Year of Living the Community: Weeks 45 & 46

GO DEEP GREEN

posting by Jana

It's been a very busy couple of weeks around the CCP, editing scripts, filming, and editing video for the first on-line course: Go Deep Green. Today I was able to upload the Introduction to the video to the Facebook CCP, with this written explanation of the project: 

Hello, Conversation Community - I want to share with you the Introduction video for an on-line course in development called 'Go Deep Green'. It's about locating the energy to sustain your sustainability and activate your activism! 

The course grew out of my own need to reframe how to be present to the planet in these incredibly challenging times. 

This week I finished filming and editing the first video in the short course. Here's what the course looks like:

Introduction

Unit 1 - Reinterpreting the role of human beings on the planet (how the new universe story gives us a sense of belonging that expands and relaxes our sense of purpose)

Unit 2 - Reimagining the part we can play in the flourishing of the whole community of life on Earth (how to switch from problem-solving to participating)

Unit 3 - Reigniting your Earth love (how to tap back into what made you fall in love with the Earth in the first place) 

Conclusion

For each Unit there is a short video with input on the topic, reflection questions, discussion prompts, and a resource page with more info. 

I'll be doing a 'promo' video for it, too, but that comes after I've finished editing all the sections since I'll take bits from them to make it. 

I would really appreciate you having a look, discussing, and putting some affirmative comments about it here and on the YouTube channel. (Please send your constructive comments about how to make the videos better directly to me through Messenger or email - I welcome them, too!) 

This content of this course has been a long time in development...46 weeks, or the past four years since I first read The Great Work, or a lifetime...

And this is just the beginning - of both the Go Deep Green course creation and the on-line school for CCP. The other course in development is the 'biggie' - The Certificate Course in Ecozoic Living: Learning the Framework. Then there will be the second in that series, Living the Framework. 

I hope people do indeed get new energy for activism out of these resources. I hope they find new connections with like-minded people. And I hope somewhere in connecting with the CCP, people feel encouraged and empowered to live out the Earth love that's in them, deeper than anything. (In case it isn't obvious: I count myself amongst the people for whom I carry these hopes.)

Your comments on the video are very welcome. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel, too. (It's helpful if you comment on the videos occasionally. Thanks!)

Year of Living the Community: Week 44

CHANGING THE NAME OF THE GAME

posting by Jana

This opinion piece in the Guardian by George Monbiot confirms something that's been on my mind throughout the development of the Community of the Cosmic Person: the role of language in empowering or discouraging engagement on behalf of the natural world.
(Thanks to Cosmic Person Mandy for putting me onto the article.)

“Even the term “reserve” is cold and alienating – think of what we mean when we use that word about a person. ”

— George Monbiot

What Monbiot contends is that the terms we use to discuss the environment (including saying 'the environment') 'estrange people from the living world.' 

Monbiot mentions studies from 'cognitive linguists and social scientists' that indicate the impact words and frameworks have on behaviour and mindset.  

“Words possess a remarkable power to shape our perceptions. The organisation Common Cause discusses a research project in which participants were asked to play a game. One group was told it was called the “Wall Street Game”, while another was asked to play the “Community Game”. It was the same game. But when it was called the Wall Street Game, the participants were consistently more selfish and more likely to betray the other players. There were similar differences between people performing a “consumer reaction study” and a “citizen reaction study”: the questions were the same, but when people saw themselves as consumers, they were more likely to associate materialistic values with positive emotions.”

— George Monbiot

A large part of what I'm doing with the Community of the Cosmic Person and the Ecozoic Living framework is trying to change the language of engagement for those who love the earth in order to recover fresh energy and insight for these commitments.

To my mind, earth activism is full of unhelpful terminology: fighting to save the planet; working to find a solution to climate change (Monbiot suggests using the term 'climate breakdown' as a way to avoid confusing 'natural variation with the catastrophic disruption we cause'); fixing the planet.

Personally, I find these terms disempowering because they invoke a cognitive dissonance that obliterates my energy and dims my mental capacities: I know that I will not fix or save anything...and, anyway, I'm a lover not a fighter. 

