Being part of a collective transformation process
Being part of a wider evolution
I am acutely aware that I have not yet written this week. I’m going through an intense time at work, which is really interesting and challenging. As always, the challenge is trying to integrate where I am at personally into work that has to happen within a system which does things in a way I might not necessarily agree with – in my case the system of international development.
Instead of a weekly email I would like to share a conversation that I was reading this morning. The conversation tackles the question, “How can we transform mindsets to address climate change?” It is between Laureline Simone, Founder of One Resilient Earth and Thomas Bruhn of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Study. I met Thomas last summer when I spent time in Potsdam and I have also written quite a bit about his book in some of my weekly emails.
When I was reading through the conversation, I found myself nodding and saying ‘yes!’ over and over. It almost feels that the two people in conversation are saying what I am thinking and feeling, and are formulating the questions I am asking myself, to an extend that I did not think possible. I feel deeply connected to them, even though I only met one of the two – and that only briefly. So in a way I’m sharing this here also to share a part of my own journey and some of my own questions. But also because it gives me hope that other people are at a similar point. One thing that Thomas said particularly fills me with hope:
The conditions of the Earth are changing now after 10 000 years of progress through the relative stability of the Holocene. It’s a bit speculative but it feels that the transformation of my own mindset is just a reflection of this collective transformation process in the Earth system.
It makes a lot of sense that we are not only going through these changes as individuals but also as connected beings. The criticism I often hear about the need to change mindsets is that “it would take too long to change every persons’ mindset!” Yet that is not really necessary if we understand ourselves as part of an ecology and our own change as part of wider evolutionary changes.
I really hope you can make some time to read this conversation. Here is the link again.
The Paper Museum
A poem by Nora Bateson
Urgent Mud
Inside
Getting juicier,
The rub of so many paradoxes has worn down the compartment walls of my being,
(Wherever me is and however many blurred variables that might include.)
Bacteria? Ancestors? An idea, a dance?
Melting forms, grinding down stones.
The grit of disintegrating the boxes gradually got soggy-
Wetness and goo of tears and the gravy of life’s weird turns-
The mud has become a puddle of possibility!
Opaque, formless and in its own time.
The mud is just sitting there not doing anything I can see.
But it is doing something.
It is making.
How long it will take to become something? No idea.
How it will begin to quicken and connect? No idea.
How it will shape, what it will be? No idea.
Fusings, musings, combinings are in motion.
In a world of rapid change…
Fluctuating environments require the ability to respond to unrecognizable circumstances.
Now let it be mud. There is nothing that will come otherwise.
This is urgent mud.
It ferments,
starts something, a small unseen stickiness, then more-
Then there is a happening.
Outside
I am still pinched by the collective exo-skeleton of ideas on how to fix the nice muck,
Name it, plan it, shape it,
The wrongness of it-
The uselessness of it-
The pointlessness of it-
The purposelessness of it-
Oh yes. It must be thus.
Precisely unsee-able from here.
Later maybe there will be a moment to say, “ah… it was there all along.”
Will saying this negate the worlds of creative work in the precious dark mud it took to allow new forms through?
Will we forget that it took being lost?
Why have I added this to the Paper Museum? When everything is measured by its immediate usefulness, its immediate utility, we are choking the natural process of stochastic improvisation, the moving, shifting, learning interconnections between life - if given room, ‘it’ might just happen. But what ‘it’ happens? It might be something we are not able to see yet because we lack all sort of reference that would allow us even to imagine it. How can we hold the spaces for the stochastic improvisation to happen? How can we trust this deep and fundamental process of creation in the universe without imposing on it our purposes and narrow and limited imaginations of what is possible? Isn’t that so limiting?