(*okay, I put "sex" in that list partly just to hook your interest. But it does fit in with this theme...)First off, I will own that I am a nature-geek. When my sister wanted to watch the "Monkees" on TV, I would hide the remote control to keep the channel on "Wild America." I would watch nature-documentaries for hours and never get bored. It was really hard for me to get why she would rather watch some goofy guys singing cheesy songs wearing too-tight clothes on Channel 24, when we could be watching Channel 2, and see real monkeys resolving their territorial disputes, swinging through trees with mind-reeling gymnastics and deafening howls. I was a quiet kid, and could spend hours scooping up guppies in a pond just to see their different-colored tails.
All this to say, observations about nature are a major way I understand the world. I am a pattern-seeker. Some patterns take time and attention to notice... even though they're right there. When did you last really marvel at feathery etchings of frost on a window, or the spirals in a sunflower-head? I saw a book called "Chaos Theory" and it had pictures comparing patterns in nature: the branches of capillaries, the branches of a river, the branches of elm trees in winter, twining into the sky. I had noticed these similarities before, but I'd never thought there might be a whole branch of science devoted to studying this! The idea is that patterns repeat, and that you might be able to understand something much bigger than yourself, by looking at something much smaller than yourself. Capillaries carry water. Trees carry water. Rivers carry water. The branch-pattern happens for a reason.
So the nature-observer in me has been looking at some of the patterns I see in Occupy, and wondering: What nature-metaphor could describe what I see happening here? If we were a plant or creature, what would we be?
I've heard Ricardo Levins Morales, one of the artist-sage-historians I know, describe Occupy as the first set of plants in succession. After the ground is disturbed, these are the first plants who move in and cover the earth. Some of the best plants in this "pioneer" phase are the ones we usually call "weeds." In most of our dealings with earth, we do a lot of "disturbing." Plowing, digging, building. After these plants have covered the bare ground, new trees start to take root and grow. Eventually, a forest moves in. The plants "know" what to do. It's a dance that holds the soil in place until the trees have time to establish a community in their basket of roots. A "Climax forest" is the result of centuries of accumulated effort to establish an ecosystem that, if you've ever been to one, truly feels like holy ground. This is what the earth would do, if we only just let it.
There are forces at work on the planet. It knows how to heal itself. Our job is to humble our monkey-minds enough to get a sense of what we don't know, and to listen. Then act, prudently. We humans tend to think we understand everything. Up until now, we've been prone to act rashly, boldly. I'd say arrogantly. We ignore the signs all around us, telling us to stop.
Nature is powerful. If we continue to align ourselves with the false wealth of money and human-based power, humankind will be shaken off (with a mass-extinction of plants, animals, and ecosystems on our hands). Conversely, if we *do* align ourselves with the force of life seeking health and wholeness, we will have power behind us that is truly unstoppable.
(How do we align, you ask? That's the big question of this age we're in. There are ways to listen to nature. Animals, plants, and even the weather speak to us all the time. There is more than one way of knowing... In fact, there are as many kinds of intelligence as there are life-forms on the planet. What if we let them be our teachers? But that's for another blog.)
"Collective Intelligence" is a term scientists use to describe the behavior of creatures like ants.
Have you ever noticed a line of ants, tracing the shortest distance from a food-source to their nest, and wondered how they "knew" where the food was?
Occupy sprang up, spontaneously, in locations all across the United States. No one thought of planning something like this. A horizontal structure and collective-decision-making were at the heart of each of these Occupations. The culture we began creating showed a willingness to invent, to try out a different way of being.
In October, a new group of humans arrived on the Government Plaza of downtown Minneapolis. We crawled out of our holes, the little places where we were surviving alone, and came into the open. We pushed tables together between concrete planters, and called it a kitchen. People cut apart mattresses, took out the stuffing, and invented sleeping bag covers. We began sharing resources with each other, developing new sign language and changing "point of process" from a pinkie to an index finger. We created teach-ins about consensus-decision-making. We organized. One of the most exciting things was the cross-pollination that began occurring: Occupations were talking with each other. Alternative Media. Facebook. Visitors traveling across the country and checking in. Like ants spreading across a field, we put our antennas together and shared information, stories, strategies. Media set up Livestream, and Occupiers across the country tuned into each others experiences, chatting late into the night with whoever was tuned in.
Later, as we began having conflicts and problems with each other, it was reassuring to know that other Occupations were having the exact same dynamics, similar issues. We heard some of the ways they were working to address the problems. We shared ours with them. It took some of the intensity of individual ego-clashes happening, and helped put them in a broader context: What we were experiencing was normal, and tied to much larger dynamics at work. Occupy had a hive-mind, and we learned much by tapping into our collective-intelligence.
Let's remember what makes us different than the "powers that be", and celebrate and honor how smart we can be when we let chance help us. (Give chance a chance) By including some space for random networking in our gatherings, along with "keeping the agenda" linear-styles of organizing, we can keep getting smarter. Keep the internet free, develop our relationships and networks with other Occupies, and let's continue supporting each other as we do this work.
Coming back to what sex has to do with Occupy:
In the biological sense, sex is a lottery. It's a way nature found, to more wildly and radically combine genes. Before sex, all that existed was cloning. Each offspring an exact replica of what came before. Single-celled organisms ruled the day. Evolution happened very s-l-o-w-l-y. Occasionally an organism would get the reproduction-codes wrong, and a "mutation" would result. If the mutation happened to be a good one, that organism could possibly out-do its "parents." This was a cool thing, life replicating itself. Without it we pretty much wouldn't be here right now ;-). But long story short, life before sex was pretty boring.
