Living Between Worlds 4.8: No news? Or good news?

Foreign.

Welcome everybody. Glad to have you here. This is the 30. What, 5th, 6th, 7th, 30 something session of living Between Worlds with Grace, Dignity and Power, where we're exploring together the challenges of doing that. Living between the old world that is clearly dying and the new world that is waiting or struggling or beginning to be born. I'm Gil Friend, CEO of Natural Logic. I'm a strategist, mentor and coach and lately an investor and worker owned enterprises. Ken, my co host. Want to introduce yourself?

Sure. Hello, my name is Ken Homer. I'm in San Rafael, California and I am a coach and facilitator and conversational designer.

And we've been designing these conversations together for this year, the fourth year of the Living Between Worlds conversations. We're glad to have you all with us. So let's start today. We're going to start today with a couple of conversations that we've been hearing a lot of lately, which were provocative for us and maybe will be for you. Also, I'm hearing a lot of people say nobody's talking about X. And I find it really striking because from what I can tell, a lot of people are talking about X and a lot of people are saying nobody is talking about X.

Can we just be clear that we're not referring to Elon Musk's takeover of what was known as Twitter?

Blank. Fill in the blank, whatever it is, pick some topic. Nobody's talking about that topic and a lot of people are talking about that topic. So what does that say to us? It says to me maybe, maybe more about how folks are listening than with what people are saying. And we'll come back to that in just a moment. And the, the other peculiar conversation that we've been hearing is people saying, you know, nobody's making plans about climate change. Nobody's making plans to prevent reverse climate change. Nobody's making plans to adapt to climate change. And I'm, I'm really fascinated by that one because, you know, that's the, one of the worlds that I am in most of the time. And from where I sit, there are thousand of people making plans about climate change. There are organizations, there's investment organizations and governments and community organizations and extinction, rebellion and on and on and on. Now, you know, are the plans effective? That's an open question. Are they sufficient? Are they being implemented? Well, those are all real questions, but they're very different questions than why is nobody making plans? So, you know, races for us, the question of where are we listening and how are we listening? And in a little surprise this morning, we plan these calls, but something always happens in the few hours before them. It kind of changes where we're going or compliments where we're going. My rabbi Chai Levy, was leading a class earlier this morning looking at the Torah portion of this week, which is called Shoftim Judges. It's the entry into the month of preparation before the Jew British high holidays, a time of deep reflection and self assessment. And the portion starts by saying, you shall establish judges in your settlements. In the common translation, actually the Hebrew says, you should establish judges at your gates. And one of the Hasidic rabbis, Hasidism is a, you know, the last few hundred years trend in Judaism that has a very, very deep psycho spiritual dimension to it. And this rabbi said, well, you know, the gates are the gates of ourselves, the gates of our perceptions. Seven gates, eyes, nose, ears, mouth, where we take in the world and aspects of our body where we interact with the world. And this fellow suggested this is an opportunity to judge. Not in the sense of meeting out a sentence, which is how we think of judges, but the other thing that judges do is they discern, they make assessments about assessments. Joe comes and says such and such happened, and Bob says, no, it didn't, thus and such happened. And the judge needs to make a determination about which way to go. So, you know, this is, this is what we do all the time. We make assessments. We've talked about this before, and we make assessments of other people's assessments. And it's all bound up in, in what we listen and where we listen and who we listen and how we listen and what we listen. And I'm speaking this in a weird way that I learned from my friend Fernando Flores, not, not listen to the usual construction as a receiver of data, but listen as an active participant in constituting meaning. I listen you, I give you form in my being in the way that I actively engage with what comes to me from you. It's not just sound and meaning, though. It's the whole body, right? It's our neurochemistry, it's our hormones, it's our muscle tension, it's the whole somatic experience. As we are here in conversation with each other, we are in real time altering each other's neurochemistry. What's that about? What's going on there? So here we are in these conversations that we're in, where we have interpretations. In the case I started with, no one's talking about, no one is planning four, which are assessments, right? And what does that reveal? So we'll have Some breakout room questions for you in a few minutes, but let's start there. What does this provoke in you? What does what I've said provoke in you?

