Teaching about climate change isn’t easy when the last drops of hope for limiting warming to 1.5C evaporate with every US presidential decree. In response, I'm making a quantum leap in how I teach.
Your reflections and words remind me of some of the challenges I've faced in teaching about environmental stewardship to students in outdoor field environments. When I started, my approach was intellectual, orderly, and I thought rational. As failures taught me about what works and what does not work, both for students and myself, I learned that the more I work with the natural needs of students, rather than fighting them, the more we all felt good about the educational experiences and the results. Integrating social interaction and fun, with recognition of diverse personality and learning types, made a world of difference. Structuring lessons as competitions between groups made lessons exciting and engaging. Using metaphors and structuring lessons so the information was coming from the students rather than from any one source made things much less boring and much less stressful. Integrating ways to monitor respect and appropriate content inclusion was successful. People want to enjoy positive experiences and are willing to participate when given the opportunity. Evaluations to check cognition, integration, and attitudes about the material covered consistently showed these methods to be very effective. I stopped being drained and became consistently recharged by my work as an educator.
Thanks for those reflections -- learning outdoors and using an inquiry-based approach are definitely much better. I teach in a very traditional auditorium with an old-fashioned set up, and it feels like we are in a museum! Next week we'll start on the 30-day experiment with change (the cCHALLENGE), which will help them experience and reflect on challenges that are practical, political, and personal.
I wonder what would happen if all this information/practices/workshopping were available more broadly to people beyond college age? I have a real issue with telling these kids they are our only hope and they’re responsible for change when there’s plenty of older adults who crave this kind of learning/engagement outside of academia.
I agree, Jill! Many of the people who are making big decisions that have profound consequences for all life on Earth have never learned about ecology, systems thinking, ethics, etc. I've thought about this a lot in the past years, and it is one reason I am going to retire from the university this year. I want to focus on working with people to scale transformative change - because what we do now matters!
Often when I feel overwhelm for the world, I remember the global majority, or activists of the past, people with no option but fighting or dancing for change. I see my privileges and how I am taught patterns of nervous system responses of freeze, shame, collapse. These meta perspectives helps me zoom out and see I have choices. That shaming myself into action is also part of the problem.
From Vanessa Andreotti I learned about my inner bus, the diverse voices and feelings within me. I learn about worldviews and our engagement in harm and desire to fix being part of harming.
Thank you for relationships building, for nourishing regulated nervous systems. For remembering entanglement. For balancing right and left brain activities. For awareness of language. For your love.
I agree that words and language matters and students need to understand this at a deep level.
Clearly more kindness and compassion is needed by all of us now. However, students also need to understand that we are in a collective moment of crisis and they must fight the misinformation, including on their social media feeds, that is blanketing our country now. They might not like to hear it, but the truth is they really are the ones who have come to Earth to change the old paradigm as the Earth changes continue. They need inspiration to innovate, to create and work to build the future world. I hope you can find ways to present the truth to them so they are inspired, not defeated. Best to you in this worthy endeavor 🙏
Thanks Leigh! I completely agree. Last week we discussed the science of climate change, the difference between misinformation and disinformation, and how few people are responsible for spreading disinformation (one study found that it's 4,556 individuals with links to164 organizations backed by corporate funding). In retrospect, I wish I had used more time in class highlighting the good work being done by researchers to debunk myths and disinformation at https://www.realclimate.org/ and https://skepticalscience.com/ . Actually, since I'm experimenting, I'll send them a message about that! Communicating both reality and potentiality is not easy -- thanks again for your comment!
I’m feeling both challenged and inspired by your words, Karen, as I have been dreading some upcoming workshops on climate policy with my students. Hopefully I can be as courageous as you and bring some “goodness” into the room…
Thanks Anne! The challenge for me is to create more space for students to express what they care about and to have more dialogues than monologues, while also covering the course content. Workshops seem like a better arena for that than traditional lectures.
I definitely agree, Karen – the time for one-way didactic teaching is over and instead we need more skillful ways to generate more collaborative and reflexive “learning conversations” in our classrooms…
I am an old student, here to learn. I have to say though, I listened to " Bucky" back in the 60s and read whatever I can find of his teachings on line now. He was and is still an inspirational Master.
