Perspectives for our Times
Polarization, the proliferation of fake news, the ascendancy of nationalist populism, the rise of fundamentalism.... Recent years leave us in need of new narratives and new frameworks for understanding these times and our place in the world.
Here are some perspectives we have found particularly enlivening.
Here are some perspectives we have found particularly enlivening.
We Are The Great Turning
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Podcast with Joanna Macy and Jessica Serrante
We Are the Great Turning welcomes you to the kitchen table of the legendary eco-spiritual teacher Joanna Macy, where she dives into what it takes to live with our hearts and integrity intact in this time of global crisis. You’ll be guided into these conversations by Jess Serrante, a longtime activist and student of Joanna’s. Together, with Joanna and Jess, we’ll discover abiding wisdom that can help us stay joyful and energized as we work toward a more just and life-sustaining world. This podcast arose from Jess and Joanna’s regular conversations about the beauty and pain of our personal lives (love, heartbreak, aging, loss) read more... |
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Doppelganger: Trip into the Mirror Worldby Naomi Klein, Penguin Random House, 2024
Canadian award-winning journalist, author, public intellectual and activist writes cogently about our current reality, "a reality that seems to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It’s happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting “the children”). It’s happening in our culture as AI gobbles up music, paintings, fiction and everything in between and spits out imitations that threaten to overtake the originals. And it’s happening to many of us as individuals as we create digital doubles of ourselves, filtered and curated just so for all the other duplicates to see." read more... |
Radical Realismby Otto Scharmer, on Medium, January 3, 2022
We live in a moment known as the Anthropocene, the age of humans. In the Anthropocene, most of our planet’s major problems are caused by human beings. As long as we refuse to see ourselves in the mirror, pain and suffering will continue to increase. But if we look honestly at our reflection in the mirror, then we can begin to bend our perspective from a silo to a systems view, from a mindset operating with ego-system awareness to one that operates with eco-system awareness. When that happens, we can change course as a collective, as a whole system. We can be in service of radical regeneration through bridging the ecological, social, and spiritual divides. read more...
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(Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
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Warriors Wanted: Why one woman is training people to defend the human spiritSeventy-five year old writer, consultant and activist Margaret Wheatley has studied the cyclical nature of civilizations throughout history and she is quite confident that the end of our civilization is closer than we might like to think. And she is doing something about it… something radical. Wheatley is building an army of 'warriors for the human spirit' with people who want to lessen the suffering in the world - whether it be from natural disasters, political strife, war, famine, or from the tyranny of daily injustices in modern life. Her warriors are trained as leaders with compassion, kindness, servitude and generosity as prime requirements listen to the CBC Tapestry interview with Mary Hynes...
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Learning to See in the Dark Amid Catastrophe: An Interview With Deep Ecologist Joanna Macy I attended one of [Joanna Macy's] workshops in 2006 in order to deal with the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder I was struggling with as a result of my reporting from the front lines in Iraq, and wrote about that experience here. Yet now, in 2017, a new darkness is enveloping the world. After taking some time to herself in the wake of Trump's ascendency to power, Macy emerged with an offering of a retreat in Abiqui, New Mexico, aptly titled, "In the Dark, the Eye Learns to See" read more...
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