The
Becoming
A child wanders into a thicket of northern red oak and black raspberry to soothe the wounds of the past. The child is plagued with the ‘malaise of the soul,’ otherwise know as major depressive disorder, and seeks to heal. As the forest is a reservoir for encountering ‘extrovertive mystical experiences in nature’in the form of epiphanies, the child sensitively roams the moist woodland terrain to gain insight into the sacred truths of Being – notably of wholeness, love, awareness, and death of the ego and time – in order to heal his psyche and soul, and to reach the ‘Greater self.’ The child seeks for mystical experiences in nature through epiphanic phenomena by virtue of developing a ritual practice as a form of pilgrimage in the woodland, involving: entrance, path, arrival, mindfulness meditation, observation, documentation, creation, prayer, and departure. The ultimate goal of The Becoming is for the child to emerge from this pilgrimage a more peaceful, self-aware, and knowledgeable individual, while crafting a complementary meditation hut for contemplation and meditation during the solitude. This thesis is partially a feat of escapism – not in the sense of cowardice – rather, an opportunity to seek solitude from artefacts of anthropological phenomena and the ego in an in-situ, wiigwaam-esque dwelling constructed from the immediate resources of the forest. An act of deep observation, anecdotes and thick multimedia documentation of relevant abiotic and biotic material, ecological relationships, natural phenomena and mystical experiences will be developed to relay the intimate mystical experiences while acting out the pilgrimage in the woodland.
The examining committee is as follows:
Supervisor: Philip
Beesley
Committee
Member:
Val
Rynnimeri
Internal-external
reader:
Tracey
Winton
External:
Carey
van
der
Zalm
The
defence
examination
will
take
place:
Friday,
January
14th,
2022,
3:30pm
Link
available
via
the graduate
student
Learn
page
or
by request.
The
committee
has
been
approved
as
authorized
by
the
Graduate
Studies
Committee.
A
copy
of
the
thesis
is
available
for
perusal
in
ARC
2106A.