Thanks Betty! I was just rereading parts of Critical Path. His work is so relevant today, and it should inspire us to design and create a world that works for everyone.
Thank you for writing about this KAren, I've written something in parallel based on the Noble voices. Historically it's all there for us, we have no need to reinvent. The link is here: https://shorturl.at/vs8fq
Thanks Vincent! I could not access the page (it says it is a private page) but would like to read it. I agree that we don't have to reinvent anything. Whenever I get passionate about new ideas, it does not take long for me to realize that they have been around for a long time. It's the context for the ideas that is changing, and hopefully receptivity changes too.
Thanks Karen. Your words are always so thought provoking. I'm lucky enough to be teaching into a global change biology course this year for the first time. I'm excited about it and daunted at the same time. Your words here are very useful for thinking about the framing.
Thanks Jonathan! I'm sure your course will be great -- and the students will be able to get good insights from your newsletter to supplement the textbooks and articles. I loved your post about transdisciplinary, which in the final image compares it to a piece of cake! :-)
Thank you for your sensitivity, for your work and for your unwavering willpower to keep opening up new fieds of possibility.
I'd like to contribute with an observation about something that jumps to my eye as I read through the post. It's a baseline beat that obviously branches out in a complex way, but let me just point to the baseline.
What if...
...if we truly want to cultivate 'students' sense of agency as a right and as a responsibility in a way that can create a fied of potentiality, we first ask ourselves why and from what stand we're doing so. That is to say, honestly inquire what our genuine / real inner notions are in regard to their embodied roles as agents in OUR class (as in everyone's class?), and our embodied role in the game.
After that, have we considered the possibility of not having all the answers ourselves and hence not needing to be the one who provides all the foundational info, narratives?, methodology and resources that all of us need to feed from, the one who creates such and such, the one who may be basically operating from an unquestioned (?) preassumption that she runs the show and she makes the boat work as if she herself knew exactly where the boat needs to go?
Are we sure we know? Are we sure we've got all the pieces of the puzzle?
And if so,
What's our ontological and factual notion of the real embodied agency of the rest of the people in class?
Thanks! Those are important questions to reflect upon. It makes me think of Donella Meadow's highest leverage point for systems change, which is the power to transcend paradigms: "That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension." Maybe it should be part of all teacher training?
We could radically revisit our embodied stand and we could hold the space from a different place. One that articulates our own knowledge and (maybe long) experience in a field around the ability to hold the space for a genuine collective inquiry of unique agents that tap into a myriad of their unique entry points to Life's Intelligence in ways that trascend the room by allowing a true Dialogue with all the elements known and unknown, through training how to deeply listen and learning how and when to emit. What if we'd engender a collective Life inquiry that's alive and hence weaves itself along a true multistakeholder dialogic path that unravels the answers AND the next moves as we go along, not before.
I love that --- and I am doing a deep listening exercise tomorrow before we talk about climate change discourses. It would be great to set up a "Bohmian dialogue" in seminars.
Let's see if what happened yesterday and today conveys what I'm working on trying to methodically approach and articulate, which may provide a hint on some sort of simple inquiry 'method/protocol'. Let's follow the inductive way.
First, I'd say it articulates a bunch of issues and subjects (among them, the need to re-invite and re-integrate the whole notion of chaos -chaos theory- and life/collective/organic/universal/cosmic/whatever's creativity) in a much clearer, concrete and grounded fashion as compared to what I could (and tried to) encapsullate in some abstract, speculative and deductive terms.
Second, it saves a bias: the specificity of my own 'entry-points', meaning the way in which I am pesonally wired and tuned-in, and hence, it offers a very simple underlying template that can be followed by differently wired-up nodes.
As this dialogue emerged, yesterday and today, I got into a whirlwind of synchronicites and pieces of info that crossed my path, that I felt drawned to and emerged in different formats, in different places: on some signs on the street, on a book -about apparently something else- that I casually came across in a bookshop and that I ended up purchasing, a video recording that I got from one of my email suscriptions and that was about apparently something else, a quote on a book that I've got at home about 'apparently something else', and a quote:
'It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for' -Soulange (painter)
I wrote the quote down, and I also wrote down a reframed version of it: 'how to find what we're looking for: by doing [and being]?' (the experiential traditions and approaches).