My language for staying actively engaged with the 'living planet' and 'places of natural wonder' and the 'natural world' (ideas for fresh wording from Monbiot) is all about participating in the flourishing of the whole community of life on earth. There are no hard edges, nothing to get my back up, and I am not given over to despair about the impossibility of 'making change' happen.

Changing the name helps me stay in the game.
(Yes, I know: 'game' isn't the right word. But it does rhyme...)

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As always, your comments are welcome. What is your language for engaging in earth activism? Do you think it's all just semantics and doesn't matter or are you searching for greater empowerment and a better way to think and speak about who you and and what you do in relation to the earth? 

Year of Living the Community: Week 43

ALIEN BELONGING

posting by Jana

This image shows M81 (bottom right) and M82 (upper left), a pair of nearby galaxies where “intergalactic transfer” may be happening. Gas ejected by supernova explosions in M82 can travel through space and eventually contribute to the growth of M81. Photograph: Fred Herrmann, 2014

Intriguing cosmic news this week about the latest 'we're all made of stardust' theories: 'Nearly half of the atoms that make up our bodies may have formed beyond the Milky Way and travelled to the solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars, astronomers claim.'
(I love the way this article in the Guardian casts a shade of allegation on this finding, as if astronomers were sitting around in a pub chatting and said to one another, 'Let's randomly speculate out loud about the nature of the universe. That's fun.')

The modelling for this new theory is mind-blowing.

“Science is very useful for finding our place in the universe. In some sense we are extragalactic visitors or immigrants in what we think of as our galaxy.”

— Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, astronomer

I'm still getting my head around this - but I love the spiral coalescence as the galaxy forms. And I find this summary from one of the astronomers intriguing. 

This whole experiment of the Community of the Cosmic Person is an exercise in exploring the usefulness of science 'for finding out place in the universe.' First science tells us we belong to the universe - all the atomic elements that make up all matter in the universe, including the matter of us, comes into being via the process of exploding stars. Now science tells us that we're all immigrants in our own galaxy. Cool. 

There is a classical debate in philosophy and ethics about whether or not it is possible to draw an 'ought' from an 'is.' In other words, does physical reality really tell us anything about metaphysical meaning? The pitfalls of drawing direct links from science to ideology are obvious: all reality is interpretation and conclusions can always be drawn to suit power and politics. But what if they also unlock potential, especially potential for a better way to love the earth? And one another? What gaps are spanned by the notion that the alien in you is the alien in me and that, once again, we are confirmed in our intuition that we really are all in this together. 

Year of Living the Community: Week 42

ALL THE WAY DOWN 

posting by Jana

I've been coming across this phrase, 'all the way down' in my PhD reading. It's about tracking a principle - such as a commitment to diversity - at every level in theory and practice. 

'All the way down' came to mind when I read an opinion piece in the Guardian this week by Martin Lukacs: 'Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals.' 

I couldn't agree more with his main argument, fully captured in the article title. And I appreciate how he unpacks this. 

“The political project of neoliberalism, brought to ascendence by Thatcher and Reagan, has pursued two principal objectives. The first has been to dismantle any barriers to the exercise of unaccountable private power. The second had been to erect them to the exercise of any democratic public will.”

— Martin Lukacs

I also agree that "it is time to stop obsessing with how personally green we live – and start collectively taking on corporate power." As Lukacs puts it, "while we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant." Yep. 

Ecozoic Living is definitely about "the (inextinguishable) impulse of humans to come together" and therefore it is about "collectively taking on corporate power." 

How can we inspire, connect, and equip each other to live our earth love via collective action and collective resistance? 

But Ecozoic Living is also a framework for living our earth love 'all the way down.' It's about the personal as well as the collective, since these are not separate realities. 

And it isn't about 'busying ourselves greening our personal lives' or even imagining that by greening our lives we are 'solving' the climate crisis. 

Ecozoic Living is about participating as best we can - individually (as in according to our desires and gifts) in the flourishing of the whole community of life on earth. There's a sense in which this is highly personal...and the personal is always political.

