Navigating This Moment & Join Friday's Community Resonance Call

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Subject: Navigating This Moment & Join Friday's Community Resonance Call

The Co-Intelligence Institute

January 2025 Newsletter

In this month's newsletter, we invite you to join our Community Resonanace call this Friday, reflect on what we've been reading and appreciating, and share a meditation practice, Meditating Into The World.

Community Resonance Call
Friday January 24, 9:30 PT

This Friday, the Co-Intelligence Institute will host our 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?

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What we've been appreciating...

While I was musing on what to write for this newsletter, during the weekend leading up to Monday January 20th – the day of the presidential inauguration and the commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – Tom invited me to consider, what was drawing my attention.

What came to mind are some recent commentaries that I’ve particularly appreciated: the first was a recent blog post by Canadian group facilitator and strategic planning consultant Chris Corrigan. In “The calm before the coming moment”, Chris muses on the enormous uncertainty of this moment, writing “I’m coming back from nearly 2 weeks working in the United States and I would be lying if it didn’t feel like it was a little bit like watching the film of people enjoying the last few minutes of their holiday before the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004. I’m not sure if the foreboding dread I feel for my friends and colleagues in the States is an over-reaction, or whether I’m not taking it seriously enough…” (trigger warning: the blog post has some intense images in it.)

I appreciated Chris’ post for many reasons, one of which is that I know that many people here in Germany, where I have been living since September on a fellowship, are also observing closely what is happening in the U.S. – as well as what is happening, in their own countries. And I know this to be true around the world… we are not alone.

Another blogpost of note is a somewhat more upbeat one by one of my favorite singer-songwriters, Carrie Newcomer. In “Add-On Stories & The Stories We Choose,” she offers us the metaphor of the “add-on story”, one where we are each co-creating the larger story, by what we add to it -- how we choose respond to whatever is taking place. This reminded me of an insight that Tom Atlee, founder of our Co-Intelligence Institute, has often shared: even when we think we are not “participating” or “co-creating”, we are still participating in co-creation, even with our inaction. How might we choose to do it more consciously?

Personally, I think a large part of the answer is through small groups of friendship and support, where we can feel connected with trusted others and thus reconnect with our sense of agency. I wish I could remember where I first heard the saying, “The only problem with power, is when we think we don’t have any!” Of course, there are different kinds of power, and the greatest power to destroy generally belongs to those who control the largest weapons. Yet poets, artists, storytellers and healers everywhere have known that “For great as the powers of destruction may be, greater still, are the powers of healing.” Which brings me to a recent blog post by Starhawk, on the transformative power of Fire, and some lessons we might draw from the L.A. conflagration…

Then there is the awesome book that has been rocking my world; Libby Hoffman’s, "The Answers Are There". It’s a true story of community healing and reconciliation work, carried out at the grassroots level in Sierra Leone, after a terrible civil war there. It's a deeply spiritual book, as well as practical one; here is another review of it. One way in which Libby’s work resonates with the vision of wholeness we hold at CII, is the non-dualistic approach of seeing the world as always both already, AND also, not-yet whole… and thus, one of the ways in which we can help grow more wholeness, is by looking deeply at the ways in which wholeness is already present, even if only in seed form.

In closing, I want to celebrate “Here We Are”, a blog post by Austin Channing Brown… powerful words of encouragement for those of us who are in mourning right now, and who know that there is still much that needs to be learned, before we could ever become a “color-blind society”. Here at the Co-Intelligence Institute, we value difference and diversity, for all the wisdom it has to offer to the larger whole. Much can be learned from an honest encounter with history, in a way that is willing to look at both what has been painfully injust, as well as, the seeds of human goodness that are in all of us. We know that we can acknowledge the wrongs that a person or a country has committed, while still holding a vision of love and restoration. One of the finest examples of this is Langston Hughes’ spellbinding words in “Let America Be America Again”, where he calls on the powerful vision of “the land that never has been yet, and still, must be…”.

May we each find ways to nurture our sense of hope and possibility in the coming years, may we find life-affirming ways to co-create with others, and may we be strengthened by our connection with the life-giving power of courageous love and healing, in the ongoing movement toward becoming more whole.

- Rosa

Meditating Into The World

As part of my work with Vanessa Andreotti’s Hospicing Modernity perspective, I’ve been exploring Indigenous worldviews. Andreotti suggests that we are part of - and in a real sense ARE - the metabolism of the planet.

I’ve long known how carbon dioxide and oxygen flow between us and the trees in bio symbiosis. But I hadn’t thought much about the flows of all the other elements, I tried a meditation, envisioning all these elements coming to me through the air, doing some work in my body, and then passing on to do other work elsewhere - a perfect picture of Vanessa Andriotti’s “global metabolism” happening right here and now in and around me.

Then I realized that although MOLECULES are always changing, few if any ATOMS get created, destroyed or added to life on earth, so that almost all the atoms in the world are at least as old as our planet. So some of the exact atoms I’m breathing in right now were breathed out by departed friends and relatives, and others were breathed out by billons of earlier peoples - famous and not - and, actually, some of those very atoms were breathed in and out by every living thing I’d ever seen in National Geographic magazine… All of those tiny atoms have been mixing forever in the ever-flowing atmosphere and ever-changing organic molecules, connecting every living thing on Earth together right here and now, in and around me!

And then a few nights ago, in a nice synchronicity, I read in WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy, “We are…made of elements [as] ancient as the earth [and] owe those elements back to the web of all living…”

Then yesterday I heard Mayan academic Yuria Celidwen in a podcast talk about "realizing, recognizing, and reverencing the relationships that make us” and becoming "participants [in] those relationships and of those flourishing ways that we [can and do] create our world.” I was struck by her implication that we can shift our identity from being our separate selves to being participants in co-creating flourishing relationships with and among all people, all nature, all reality. That’s a lovely way of describing what I sense as both a current reality and an ideal way of being. It’s both a great vision of the world I want to realize and a guiding light for co-creating it.

And so my meditation on the flows of atoms became a pathway into realizing my participation in what life is all about, to which we can all bring unique gifts.

- Tom

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January’s Wise Democracy Pattern

50 - Life Enhancing Enoughness

Realizing long-term broad benefits involves realizing an abundance of life-serving qualities and conditions in both the present and the future. So counter both unnecessary scarcity and tendencies towards greed, extremism and unconstrained appetite by promoting the ample sufficiency of prudence, simplicity, companionship, health, beauty, gratitude, generosity, equity, spirit and creativity.

Featured Question

What things and activities in life deeply satisfy us while costing little or nothing and creating few or no bad effects on the life around us?

Featured Resource

How a new materialism can give us back control and quality of life

January’s Co-Intelligence Poem

On a droplet just fallen from a web

by Tom Atlee

Who can say where time takes this water?

Down among salts and stones

then hauled up through root-hairs, locked

for days in cells or veins of iris,

then out past the butterflies up

through the endless lung of Boston,

to be sucked into salt on a gull's tail

and flicked brineward in a dive.

Lost in oceanic anonymity, then,

it moves among fishes, to rise again,

rent from a wavetop landward,

tossed and dashed with sisters in pines

and tumbling down steep Adirondack cascades,

then to sleep in a Hudson momentum en route

to ocean again.

And in seven years maybe

to see the Ganges or Hollywood

or surge through crowded capillaries

past my feelings, brainward.

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Subject: Navigating This Moment & Join Friday's Community Resonance Call