I followed the leads that I mentioned BY ACTING ON THEM:
I typed the quote on the internet, I opened my book at random and I found a quote by Terence McKenna that just fitted incredibly in one of the parts of this dialogue, and in what I had tried to say in my previous intervention.
I then remembered the quote on the book I had just found in the bookshop, I checked it and there I found something else two pages prior.
I watched the video that was titled something about power and processwork and actually ended up being quite an experiential exposure to a way of embodying a 'stuck' place in our lives that invites a deep listening to our body's intelligence into the inquiry, and then acting on it for our body to show emergent possibility/ppossibilities in the given situation.
Although it was late and I didn't feel like it, I acted on the lead and I let myself be guided through a 'social presencing theatre' exercise. The information and the new lead that I got as a result were quite amazing.
A wholesome process that started weaving all the above mentioned experiences and inputs around -the above-mentioned- Soulange's quote was triggered right after. It was very late at night, so after making some notes, I put it all to rest.
Today I acted on the new leads that I got yesterday, and I searched for some of the references that were provided in the quided exercise... and I found some gems. The exact words, dilemmas, ways of phrasing the challenges, that were explicit and implicit in this dilogue were marching before my eyes as a challenge and as emergent possibilities that shaped inputs, models, practices, proposals that have been articulated by different people in diferent fields.
Of course, one could rightly argue that my suscriptions, my inclinations, my activities and sensitivities belong to a cluster that shape my areas of interest and endeavours and chances are they're inherently interrelated and sooner or later their interrelatedness will show. That's a sociological fact, and still, I sometimes come across leads in my inquiries that have nothing to do with my interests, and I find in places that are (apparently) unrelated to me, although in my case they usually show up as written or talked words and interactions, because of my personal set-up. But that's not even to the point.
Of course I'm in a cluster (or a cluster AND a fractal?), and so what? A cluster reflects my existential stand, my direction, my set-up, my intention, that gathers and attracts elements on the same 'wavelengths' (string theory?) in this interconnected quest that I may not even be aware of when I don't need to be but will emerge when I do; they are part of my quest. And that is the point. I'm not here to do what someone else is here to do, but what I'm here to do from my own unique set-up. We may overlap and we do overlap and we want to overlap and gather and share in the wider picture of shared concerns, but from our specific pods of unique set-ups and action because we can't and we're not all meant to do it all, but our interconnected parts in the interconnected whole.
I honestly believe this is where this civilization got the notion of 'specialization' and fragmentation wrong. Same as these species divided lands according to some awkard and humanmade criteria, instead of by biotopes, we fragmented the world into categories according to some weird criteria we came up with instead of listening to the real clustering that underlies our embodiment on the planet... the funny thing here and the hilarious thing of many human issues along these lines if the consequences weren't so dire is that we get close, but we horribly miss the point at some point/turnaround, we create arbitrary replacements that don't work parallel to the actual patternings, and then we build up a huge replacing mess that reifies on top of what's actually beating...
Anyways, back to the point, the general template that I've seen emerging for a while on ways forward is utterly simple: deeply feel into the situation and embody it (many different ways of doing so, too); listen to the cues without AND within; let the embodied self act and go, move, grab, talk, open (a book, a can, a door, a wardrobe,...), read, play, and follow the leads, then act on them, get new cues and new leads and act on them... in a spiral.
When this is part of a collective inquiry, paths will cross with other individuals who will receive and emit, listen to the cues and act on them, too. And there'll be common pools/vortexes articulated in various ways. In a class/learning environment, the pool/vortex could be the interconnected group/class, where people come, go and pool their leads and processes in and out, in a increasingly interconnected -explicit and latent- network that allows for widening and diversifying a wide range of networked forms of embodied action-inquiry
Thanks for taking the time to write and share your insights! To me, it's a beautiful description of the power and potential of individual and collective agency in an entangled world. I love the Soulange quote 'It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for'. As you write, it's important to remember that "we can't and we're not all meant to do it all" and also "I'm not here to do what someone else is here to do, but what I'm here to do from my own unique set-up." I believe embodied actions are most powerful when they are aligned and attuned to the values that apply to all, e.g., justice, integrity, compassion... On that note, I'm going to spend my weekend following the leads and see where they take me. :-)
My pleasure. Thank you for sharing and networking your quest.
