midwifing change

There’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.

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.

“While traditional materialism is rooted in the present, Speculative Materialism – from the Latin ‘speculat’ meaning “observed from a vantage point” – looks to the horizon. Rather than designing materials to last for time immemorial, what about redesigning materials to degrade and be regenerated cyclically over time? […]

good folks are pushing hard across the entire range of human endeavors to find new ways to see, better ways to work. Yet I’ve also heard from these same people, time and again, how hard it is to break out of the professional constraints of convention, common practice and assumed continuity. How hard it is to get those with assets and authority to

And basically, my gripe is, we collectively generally treat every transition the way I used to treat “time for recess”: This is just going to happen, so let’s not focus on how it’s going to happen, or whether the getting there is hard. Let’s just get from here to there, OK? And then we can be there and forget about here.

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