Learning to be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner takes us inward to a deeper green heart, and leads us outward to connect with others so that "our individual choices will most count" by fighting together for "an economic system (that) can provide viable, environmental options for everyone—not just an affluent or intrepid few." 

I'd love to hear your thoughts and responses to the article and to my reflections. Comments welcome! 

Year of Living the Community: Week 41

UPDATE ON THE CERTIFICATE COURSE IN ECOZOIC LIVING

posting by Jana

Thanks to Video School Online, I enjoyed a weekend project of logo design in Illustrator.

Do you ever experience times where things just seem to gel? You've been thinking about something for ages - in my case it's been 4 years since I first came across the idea of the Ecozoic - and you work with it this way and that...then whammo! Something falls into place. That happened to me over this weekend. 

I wonder about all the things, big and small, from right now and way back when, that go into a 'gel' moment. Where does one even begin to place the beginning of these things?

Such wondering aside, what I figured out this weekend is this: what I mean by Ecozoic Living is 'an ethical action-reflection framework for living your love of Earth in challenging times.' Also, I realised that I want to teach the framework in two parts: learning and living. 

The first part, an online course I hope to launch in December, focuses on learning about Ecozoic Living: what does it mean to learn to be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner? The second course, out sometime next year, will be about living this framework. 

The draft scripts are written for course number one, and a schedule of tasks is laid out. (And because I'm a planning geek, here are some photos!)

the plan for course one

mud map of the plan to launch - from tomorrow to 15 December! 

The ideas for the second course come directly out of this year-long experiment in Ecozoic Living. As I reflected this weekend about how I've been 'doing' Ecozoic Living over this past year, several categories emerged:

1.     creating rituals of presence to the planet
I think this ranges from being highly intentional or elaborate to simply pausing in the moment to pay particular attention to life, the universe, and everything. For example, I notice myself going up to the rooftop at sunrise or sunset, greeting the first or the last stars of the night or turning to the four directions with gratitude.

2.     facing facts
In her helpful and challenging book So Far From Home: lost and found in our brave new world, Margaret Wheatley quotes Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa:                 

We cannot change the world as it is,           
but by opening ourselves to the world as it is
we may find that gentleness, decency and bravery are available - 
not only to us but to all human beings.

This category of action is about encouraging people to maintain a discipline of taking in and reflecting upon the state of the world. I notice myself practicing this more intentionally, especially using Twitter: following links and reading entire articles instead of skimming.

3.     putting money, time, and effort where the heart is
I think the framework of ‘learning to be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial         manner’ helps people filter and choose specific ways to participate in the life of the world. This is helpful given the overwhelming number of things in which one could become involved. For example, it’s helped me choose to support www.earthjustice.org.

4.     inspiring, connecting with, and equipping others for Ecozoic Living
The scope is endless here – everyone will have their own way of passing it on or expanding the circle: posting an interesting link on the CCP FB page; hosting a book group on The Great Work; organizing a direct social action on an issue; etc., etc. I envision providing inspiring examples and a supportive structure for participants to use to develop their own plans, like I encountered in the capstone course of the Journey of the Universe: A Story for our Times specialization on Coursera.

5.     cultivating conscious awareness
I think my motivation for doing the daily Cosmic Quotes falls into this category, which is about ways to keep the framework of Ecozoic Living front of mind. I’m also thinking of things like my Cosmic Commitment Card called ‘CPR’, which is a mini-reflection tool for thinking over one’s day in terms of ‘Consume’, ‘Produce’, and ‘Reflect’ that I hope helps people find balance in these terms and to live questions around ‘why consume?’ and ‘why produce?’ and ‘why reflect?’

My hope for the second course is to develop it collaboratively with other Cosmic Persons. Email me if you're intrigued! 

after 10 hours standing at the computer yesterday, I put my feet up at a local market today to keep working on scripts for the first Ecozoic Living course

It was a good weekend: for years I've been floundering around trying to figure out a way to 'action' the Ecozoic (and as long as I can remember I've been trying to live with joy and integrity in a world I love dearly despite the desperate global realities). I think I'm onto something with this Ecozoic Living idea, and I hope others will join me in the journey. 

