My life is staked on the belief that we can create a new culture. When I say my life is staked I mean my main creative effort for this year is focused on the series of experiments I am designing and actioning to this end, called Tribe in Transition.
But can we really create a new culture or am I the crazy idealist everyone has always told me I am?
I’m going through a process right now of evaluating all my beliefs and all my thinking – or trying to. I am questioning everything because I don’t want to be staking my life on an illusion and possibly misleading others. But on the other hand what use is a transformational guide who is questioning her basic beliefs? What does she have to stand on? Can she lead people across shifting sands?
Perhaps after all that is what is required…to dare to cross the shifting sands of cultural transition without clinging on to anyone or any false hope or comforting belief. Open-eyed and awake.
When I think about our current culture – the one I want to replace or transcend with a new culture – I see that although there is a cancerous monoculture spread by the engines of corporate profit, there are also many, many lively sub-cultures all co-existing together and all interdependent. And whilst these sub-cultures appear to exist in the same world, even those closest to us seldom speak the same language. We all get by imagining we have a shared reality. You only have to look at the tensions in many families to see how true that is.
I’m thinking about the little microcosm I live in here in Golden Bay – a population of 4000 souls are spread out across about 50sqkm of rural land bordered by the sea and separated from the rest of the island by mountains. We are a community of hardy pioneers and people disillusioned by mainstream culture and wanting to create a life grounded in nature and creativity. Or are we? That’s certainly one part of the culture: artists, artisans, healers, spiritual seekers, permaculturalists, people wanting a simple life, oddballs of all kinds. But then alongside there are the farmers and the people whose families have lived in Golden Bay for centuries, and people doing a regular job at the supermarket check-out or the dairy factory – what culture do they inhabit and how do they think? And what about the generations – does a Golden Bay teenager inhabit the same world as an octogenarian? Even among “the like-minded community” when you dig a little beneath the surface, how like-minded are we really?
The heart knows that we are all One. We’re all in this human experience together. All gathered here at this moment in planetary time when we are faced with the crisis of possible species extinction and the opportunity to take an evolutionary leap. The differences exist in the mind, in our beliefs and values and in the ways we walk our talk.
Part of the experiment of Tribe in Transition is to find a common language and common understandings for our experience of being in transition. And the common language comes not from creating some nice warm fuzzy “we space” we can wrap around us like a comfort blanket – although some of that is a great incentive to keep going when the going gets tough- but through the sustained effort to express, hear, acknowledge, witness and accommodate our differences.
In my own life and through my work I am called /want/intend to create containers strong and clear enough to hold and include all the disparate and fragmented parts of our personal and cultural wholeness. That’s a big undertaking and I can’t do that alone. If you resonate with anything I’ve said please leave a message.
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