I'd just like to add one thing if I could, please. I'm very intrigued with design. I think that the project for humanity coming up is how to design our presence on Earth so that we keep the planet cool, so that it stays within livable limits. And so we need to design institutions and agreements and negotiations and commitments. And when I listen to someone say, and there's someone that many of us know who says, you know, no one's doing this. And I'm asking for precision in language because people are doing this, it's not necessarily effective. The plans aren't coordinated. They're not coherent. They're not working together. But to say no one is doing X means I'm going to design very differently than if I say there are a lot of people doing this. But so far, it hasn't a critical mass. It hasn't come together in a way that's coherent. So that's a very different question of design. And I think that's one of the core pieces that Gil and I were talking about as we were preparing for this call of, you know, when you hear people make declarations of, no one is doing. I'm going to say Y, because X is now poisoned, but no one is doing Y. Right.

That.

That has a lot to do. When you listen and say, well, how am I going to intervene? How am I going to approach this from a design standpoint? And so I just want to throw that in as. As another layer of what we're. We're getting at. And now, please.

That's great, Ken. Yeah. I mean, the direct. The assessments and the declarations we make throw us into different games.

And I just noticed David wrote Design for Coalition versus Design against Vacuum. The other thing is, when I spent 10 years of my life as a member of the design team for the World Cafe, and we talked about, how do you design for coherence, not control? This is a really big question. A lot of people are out there designing for control. And what we want to do is design for coherence. How do you get multiple different populations with different interests to engage in ways that bring about coherent behavior rather than controlling behavior? All right, I'll be quiet now.

So we're going to wait for your hands to come up on the screen.

Heather, please. Good to see you.

Yes, it's good to be here. I have to laugh at myself because right now I'm like really angry because, because I'm so involved at the grassroots in the homeless community here around trying to provide food and shelter and, and now just a place to get out of 105 degree heat that I'm overwhelmed in conversations with people trying to do everything all the time everywhere and, and I'm realizing in this moment is that I actually don't have time for design conversations anymore. I'm more in what Peggy Holman would call the flow of emergent phenomena. I don't know how to design for emergence because it's already happening. But I have a friend who posted, sent me an email today about we're in class five rapids right now as humanity and if we were in a raft going down Class 5 rapids like in the Deschutes river in Oregon, we would be looking for the through line. We wouldn't be having a conversation about how to plan for our rafting trip. We would be rowing desperately to find the through line. So I guess that has really stuck with me today about that's. I am so overwhelmed with people talking about what to do and how to do it that I'm, I really would love to see a through line. That's, that's what I'm looking for as trying to figure out how to design for controller coherence because my daily life is now in Class 5 rapids with, with homeless and hungry people where I live.

Thank you, Heather. I'm not going to respond. I want to let a bunch of people speak first. Carter, welcome. Thanks.

I'm sort of responding to your setup a little bit more than anything. I found observing this conversation around climate for 20 years that there's a lot of complaining about politicians aren't doing this, people aren't talking about this, et cetera. And my reaction has often been and continues to be that a lot of that ends up to me hitting me as performative, non nuanced thinking. That tends to in my mind my observation ignore all the complexities that have to do with whatever that planning or that whatever is. So I mean the latest example would be Biden's not declaring a climate emergency and having a whole conversation about this one like phrase where as you just pointed out, we're actually in the middle of needing to be paying attention to going through the rapids and it's a distraction or the governments of the world, you know, aren't coming together and doing something. Well, the governments of the world don't have the mechanisms yet or the practice to have, you know, attacked something for mutual benefit at this scale. Ever. So it's not. Not a surprise that it's not unfolding is my. Is how I look at it. So, anyway, that's my. I seek to encourage curiosity, the idea that you're right, emergent properties are going to be what unfold. And anyway, that's all I'll say about it. Just generally, I think a lot of that conversation comes from not thinking through all the things you probably don't know about. What makes something more difficult to do than not.

Thank you. Don't.

Well, as you were discussing, you know, doing the intro, it was just so apparent to me. It reminisced what. You know, Marianne Williamson is running for president, and she's been talking to people, and people just throw up their hands and say, well, we just have the politicians we have. And she's like, I'm standing in front of you. I'm trying to be. You know, I am offering a different conversation, a different alternative. So in my. In my opinion, it's a distractor when people just say, you know, nobody's talking about it. They just mean they're not talking about it. You know, they're not doing anything about it. They're not engaged with it. Because those people, like our first speaker in the audience said, you know, people who are on the ground doing something about it never had that conversation. So it's just a distraction and. And a way to dismiss. It's a dismissive comment.

