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.
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...
|
|
(Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
|
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...
|
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...
|
|
|
Something Extraordinary Is Happening in the World, And Most People Haven’t Noticedby Gustavo Tanaka, in The Blog, Huffington Post, Dec 16 2015, updated Dec 16 2016
Most of us haven’t quite realized there is something extraordinary happening. A few months ago, I freed myself from standard-procedure society. I broke the chains of fear that kept me locked up into the system. Since then, I see the world from a different perspective read more...
|