of motions/emotions/meanings in direct and shared experiences currently called "performance" or "drama" or "ritual" or "happenings" or ngoma. Living fully expressed in everyday life means that . . . . . .
3. Being before knowing. We are before we think. We exist, experience the world, interact with other humans and with the natural world, before we can think about "knowing" anything. Direct and shared experience is prime-primary-primitive and . . . . . .
4. Primary communication before secondary communication. Physical skills, synchronized movements, gestures, stylized stances, dance movements, drumming, musicking, hand games, mimickry, call & response games, etc. create a permanent and necessary pre-symbolic foundation for ABC's (Arting, Beautifying, Crafting), 3 R's (reading, writing, arithmetic), media literacies, all the "cognitive" learning areas that are currently fetishized, made more difficult and often made impossible by schooling, testing, standards, curricula, etc. that ignore primary communication and . .... . . . .

These last three open-ended positions are phrased sequentially to insist on a reversal of current understandings, priorities, posited causalities. The short chapters which follow have a common goal of persuading you to put life, being, primary communication FIRST in order to replace the "before" with "be for" and "as" and "is" . . . . i.e. life be for learning, life as learning, life is learning; being be for knowing,. . . etc.

In the sustainable future a lot of our current categories and oppositions, dialectics and discursives, scenarios and plans, will fall into unplanned obsolesence. Recursive, cyclical, layered-merged-nested identities and multilingualities will reemerge as who we are in the moment, in this time and this place.

But enough of philosophical axioms, definitions, slogans, goals, lists, prophecies. Please listen carefully to Pat Campbell's appeal to parents. Then, since you seem to be starting at the beginning, go to Section 1, "Wombdrum to Earthdance" to have some fun thinking about how it might be done.

Charles Keil