Deep California page at Chalquist.com - Website of Craig Chalquist, PhD

California can only be understood by those for whom the symbols, if they come at all, follow the land itself in the order of apprehension: it can only be known in all its dimensions by the native, or by those like him, from within and never from without. — Wilson Carey McWilliams

California is 163,707 square miles of bankruptcy, mismanagement, ecological destruction, urban encroachment, Republican obstructionism, Democrat enabling, violence, chaos, and quasi-psychotic regression. It is also a land of experimentation, innovation, intuition, and edge-of-continent dreaming.

Although plenty of information is available on California, including this guide page to state services and current conditions, these books, and various state facts, a Deep Education perspective moves below and behind surface data and events to examine underlying forces (including those in the human heart), paradigms that filter collective perception, ecologies of the imagination, and landscapes that sculpt the desires and fantasies of their inhabitants. Seen through a holistic lens, California comes alive as a multidimensional system of human and nonhuman energies, aims, interactions, and repercussions.

This page will provide Deep Education commentary on the state as a whole, events unfolding county by county, and local developments. My conviction is that when we can see how events from many fields of experience--ecology, politics, agriculture, social justice, local culture, architecture, education, and even dreams and the symbolic life--connect into living systems, we discover more satisfying ways to live with the land, its elements, and each other, beginning with a lucid moment of connective insight: "Eureka!"

For more about California as a land of legend, myth, motif, and dream, see my Animate California Triogy.

At YouTube: "Animate California: The Soul of the Golden State in Image, Myth, and Place."