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“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” —Albert Camus
One indicator that things are off is when impacted communities and people of color get involved and they are put in the role of “performing the action,” for example, having their photos taken, being spokespeople, or being asked to endorse or represent work they don’t get to lead, etc., while most of the background organizing is still dominated by the folks who aren’t impacted and won’t be around long term to sustain the campaign or to be held accountable.
“Starlings’ murmuration consists of a flock moving in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every individual bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage a larger flock cohesiveness and synchronicity (at times upwards of over a million birds).” —Sierra Pickett
We spend precious time thinking about what has changed that we didn’t choose or can’t control, and/or thinking ahead to future stress. Often this is because we aren’t clear or committed about our dream destination, so instead of moving towards anything in particular, we are in nonstop reaction. A first question to ask ourselves is, how do we practice increasing our ease with what is?
I am talking about the combination of adaptation with intention, wherein the orientation and movement towards life, towards longing, is made graceful in the act of adaptation. This is the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing.
In movement work, I have been facilitating groups to shift from a culture of strategic planning to one of strategic intentions—what are our intentions, informed by our vision? What do we need to be and do to bring our vision to pass? How do we bring those intentions to life throughout every change, in every aspect of our work?
creatures’ bodies. There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting, to live based on your collective real-time adaptations. In this way thousands of birds or fish or bees can move together, each empowered with basic rules and a vision to live. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.
What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can.
As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren’t part of your visionary life’s work.
failure… How often, how quickly can I become aware
It is useful to classify the economic and ecological disruptions that make up this “new normal” of instability into two groups: shocks and slides.
Shocks present themselves as acute moments of disruption. These are, for example, market crashes, huge disasters and uprisings.
Slides, on the other hand, are incremental by nature. They can be catastrophic, but they are not experienced as acute. Sea level rise is a slide. Rising unemployment is a slide...
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One of our key roles, as social movements, must be to harness the shocks and direct the slides—all towards achieving the systemic, cultural and psychic shifts we need to navigate the changes with the greatest equity, resilience and ecological restoration possible.
We believe that shifts can emerge from collective “aha” moments when social movements awaken the popular imagination to new possibilities and spark social action.
Shifts also result from well-organized communities creating new institutions that meet peoples’ needs as responses to the shocks and slides better than the
dominant systems can, such as food sovereignty projects, collectivized housing systems, cooperative economics (time banks, worker co-ops, food shares, community-based restorative justice projects, etc.).
less prep, more presence low ego, high impact building alignment, not selling ideas relationship is the measure of our strength this will be as amazing as you are trust your own work and each other
Facilitator learnings: relax under pressure! there is no form of freaking out that will make this job less challenging. have a few trusted people/a team
Flocking is fundamentally about decentralizing the effort for safety and trusting leadership to come from any edge of the flock. “When Hurricane Katrina
you can’t bring down a hundred oak trees bound beneath the soil! How do we survive the unnatural disasters of climate change, environmental injustice, over-policing, mass-imprisonment, militarization, economic inequality, corporate globalization, and displacement? We must connect in the underground, my people! In this way, we shall survive.” —Naima Penniman
Humans are unique because we compete when it isn’t necessary. We could reason our way to more sustainable processes, but we use our intelligence to outsmart each other. We compete for fun, for ego.
Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.
On so many levels, interdependence requires being seen, as much as possible, as your true self.
Meaning that your capacity and need are transparent.
Just at least consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others.
rock star status is a cyclical thing. It becomes its own work, maintaining and promoting the rock star in the organization.
Lifting people up based on personality replicates the dynamics of power and hierarchy that movements claim to be dismantling.
That the frenetic pace of doing, doing, doing, without being present with each other and the season we are in, what is happening around us, is unnatural and counter to life. So it has made me realize how important community ceremony and celebration is to our efforts to transform the world.”
By meditating with the spiral in mind, I can focus my attention on re-encountering the old wounds differently and imagine a new possibility.
Occupy and Black Lives Matter/Movement for Black Lives,
Both grew from common longing, from a relinquishing of control, and from a celebration of leaderfull transformation. Both have been challenged by the limits of our human
capacity to cooperate, sustain, and grow in conflict; by the weight of large-scale expectations on something long awaited but new; by the learning pains of organizing for depth in the age of social media.
The crises are becoming clear even to those not being directly oppressed, or those directly organizing. And people are ready to stand up and dream of something different. And yes of course it would be amazing to
The major critique I have heard of this effort is the lack of demands, and multitude of messages. My thought so far is: humans have a multitude of cares, of passions…trying to lockstep us into one predictable way of being is the essential desire of corporations, because if you can predict what people will want and do, then you can profit by coming up with appropriate products and activities for them. This movement is instead making it as easy as possible to enter, no matter what passion brought you to the square.
We are realizing that we must become the systems we need—no government, political party, or corporation is going to care for us, so we have to remember how to care for each other.
The whole thing seems so utterly not produced, not micromanaged, and not acting from a place of crisis which excuses top down elitist decision-making processes—not rushing itself.
There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.
It is so important to cultivate our patience, our thoughtfulness, our willingness to slow down and seek the wisdom of those not already part of our movements—not to get them in step with our point of view, but because we need their lived experiential wisdom to shape solutions that will work for the majority of living beings.
It is imperative to regenerate our curiosity, our genuine interest in different opinions, and in people we don’t know yet—can we see them as part of ourselves, and maintain curiosity, especially when we want to constrict and critique?
a key metaphor that is used at Allied Media Projects: the role of organizers in an ecosystem is to be earthworms, processing and aerating soil, making fertile ground out of the nutrients of sunlight, water, and everything that dies, to nurture the next cycle of life. All that has come before is in the soil, which now yields the movement to counter Wall Street and the systems of capitalism and create a new economy of relationships, a new society of care and respect. In that paradigm there is no failure.
Everything we attempt, everything we do, is either growing up as its roots go deeper, or it’s decomposing, leaving its lessons in the soil for the next attempt.
Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.
“There are so many formations I am not a part of—my non-participation is all I need to say. When I do offer critique, it is from a space of relationship, partnership, and advancing a solution.”
“Hater: A person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.”—www.urbandictionary.com
“Resilience: (v) The way the water knows just how to flow, not force itself around a river rock; then surely I can stretch myself in the shape my own path is asking of me.” —Corina Fadel
“Nature is in the pesticides that are in the flesh of whales in the deepest parts of the arctic ocean, because what humans create is not exceptional, it is not outside of nature.71 The vastness of the cosmos is a nuclear reactor that creates all the elements that make us up and makes up our minds and all that we create, from poetry to weapons, sweatshops and digital networks made in them that connect people. Nature is everything.” —micha cárdenas
“We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.” —Neil Degrasse Tyson
After many dives I now think of “coral reef” as a verb, or a process, a way that ocean life creates home and beauty out of ships, cars, bikes, and other things never meant to live on the ocean floor.
For me, somatic work has been about relearning and reconnecting to the wisdom and life in natural forces. That what is most alive leads to opening, creating, change. That in the destruction of something lies a whole new world of possibility—a place where patterns can finally become unhinged
