A little over a dozen of us from various parts of the
world just finished an inspiring 6-week online course facilitated by Chris
Johnstone and Barbara Ford. Together we read the book "Active Hope"
by Joanna Macy and Chris. You can read about the book here and the announcement for the course here.
One thing we did in the course was the following
exercise, shown here for the benefit of those of you who weren't in the course
or who haven't read the book (it's on page 199):
Identifying your goals and resources
1. If you knew
you could not fail, what would you most want to do for the healing of our
world?
I came up with a list of five ambitious visions:
·
Start with global warming. Reduce
CO2 in the air to a sustainable level
·
Make Los Angeles into a Transition
Town
·
Make The Great Turning the
overarching main context for stories in the mass media, replacing Business as
Usual and the Great Unraveling
·
Overthrow the corporate empire and
replace it with a just, humane, and sustainable system
·
Help co-create an emerging
planetary consciousness capable of decision making to heal the earth
2. What specific goal or project could you
realistically aim to achieve in the next twelve months that would contribute to
this?
We had to work with just one. Due to health limitations
(I cannot speak and can barely walk) I ruled out the first four. A project with
any of them would require working with others in a way that would involve at
least some walking and/or talking. The fifth is something I could work on from
my computer without leaving the house. I really want to do them all.
3. What resources, inner and outer, do you have that
will help you do this?
4. What resources, internal and external, will you need
to acquire? What might you need to learn, develop, or obtain?
5. How might you stop yourself? What obstacles might
you throw in the way?
6. How will you overcome these obstacles?
7. What step can you take in the next week, no matter
how small, that will move you toward this goal?
These are the highlights of my answers:
- Long-term
goal: Help co-create the global planetary consciousness that will be necessary
for the self-healing of the earth.
- One-year
goal: Write a paper (and possibly a blog of the work in progress) that
unpacks this vision of an evolution of consciousness. Explore it deeply
and thoroughly enough that publishing it makes a contribution to the
healing of the earth.
- One-week commitment: Set up a structure
for gathering all the ingredients, strands,
and facets of the project.
I am happy to announce that, to
fulfill the one-week commitment, I have created a simple Word document called
"Ingredients Brainstorming", and begun to populate it. I obviously have a long way to go. I've never
been so aware of the vast spaciousness of the empty page. There are so many aspects of this issue that
I want to explore. I just need to be patient and try to access a larger view of
time.
To be continued.