Well, it's an expression also of despair and resignation. They don't know what to do about it. Maybe they feel helpless, maybe no, have no sense of where to move, whether on the rapids or not. We'll come back to the rapids in a moment. Stuart Levine. Thank you, Don.

Yeah. Gil, I have to say first, you look like a wonderful talking head in the way you've set yourself up. It's absolutely marvelous.

I've got some work to do on my lighting. We're getting there.

Good job. This is a little repetitive, probably because people have mentioned it. It's not that people out there externally are not talking about it, but the internal person is not talking about it. It's a function of not clear seeing and not clear thinking. Sometimes I'm guilty of it. You've called me on it, Gil. I'll throw out what is my assessment as opposed to making an assertion. But I know myself, if there's something that I'm interested in, the first place I go is to do a little bit of research. Is there anybody talking about this, and what are they saying about this? Is this a conversation that I can step into as opposed to someone who just dismisses whole hand, some domain of inquiry or something that we ought to be thinking about. In fact, if you do some research and find that nobody else is talking about it, then maybe it's something that you ought to engage and start talking about. Because we create the world in conversation.

Yeah, Cool.

Thank you, Felix. And then hank. Felix, you're on mute. Come off mute.

All right. I think now you'll hear me.

Yeah.

So I feel like this is. That internal reaction is. Is. Is on the mark. What, What I feel when people are saying no one's doing anything is they're not seeing anything that gives them hope, hope for an abundant, restored world. You know, they're seeing reactions and desperation and try to avoid the worst consequences. That translates to people in. They're not doing anything that makes me feel like I want to do anything. And I think that the.

The.

The famous criteria, speed, scope and scale. More and more people are looking at anything that anyone is doing. How they're acting, how they're investing, how they're donating, how they're talking. Does it match the speed, scope and scale of what we need? And I think that people are doing that internally as well.

Good. Good. And clear point, Felix. Thank you. Which is where you're focused, of course. We'll talk more about that another time. Hank Kuhn, to you, please.

Yeah, thanks. Well, I put some of the thoughts I wanted to express in the chat. I don't think it's about people who are similar to us not doing something about it. I think we all know lots of people who are engaged in very positive activities. But I think it has to do with what's being mainstreamed, mainstreamed in media, mainstreamed in society, mainstreamed in the conversations people have when they go to a sports event or coach their kids. And I think that's really a source of. One of the sources of the problems at the moment. And I'm not sure about others on this call, but I know, unfortunately, I only took where I mostly talk to people who agree with me, and in the circle of people who agree with me, lots is being talked about and lots is being done. But I personally believe, and I'm talking from the context of the Netherlands, which is reasonably progressive Western European country, that's 15 or 20% of the population, and the other 80% of the population is mostly concerned with right now. Oh, yeah, there's. It's very hot here. Something's going on. Or my favorite sports team just scored a big victory or where am I going on vacation this summer? So I like to see how the conversation goes to mainstreaming these conversations and mainstreaming the good examples of what's actually happening.

Yeah, thank you for that, Hank. 15 to 20% is a pretty good number.

If it's the right number.

If it's the right number. And of the people who are focusing on the football game or other things, the ones who are saying it's too hot here are on a boundary that's starting to shift. I mean, more and more people, even folks in the oil and gas industry in Houston, are saying something's going on here, maybe something's happening to our game. So that, that, you know, that's, that's a, that's a moving process. You know, Felix, I like what you said about people not seeing hope or not motivating me. That's a more useful, It's a more accurate, It's a more useful assessment than nobody is talking about. It's actually, you know, it's a, it's, it's an assessment you can do something with. You know, nobody's motivating me. What would motivate me? What am I missing? What do I care about? Maybe I can look more careful to find who was having that kind of conversation. You know, Hank, the, you know, you speculated this is that the conversation we're reporting is people who are not similar to us. This rose up for me because it's people very similar to us, people in our world, people involved in climate action and sustainability, who are expressing this kind of undifferentiated despair. And you talk about the mainstream. The mainstream media is designed to manufacture spectacle and to manufacture despair.