Year of Living the Community: Week 40

AFFECTED BY AFFECT

posting by Jana

I've recently started following Aeon magazine on Twitter, thanks to Cosmic Person Debbie posting an intriguing article from it on the Conversation Community of the Cosmic Person FB Group page. 

Trolling the Tweets today, I came across Aeon's conversation page. The question and the answer on the top of the stack both caught my attention. I'm moved by the rap/poetry passion of the respondent; affected by affect. 

Do we matter?

What do you think?

Nepomuk Onderdonk replies:
I think the vision of our universe that we hold makes a difference for our lives; for most of our history, we DID think of ourselves as a center of the universe, fructifier of heaven; the idea was codified into religious scriptures precisely because of the effect it had on hearts and minds, a feeling of being significant and even universally loved.

With the dawn of our telescopes, this vision was understandably dropped, but the unforeseen effect seems to be similar to a child who becomes orphaned and lost, imagining that no one matters, or if there is someone who matters it must surely be someone other than us, or that no divinity could possibly be able to keep track of or care about something so “insignificant” as a speck as “isolate” as that of the earth and the “solar system”.

I wonder to myself about this great “leap of doubt”; who are we trying to impress by pointing out that we are not the center, the sun is, and that we are aware there are so many other galaxies and so insist on our own insignificance. It seems to me at best, folly, but at worst, disingenuous, an excuse to rock and roll down the hill of hedonism to rest in the garbage heap of materialism, justified by a small screen from a telescope not to have to climb the mountain of immortality; but 30 years deep into the golden age of astrophysics and 15 years deep into the golden age of eastern mysticism translated properly into modern English, I watch the river of immortality that is the stars and the heavens above me only with increased awe, as I come to understand the depth that passes above me every day, my shamanic altar integrating and in tune with not only the sun moon and dipper, but SGR A* the black hole at the center of the milky way, and Virgo A* the quasar at the center of the local supercluster; and whatever Kepler or Galileo’s views may be relevant to, they are irrelevant to the spirituality of a human being or other living creature residing on the earth, who can sit still and look up, as a river of stars with boundless depth “pass above us” every 24 hours, the flowing energy of the warping stripes of the stars and the galaxies above a serene netherworld of heart and mind that moves like wisps of smoke to evaporate distress and difficulty below, caressing with tender care the flocks of pure life that are not aware of their silk thread discipline, their chronicle of poetry above the chaos; and so we respond, rising up to soar like a phoenix into the heights of our spirit’s mysterious perfection, to stand aloft like dragons on an island across a deep ocean, to further experience the pearls that are written out onto the sky in a composition of wholeness, the true invitation into numinous spirit’s dark mystical and silent chamber, the accumulated episodes of heaven’s temple palace precious treasure book.

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in other news...This week I've been sprucing up the website a bit, freshening the home page, reorganising the Cosmic Person sections; simplifying where I can. I'm going for a cleaner look whilst trying to serve up rich and hearty content - more stew than broth but with clean flavours. Feedback and input welcome! 

Year of Living the Community: Weeks 38 & 39

IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER

posting by Jana

burning the dried christmas tree at the winter solstice

It must have been too dark and cold last week to post an update on the Community. But I did manage to post a Winter Solstice newsletter to subscribers. Have you subscribed yet? You can do so here. 

It's much colder here in Ballarat for the weekend than in Adelaide, or so it seems. Good to be holed up with family in a wood-stove heated house reading The Posthuman by Rosi Braidotti and eating home-made bread. 

I admit to not being 'the dream catcher type' but here's a beauty by Cosmic Person Sharon in Ballarat using reclaimed family heirloom doilies and some clever craftiness

How do you spend your cold, rainy Ecozoic Sundays? 

Last Sunday was bright and fine in Adelaide and a few of the Community of the Cosmic Person gathered for conversation at the Market Shed on Holland. The conversation was authentic, energetic, and wide-ranging.

