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dispatches for (un)learning and re-imagining education
~ Issue #10 ~
 
In 2025 the Ecoversities Alliance is celebrating our 10th anniversary and looking toward our next decade with enthusiasm, ever-evolving ideas, creativity, and, as always, love. The anniversary year is also bringing some changes to the magazine, and we hope you’ll become a contributor to our upcoming issues.
 
Thanks to all who participated in our “new name poll.” You chose EcoVersos: the Ecoversities Magazine. We’re working on a logo for the next issue. If you’re a designer and would like to help with the process, respond to this email to let us know of your interest!
 
We’re also excited to introduce a new feature that will debut in our next issue and run as a regular feature in subsequent issues. In “Readers Write” you’re invited to share up to 250 words on the subject for the coming issue. In honor of our 10th anniversary, our first theme is “Milestones,” which you can interpret any way you wish. Send us your true story or poem relating to the theme to ecoversitiesweavers@gmail.com; it would be a fun bonus (but not necessary) if you tie it in some way to your relationship with Ecoversities and the multidisciplinary work that happens within our diverse alliance. 
We are honored to be able to share these 10
rich stories from our relatives.
 
Sacred Sites as Ecoversities
by Pooven Moodley
We start with the journey of a respected international human rights and environmental lawyer, Pooven Moodley, who receives counsel and wisdom from sacred energy points on the planet and becomes a cofounder of one of our newest threads, Sacredversities. 
 
“The unlearning process at sacred sites starts with the appreciation of multiple paradigms and ways of learning. Learning from a mountain is a very different methodology than learning from a teacher in a classroom. It opens up a process that goes beyond our mind and beyond the senses which we use on a daily basis. It shows us the full potential of who we are and what we are connected to and can access. These sites hold memories, energy, and knowledge that has been stored for thousands of years. We can access this within our DNA.”
 
READ ARTICLE
Law Student in a Lawless Land
by anonymous
Our friend matriculated at the law school of Al Azhar University in September 2021 hoping to learn to defend Palestinian women’s rights, hold Israel accountable, and help enact environmental laws to protect her sacred land. Now her home and university are destroyed, and her life and the lives of everyone she loves are beyond precarious. In “Law Student in a Lawless Land” the writer ponders questions around what legal protections anyone on the planet really has. 
 
“At this moment, I am so confused. Should I give up studying law? Am I really interested in pursuing it, knowing it is powerless to help us? I’m still studying it. But I’m also planning on studying psychology. To try to dig deep to understand people’s behaviors and then change them. I would like to do research and teach the world about a genocidal war. I need to understand both what allows people to be so cruel and what gives them the strength to resist, to survive complete devastation.”
read article
The Refugee: Absence of Meaning and Identity
by Ahmed Saleh
Reading “The Refugee: Absence of Meaning and Identity,” the reverie of Palestinian poet, editor, translator, member of the Ecoversities family, and lifelong refugee Ahmed Saleh, made one of our editors feel as if she were the one without the ID card and the identity that informs it, living with the paralyzing chill that accompanies such a state of un-being. Image by Wilfrido Aquino from Pixabay
 
“I think that if I want in the future to write a biography of my life, it should surely begin with the corpses I have seen throughout my life. Every question that has remained in my mouth without answers, for a person who spent his life searching for meaning in the waiting in lines of salvation and asylum. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl says: “I dare say that there is nothing in the world that can help a person as much, even in the worst circumstances, as knowing that there is meaning in his life.”
 
READ ARTICLE
Healing Spirits of the Yukon
by Magdaluz Bonilla
 
Magdaluz Bonilla traveled from her home in Mexico to the Yukon Territory of Canada for a summer residency at sierra ying allen and Adventureversity, where she found joy in the companionship and in the pure waters, wild animals, and whispering winds. She was inspired to create a set of Healing Spirits of the Yukon Oracle card deck, which is available for pre-order by contacting Magdaluz directly.
 
 
“To seek, to listen to the messages of the water, the wind, the sun, and the earth, to want to listen to those voices that express themselves in other temporalities. There is truth contained at the edge of the road, in the buzzing of insects, in the whispers of the trees, and in the mystery that falls from the sky and emanates from the ground.”
View ORACLE Cards (ENG/ESP)
Poems for Gaza
by Waddah Abu Jamea
Palestinian poet Waddah Abu Jamea somehow still finds words to defy death in the face of existential horror. Here is poem in Arabic is also offered in English, translated and with an introduction by fellow Gazan writer Ahmed M. Saleh. Both men, living in exile, are struggling to raise funds to help their families remaining in Gaza find safe havens and begin to live again.
 
