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?
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
... See moreOur elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember
A community of practice — creating a network of practitioners who can support civil society organisations to design their endings, and intelligently and carefully dismantle them.
We are all at the start of a thing. There’s integrity in having the courage to point out thinking that no longer works, and the humility to acknowledge all that we don’t yet know.
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
... See moreMargaret Wheatley, the brains behind the Berkana model, spoke of four essential areas of work that are needed to sustain an emerging paradigm: naming, connecting, nourishing and illuminating elements of the emerging patterns. These are how we are beginning to understand our role in this work: seeing ourselves as gardeners, or midwives, working to
... See moreOld attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.
hospicing, which recognizes the eventual inevitable end of modernity’s fundamentally unethical and unsustainable institutions, but sees the necessity of enabling a “good” death through which important lessons are processed.