October 25, 26 addendum

Dear HEALers:

I look forward to our time together this Friday and Saturday.

My purpose in writing is simply to suggest a few more connections in our readings and upcoming discussions. In particular, the foci this coming weekend will be on the dynamics of vital, health-promoting relations with others of a human and more-than-human kind, and on the "Foundations of lifelong health: Food and Shelter."

Let me suggest a connection between the two foci.

Food and shelter concerns are very much about resources, their sources, and distributions. These are not only key determinants of human health but also of the health of diverse ecologies.

Matters of relationality can be contained within specific spheres of human functioning (in the specific health care and therapeutic professions, along with those of teaching, coaching, and counseling, for instance), however they are also integrally connected to social, environmental and wider ecological conditions.

The "One Health Initiative" recognizes "that human health (including mental health via the human-animal bond phenomenon), animal health, and ecosystem health are inextricably linked."

http://www.onehealthinitiative.com/

Although this "initiative" still operates largely within a biomedically-focused paradigm of health promotion (for which it may well be helpful to consider salutogenic perspectives), there is something to be gained from seeing health care (and health education and promotion) as having much to do with recognizing the connections between human and more-than-human life forms (especially when using and consuming the latter).

Which brings me to a further reason for our Saturday Field (or big red barn) Trip. It has to do with the direction of thinking which I indicated in the last email, and which has to do with considering "the broad reaches of the vitality of our pedagogical relations with others."

I leave it to the Field Trip experience to provoke our thinking along these lines. Suffice it to suggest that we consider, in addition to our observations of human-horse connections and their implications for our professional and personal relations with others, the therapeutic, health-promoting and relationship-enhancing consequences of the human-animal bond. (Insert your own favorite animal.)

Here is just one of the many readily available articles on the "One Health" connotations of the "human-animal bond."

http://www.arcamax.com/pets/mypetworld/s-1303595

Cheers,

Stephen.