One topic we seem to keep picking at like a thread in the CCP is how to feel as if one is doing 'enough' about the state of the world especially in terms of anthropogenic climate change. Of course the answer is always that it's impossible to feel one is ever doing enough, but then comes the question about what can one person do anyway? The size, scale, and complexity of the issues is overwhelming. Despair lurks and occasionally jumps out and mugs the unsuspectingly hopeful. But do, and be, we must. It has to be enough to do what one can, to be as real as we can be. 

It's been really good for me to connect with others and just talk about these things, both in the couple of local face-to-face gatherings and online in the Facebook group and through the Coursera specialisation, 'Journey of the Universe.' 

There's a new forum page on this website, too, that can help us connect. Anyone can start a conversation thread...

Year of Living the Community: Week 37

FEELING DEFIANT ABOUT 'DEFIANT EARTH'

posting by Jana

What's better over a cold but beautiful long weekend than to curl up in a sunny spot on the couch with a good book? My choice for the Queen's Birthday weekend was as shown above, Clive Hamilton's latest: Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. 

I don't actually remember the last time a book made me so mad. Hamilton's blatant misogyny ('feminism set out to cut men down to size') and near constant assertion of his own brilliance whilst almost spitefully dismissing swags of work by other prominent scholars who are also 'groping toward an understanding of what it means after 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth to have arrived at this point in history'... well, I'll say this for his style: it made me read the book at record speed. Good thing I was reading on my Kindle or there would have been some page tearing as I tore through the pages. 

All that fury not withstanding, and even with the added grumble of awareness that Hamilton would probably delight in making people furious as proof of his aforementioned singular brilliance, there was a lot in this book to think about. I'm really glad one of my PhD supervisors recommended it (thanks, Peter.)

Hamilton's thesis is that most people apply Holocene thinking to the Anthropocene, misreading the scale and scope of the reality. We can no longer think about ecosystems but must engage with the Earth System as a whole.

The scale and scope of the reality, he indicates, is that human beings as the geo planetary force we are and have been since 1945* means that for the first time and from now on human history and Earth history converge. We are dealing now with the Earth as a whole system and the reality of volatility of that system that we ourselves have created.  

Earth Systems science evolved into a discrete field of inquiry in the 1980's. 

Hamilton argues persuasively that: 'We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give up the idea we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.' He calls for radical rethinking of what it means to be human in this meta reality. (Sounds like Berry's insight about 'reinventing the human'...though of course, Hamilton likes to dismiss Berry's body of work as 'mystification.')

Hamilton calls for rethinking the human and then summarily discounts the interiority that rethinking who we are and how we shall live will depend upon. How will we 'mature' into accepting the bounded/severely limited freedom of the world we have instigated if we don't discipline ourselves to patterns of grounded presence? If we don't grope around, learning to be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner?

But exploring ways forward is not Hamilton's project. His project is to shock the reader into paying attention to the true scale of what is going on with the Earth. Job done. I suspect he'll move on to his next blockbuster book and leave the rest of us to figure out what it means as the sun sets on The World as We Have Known It.

*In order to qualify as a new geological era, the Anthropocene has to be evidenced by stratigraphic changes: the rock record must exhibit a sharp marker differentiating one period from another. In the case of the Anthropocene, the rock record indicates the 'sudden deposition of radionuclides across the Earth's surface as a result of nuclear explosions in 1945. Although the nuclear age has not itself changed the functioning of the Earth System, the layer of radionuclides laid down in 1945 does mark the dawn of the era of US global hegemony and the astounding period of material expansion of the post-war decades, that is, of capitalism's sublime success.'

Year of Living the Community: Week 36

GATEWAY TO THE ECOZOIC

posting by Jana

I've been involved in a four-part Coursera specialisation "Journey of the Universe: A Story for our Times" since September of last year. The course features ideas like the Great Work from Thomas Berry and the Journey of the Universe from Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. All the stuff that makes up the resource pool for this Community of the Cosmic Person initiative. 

Projects for the capstone course are due this weekend so I've been welding my little heart out. About a decade ago I figured out that (a) I can't draw (b) musical instruments take too much time to practice (c) I am basically abstract as a person so representational art is not going to be my thing. I discovered welding and the art of found-object sculpture...and knew immediately that this was a medium I could manage.

