So we had a great meeting, the discussion flowed and together a timeline of activity, milestones and the emotion of change was created, more on its detail later.
For the moment a short piece on barriers and starting points - when faced with ground shifting issues it is easy to procrastinate - a few objections we identified to begin with...
We aren't allowed to...
Fear is a mind number. All too often the first point of resistance to any initiative is that we are not permitted to do it. As if waiting for permission ever changed anything! Who constructs the barriers in the first place?...people! If its socially constructed it can be socially reconstructed.
We haven't got the money...
Three critical elements of any initiative are not linked to money - authenticity, vivacity and playful (Oliver James 2007). James's work exploring the psychology of happiness tells some simple and compelling stories of what makes human beings thrive and live fulfilling lives. The message is clear, despite considerably more financial security than we had in the 1950's (even during a credit crunch) more people than ever are reporting emotional distress - a mental illness like depression, anxiety or psychosis (pxiii). In starting the journey towards creating sustainable communities part of our immunity kit needs to be emotional fitness and well-being. Authenticity - means to be real rather than false. Vivacity - means to feel enervated, fascinated and excited by life. Playfulness - is is taking what is going on around and 'use your imagination to transform it into something amusing and beyond what it seems (p252)- best illustrated in children's play.
We don't know enough about how to do this...
So who does? I draw inspiration from David Boud here and his commitment to dialogue as a way of transforming situations and lives. Talk to each other, share the possibilities of what you want to achieve. Do something and then reflect on what it was like and what you might do differently next time. The way forward will become clearer the more you do it. This is about 'leading from the future as it emerges' (Scharmer 2007) - as Peter Senge reminds us, 'the greatest of all human inventions is the creative process' (in Scharmer 2007 - Foreward). In Scharmers work he talks about people learning together about the future by 'drifting together' with the right intentions. The whole process of capacity building, creating resilience, is paying attention to the drift and making best use of the connections we create along the way, but remaining focused on the larger goal of serving the greater need - the deep ecology. Not knowing what to do encourages us to be resilient, resourceful and reflective - the feeling of what we are moing towards can become a real, powerful force for change.
Things to do...starting off...
My suggestion is that there are only three points of departure that you need to create a sustainable community.
Food, energy and know-how.
Food - to nourish and connect us back into the ecology of the earth.
Energy, to provide for our warmth and to enable us to use other resources effectively.
Know-how, to nurture our abilities to share, explain, develop and apply what we know to new situations with care and attention.
The conversation that develops over time will attend to all the other dimensions that will make the activity fulfilling and sustainable. It is a self-organising system, it will evolve to suit the local circumstances.
A sustainable community focused on food, energy and know-how will provide enough flow into awareness raising, nurturing appropriate organisational needs, generating communication networks using face to face and telecoms, celebrating the journey, groups for spin off activities to strengthen the web, generating demand for new skills and know how, creativity and enjoyment for life and of life.
Food...Use food as a point of reference, sources of food, types of food, places where you can grown food, who grows food, how do they grow food, where do they grow food, where else can we grow food, what sort of food can we grow, when can we plant it, who will be involved, what will we need, who else will we invite?
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