To me it points to something that wants to emerge in terms of a paradigm shift and some foundational principles that we have bypassed -or even deliberately exiled- in our civilization's ontological and epystemological stand. How to revisit, truly re-integrate and articulate them in all our ways is indeed an interesting and challenging task down to the specifics of the diverse, interrelated networks within the individual-collective continuum.
May you have an interesting and revealing lead-hunt weekend.
How about Prigogene's theory of dissipative structures, from a quantum social change perspective? I keep hearing, even from astrologers, that this is going to the the "year of chaos." Trump is the biggest chaos agent ever! But what if chaos is seen as a good thing, Karen - a necessary prelude to a sudden leap to a higher social order? Yes, even if that means collapse! And what if you were to combine this proven principle with the idea of Gaian agency? As I vow everyday, "may I be free from unrealistic expectations about how the world is supposed to work, how sentient beings are supposed to behave, and how my (our?) spiritual path is supposed to unfold."
Thanks Zhiwa! That is something to think about for sure. One thing that I'm wondering is whether we are experiencing a failure of imagination. So many people are wary of radical transformations based on equity, integrity, compassion, and other values that benefit the whole. It's "unrealistic" or "utopian"... What if we were to collectively imagine and engage with rapid change in a positive direction, rather than watch things get torn apart and destroyed? To do so, we may have to align with Gaian agency, as you describe!
Yes, that's the great tragedy of the course we are on collectively, Karen. There are so many life-affirming paths open to us, and so much support for same, but the powers that be seem determined to make this transition as difficult as possible - at least, in the short term. Economic collapse seems inevitable now, but from an ecological standpoint, that may just clear the floor. Gaia is and will remain our most powerful ally, at both the individual and collective levels. I know she sustains me in these darkening times, b/c I have tuned my self-regulation into her homeostasis. I'm curious what kind of self-regulation practices your students are adopting?
Your reflections and words remind me of some of the challenges I've faced in teaching about environmental stewardship to students in outdoor field environments. When I started, my approach was intellectual, orderly, and I thought rational. As failures taught me about what works and what does not work, both for students and myself, I learned that the more I work with the natural needs of students, rather than fighting them, the more we all felt good about the educational experiences and the results. Integrating social interaction and fun, with recognition of diverse personality and learning types, made a world of difference. Structuring lessons as competitions between groups made lessons exciting and engaging. Using metaphors and structuring lessons so the information was coming from the students rather than from any one source made things much less boring and much less stressful. Integrating ways to monitor respect and appropriate content inclusion was successful. People want to enjoy positive experiences and are willing to participate when given the opportunity. Evaluations to check cognition, integration, and attitudes about the material covered consistently showed these methods to be very effective. I stopped being drained and became consistently recharged by my work as an educator.
Thanks for those reflections -- learning outdoors and using an inquiry-based approach are definitely much better. I teach in a very traditional auditorium with an old-fashioned set up, and it feels like we are in a museum! Next week we'll start on the 30-day experiment with change (the cCHALLENGE), which will help them experience and reflect on challenges that are practical, political, and personal.
I wonder what would happen if all this information/practices/workshopping were available more broadly to people beyond college age? I have a real issue with telling these kids they are our only hope and they’re responsible for change when there’s plenty of older adults who crave this kind of learning/engagement outside of academia.
I agree, Jill! Many of the people who are making big decisions that have profound consequences for all life on Earth have never learned about ecology, systems thinking, ethics, etc. I've thought about this a lot in the past years, and it is one reason I am going to retire from the university this year. I want to focus on working with people to scale transformative change - because what we do now matters!
Often when I feel overwhelm for the world, I remember the global majority, or activists of the past, people with no option but fighting or dancing for change. I see my privileges and how I am taught patterns of nervous system responses of freeze, shame, collapse. These meta perspectives helps me zoom out and see I have choices. That shaming myself into action is also part of the problem.
From Vanessa Andreotti I learned about my inner bus, the diverse voices and feelings within me. I learn about worldviews and our engagement in harm and desire to fix being part of harming.
Thank you for relationships building, for nourishing regulated nervous systems. For remembering entanglement. For balancing right and left brain activities. For awareness of language. For your love.
Thanks for sharing those insights, Malin! Zooming out right now is especially important, so that we can act wisely rather than react harmfully.
