So happy that Tom has started using a posterous site to share his thoughts with the world. He’s been writing great stuff lately:
We are geniuses at impacting the world while preventing impact on ourselves. As we solve our lives into greater and greater separation from the built-in learning mechanisms of evolution, nature has to stretch further and further to heal itself, to get us to pay attention, to stop treating feedback as a problem and see it as an increasingly urgent invitation — indeed a demand — to change. Yet still we go further and further out on the limb, brilliantly resisting nature’s limits and messages.
Our separation from nature — or should I say, our separation from reality as it really is, in all its fullness that is so hard for us to grasp — has now reached global proportions. Reality’s feedback is now coming in the form of increasingly extreme weather, emptying oceans and aquifers, cancers arising from an environmental chemical soup so complex we can no longer track the causal links any more, new diseases that won’t respond to antibiotics and can span continents and seas in hours on jets, and small groups and networks with increasingly powerful destructive technologies at their disposal.
We are rapidly moving into a realm where problem-solving becomes obsolete, if not downright dangerous — especially at the global level, especially when we are trying to preserve our systems, our habits, our identities, our protections and privileges. Because these challenges are not primarily problems to be solved. They are realities to engage with, to come to terms with, to learn something from about who we are in the world, to be humbled by and creatively joined. Yes, joined. Because inside the realities of today are profound lessons about who we need to be next, individually and collectively — about the cultures, technologies, stories, and social systems we need to create and move into. We won’t learn those lessons if we see these realities as merely problems to resist or resolve — or worse, to make another war on. We need to see them as embodying the precise information we most desperately need to take in right now.
via Six Degrees of Separation from Reality – Tom-Atlee’s posterous .
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A couple of men with megaphones tilt at artificial order to reveal the beauty of free humans. Sometimes free speech can be annoying or not what you expect. It can seem a little uncomfortable or a little strange. When I watched this for the first time I have to admit that I felt a little stressed, but I realized that in simply talking through a megaphone, peacefully and standing in the chaos they were creating, these two guys are revealing an edge inside me, a limiting belief that, when I let it go, makes it possible for me to experience delight.
Enjoy it.
via Mark Groen.
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My friend Dustin Rivers is locked in a perpetually generative inquiry:
…what are the next steps to become liberated?
The best questions are the ones we ask ourselves, and require us to act differently once we come to an answer. “How do I contribute to the things I complain about in my community?” is an example of that. I speak of liberation; the action of becoming free from constrain or oppression or control. Most Settlers will not think of Indigenous peoples in Canada as ‘needing’ oppression. That’s mostly due to the discourse on indigenous issues moving away from the root of the cause, into more a colonial mentality direction. I seek to look deeply into the root of the problem, and to see the 55”²000 ft level of awareness of our context as Indigenous people.
If we do live a truly indigenous life, it is in spite of the temptations, the desires, and the allure of colonial model of existence. The truth of the matter is, indigenous way of life is beautiful. It is not savage, it is not backwards, it is not ‘stuck in the past’. It is something we as Indigenous peoples must identify as a great thing, despite the systemic racism society that says our ancestors are inferior to modern day society.
via Still A Need To Ask The Question at Liberated Yet?.
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There are patterns and rhythms in invitation that help clarify the intention. Sense these and don’t force them because the quality of generative and creative space depends on how well we know and work with these patterns.
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My friend Norah Rendell is a traditional musician of the highest calibre. She is a beautiful singer and a gifted Irish flute player and a curious and lively human being. To be around her is a delight and to make music with her is to be carried away in a space of grace and beauty where we can find out what it means to be truly human. I’ve just spent the better part of last weekend visiting with her in St. Paul, Minnesota, making music and sharing lots of story.
For me the social production of music is a deeply important human activity. When we join our voices together we all contribute to a sound that is bigger than ourselves. We glimpse some transcendent possibility, the notion of a true community. We do so without living out of balance with the natural world at all. We simply make sound and all that is left behind is the echo of harmonies ringing in our ears and perhaps, if we are lucky , a flutter in our hearts that comes with the experience of fundamental harmony – the harmony of notes and of friendship and of purpose. Music does not leave waste behind. It leaves no dangerous or permanent residue at all. Just ephemeral beauty.
