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February 10, 2022
Emergence is one of the best concepts I have learned for discussing this wow, this wonder. “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”2
Emergence
One of my favorite questions today is: How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?
Question
My favorite life forms right now are dandelions and mushrooms—the resilience in these structures, which we think of as weeds and fungi, the incomprehensible scale, the clarity of identity, excites me. I love to see the way mushrooms can take substances we think of as toxic, and process them as food, or that dandelions spread not only themselves but their community structure, manifesting their essential qualities (which include healing and detoxifying the human body) to proliferate and thrive in a new environment. The resilience of these life forms is that they evolve while maintaining core
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Dandelion and mushroom
One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.
Resilience and love
Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than any other emotion.
Observation
We would organize with the perspective that there is wisdom and experience and amazing story in the communities we love, and instead of starting up new ideas/organizations all the time, we would want to listen, support, collaborate, merge, and grow through fusion, not competition.
Where we are now
Octavia Butler said, “civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation.”
Adaption
We must imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as potential cultural and economic innovators. This is a time-travel exercise for the heart. This is collaborative ideation—what are the ideas that will liberate all of us? The more people that collaborate on that ideation, the more that people will be served by the resulting world(s).
Oh imagination
Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. I suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
Imagination
My mentor Grace Lee Boggs first raised the concept of emergence with us in Detroit after reading Margaret Wheatley’s work about biomimicry and mycelium magic.17 Grace started asking us what our movements would look like if we focused on critical connections instead of critical mass.
Mushrooms
which evolved into strategies for organizers building movements for justice and liberation that leverage relatively simple interactions to create complex patterns, systems, and transformations—including adaptation, interdependence and decentralization, fractal awareness, resilience and transformative justice, nonlinear and iterative change, creating more possibilities.
Adaptation and interdependence
In 1992, Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science, based on her work with organizations and leaders on what is effective, through a lens of quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory. Her key learnings were that: everything is about relationships, critical connections; chaos is an essential process that we need to engage; the sharing of information is fundamental for organizational success; and vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos and information.
Leadership
In Grace’s work, that cycle of transformation was foundational, something to cultivate in young people, in communities.
Transformation
In my experience, healing happens when a place of trauma or pain is given full attention, really listened to. Healing is the resilience instinct of our bodies, a skill we unlearn as we are taught to pay for and rely on data and medicine outside of our own awareness to be well.
Healing
important that we learn to be in right relationship with change.
Change
Nalo Hopkinson (sensual breathtaking magic);
Magic
We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home?
What we learn in school
We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.
Training
We are still mostly misdirected, turned away from the wisdom that is our inheritance. Joanna Macy speaks of the “great turning,” a collective awakening and shifting direction, away from the wanton destruction of this planet and each other, away from those practices of separation and competition listed above, towards life and abundance.
The Great Turning
I am living a life I don’t regret A life that will resonate with my ancestors,41 and with as many generations forward as I can imagine. I am attending to the crises of my time with my best self, I am of communities that are doing our collective best to honor our ancestors and all humans to come.
Vow
One major emerging lesson: We have to create futures in which everyone doesn’t have to be the same kind of person. That’s the problem with most utopias for me: they are presented as mono value, a new greener more local monoculture where everyone gardens and plays the lute and no one travels… And I don’t want to go there!45
Diversity
How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? To be abundant when what we consider valuable is shifting from gold to collard greens?
Children