I agree that words and language matters and students need to understand this at a deep level.
Clearly more kindness and compassion is needed by all of us now. However, students also need to understand that we are in a collective moment of crisis and they must fight the misinformation, including on their social media feeds, that is blanketing our country now. They might not like to hear it, but the truth is they really are the ones who have come to Earth to change the old paradigm as the Earth changes continue. They need inspiration to innovate, to create and work to build the future world. I hope you can find ways to present the truth to them so they are inspired, not defeated. Best to you in this worthy endeavor 🙏
Thanks Leigh! I completely agree. Last week we discussed the science of climate change, the difference between misinformation and disinformation, and how few people are responsible for spreading disinformation (one study found that it's 4,556 individuals with links to164 organizations backed by corporate funding). In retrospect, I wish I had used more time in class highlighting the good work being done by researchers to debunk myths and disinformation at https://www.realclimate.org/ and https://skepticalscience.com/ . Actually, since I'm experimenting, I'll send them a message about that! Communicating both reality and potentiality is not easy -- thanks again for your comment!
I’m feeling both challenged and inspired by your words, Karen, as I have been dreading some upcoming workshops on climate policy with my students. Hopefully I can be as courageous as you and bring some “goodness” into the room…
Thanks Anne! The challenge for me is to create more space for students to express what they care about and to have more dialogues than monologues, while also covering the course content. Workshops seem like a better arena for that than traditional lectures.
I definitely agree, Karen – the time for one-way didactic teaching is over and instead we need more skillful ways to generate more collaborative and reflexive “learning conversations” in our classrooms…
I am an old student, here to learn. I have to say though, I listened to " Bucky" back in the 60s and read whatever I can find of his teachings on line now. He was and is still an inspirational Master.
Thanks Betty! I was just rereading parts of Critical Path. His work is so relevant today, and it should inspire us to design and create a world that works for everyone.
Thank you for writing about this KAren, I've written something in parallel based on the Noble voices. Historically it's all there for us, we have no need to reinvent. The link is here: https://shorturl.at/vs8fq
Thanks Vincent! I could not access the page (it says it is a private page) but would like to read it. I agree that we don't have to reinvent anything. Whenever I get passionate about new ideas, it does not take long for me to realize that they have been around for a long time. It's the context for the ideas that is changing, and hopefully receptivity changes too.
Apologies KAren for the link not working and thank you for messaging me about it. I’ll pop the longer link below it should work fine.
And yes you are so right on highlighting the context, that’s very important and can be easily missed.
https://vincentmcmahon.substack.com/p/beyond-noise-how-to-think-move-and
Thanks Karen. Your words are always so thought provoking. I'm lucky enough to be teaching into a global change biology course this year for the first time. I'm excited about it and daunted at the same time. Your words here are very useful for thinking about the framing.
Thanks Jonathan! I'm sure your course will be great -- and the students will be able to get good insights from your newsletter to supplement the textbooks and articles. I loved your post about transdisciplinary, which in the final image compares it to a piece of cake! :-)
Thanks Karen! Yes, that visual was great wasn’t it? I was lucky to get to use it. :)
Thank you for your sensitivity, for your work and for your unwavering willpower to keep opening up new fieds of possibility.
I'd like to contribute with an observation about something that jumps to my eye as I read through the post. It's a baseline beat that obviously branches out in a complex way, but let me just point to the baseline.
What if...
...if we truly want to cultivate 'students' sense of agency as a right and as a responsibility in a way that can create a fied of potentiality, we first ask ourselves why and from what stand we're doing so. That is to say, honestly inquire what our genuine / real inner notions are in regard to their embodied roles as agents in OUR class (as in everyone's class?), and our embodied role in the game.
After that, have we considered the possibility of not having all the answers ourselves and hence not needing to be the one who provides all the foundational info, narratives?, methodology and resources that all of us need to feed from, the one who creates such and such, the one who may be basically operating from an unquestioned (?) preassumption that she runs the show and she makes the boat work as if she herself knew exactly where the boat needs to go?
Are we sure we know? Are we sure we've got all the pieces of the puzzle?
And if so,
What's our ontological and factual notion of the real embodied agency of the rest of the people in class?