I reflect on this here in seat 10A of a United Airlines Airbus 319 flying over the sprawling suburbs of western Denver. My journey this week to the Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul were largely about trying to do two things: support the longing in friends who cultivate a view that wants people and communities to experience possibilit, health and creative, and to design creative spaces for human beauty to emerge in this service. I did this by working with dear friends Jerry Nagel and David Cournoyer teaching some basic ways in which people can come together to talk to each other well. Jerry, David and I also met with Ginny and we co-created both a learning journey for people working in community health as well as a little team among ourselves that was rich and generative and fun.
And then Norah and I got together and we did the same thing with other Irish and traditional musicians, gathering in pubs and around kitchen tables to do what humans in our culture have done sustainably and beautifully for millenia: play music together.
That was my week in a nutshell but it isn’t the way I would have described it until I looked out over these suburbs from my seat, having departed a terminal in which CNN was blaring about Iranian missile tests, murder, pandemics and fear, punctuated every seven minutes by ads for the drugs and goods that would make all this panic easier to take. I’m not pessimistic about the world – rather the opposite, but I am realistic about what is possible for me to do to “fix” it. And in this moment it has become clear to me that my work now is to make beauty; beauty that is created in the endless present moment and that leaves only the trace of love in hearts. I have o idea if this work I do will save the world. But without people who remember the capacities that arise from collaborating and co-creating, there is no chance for anything.
Friends, this society is killing us by small acts and mammoth dysfunction. In fact the ways in which our world is changing seems evident everywhere except on the human scale. Forty percent if the ocean is covered in plastic and soils are dying because the antibiotics we use to keep ourselves thinking we are healthy are destroying microbial communities and making it impossible to feed ourselves without amending the earth with carcinogenic chemicals.
But we humans have no way of seeing things at these scales. If I go by what I have seen this morning at the airport, we seem to react most strongly to compromised business deals, flight delays and a forgotten napkin.
Our craving for permanence has led us to create material legacies that outlast our lives. This seems fundamentally unnatural to me. We take space far greater than that bequeathed to us by our descendants and in return we give them buildings and suburbs and devastated farmland and uranium. We also give them beautiful pieces of art and sculpture and music, don’t get me wrong. But we never question the mindset that leaves things for others to clean up, store or appreciate long after we have gone.
I zm coming to believe that the converstation about sustainability is flawed if it focuses on materials only. I think we have lived far beyond our means and that it is simply not possible for us to make our present impact on the earth sustainable. We have already extended our reach hundreds of thousands of years into the future. You cannot claw back the effect of spent uranium. We cannot put our impact back in the bottle
I think rather what is called is for us to develop and practice the gift of living in community and co-creating beauty together together. If there is one mark I wish to make in the world it is to be a vehicle for the continuation of all that human beings have learned about co-creating community. There is nothing I can do anymore to mitigate to material impact I have made on the world. It is up to us now to ensure that during the change to come in the generations that follow our descendents have the to knowledg e and practice to live, work and love each other well. The quality of my children’s future will depend on, both metaphorically and literally, their ability to make music with others.
Late last night as Norah and I were trading songs after our day of making music with others she told me that she worked for a time in a Jewish geriatric hospice in Montreal. Her job was to sing with dying people, people who had survived the holocaust, people who only spoke Polish or Yoddish or French, languges that Norah did not speak. She would visit them and just sing, sometimes songs she didn’t even understand. And what she noticed was that, even with people who were on the verge of death, they would come to life when they sang with her. The beauty of singing with another woke up their hearts an reminded them that inthe present moment, racked with pain perhaps and a little fear and doubt, they were nevertheless alive to the call of present beauty.
I think, somehow, this my deepest work now: to simply find spaces in which we can find beauty and combat the despair of change we cannot control.