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
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 moreJoe Lightfoot • A Collective Blooming: The Rise Of The Mutual Aid Community
The longer I do this work, the more I understand that we need to build a stronger account of the moment we are in: a story of decline and new opportunities; of deep crisis and mind-bending possibilities. Most importantly, a time to act from hope rather than sink into fatalism. We need to confront and reckon with the existing order; to reveal it for... See more
Sophia Parker • Emerging Futures at JRF - Two Years In, the Story So Far
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.
Sophie Lucido Johnson from You Are Doing A Good Enough Job • It's Going to Take You Longer to Get to Work
Old attitudes and ideas simply aren’t adequate to help us navigate what lies ahead. And pervasive gloom about the future risks being self-fulfilling.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
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.
Francis Weller • The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
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.
Andrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.
Jasmine Bina • Five Ideas for Rethinking the World
These moments where one world-system is dying and another is being born are experienced emotionally - as loss, grief, dissonance, confusion, excitement; socially - as contention, struggle, polarisation; and spiritually - as a breakdown in encompassing narrative, meaning and purpose, and a longing for home.