Thanks! Those are important questions to reflect upon. It makes me think of Donella Meadow's highest leverage point for systems change, which is the power to transcend paradigms: "That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that NO paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension." Maybe it should be part of all teacher training?
What if...
We could radically revisit our embodied stand and we could hold the space from a different place. One that articulates our own knowledge and (maybe long) experience in a field around the ability to hold the space for a genuine collective inquiry of unique agents that tap into a myriad of their unique entry points to Life's Intelligence in ways that trascend the room by allowing a true Dialogue with all the elements known and unknown, through training how to deeply listen and learning how and when to emit. What if we'd engender a collective Life inquiry that's alive and hence weaves itself along a true multistakeholder dialogic path that unravels the answers AND the next moves as we go along, not before.
What if...
I love that --- and I am doing a deep listening exercise tomorrow before we talk about climate change discourses. It would be great to set up a "Bohmian dialogue" in seminars.
Ready? :-D, a long chunk came through... down below (hope it fits in this little box)
Let's see if what happened yesterday and today conveys what I'm working on trying to methodically approach and articulate, which may provide a hint on some sort of simple inquiry 'method/protocol'. Let's follow the inductive way.
First, I'd say it articulates a bunch of issues and subjects (among them, the need to re-invite and re-integrate the whole notion of chaos -chaos theory- and life/collective/organic/universal/cosmic/whatever's creativity) in a much clearer, concrete and grounded fashion as compared to what I could (and tried to) encapsullate in some abstract, speculative and deductive terms.
Second, it saves a bias: the specificity of my own 'entry-points', meaning the way in which I am pesonally wired and tuned-in, and hence, it offers a very simple underlying template that can be followed by differently wired-up nodes.
As this dialogue emerged, yesterday and today, I got into a whirlwind of synchronicites and pieces of info that crossed my path, that I felt drawned to and emerged in different formats, in different places: on some signs on the street, on a book -about apparently something else- that I casually came across in a bookshop and that I ended up purchasing, a video recording that I got from one of my email suscriptions and that was about apparently something else, a quote on a book that I've got at home about 'apparently something else', and a quote:
'It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for' -Soulange (painter)
I wrote the quote down, and I also wrote down a reframed version of it: 'how to find what we're looking for: by doing [and being]?' (the experiential traditions and approaches).
I followed the leads that I mentioned BY ACTING ON THEM:
I typed the quote on the internet, I opened my book at random and I found a quote by Terence McKenna that just fitted incredibly in one of the parts of this dialogue, and in what I had tried to say in my previous intervention.
I then remembered the quote on the book I had just found in the bookshop, I checked it and there I found something else two pages prior.
I watched the video that was titled something about power and processwork and actually ended up being quite an experiential exposure to a way of embodying a 'stuck' place in our lives that invites a deep listening to our body's intelligence into the inquiry, and then acting on it for our body to show emergent possibility/ppossibilities in the given situation.
Although it was late and I didn't feel like it, I acted on the lead and I let myself be guided through a 'social presencing theatre' exercise. The information and the new lead that I got as a result were quite amazing.
A wholesome process that started weaving all the above mentioned experiences and inputs around -the above-mentioned- Soulange's quote was triggered right after. It was very late at night, so after making some notes, I put it all to rest.
Today I acted on the new leads that I got yesterday, and I searched for some of the references that were provided in the quided exercise... and I found some gems. The exact words, dilemmas, ways of phrasing the challenges, that were explicit and implicit in this dilogue were marching before my eyes as a challenge and as emergent possibilities that shaped inputs, models, practices, proposals that have been articulated by different people in diferent fields.
Of course, one could rightly argue that my suscriptions, my inclinations, my activities and sensitivities belong to a cluster that shape my areas of interest and endeavours and chances are they're inherently interrelated and sooner or later their interrelatedness will show. That's a sociological fact, and still, I sometimes come across leads in my inquiries that have nothing to do with my interests, and I find in places that are (apparently) unrelated to me, although in my case they usually show up as written or talked words and interactions, because of my personal set-up. But that's not even to the point.