That's what I'm worried about.

And, and, and, and to produce eyeballs to sell to advertisers. They have a different job than we do. And to the extent that they can do anything, well, we'll see. You know, even msnbc, which is arguably the most progressive of the mainstream broadcast media in the US seems to be unable to cover more than one subject any given week. And this, you know, this week and last week and the week before that, it was Trump case. Nothing else. No climate. No, nothing else. So there's other places where we have to look, and that will actually lead us right into the breakout. First breakout question. But let me quickly take Heather, your comment and Stuart's, then we'll go into breakouts.

Thank you, Gil. So now that I've calmed down a little bit, what, what's come behind the upset is, is that I think we're In a collective. I'm an, I'm in a trauma response all day long, every day. It's an echo effect of early childhood sexual trauma, but it's also a present day trauma response to my sense of what's happening in our government here in the United States and the abuse that's being heaped upon us all. So I'm wondering to what extent the fight, flight, freeze kind of reactivity of the human neurobiology is at play in people's inability to engage on these issues. That we are all, we are all in shock and awe right now in every way, as far as I can tell. And we're not talking about that either.

Too much shock and not enough, I would say. So look, trauma response, yeah, but when you are working with homeless people in your community or when you're on the river looking for the through line, you or the guide of the raft are bringing something into that story. And some of it is training and some of it is physical conditioning, is learning different kinds of responses in our bodies so that we can engage the flight, flight freeze options differently. I have a good friend who's a first responder, who's actually a captain in a large city's firefighting department in charge of first responders. And you can, we can imagine, we can sort of imagine what those folks have to deal with, but we can't really imagine if we haven't been in it. And they have trained and drilled and practiced and learned from experience and learned from after action reviews both what to do technically, but also how to be in those situations so that in the midst of absolute chaos and grief and panic, they can see a through line and they can bring people with them along a through line that no one else can see. And I would suggest, I don't know everybody on this call. I know a lot of you, but I would suggest that's one of the things that's common to the people on this call, is that we have to varying different degrees of capacity and ability to look for a through line and to share it with people who maybe can't see it and say, oh my God, there's nothing to be done, there's no through line, we're doomed. Nobody's talking about it. It's like, no, just. Could you pat it a little bit more on the right side of the raft? I don't have to explain the whole thing to you. I don't have to get into hydrodynamics. I can just say, here's the thing you can do right now. And look at that. We're all. We're all safer now. Okay, take a breath. What do we do next, Stuart? And then we're going to break up.

Yeah, quickly.

And Gil.

Perfect setup. One of the things I was thinking was, you know, do what you can where you are with what you have as a bit of a mantra. But more important, I think.

A lot.

Of people have not worked through their own emotion. I mean, there's a lot of shit going down out there, and there's real cause for the kind of fight, flight, internal response. But I think before you can effectively take action and find that through line and be that leader, you need to have work through. Okay, it's really bad. But I can be a person of some of sanity in this arena. And I commend everybody to read the second edition of Meg Wheatley's book, who do youo choose to Be? Because at this moment in time, that is such a sacred and very, very important inquiry. I mean, you know, I've been part of Meg's group of warriors for the human spirit for about seven years, and it really has provided a grounding in a world where all of our groundings have, quote, disappeared. My thoughts about a place to go to kind of see the whole picture, the internal picture, and what I think is a very useful response to it. So you can be effective in the world. That is that clear seeing.

Yeah. And without necessarily being able to wait until I've got it all figured out personally, because it's, you know, do the best we can right now as we do, learn to do better. Thank you for the hands. Ken. Homer, over to you, sir.

