Hope and despair and all points in between

Start your day with some Karine Polwart, The News:

What if the news were nothing more
Than the secrets of seashells on the seashore
Whispering which way the wind will blow this night
And how everything’s gonna be alright?

What if the very first sound you heard
At dawn was a wild and wonderful word?
And what if a smile was your first sight?
Wouldn’t everything have to be alright?

Polwart has an edge to her music, don’t let these lyrics fool you. She is a biting and incisive observer of the world as it is.

We don’t have to have hope to appreciate a better future for our planet and our species. We should, if we haven’t already, probably get better at holding the two ideas of hope and despair in mind at the same time. My friend Dave Pollard does that in his writing and signals today that he is embarking on a post-collapse series on his blog which I can tell you in advance will be worth reading. Not because you will agree with it, or because it will give you hope, or validation or solutions. Just because it will help you cultivate a more complex perspective on the world around you. That’s what Dave’s writing does for me, and that’s what Dave in person does for me too. And maybe that what’s Mylène Farmer – who he references in his post – is doing too in her joyful performance of Désenchantée, which seems so at odds with the lyrics.

Another fella who is writing a great series of posts is Ron Donaldson who is signing off from a career in complexity, participatory narrative inquiry, and facilitation with a series of retrospective posts about his journey. Today he has one up on his work with Participatory Narrative inquiry. the whole series is worth a read.

One of the reason why I think we get deluded into believing that the world can be saved is that we place a big emphasis on stories about how the small thing that happened has big implications. Well, on Taming Complexity, there is a great story about how one public participation design on a NASA program to literally save the plant went awry. This is important reading. We need to get good at public participation and deliberation around technical issues as well as complex ones.