Consequently, my project for the Coursera capstone, in the "Media & Arts" track, is a found-object sculpture. Here's me going on about it:

Here is my explication for the course submission... hoping to inspire your next Ecozoic project! 

My project is in the category Media & Arts.

After this amazing course that conveyed so many ‘big ideas,’ I wanted to put words aside and let my intuition guide me with this project. My mode of artistic expression is found object sculpture; typically I weld metal pieces into abstract or representational forms.

My project was to create a found-object sculpture that interprets Berry’s idea of the Great Work – the shift in consciousness involved in human beings learning to be present to the planet in a mutually enhancing manner.

The concept of my piece is ‘Gateway to the Ecozoic.’ Using a gate as the ‘canvas’ represents the conscious, personal choice involved in moving from the Technozoic to the Ecozoic.

This project involved welding objects onto a metal gate purchased from a recycled building materials shop. Objects were collected from recycled building materials and also included natural objects and things I had around the house. The beeswax candles were the only new item I purchased. The focus on found objects represents a focus on alternative consumer practices: reduce, reuse, recycle!

The thing about found object sculpting is the iterative process between the ideas you start with and the objects you find which in turn reshape the ideas.

I knew I wanted to feature the elements. This turned into air (prayer flags, fabric strips); fire (candles); metal (most of the objects and the welding itself); wood (plants were included); water (yet to come); earth (planter pots).

I also wanted to feature play and celebration, two themes emphasized in the new universe story: colour (prayer flags, purple & green plants, red hooks), natural objects (shells, rock), interactive elements (chimes, washers to put on bolts, door handle to put into door plate, photo mobile).

Finally, I hoped to find ways to invite people to be fully present as they experience the object, incorporating as many of the five senses as possible: there’s an incense holder for smell; bok choy for taste; rocks and shells to pick up and touch; chimes to play for sound; photos for added visual interest. This represents how the idea that human beings are the universe reflecting on itself, which I find thrilling.

The creation process helped me focus and meditate on the themes of this course, and I hope that sharing this object with others will spark conversation about what it means to be ‘learning to be present to the planet in a mutually enhancing manner.’

Gateway to the Ecozoic - mixed media found object by Jana Norman

key to the Gateway to the Ecozoic

Year of Living the Community: Week 35

A BUSY WEEKEND OF FRIENDS & NEIGHBOURS

post by Jana

It's been a busy week around the CCP; everyone seems particularly snowed under at work. (I've been filming the first unit of the Certificate Course in Ecozoic Living on top of everything else. That project has a long way to go...)

gotta love the green screen!

There was time last weekend to make some Earth community connections. 

On Friday night the CCP Experiment Team attended a screening of Seed: The Untold Story as part of the Transition Film Festival here in Adelaide. There is nothing I can say that the trailer doesn't say better:

On Saturday, we trooped back to the same precinct, the experimental arts precinct in the northwest corner of the CBD, for an ACE Open gallery tour and installation events. Of particular interest was a body-centred performance art piece by Tongan Punake (traditional poet/master artist) Latai Taumoepeau called 'Ocean Island Mine'. Since CCP team member Mandy has long-standing connections to Tonga, we had a lovely conversation with the artist after her endurance piece finished. 

Another work by Latai was also featured as part of a larger installation called 24 Frames Per Second, an international collaboration focusing on dance outside of the black square of theatre. This piece, 'Repatriate', is also very confronting. Here's an interview with Latai about the work.

Finally, to close out the weekend, it was time to meet some new neighbours at a drinks get together down the street. Everyone knows us as the vertical garden house! 

lettuce from 'the great (green) wall' of Charlotte Place

All in all, I'd rate this past weekend as 5-star Cosmic for its immersions in the wonder of the processes of life in the form of seeds and the resilience of seed masters around the world; for the face-to-face connection and confrontation with eco-colonialism; and its gentle neighbourliness. 

And speaking of neighbourliness, here's a beautiful article Paul came across and shared this weekend, too. It's very clear to me now that my childhood friend, Mr Rogers, was a Cosmic Person through and through, defined by presence and mutual benefit.