And as to. To tack onto that, my Angelou said, do what you know how to do until you know better, and then do better. So we're in that learning mode as well. And I wanted to say something here about. I just slipped my mind, but I had to come inside. There was a jackhammer going off the next driveway over, which is not part of the planned call here. So apologize for. For that. You know, we. I'm very intrigued by this idea of how assessments affect the future. And my latest understanding is that we make assessments about the future, which then determine how we're going to act towards the future. So if we have an assessment that the future is really bleak, that there's no hope, we might give up. I know a lot of people in my age, cohort and older who are saying, well, I'm really glad I'm old. I'm going to. It's the time spirit really hits the fan I'll be gone. And it really bugs me because I feel, don't you have an obligation to the people who went before and people coming after? Shouldn't you be doing whatever you can for as long as you can? That's my personal judgment. That's my assessment. But it's one that. That, you know, comes from a soul place of. I am not some, you know, some little thing just floating around. I'm part of a much larger being called humanity. And I didn't get here on my own. I didn't arrive to where I am on my own. I'm not going to leave on my own. I'm going to need to be attending to those around me. So, yeah.

And for you, Ken, that's not just an assessment, that's a commitment.

That is a commitment, yes.

It's what you're living from.

And so when I. I've learned a lot as a facilitator about affective priming. If you want to get people into an imaginal space, do a little improv before you start to put them on, onto a actual task so they get their imagination loosened up and so effective priming, when it comes to assessing the future, I find it's a really good idea to think about good stuff like what is good that's going on. David Cooper INVENTOR of Appreciative Inquiry don't go into an organization and say what's wrong and who's to blame. You put everybody on the defensive. They're on the defensive. They're not. They can't learn. You can't learn. You're trying to cover your ass. Instead, say what matters and who cares? And then you get people into a very different state. Before I go on to the breakout room, Carter, why don't you go ahead?

I was just going to echo the, you know, we're part of humanity. We're also part of humanity over time. You know, one thing I tend to encourage in my own conversations is, hey, you're we. We get in this generational who's to blame stuff. You know, even the CEOs of the oil companies didn't build the oil companies. So it's a bit like blaming the bus driver for having built the bus. And I find what works for me personally is to remember that again, it took civilization 5,000 years or more, 10,000 years to evolve to the point we're at now. So it's kind of nobody's fault. And that gives more equanimity for how I approach or how we can approach what's going on around us.

I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Along the lines of assessments about the future and affective priming. Tom, we've got a question for the first breakout room of what are the two or three best things happening in your life, these. Happening in your life these days? What are the two or three best things? Can be very personal. It can be something a little bit more global. Just. We want to. We want to actually focus on some good stuff. So any questions on that? Is that a clear question? Maybe have thoughts or want to modify that in any way? All good. Okay, I'm gonna put. Oops. Ilya just. I lost my chat. When you did that. Here it is in the chat and gonna open the breakout rooms, and I'll. This will. We'll make this one fairly short. We'll see you in about 15 minutes. So go ahead. Welcome back. I don't know about y', all, but my room was rocking.

We had.

I. I feel very energized after this conversation. We'll take just a minute to hear anybody hear something that really surprised or delighted them. We're gonna go to the next breakup, but just want to hear anything that popped up that's really juicy. No. All right, second breakout room. Go ahead. I got one.

Marianne.

I was looking for the handout button. Couldn't find it in time, so I thought I'd just button. Marianne told us a great story about something that her grandchildren had done. And I think coming back to this idea of hope, that's something that I'm definitely seeing more and more often is young people doing things that I wouldn't dreamed of doing when I was a teenager, that I wouldn't have dreamed of having the courage of stepping up and standing up and speaking out. So that I think is. Yeah, that was a great story. Thank you, Marianne. Wonderful. All right, so here's the second question. Pretty much the same as the first. We're going to shift the focus now from your personal life to the world. What are the two or best three. Two or three best things happening in the world these days and what makes them so. So I put that in the chat. I prepared the rooms. I think a couple will be in the same. You may see a little overlap in the rooms, but I'm seeing significant difference. So hopefully it'll work. And we'll be back in 20 in about. Back at 10 after 1, so about 18 minutes.

The flip side to the. Nobody's doing anything. Nobody's talking about. What are you seeing that really is engaged and effective and feeds you and has you make an assessment. This is good. I want to see more of this. And we'll harvest when we come back.

Hope you all had a good time. Once again, I was in a. I think I was probably in the best room, but that I'm very prejudiced. You know, I get attached to my people. So we'd love to hear from folks what went on in your rooms? What did you learn? What did you hear about what's going on that's great in the world. Please raise your hand so we can know who's wanting to talk. That also puts you in the queue so we can track you. Felix, please.

