# Regrowing a Living Culture ## 1st week Filled with stories of people who spent a lifetime mastering an art or craft. A person who spent 10 years as an apprentice before they could tell a story. ## 2nd week An inquiry into whether it's possible to work together without having to believe in the same things. ## 3rd Week "If you haven't been fed, become bread." - Instead of focusing on the lack, can we look at what we already are that can be offered as a gift to others. Context: - Private sector is about using money to get people to do things. The public sector is using the authority of the state to get people to do things. The third sector is full of people who are doing things out of willingness. - Money gives us the luxury of not caring about the feelings of the person on the other side of the transaction. 4 practices to cultivate for a time when things get harder: - The art of invitation. It leads us to get people to come together to do things without money or the use of state power. Cultural protocols can help lower the threshold, make it easier to make invitations. - Stillness. Changes the quality of being from which we issue invitations. Vanessa Andreotti's "getting to zero", where we get away from plus or minus, up or down, the energy of wanting to win or be up. - Attention. - Gift. "Finding moves that break the spell of the dominant logics." Rowan Williams - the most important thing a school can do for a child is to give them the experience that they matter for who they are and not for what they do Practice involves hard things. But what hard things should we choose to stick with? The answer is, if you have to force it, it probably isn't right. That's where stillness comes in. Mikie: "In order to regrow a living culture, I have to outgrow my comfort zone." Helen: "This is a safe space. It is a safe space to admit that I don't know what the fuck is going on. And to ask if anyone else knows what the fuck is going on. And we're going to need more of this as times get more difficult." ## 4th Week Max Weber - disenchantment of the world - Weber borrowed this term from Friedrich Schiller to describe a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society - iron cage of modernity - three forms of authority - western societies were typified by legal-rational authority - impersonal structures - traditional authority - charismatic authority - Max Weber launched the word 'charisma' in its modern meaning - people started using it in the 1960s to refer to politicians - then people started using it to refer to celebrities - Weber identified it as something scarce, that is innate to individuals who are born with it. He borrowed this notion from romanticism. - In its older meaning, charisma meant grace and favour. It was not scarce. The word was first coined by St Paul in his Letters to the New Testament. - Elizabeth Gilbert gave a TED talk in which she points to the word 'genius' and how it used to mean a spirit that resided in one's walls, rather than an exceptional individual. She points to the disenchantment of genius, and the toxic effects of that. Ivan Illich - "The limit of political possibility today is defined by the number of people who can sit aorund a table and share a meal." The legal-rational structures of the world have a script for dealing with pockets of progressive education - "oh dear, that looks like a cult." What's a signal that there are healthy dynamics in a school, so that we know it's not a cult? - The number of people who point to another school or community that they feel resourced from. - This helps avoid scarcity and double-bind dynamics. Belonging and commitment is handled in a way that we are not asking people to put their sense of security and safety on the line. Otto Scharmer - Axial Shifts - https://medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/turning-the-tide-living-inside-the-axial-shifts-3ed1ba4f5dfb Karl Polyani - [[Decelerationism]] - for about 200 years, the crown actually tried to slow down the process of enclosure - if it wasn't for that slowing down, the social repercussions would have been far worse ## 5th Week We are living in a time when it no longer makes sense to move to another country for a career move. What are the habits that will help us make a home in exile. The plight of migrant workers is an extreme case of what we will all be facing soon. We will all be in exile soon. Ecology (whose root word is "home") was coined in the 1860s when there was mass displacement. Home is mixed up with a lot of toxic uses - go home, woman's place is in the home. It's not a good step to invite people into a pre-created space, like a Hospicing Modernity reading group. It's better to start small, with something inviting. People want to be part of something they have a hand in creating. When things collapse, we probably don't want to just be having relationships based on Hospicing Modernity or Transition Towns. A good clue is that it should be something our ancestors would recognize. It's bone knowledge. # Pockets, Patterns and Practices ## 2nd Week Adam - I don't use money much these days, but when I can use money to light a fire for people to gather around, then that's a good use of my money The word practice has room for both the 7 year old who is clumsily playing an instrument, and the dedication to craft of an expert A muscle that we haven't been using is still there anatomically, it is still part of the kind of creatures that we are In modernity, we under-use muscles that people in most times and most places needed to survive How did we fall out of practice? How did we fall under the spell of other logics? Karl Polanyi - "laissez faire was planned" Our fossil fuel economy has rendered us incapable of being worthy of what we are