Join us today for the first Community Resonance call of the year. The intent for these calls is to offer space for you to share about what is present in your world, including what you are doing, or what others are doing, that resonates with the Institute’s work. This can also include how you are navigating the world, and any thoughts, insights, practices, or ways of relating that have been supportive or inspiring to you. Many of our calls also offer a particular framing, which we invite you to respond within if you like.
Meeting Details:
Friday, January 24 at 9:30am Pacific Time
Community Resonance Call with Slow/ Co-intelligence Institute
Join the call here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84512803185
Here is this month’s framing, offered by Slow, who will be facilitating:
As with many Americans & other humans, I am shaken reading some of the things the incoming administration has done, and plans to do, as well as any plans I’m yet unaware of - plans of the new administration, and plans of the corporate oligarchs who now accompany it, grasping directly for the government reins, &/or petrified-to-submission of those who hold those reins. All of their harmful actions are based on deep confusions and attachments that seem so transparent to me, I want to tear my hair out! Especially when I see so many of those who will be harmed supporting them.
Out of care for all of us, there is much good work to do protecting people who are at risk, archiving & sharing information that is at risk, and speaking up for those being harmed or at risk of being harmed. I am drawn to this work, and am grateful to see so many others working on these things (more than me!), in fact I’m often awed at people’s persistence toward these efforts even under the most trying circumstances.
And, I can't help wondering, how do we also attend to the harmful actions of government, corporate, & other oligarchs that were the daily norm the day before the inauguration — last year?
Going back decades, (Centuries. Millennia!) the list of human, social, ecological, and other tragedies is nigh infinite. I've always wanted to tear my hair out about these things. Many of the core patterns of domination we see around us are very old. Imperial civilization. Victory through war & other violence, through finance, through laws/rules. Through lies. Through manufactured scarcity, manufactured desires, and pseudo-satisfiers. This includes both material stuff, and stories such as those about who our enemies are, and what counts as "winning."
I have been shaken throughout my life learning thing after terrible thing that governments and for-profit corporations have been doing, both on purpose, and through the likely outcomes of poor design.
I am also struck with awe, at the inventive alternative systems by which humans have, and still do, organize ourselves. Some seem to be universal and ancient such as authentically hearing each other & coming to agreement. The emergence of commons management, wherever population density makes management relevant. Other approaches or methods that may be - or at least seem to be - newer, such as sortition. Or deliberative mini-publics. Transformative justice. Community accountability. There are countless independent groups and movements of varying sizes across much of the world, or even across towns, who handle certain needs locally, with systems which differ significantly from the formal systems which purport to be necessary to run everything.
The apocalypse arrived a while ago, it's just not evenly distributed. For many millions it is beginning right now, in relation to the new would-be rulers of the US. For thousands in LA, it was earlier this month when the fires of global warming and poor forest management (also) took their homes along with nearly their entire built community. And even where there is no such physical destruction, our systems of manufactured scarcity frequently kick people out of their homes.
For many indigenous peoples, the apocalypse began generations ago, and some are well into a process of grieving, healing, & other recovery, even as they fight to end new harms and indignities. In Gaza, the war is the heart-wrenching consequence of seventy years of things not being put right. Some Israelis’ apocalyptic thoughts are fixed on the specific day of October 7, 2022. Wars rage and grind in Burma, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ukraine & Russia, among other parts of the world. War feeds into economic crises and austerity responses (and brings great profits to others!), as Sri Lanka has been experiencing. There’s the smashed hope for democracy in Hong Kong over the past decade. And the list goes on…
All of this is not intended to provoke doom & gloom. Rather, it is an invitation for those of us (if you are one of these) just now or recently experiencing collapse in some way to see how many other folks are in a similar boat, and in many cases, have been experiencing collapse for far longer. They are invaluable allies! They have learned things, and have experiences, which are likely to be extremely helpful to us if we are open to listening, and working together.
The survival - and often thriving - at this time of alternatives to exploitative & alienating systems, speaks to the strength of our human will to find another way; to develop new and support existing systems that center the wealth of life we live among, rather than an often-inchoate fear of not-enough.
Here are inquiries we invite you to consider…
What is possible now that wasn’t so possible before?
Let us hold space for transforming any specific apocalypse alongside our work to transform the larger apocalypse-generating systems we all live in.
What are you and/or others doing towards transforming specific challenges or opportunities we face now? How do these relate to our larger systems? How might they relate?
What are you and/or others doing towards transforming the larger systems? How does that effort relate to specific challenges or opportunities we face now?
What becomes possible through attending to the challenges and opportunities at all scales?
