An interview with Tom Mansfield by Barbara van den Bogaard
In the month of August I spend my Friday afternoons in an online training called ‘Thinking like Gaia (Mother Earth)’. The training aims at familiarizing participants with ‘Living Systems Thinking’. Tom Mansfield is facilitator of this training and the inventor of a card deck called ‘Cards for Life’.
‘Cards for Life’ is a deck of 72 cards in three sets; Dynamics, Being and Doing, to offer the dynamics of living systems, the ways of being that can help us embrace complexity and inspirations for action (doing) that support planetary health.
It is for helping two forms of reconnection; inner and outer and humanity and nature, through a series of four exercises that work for individuals and collectives.
Each card has an invitation to personal inquiry and practice on one side—the inner dimension. And a series of questions on the other side that invite application to teams, communities and larger systems—the outer dimension.
Each features an image of a living system as a metaphor or example of the concept. The cards are poetic and open to interpretation, allowing people the space to define what regeneration means for them in their specific situations.
Thinking like Gaia is more than the sum of the cards though, says planetary coach Tom Mansfield. On a warm august afternoon Tom and I had a heartfelt conversation filled with curiosity, unexpected pathways and a remembering of a poem written many years before by a nineteen year old Tom.
How did the idea for Cards for Life emerge?
Cards for Life was in my soil for a long time. Not a seed yet, as in, I might make a card deck one day. But the potential of it was there in the background. It was waiting in me or around me because I already had this semi poetic list of all kinds of obscure but favorite things to work with, varying from regenerative agriculture to masculine and feminine polarities. This list grows and every year I add more to it and I share it with some friends. I like to archive and collect what feels like useful and good ideas.
The first time I’ve sort of articulated the cards in some way is when I saw a sketch for some permaculture cards. I was sent this word document by a friend, and it was a list of standard permaculture principles. It had words like ‘observe’ and ‘interact’, ‘growth’ and ‘margins’. Some of the concepts that today are actually in the ‘cards for life’.
I saved this document and it sat with me for a while. It then skipped forward a couple of years in the back of my mind and in 2022, I did the bio-leadership fellowship program, and I remembered this sketch of ideas. I think that was the point where I thought, I wonder what it would look like to take these permaculture principles and make them into cards with two sides of each concept: self and system, inner and outer.
I then wrote to my friend who sent me the document of the permaculture principles and I asked: “Where did this document come from?” Because I couldn’t find it online or in my email. But she didn’t remember sending it to me. That was really bizarre. I remember this exchange, but then there’s no record of it. It was the spark though that allowed me to connect my permaculture training with the NLP training for personal development I had done and the coaching I practiced.
I started playing with the principles and I created the ‘dynamics’ cards first. And then the ‘being’ cards just kind of fell out of them. And as soon as I conceptualized the ‘being’ cards, I knew that there was the ‘doing’ counterbalance that was needed. It was somewhere halfway through 2022, I realized, I’m making a deck of cards and then it wouldn’t leave me alone. I was getting up at 4 a.m. and writing things down. That’s when an eight month journey of creating the first prototype started.
Where does your love for our inner and outer nature come from?
I grew up in nature with parents that had a really deep and quite profound love of nature. My father grew up in the countryside and worked as a gamekeeper, looking after large areas of land and the animals, and shooting and hunting. My mother has been a painter all her life. She paints outdoors in nature. So those are two strong influences for me. After I was born in England, we moved to a small farm in the south of Ireland, and we had a cow that we milked, grew our own vegetables and had a well made, to bring running water to our home.
It was very idyllic, medieval almost. The house and farmlands were packed with animals. I was always hanging out with them. Sleeping in the dog’s bed and playing with the cows in the barn. It was wonderful. I couldn’t be separated from the dogs that used to break into my room, or I’d sleep in their bed. It was raw, very close with all of life and death.
I didn’t have any fragility around killing and eating animals, training them, looking after them, nurturing them. To me it was the precious entanglement of life and death that was very rich and very present. I’m really grateful for that upbringing.
I’m not bypassing the kind of suffering that’s involved in taking care of ecosystems. Permaculture isn’t just a fluffy thing. There’s things to be weeded and rooted up and death to be taken care of. Looking after animals can be really brutal.
So in what time did you grow up you would say?
I’ve grown up in this time of the world with the ecological crisis, with the planetary health crisis very much present. At least it was very present to me from a very young age. Maybe with that immense love of nature growing up that strongly attuned me to the harm of it as well. I’ve been through recovery with quite severe addiction for a long period of my life.
I think all these experiences come together in the cards, which is really beautiful.
I mean, Life, it’s overwhelming, isn’t it?
I think in low level ways, addiction is kind of the norm. That’s the world that we live in, which is about numbing the pain of the world and the living creatures on it. This pain, we also feel personally and for some of us, it’s more radically expressed or more dramatic.
I’ve reconnected with a poem recently written by my 19 year old self, and I’m sharing that, because it’s about collapse. Gosh I’ve written it over 20 years ago… Let me see if I can remember it and share it right here, right now…
Poem by Tom Mansfield (19 years old)
So I just listened to your 19 year old self?
Yes, you did…
I think it can be rare to create something and then really feel it again so many years later. I’m grateful to my younger self for that. The clarity of the poem. Like it actually says at the end, a catastrophe might accelerate our capacity to be happy becoming manifesting reality. As I see now, I was meeting the severity of the extinction time that we live in, not knowing how total that can be for ourselves and other life of the world.
And I think I had the foresight then to know that, like the disruption card says, there’s no breakthrough without breakdown. There’s some inevitability to collapse, and we might look at it as an opportunity to build something better, something more mature, and there’s going to be all this turmoil and violence in between.
I often felt like I didn’t know what to do with this information, these ideas rushing through. Looking back now, I really can see that I didn’t know what to do with myself, how to respond meaningfully to this time. At school, I was always arguing with teachers causing a lot of trouble having intellectual arguments all the time. Often I just got asked to leave because they couldn’t really deal with my mind and my curiosity, and my rebelliousness.
Have you been called an idealist often?
In some ways I think being idealistic is the most real thing there is. The most brave, imaginative, creative thing we can be. It’s about creating reality and creating energy. I think what we need is the idealism of imagining these futures, these post growth futures, these post collapse realities of greater connection, inner and outer and of humans in the more than human world.