Part of"DandDTrans," a community of inquiry and action regarding the role that dialogue and deliberation can play in addressing the mega-crises of our time
Please use the this space to share your thoughts now about Tom’s original question and what occurred for you over this past month of involvement: What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?
Use the queries below if they help but don’t feel bound to respond to them or be in any way limited by them. Tell the stories and give the details that will make your ideas and experiences come alive.
What you gained: What new insights, challenges, ideas, inquiries, or actions came up for you from your participation this past month? What possibilities have opened up or been further reinforced?
What you experienced: How did you feel or change at different points in this process? Which processes did you participate in? Which were new to you? For processes you’ve experienced before, what was it like doing them online? What worked for you, and why? What didn’t? How might you use or change these processes on another occasion? What about the web tools used? Maestro? Hackpads? Zoom(if you experienced that)? Any others?
What next: What are you doing, will do or might do as related at least in part to the question that brought us together and/or as a result of what we have done together? Who else would(might) you involve?
My DandDTrans"Story"
Gratitude
This was an extremely rich experience for me on many levels. The people who gathered for this dialogue are extraordinary. Just browsing through +their introductions leaves me honored and humbled to be dancing with this crowd. I am especially grateful to all the people who helped produce this engagement as well as to those participants who showed up consistently and engaged deeply. I have learned a great deal, and I have also been inspired by what we have demonstrated to be possible.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
I'd like to think that, in our own small way over the past month, we have also modeled and stood for the restoration of"some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world." If that is so, it is because of the caring, and integrity, and commitment, of those who showed up. +I shared the invitation for us to "banish the word struggle" from our attitude and vocabulary, and it was easier said than done. Yet I believe we achieved that to a significant degree, as marked by a shift I noticed in the conversation from complaining about divergence and disorientation to a desire to"give the divergent field enough room" and to simply"+show up with as open a heart and mind as possible."
Grief and White Privilege
As I wrote the paragraph above, I noticed a degree of reluctance to put this group in a category that in any way resembles the those"ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds" that Hawken finds so inspiring. For we are most certainly(on the whole) a highly privileged cohort.
One of the most powerful moments for me in DandDTrans came during the closing Reflections portion of the second Bohm Dialogue. Steph suggested that white people are"playing catch-up" in our capacity to deal with grief and the prospect of a bleak future. Most(though certainly not all) of us did not grow up with extreme oppression, and for the most part, neither did our parents. And even if they did, they might be among the fortunate ones who escaped from oppression and saw their children live into far a better future. We know that is not the case for many other groups, who have born the brunt of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and the ravages of the extractive economy.
I thought about how demure my lily-white UU congregation is. Yes, our rituals are beautiful, and so is our music. Yet there is also talk of"struggle," and of complaint and blame that might be a reflection of an underlying sense of entitlement. At the same time, I sense a sorrow that we simply don't know how to grapple with. As +Naomi Klein suggests:
What if part of the reason so many of us have failed to act is not because we are too selfish to care about an abstract and seemingly far-off problem-- but because we are utterly overwhelmed by how much we do care? And what if we stay silent not out of acquiescence but in part because we lack the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide? The end of the world as we know it, after all, is not something anyone should have to face on their own.
Without good support structures--those"collective spaces" Klein speaks of-- our life energy is drained bit by bit, day by day. If we're awake to what's going on, it's drained by the"raw terror of ecocide" that awareness brings, which is made even worse by the knowledge that we are contributing to and benefiting from the very things that are killing the planet and our souls. Then add to the mix a pervasive sense that there's nothing we can do about it. This might be well worn territory for the Hopi and Lakota, but it's new ground for us, and I think we are indeed"utterly overwhelmed."
If, on the other hand, we're not awake, or choose to deal with the overwhelm by going back to sleep, our life energy is drained in other ways, as we are drawn into mindless entertainment, the consumer culture, addiction, rebellion, or(perhaps worst of all) deep resignation and cynicism. +As Peter Block notes, cynicism is a"spiritual" stance which"presents itself as if data and experience were on its side,[and] ultimately alienates us and destroys community."
So perhaps the highest value of what we have done is to have co-created a space for sharing our grief, and our frustration, and our expressions of just how much we really DO care, even if we're not all clear on what to do right now about that. As William Stafford writes in the conclusion of his poem, +A Ritual To Read To Each Other(h/t Barbara Fast, minister at UU Danbury):
And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
My DandDTrans "Story"