So one thing that I brought up that has given me a lot of hope is the revival over the last couple years of the American labor movement, and in particular the last month, month or so, the UPS settlement has really inspired a lot of people. You see these, these, these images of people saying, I want to earn $120,000 like a UPS worker that is. Will within five years. It's not right now. And, and the UAW is in its last month now of negotiating its, its, its settlement. And, and it seems to me that the idea that, that workers are entitled to a living wage is a message that take shape a lot. And, and I, I, the project I'm working on is trying to actually extend that to the idea of green jobs, because green jobs have been presented as an aspiration and somewhat defensive. But if we actually present green jobs as an investment that within a few years will bring back multiple returns if we, if we electrify things, we don't. That's not an exponential expense. That's something that in a few years will, will, you know, bring back two or three times the, the, the economic savings. And so that whole idea of the green economy, I think right now we're poised to actually make that a, A very inspiring message for people.

Thanks, Felix.

There's more, there's more people working in the renewables industry than in the fossil industry in the United States already, and that will continue to move on the labor front. Just to add to your list, Felix, is Hollywood, where you have, you know, remarkable solidarity across different levels of income in, in the entertainment industry, and a real clear juxtaposition of where the money is. Somebody tallied up that the total of the requests of the unions is less than the executive salaries.

One executive salary.

One executive salary. Thank you, Ken.

Yeah.

And that, that lands very broadly with people across the political spectrum. Go on. And then Mark.

So this set of questions was more challenging in our small group. Than the kind of personal set of questions from before. And I just wanted to say, with all due respect to our group, there were differences of opinions whether something was actually good or not and the sense of. So I just wanted to off say that as far as the group dynamic.

Thanks, Don. Mark.

Well, I was fascinated in both these groups, just the wide span of experiences that was being brought. People from California, people from Oregon, people from the Netherlands, people from the Mediterranean island of Malta. It was, it was just galvanizing just to hear those kind of perspectives in terms of things that have been giving me life out in the big world. In terms of this climate movement happened on Monday, which was the landmark victory from the judge in Montana on the case brought forth by about a dozen young people that the continued production of fossil fuels is endangering their future. Now, this was a case I was following with great interest, but to my great surprise, the Montana judge gave that victory to those young people. The ramifications for this are going to be massive and it's going to open the door for other such actions like this. And it's a whole new front opening up for the climate movement where we're going to be going to the courts for these victories because we don't see a lot of not enough action from our elected officials. So this is really interesting. This is a really interesting development.

I'm glad you raised that one. Mark. I don't know what the count is, but there are lots and lots of these cases moving through the courts all over the country. Yes. One of the things internationally you don't, you know, you don't see a lot of coverage about it in the mainstream, understandably, but it's moving.

Yes. Mark, I really like your deco background there. That is very cool.

This is, this is from Sri Lanka, but it's art deco to us.

It really looks like art deco to me. But yeah, it's wonderful. Anyone else want to share what they, what they encountered in our group, either the first or the second?

Hank, let me just say something. In the second group at least, what I think I heard was that there's much more appreciation of the commons in America, much more appreciation of what the common wealth might be, support for the public goods and what that means, much more discourse about the commons. And over in Europe, you don't get those reports because doesn't sell subscriptions. So I was very happy to hear that that type of thing is really going on.

Thanks, Hank. I'll add someone in my group was saying that and they're not here in the Us, they are sensing there's been a shift of the black and white thinking they tear it down without any plan to build up. That wave seems to have crested and people seem to be much more interested in nuance now and complexity. And I also want to point out something that I said, which is that this group, these calls are one of the great things happening in the world right now, at least in my world, you know, and it's not just this call. I mean. I mean, at least two other groups that hold similar calls with. We're trying to, you know, find our way through this really naughty mess, these Class 5 rapids. And the fact that there's groups like this that are springing up all over, I think is an enormously positive development. Stuart, please.

