Mastery's Paradox

Often equated with control and domination, mastery, if left unchecked, leads to annihilation and colonization of otherness. Mastery is also evident in intellectual humility, in conceding that humans will only ever have a partial understanding of the universe. This partiality is a gift. Our greatest teacher, the Earth, shows ecological mastery independent of human minds. Early modern Westerners, the Renaissance humanists, were comfortable living with the unknown. Treating modernity and mastery with compassion, the author explores how scarcity and abundance affect our relationship to the strangeness inside, between and around us. We ache to recall a humbler, pluralistic, non-colonial ethos. Old earthen ways lie waiting for us to take them up again. Using vibrant paintings and accessible prose, the author illustrates the mastery of living well with those we don’t understand. This book summons Westerners home to forgotten wisdom and to respectful, non-colonizing relations with otherness.

In a culture fetishizing Mastery as dominance, control, hyper-efficiency, all linked to a desire for competitive advantage and security, this beautifully written book by Tanya Behrisch shows how there is also co-incidentally an ‘other’ way, more whole-some and life-giving. Drawing on her experience as artist, corporate manager, student and observant lover of the greater-than-human world, Behrisch intricately reveals the paradoxical, indeed interpenetrating organic relationship between making and unmaking, grasping and letting go, closure and openness, completeness and indeterminacy. For a time when an old ‘order’ seems to be dis-integrating, this is a truly important study.

– David Geoffrey Smith, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, Canada