taking. As we have lost the muscle of giving with generosity, so have we lost the muscle of being able to receive with dignity The loss of this is related to our loss of elders, for elders cannot survive without being able to receive Gustav Landauer: - "[t]he state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently." - https://www.panarchy.org/landauer/state.html Michael Foley - Green Uprising Farm - https://greenuprisingfresh.wordpress.com/home/ - Farming for the Long Haul - https://www.amazon.com/Farming-Long-Haul-Agricultural-Inventiveness-ebook/dp/B07N6DQNCN?crid=HRBWAAVFPCLH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7wLqv3F12EiFQxhWZvXlbT5u2opH1ep3OOTfhPx3SJdleH0tF6-_d-h69uXYzzc8sKUO3DmVZfE8dlxi3k96a-AP6F8yfJGh-XGjBQPyg7g.YkCzvTVbVcBhixI_GB_2NK-7KmIvPlZeITw9ukQzPcM&dib_tag=se&keywords=farming+for+the+long+haul&qid=1731528671&s=digital-text&sprefix=farming+for+the+long+hau,digital-text,286&sr=1-1 - https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/michael-foley/ - https://wordofmouthmendo.com/word-of-mouth-stories/2021/9/1/green-uprising-farm Neon Crone - Rivendell Retirement Plan - imagine you are Bilbo Baggins and planning for your retirement from the Shire - Start saying out loud what you want to happen. And try to harvest pledges. - "The Dangerous Old Woman" by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes! Sharon Blackie, Hagitude - https://hagitude.org/ Jeff Aitken - I'm blissfully confronted by what is unfolding - I'm about to lose my home. I used to work for the Shire. So I resonate with the idea of retiring from the Shire Pledging Zero - the courage to come to a meeting and pledge zero Adam Wilson - A light-hearted way of introducing his farm: most of my young farmer friends are selling food and losing their livelihood, so I thought I'd try not selling food - Heartbreak story approach - a farmer who said that on his best days, he feels he is doing something great for the world; on his worst day, he feels he is just subsidising the lifestyles of the rich world - by foregoing the charging of money, he is dropping all the defenses against being extracted from the world; but in doing so, he gives people the opportunity to discover something that they didn't know was there > The elder is not human. The elder is a vocation of care, a marking of thresholds, an impersonal force at the ecotones of our usual wisdoms. An errant line that carries the third sound of loss and possibility into the generosity of descent. The elder is not useful; the elder is the cautionary delimitation of usefulness. The expert, on the other hand, is the elder captured and put to good use. The expert is the elder rendered purposeful, subservient to an already determinate end.  > – Bayo Akomolafe david benjamin blower - demonisation Chris Corrigan - Open Space - https://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot/open-space-resources/ Bruno Latour - Down to Earth - The metaphor of being on a plane, and being told we won't get to the destination, and the airport we left from is no longer available - We have to find a way to come down to earth Bergau - a drinking village with a fishing problem Our civilisation is headed towards collapse. But it can't be addressed directly. It has to be dealt with by creating pockets of conviviality. Ivan Illich - knew that in America, conviviality was a reference to drunkenness how can we rescue words from the impoverished versions of what they used to be: - hospitality - conviviality Message in the chat - dictionary 'farm' reference -- Middle English: from Old French ferme, from medieval Latin firma ‘fixed payment’, from Latin firmare ‘fix, settle’ (in medieval Latin ‘contract for’), from firmus ‘constant, firm’; compare with firm2. The noun originally denoted a fixed annual amount payable as rent or tax; this is reflected in farm (sense 2 of the verb), which later gave rise to farm out meaning ‘to subcontract’. The noun came to denote a lease, and, in the early 16th century, land leased for farming. The verb sense ‘grow crops or keep livestock’ dates from the early 19th century. ## 3rd week Maps for finding each other. Mudmaps. ## 4th week Unevenly distributed collapse. Six ways to die. Infraculture - to prevent the 7th way to die (ie loss of meaning, suicide, etc) ## 5th week Conviviality includes the practice of merriment. Rebuilding the muscle for conviviality. Adam Wilson - people holding hands and facing outwards, an attentional community - supporting each other so they can be more of service to the world, instead of just facing inwards --- See also: [[Belonging]] # A Bit More Practice ## 4th Week - Table Practice Brian Eno - culture is whatever you don't have to do Adam Wilson - irony free zone - places where people are kind, generous and authentic Rule of the commons - you can take as much as you want for personal consumption, but not to sell to others Longer tables, not higher walls Tiny engines of abundance, of making special ## 5th Week - Putting it into Practice Martin Shaw's advice to simply remember the one thing from a story that stays with you, because that's probably the part of the story that holds the medicine you need. In this age when our model of education is to pump us full of information, we should resist the pressure to remember the whole map. A carpenter saying he is forced by regulations to install things made in factories, because that's what makes the insurers happy. It's harder and harder to have the aspiration to become a master carpenter. The idea that AI and technology can save us time is a lie that is over two hundred years old. The reality is that we become harnessed to the time of machines, and machines can do things must faster than we can. So we are torn out of our bodies' natural rhythms.