“In yet another, dramatic siege the importance of writing grows as a means to highlight the stories of the Palestinian people who face daily catastrophes. Amid the terrifying death, daily famine, and bloody disasters that have been ravaging the Palestinian body for over a year since the onset of the genocide, writers, poets, and artists rise to scream at us from their deaths, seeking to save what remains of our humanity by writing their wills, diaries, testimonies, and lives that were stolen from them in the harshest and most brutal ways.”
READ pOEM (ENG/ARABIC)
Unlearning Genocide
by Dino Siwek and Mar Mordente
These texts are a continuation of a conversation that began in March 2024 with the Senti-Pensar Gaza gathering. This meeting took place in São Paulo, Brasil, and marked the start of an artistic-pedagogical inquiry into the culture of genocide. Photographs by Kya Roy Fay.
 
“I insist on learning to exist at the borders between dream and death, at the edges of the Earth’s humus. Only there have I found some space to try and remain with the pain of the other for more than 10 seconds of a story. To expand the time of a feed into 10,000,000,000 seconds. To create space-time within my own throat, turning with the Earth’s rotation to say: I’m sorry. I feel so much. I feel everything that cannot fit into mourning. And still, to feel useless. And still, and yet, to persist.”
READ Article
Portals at Hiraya: Letters of Healing
by Vanessa Meng
 
“A portal,” writes Vanessa Meng in her evocative memoir of her residency and poetry/Wayfinding workshops at Eva Wang’s Hiraya collective in the Philippines, “is often understood as a way to leap from point A to point B, bypassing what the journey entails. In our workshops participants travel not into a different physical space, but into a different energy and way of navigating . . . posing questions and trusting that the answer will come.” Come along for the journey with Vanessa!
 
“It is a reminder that the portal into a new world is not at all about a new destination, but creating within the same space to find something new in what was already there. It is a reminder that what is felt is always beyond what is seen. Wayfinding is allowing yourself to be guided. Healing too can be understood as something that will naturally occur if we follow with our intuition. All life grows towards healing."
 
Read article
The Three-Decade Evolution of Vanvadi Forestversity
by Patrichia D’cruze
Wholesome food, abundant clean water, fresh air, comfortable homes, peaceful surroundings, natural ambience, supportive relationships, and creative fulfilling work are all basic human needs. How to meet them in harmony with nature and fellow humans remains the core challenge of our churning times. Read about one journey from idea to ecological regeneration and learning in Maharashtra, India.
 
“Today, Vanvadi stands as a living example of how people can come together to regenerate land, following the ‘zero chemical and minimum intervention’ principles of natural farming and forest regeneration, for the co-evolution of humans and the environment. Its story continues to inspire those who seek to reconnect with the earth and live in harmony with nature."
 
Read article
Hubo un Tiempo que Habrá
by Sergio “Yeyo” Beltrán & friends
Our beloved Yeyo has written a poem for Ecoversities dreamers and weavers that he has called “Hubo un Tiempo,” (“There Was a Time”), which has been made into a stunning video featuring voices from Ecoversities. See how many voices you recognize, and feel your spirits lift! In Spanish with English subtitles. 
 
Nos contaron las abuelas que hubo un tiempo que habrá…
Donde el agua fluye limpia desde el manantial hasta la mar océano.
Nos dijeron los ancestros que hubo un tiempo que habrá…
Donde la Tierra es madre y cobijo y no mercancía.
Soñaron los abuelos que hay un tiempo que habrá…
 
The grandmothers told us that there was a time where there will be...
Where the water flows clean from the spring to the ocean sea.
The ancestors told us that there was a time where there will be...
Where the Earth is mother and shelter and not merchandise.
Grandparents dreamed that there is a time where there will be...
Read poem & watch film
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Thanks for reading! 
Don't forget to forward this to a friend :)
 
 
The Ecoversities Alliance has a rich and growing library of commissioned publications, contributed by members since 2018. Explore the many essays, books, articles, films, podcasts, and multimedia publications on themes related to our ongoing and multilayered research in the Alliance and within the larger ecosystem of re-imagining education. 

We invite you to let your intuitive self guide your exploration through this tapestry of provocations, questions, inspiration, stories, experiences, cosmolivings, may they enrich your soil and support you as you navigate the wilds of learning and unlearning. 
 
We hope that you enjoyed this issue of the magazine and invite you to reply to this email with your thoughts and responses.
 
And we look forward to receiving your prose or poetry submission to our new feature “Readers Write” on the theme of “Milestones.” If you’re an artist or photographer and would like to submit something, we welcome those as well. The last day to have your work included is Monday 15 June, 2025, from wherever you are on our precious planet.

With love—
Catarina, Maura & sierra
 
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Adaytu, Adaytu 5J8M+J8W, Ethiopia