Yeah, just to echo that, Ken. The idea that there are groups like this, but there are also the idea of projects that are percolating. Not a day goes by when I don't see one or two projects that I would consider to be, you know, projects heading in the right direction that are just. That are just present and they're percolating up all over. I can almost feel them bubbling. Not that I'm living in a place of great hope that we're not going to be in dystopia before we figure out what to do, but I don't care whether it's before or after the positive projects, before or after some form of collapse. The positive projects will keep the species going in some sense. And it's great, and it's inspirational to hear the thoughts that people are coming up with. Projects that are pointing us in the right direction. Right being my assessment.

And I said in a conversation the other day that there's, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of these projects. And the person corrected me, said, no, there's millions, maybe tens of millions. Many of, you know, Paul Hawkins book Blessed Unrest from a few years ago, which, you know, listed an enormous catalog of grassroots initiatives around the world. Ken, to what you said about complexity. I'm reminded of something that Heather said in one of our breakouts. Heather, if I could. Working with. With community gardens for the homeless and working with younger people. And she felt sort of as the old experienced, not for profit manager, kind of holding back the enthusiasm of these young folks, just. Just go and do stuff. And so sometimes it's an appreciation of complexity is valuable. And sometimes just getting something done and not figuring out, you know, just finding the through line where you have to act quickly right now and get something done. In some cases where it's Life and death. In some cases, it's something less urgent but equally important. So I'm hearing lots of beautiful polarity in this conversation. Big and small, fast and slow. In our last group, somebody talked about a posture of just saying yes to every request that comes to them and the enormous richness of that. And someone else talked about saying no to every request that's coming to them and having the quiet that that enables for them. Neither is right, but that somehow felt very similar to me in their spirit. So thank you for that, folks who shared that. Hank, back to you.

Yeah, I just had a general question to the group again. From my European perspective. In the Netherlands for the last seven or eight years, there's been a lot of talk about creating a new social or societal contract between citizens and the government. And it's an idea that's emerging and has been emerging for a while. I was just wondering if those type of conversations about new social or societal contracts are taking place in other countries as well.

You know, I don't know for sure. Somebody in. In one of our breakouts, I'm looking at my notes who this was. Oh, Philip, are you still here? What you said about people intentionally choosing not to blast their workout into meme space, you want to say a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I think there's just a perception amongst a lot of folks who have focused plans that their plans are so disruptive to status quo of business that if they're too public about what they're doing, then, you know, there is. This isn't just a natural. I mean, it's not just a natural phenomenon. It's not largely a natural phenomenon that we're confronting. And there's a lot of money in the way things have been going and keeping things going that way.

So I think there.

I've recently been exposed to a surprising number of people who are quietly telling me about what they're doing, telling me not to tell anyone else, and specifically because they don't want to face unnecessary headwinds as they break out their projects. And so I'm choosing to believe that that's a phenomenon, a dynamic that a lot of projects are exposed to, and that perhaps there's exponentially more things happening than we're aware of.

It's a very interesting one because we've been living for the last, I don't know what, 17 years in this culture of let's get more followers, let's get more likes, let's get more follows. And the folks you're talking about are saying, no, no, we're playing a different game than that. Yeah, really interesting, Heather.

Well, that was a very serendipitous transition, Gil, for, for the half baked idea or thought or feeling that I'm feeling called to share. There are two rooms of indigenous people that I sit in on a regular basis. And the conversation there, one is redthought.org which is a conversational space hosted by Joe Day Gatti, who's a former tribal chief of the Yakima Nation. And the other is a place called Pull Together now, which is a group of indigenous leaders, mostly in the inner mountain west of Canada and North America, with some participants from Central America talking about Indigenous rights and reparations. And so the conversations in those rooms are entirely different than the conversation in this room.

Can you tell us a little about them or what's the flavor of them?

