Since I created this blog two weeks ago, I've been bending peoples ears, testing the water. I want to write about some of the conversations I've had... also an experiment to see if a blog entry like this might help these conversations to continue.
My question, most of the time, was 'what's your gut response to my sense that what is needed now, more than anything, is to cultivate resilience'?
I write as I remember, perhaps the most recent conversations first.
David Abram spoke at Scottish Natural Heritage's spectacular 'morethanus' event in Inverness last week. David's deeply focussed message was for stories, and more stories, and not written down, but stories of our local places, told as we walk those local places, grafted onto the taproots of indigenous animism. Told with voices that growl up from within our animal body. His force-of-nature story-telling of the magic of the wild; of written language's divorce from oral connectivity between living beings in living places and the indigenous within us all... resonated at angry-love depth with Jay Griffith's 'Wild', and bounced off Mark Lynas' deep cry for climate sanity.
I hear that his call is about connecting language back to real beings; that depth connection with place and the more-than-human is the essential work for human ecologists, vital for resilience practice. David was able to visit us on his way home, suggested I check out Bill McKibbon's 'Deep Economy'. In our late-evening conversation, I also heard again a call for wild-words, and earthed stories, that can become more of my/our work in the world. As I write, I suddenly become aware of the paradox of writing these words into this blog... writing into cyber-space, hosted on a server thousands of miles away... is this in itself destructive of the consciousness that David was calling forth?
Mark Lynas was in a different place; a place of no time to delay; a place of the immense power of the local even in the face of our knowledge, dimly perceived, that we are living through earth's, fastest and biggest extinction event ever. Ever. His response to resilience was '... and vulnerability...', that the tremendous vulnerability of our ecosystems as they are at the present; the coral reefs and forests on the point of death.
After the SNH event, I talked with Tess Darwin, a friend from Falkland and also a visionary, working away within SNH, about the transformative potential of this work which SNH could support. Could wild-unwritten-place-based-storytelling be a core of a resilience strategy for the hundreds of communities of human and more-than-human communities that SNH has a mission to support?
Justin called by yesterday; we teach together on the 'Finding Voice' workshop I run every year here in Falkland, Fife for the Centre for Human Ecology Masters' programme; he's a trickster, calling himself and by extension me and you... to presence in our lives, with the way the world is. One of Abram's sensitive souls... working and living in two separate cities, with three young children.... responding to resilience by showing just how much the structures of work and family life work to cut away this life-force; and inquiring what it would take to create a far more resilient life...
Tara, my partner, has been unendingly positive; an amplifying and encouraging mirror to say 'you've had some daft ideas in your time, but this one isn't daft, this is for real, and it's needed'...
Tara was making soup for our guest last night when I popped into the village to join about thirty local folk to hear from Ben, from Totness transition towns movement. His gentle, paced way of describing the twin, converging apocalypses of climate change and peak oil... and their implication of re-localisation... left many in the room convinced and shaken. Tara and I have been living here for three years; this is the first time so many over-lapping groups friends and a wider network has come together in the village, organised by my friend and colleague at the Rural Leadership Programme Sibongile Pradhan. It was partly Rob Hopkins' presentation on this 'energy descent' movement that stung me into heightened resilience-awareness two weeks ago; Ben, too, was gently insistent that this one crucial factor at the heart of the movement's blistering global spread over the last year. Ninian, friend and Laird here at Falkland Centre for Stewardship, turned in recognition of our conversation last week (with Helen Lawrenson, the Development Director) where these local friends agreed with me that 'what else is there to do?'. I sense Ben's visit has been profoundly helpful in perhaps catalysing the first 'transition village Falkland' next January. Could we lead the way in Scotland?
Good friend and colleague Verene Nicolas told me that she's been dwelling on resilience for many months; that there is a book by this name in France which has captured the mood of the times and been hugely influential in France for the past couple of years. I sensed from both Alastair McIntosh and her, that evening, an affirmation that this is another doorway into spiritual service; another way of seeing the integrity of the community activism they embody in their home in Govan, Glasgow and way beyond.
I've chewed the ears of many more folk; Roddie, outdoor education specialist as morethanus, picked up that he was left in no doubt by our conversation that resilience in on the burner; Peter Merry, 'spiral dynamics' wizard in the Netherlands and motivator behind the Centre for Human Emergence, Netherlands, wrote a supportive email with multiple references to global-level resilience work - it's going to be a good while before I've digested all this; in the meantime, several of the links are up on the resilienceblog.
I play in a string quintet with Katherine, Sarah, Aby, and Peter; we've a gig coming up in a couple of weeks; I think I heard Katherine say that resilience 'makes sense' to her. Thankyou musical friends...
Finally, Mary-Jayne Rust gave a powerful talk to the London Guild of Psychotherapists two weeks ago, and invited me out to a coffee afterwards with her friends Viola and Zita.
As we talked about the resilience of the martial artist, centred, strong and flowing, not brittle; able to bend with change and stay alive with and embodied in the moment; and as I talked about local resilience as being those powerful webs of connection to a tribe, even if it's not in one place... we all seemed alive, engaged, enthused by life.
These are the kind of conversations I'd love to have more of; what other kinds of conversations are worth having just now?
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