Our younger granddaughter, discovering her gift, her passion, and her purpose
What I'm thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:
What This Blog is About: This
weblog began as my vehicle for thinking out loud. It has evolved in
part into an expression of my gift and passion (imagining
possibilities) and of my purpose (provoking what I have come to call
Let-Self-Change, in myself and others). I have had the opportunity to
discover that the five most popular reasons for believing our
civilization can and will go on as it has are either propaganda or
wishful thinking. So some of my recent provocations have focused on
disenchanting readers of five persuasions who believe that some human
or super-human force will save us from civilizational collapse in this
century:
- Economic
salvationists who have faith in the 'free' market, and the
responsiveness of our economy to the needs and demands of the planet's
citizens,
- Political
salvationists who have faith in the power of democracy, and the
responsiveness of the political system to the needs and demands of the
planet's citizens,
- Social
salvationists who have faith in a great and spontaneous social movement
of collective realization, understanding, raised consciousness and
commensurate change,
- Technological salvationists who have faith in the unlimited power of human ingenuity, expressed through innovation and technology, and
- Religious salvationists who have faith we will be rescued, rapturously, by some higher power.
Those
readers who no longer believe in any of these five miracles are
searching, as I am, for another way forward. The best we have been able
to come up with is a new self-managed society built on local,
responsible, self-selected communities, living, and making a living, in
natural (i.e. in balance with the rest of life on Earth), sustainable
ways. It's a very idealistic vision, one that will have to emerge right
in the midst of our fragile, furious, exhausted civilization, based on
many local experiments, evolving 'working models' that others can copy
and adapt to their needs. These communities need to be autonomous and
self-sufficient but also connected to learn from each other how to
cope, together, with the crises that this century will present to us
and the generations that follow.
One reader has called this
"grasping at straws". Perhaps it is, as the people who seem to be most
knowledgeable about the state of the world and this community-based
vision seem to believe efforts to realize that vision will be in vain,
but are worth trying anyway. Our 'success' depends largely on
recruiting more and more of those disenchanted with the five faiths
above, and our 'walking away together' to improvise and emerge
something completely different, a way of living and making a living
that can work, at least for a few million years.
So upcoming
articles will continue to provoke readers to let themselves change and
learn and free themselves from the delusional faiths that are
destroying our world, and to figure out, together, how to move forward.
Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignettes #3 and #4.
Blog-Hosted Conversations:
Plan is for 30-minute conversations,
once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential
skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live,
and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice
podcasts, and may not make it to the blog. I plan to post some
monologues first, readings of my own works just to try out the new
medium, and perhaps, if I can get a copy of the recording, a podcast of
my presentation last week at the SLA in Denver.
Paradoxically,
the less faith I have in the established order and the ability of
civilization's well-intentioned systems to save us from ourselves, the
more energized and exhilarated I become. How's your mood? Is the Bush
regime's intransigence, and the Democrats' equivocation, getting you
down? If you're more upbeat, or more depressed, than you were a year
ago, or ten years ago, why? |
11:11:53 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