The flavor of them as, as a white woman in, in a, in, in a minority of, of brown skinned human beings is that the trauma and brokenheartedness of, of, of these people in real time now, after 400 years of genocide and racism is way beyond my ability to take it in. And so I, I mostly just listen because the experience of those human beings and the legacy and wisdom of their ancestors and how it has been not just marginalized, but erased, as you know, from, from white culture is, is a shock to my system. Every day I, I am learning history from these people about horrific events I knew nothing about. And, and so it, it's not humiliating or humbling. I feel completely welcomed as, as a white woman to be there, as just a human being and, and to listen. So it, it partly goes to. I guess maybe one of my operating principles is to, if you want to get people involved, you have to go where they are rather than being the white person trying to generate a project and, and invite people of color. I guess I, I've taken to heart that for me, my pathway is to go where the people of color are as a white person and listen to their feelings and their thoughts and their ideas about what this moment means for them and what the pathways forward look and feel like to them and, and to be willing to, to leave the room when asked. You know, there are times when the presence of a white person is not welcomed and I've had to learn to, to just not take that personally. So I, I don't know what else to say about that, but I just felt in this moment coming up from my core that I needed to say something about the Indigenous rooms that, that I'm sitting in and how Those people, those people are dealing with their experience as human beings in the here and now and, and their access to ancient and ancestor wisdom and their commitment to seven generations ahead. It's a completely different context than, than the white dominant culture conversations I'm in. It's just a different thing. Just a different thing.

Heather, thank you for that. Stuart, could we take a few moments for some breathing before you speak? Just. You decide when it's time.

Yeah, I, I thank you, Heather, for, for articulating that. You know, we talk a bunch about climate, but the emotional climate of the large segments of population that have been abused, as you so beautifully articulated, you know, without those conversations and addressing that aspect of the context we're in.

Will.

Just continue to perpetuate the colonial, colonial capitalist mentality. So thank you. Thank you for doing that. And I just wanted to respond also to what Hank said. Are people thinking about a new social contract in other parts of the world, aside from Europe? I just wanted to say I am. I'm both thinking about it and writing about it as critical pieces in this conversation.

Thank you. We're. We're once again close to time. This has been an extraordinarily rich conversation. I'm grateful to all of you, both those who have spoken and those who have not spoken in our last few minutes. If you could, in the chat, share where you go for news and perspective. Where are you. Where, where do you find the stories that you've shared or that you wish you had shared? Just, you know, just run that in the chat. We won't. We don't have time to talk about it now, but that cross fertilization may be helpful. Ken, do you have the last slide at hand or should I bring that up on my side? I can agree, but actually, before that, I just want an invitation for you all. You've heard me talk. Those of you who've been here before talk many times about Fernando Flores and Chauncey Bell as people that I've drawn a great deal of enrichment and insight and cultivation from. They've been working together for some 40 years and they're doing remarkable things starting in September, which is a joint program together. Together. About mobilization. And how do you know about. Well, I'll leave it at that. About mobilization, which is what is kind of an undercurrent of the conversations that we've been having. We'll put a link in the chat. There's an introductory session tomorrow. Yeah, just put it in session tomorrow. If you can't make it register for it, there'll be a recording made available of it. Whether or not you're interested in doing the program, I suggest that listening to their presentation will be a very rich and valuable experience for you. So that's there for that. And then that's, you know, tomorrow, 3pm Pacific. And then once again, a reminder of our logistics. And Ken, you can bring up our friend Brandy Carlisle for our closing music while you take a look at this. We hope to see you on the 20th of September for the next session. We do this third Wednesday of every month. Please invite other people and in the spirit of some of the conversation today, please invite people who were different than us, different ages, different complexions, different orientations, different places in the world to really enrich what we do here together.

I also want to share something with people. Those of you in Open Global Mind will see this in tomorrow's plex. But Pete Kaminsky and I put together a review list of books. It started out as a list of books about collapsology, but I just couldn't focus on the collapse part. So I started to look for what's the opposite of collapse. And one of the books is called the Collapse of complex Societies, written 1988. And in doing some research, I found out there's a book called the Regeneration of Complex societies, written in 1906. And I've included a bunch of indigenous books in there. So this list is about, about 55, 56 books I just put here as a Google Doc. It's got tons of great resources. I spent a long time putting links to Goodreads reviews in there and just giving a little paragraph of what each book is about. So you might find some really important stuff in here that you'll, you'll find uplifting and as well as some stuff that's quite harrowing.

And Ken, you're open, you're open to suggestions of other resources?

Absolutely, absolutely. So if you, if you, there's instructions there. If you want to add books of how to go ahead and do that. So there we go.

And see you next time. But only if you're standing in the eye.

You can dance in a hurricane.

But only if you're standing in the eye. Bye, everybody. See you next month.