Of course I'm in a cluster (or a cluster AND a fractal?), and so what? A cluster reflects my existential stand, my direction, my set-up, my intention, that gathers and attracts elements on the same 'wavelengths' (string theory?) in this interconnected quest that I may not even be aware of when I don't need to be but will emerge when I do; they are part of my quest. And that is the point. I'm not here to do what someone else is here to do, but what I'm here to do from my own unique set-up. We may overlap and we do overlap and we want to overlap and gather and share in the wider picture of shared concerns, but from our specific pods of unique set-ups and action because we can't and we're not all meant to do it all, but our interconnected parts in the interconnected whole.
I honestly believe this is where this civilization got the notion of 'specialization' and fragmentation wrong. Same as these species divided lands according to some awkard and humanmade criteria, instead of by biotopes, we fragmented the world into categories according to some weird criteria we came up with instead of listening to the real clustering that underlies our embodiment on the planet... the funny thing here and the hilarious thing of many human issues along these lines if the consequences weren't so dire is that we get close, but we horribly miss the point at some point/turnaround, we create arbitrary replacements that don't work parallel to the actual patternings, and then we build up a huge replacing mess that reifies on top of what's actually beating...
Anyways, back to the point, the general template that I've seen emerging for a while on ways forward is utterly simple: deeply feel into the situation and embody it (many different ways of doing so, too); listen to the cues without AND within; let the embodied self act and go, move, grab, talk, open (a book, a can, a door, a wardrobe,...), read, play, and follow the leads, then act on them, get new cues and new leads and act on them... in a spiral.
When this is part of a collective inquiry, paths will cross with other individuals who will receive and emit, listen to the cues and act on them, too. And there'll be common pools/vortexes articulated in various ways. In a class/learning environment, the pool/vortex could be the interconnected group/class, where people come, go and pool their leads and processes in and out, in a increasingly interconnected -explicit and latent- network that allows for widening and diversifying a wide range of networked forms of embodied action-inquiry
Thanks for taking the time to write and share your insights! To me, it's a beautiful description of the power and potential of individual and collective agency in an entangled world. I love the Soulange quote 'It's what I do that teaches me what I'm looking for'. As you write, it's important to remember that "we can't and we're not all meant to do it all" and also "I'm not here to do what someone else is here to do, but what I'm here to do from my own unique set-up." I believe embodied actions are most powerful when they are aligned and attuned to the values that apply to all, e.g., justice, integrity, compassion... On that note, I'm going to spend my weekend following the leads and see where they take me. :-)
My pleasure. Thank you for sharing and networking your quest.
To me it points to something that wants to emerge in terms of a paradigm shift and some foundational principles that we have bypassed -or even deliberately exiled- in our civilization's ontological and epystemological stand. How to revisit, truly re-integrate and articulate them in all our ways is indeed an interesting and challenging task down to the specifics of the diverse, interrelated networks within the individual-collective continuum.
May you have an interesting and revealing lead-hunt weekend.
How about Prigogene's theory of dissipative structures, from a quantum social change perspective? I keep hearing, even from astrologers, that this is going to the the "year of chaos." Trump is the biggest chaos agent ever! But what if chaos is seen as a good thing, Karen - a necessary prelude to a sudden leap to a higher social order? Yes, even if that means collapse! And what if you were to combine this proven principle with the idea of Gaian agency? As I vow everyday, "may I be free from unrealistic expectations about how the world is supposed to work, how sentient beings are supposed to behave, and how my (our?) spiritual path is supposed to unfold."
Thanks Zhiwa! That is something to think about for sure. One thing that I'm wondering is whether we are experiencing a failure of imagination. So many people are wary of radical transformations based on equity, integrity, compassion, and other values that benefit the whole. It's "unrealistic" or "utopian"... What if we were to collectively imagine and engage with rapid change in a positive direction, rather than watch things get torn apart and destroyed? To do so, we may have to align with Gaian agency, as you describe!
Yes, that's the great tragedy of the course we are on collectively, Karen. There are so many life-affirming paths open to us, and so much support for same, but the powers that be seem determined to make this transition as difficult as possible - at least, in the short term. Economic collapse seems inevitable now, but from an ecological standpoint, that may just clear the floor. Gaia is and will remain our most powerful ally, at both the individual and collective levels. I know she sustains me in these darkening times, b/c I have tuned my self-regulation into her homeostasis. I'm curious what kind of self-regulation practices your students are adopting?
This was so inspiring to read. Thank you!