midwifing change
we’re caught in a liminal space that’s colored more by the war of the worlds than the transition between them. what might it mean to consider the space of the threshold — hospicing the old and midwifing the new?
midwifing change
we’re caught in a liminal space that’s colored more by the war of the worlds than the transition between them. what might it mean to consider the space of the threshold — hospicing the old and midwifing the new?
“ The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. ”
— Antonio Gramsci, philosopher, linguist, journalist, writer and politician, in Prison Notebooks
Through our ability to acknowledge the layers of loss, we can truly discover our capacity to respond, to protect, and to restore what has been damaged.
When we mourn the extreme levels of suffering in the world together as a community, we can be held and hold others as we each go through our own personal cycles of grief, or what the Germans refer to as Weltschmerz (a deep sadness about the imperfection of the world). Such communal solidarity can get us through our darkest moments and ensure we
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The process of crossing the threshold is demanding for each and every one of us. When the cracks appear in a long-held belief, it causes anxiety and pain. As the certain world is replaced by great uncertainty, the risk is that we cling to what we know more than ever. The gravitational pull of the familiar exerts itself, no matter how dysfunctional
... See moreThere’s a lot of alienation; a lot of disaster porn. We need grieving rituals so we can go through our despair together, so we can face the losses we know are coming.
In these times of transitions, of systems shifts, of collapse and erosion, of unravelling - of so much no longer making sense, or seeming to work - we think that the shape of tomorrow will be in part determined by the richness and health of the compost from which seeds of the future grow. This means paying as much attention to endings as we do to
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