With sex as an evolutionary survival tool, suddenly mutations weren't a once-in-awhile phenomenon. Sex meant that each parent could throw their genes into a giant mixing-pot, and what came out looked like neither one, exactly. The reason you look so different from the other members of your family is because you are all mutants. But you just may have an evolutionary cutting edge over your sister or brother (which in nature, would look like having more healthy children than they do...) Nature banks in diversity. Ancient agriculturists knew this, and for this reason the Indigenous tribes of Peru developed hundreds of varieties of potato. If one type of potato didn't do well, another would. This is very different than the current model of agriculture, which favors uniformity and monocultured fields. Standard fields planted in standard rows deliver a standard potato to the standard McDonald's, to make you a standard order of french fries. A question posed by many (who are paying attention to food & where it comes from)... is "How resilient are these acres and acres of only one type of plant?" The answer is Not Very.Evolution happens because the organism is responding to stress. Some conditions in the environment are becoming intolerable (no food, no place to live, unsafe due to predation, climate change, etc.... sound familiar?) ...the organism has to do something to ensure the line of its own ancestors has a chance in the future. A weird and fascinating fact: around times of environmental stress, the rate of mutations seems to increase. The species is seeking a way out.
This is where Diversity, as a major strength of Occupy, comes in.
This may be a bit of a stretch, but let's use sex as a metaphor for consensus-process.
How do we view disagreement?
Usually, as something to be avoided. At least I often do. What can I say? I'm Minnesotan. Maybe Occupy Minnesota is having a particularly hard time with Consensus-process because we are sometimes called out (by out-of-state-folks) for a culture steeped in passive-aggression and buried resentments. What's this about? An inherited quirk from Norwegian culture? I'm not sure. But it is a pattern I see, that when there is disagreement, we often back away. Instead of having it out in the open and working it out right then and there, we run, we avoid the situation. We may pretend we still like that person to their face, then talk mean about them behind their backs. Or fill our plate with things to do, and suddenly a few months have gone by and you hope whatever it was has been forgotten about.
Avoiding conflict is a natural human thing to do. So is sticking with the people who more or less "clone" our ideas and don't challenge us to think differently. But it's not very growthful. Our ideas change only very slowly, and our version of reality can become more and more off-base. In our culture, "cloning" is much more likely to happen when there is an absence of critical thought or civic engagement. When people wrap their identity around an opinion that they hold, saying "I believe" instead of "I think" (Thank you, John Trudell)-- it makes it that much more difficult to engage in true dialogue about an issue. But we are so much more than our opinions. We are also human, and so is your "opponent." As strongly as you feel your truth, because it is based in your experiences, there is another set of experiences, and another truth, held by another whose life you can't truly understand because you haven't lived it.
But what if, instead, we began thinking of disagreement as a sexy chance to merge viewpoints? What if, instead of trying to clone my ideas onto you, I acknowledge that I only know my own story, and open my mind to hear your story, and the reality that you see? What if we could find a way to respectfully communicate our different experiences, identify the issues between us, and come out with a diversity of ways to address it?
Part of our evolutionary process, as a new culture and as a movement, is to learn how to turn our challenges into strengths. Consensus-process, many would agree, has been one of the most difficult pieces of Occupy. But there is a reason we don't want to shift to replicating the same models of dominance, hierarchy, and oppression of minority voices, that we are fighting against.
A key evolutionary moment happened in the world, when a few smart mutant organisms began using oxygen as a source for life, by breathing it. Before this, oxygen was building up in the atmosphere, and was toxic to all living organisms. Overall, it seems oxygen-breathing was a survival-strategy that went pretty well for life on earth. ;-)
Right now, our world is brewing in conflict... there seems to be no shortage of it. A similar evolutionary leap, on the scale of learning to breathe oxygen, seems called for. What if we could turn the way we deal with conflict into tools that help us better understand the complexities of human relationship? What if our goal was less about being right, or even keeping up a shaky veneer of 'peace', and we thrived instead on growing the heart and learning from each other?
I've been alive long enough now, to recognize something about conflict: Even though I may run away from a problem, by moving or changing jobs or ending a relationship, sooner or later I have to deal with it. The job/person/place changes, but the pattern keeps coming back. I say to it "Hey, I recognize you. I thought I left you in the dust, long ago." The pattern laughs at me and says "HaHaHA! You fool. Running is futile. Don't you know I'm part of you? Anyways, I had something I was trying to tell you..."
We are suffering, now, from the patterns of oppression, dominance, and disconnection our ancestors have been running away from for generations. As we try to escape from looking at our own shit or dealing with it, we set up walls of defense around our communities, our neighbors, family members. We separate ourselves from the earth. We separate ourselves from our own bodies. But we can't keep running. We just can't. Too much is at stake now. We have to open those doors, because the house of our planet is burning down and working together is the only thing that can stop it.
Of course it feels too big to handle. I feel overwhelmed every day at how much there is to heal from, how much there is to do. But then I remember the patterns of nature. How the small reflects the big. I will do, today, what I can, to face what must be faced. When I am in disagreement with someone, I will do my best to hold them with compassion and try to understand their perspective -- while honoring my own. I'll look at my own life, and see what this conflict is teaching me, right now, about where I need to grow. Let's be mutants & proud. How about a little Consensus-building next week? (wink, wink ;-)...
Next Blog: What do we want and When do we want it? Manifestation 101 and why YES and THANK YOU are powerful magic.
Thanks for reading. Writers out there, I welcome suggestions or comments on my work. & Readers, the same...
Yours,
Malia
No comments:
Post a Comment