Relocalization is challenging because we're looking at pretty big to our lives. Helps to have a micro-climate in which there's room for it to happen - a small group. |
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"The small
group is the unit of transformation" - Peter Block The importance of small groups! Gotta say it again. Relocalization is going to be challenging because we're looking at real change in our own lives and in our society's - a perfect storm! To look at, feel, uncover, and move into the change we need - and to be with others as they do - it'll be great to have from a micro-climate in which there's room for us to safely explore the options and move into them. Without it we're we're too subject to the groupthink of the prevailing story around us, business as usual. I've hugely benefited from groups myself. but despite quite a bit of group experience, I'm not in a group that gives me all of this. But a place to start is what I call an Open Source Relocalizing Group - Open Source because it takes elements that work and puts them together, invites your participation in making them better. Check it out now if you like. Those of you who feel some pull here, please jump in or contact me and see what can happen. We're creating a form and seeing if it has any resonance out there. You may feel as I do, that a future based on the past, isn't looking too good right now. We evolved in small tribal groups and kinship alliances; we were together with a group of others. Many of the daily - and key - decisions we made were group ones. Imagine yourself for a moment on a trip through the wilderness with the decision about when to move on before you. Everyone has a say on what to do and the decision gets made with multiple heartfelt input. That's just how it worked! For our million year evolutionary heritage as humans, our allegiances were to a group, a system, like this. That's part of how we operated and it's part - not the whole but a part - of how we operate still. Click here for my essay on the evolutionary imperative groups that have room for our collective and individual selves. My experience in groups over years is that connecting to a deep sense of "groupness" is fundamentally restorative; it reminds me of the missing part of myself. The "groupness" I'm speaking of develops because each individual's gifts are welcomed and seen as the gifts they are - the very opposite of groupthink. I'm still in a group I've been in for almost 20 years (and I'm in more than one). When the group comes together, there's a sense that we're all in this together . . . this "whatever it is," nameless thing. We're connected but not diminished, collectively responsible for what transpires. You can take the individual out of the group but you can't take the group out of the individual. It's part of our hardwiring to come alive in a group, to see the big picture. It's harder without that connection just as it's harder without connection to a family. Our personal and private understandings - on the meditation cushion for example - don't by themselves have the power to change community or build it. It's the public conversation about a new possibility that is the birth of something new. When that new possibility is spoken aloud to a group of our peers, we become responsible for it; if we don't walk away, something will be required of us to bring it into being. Being co-creator of something you value makes you feel that you're part of something bigger than yourself, as we are. Nor need you give up yourself to get there. The opposite: you've put yourself on the line for something you want, something that you can't fully do yourself. A leaderful group, not a leaderless group. Fully bottom up - because each member is responsible for what happens. Your Invitation Is there something here for you around groups, groupness, collective intelligence in the way I'm speaking of it? If anything's "resonating" I invite you to join me in co-evolving the emergence of collective intelligence through local groups in which there's room for just-how-we-are today AND an openness to allow the work that nourishes and fulfills to get done. There will be a "cost" in that that works means allowing room for something we can't know yet - the future and the great unknown. Click here to check out a format for an Open Source Relocalization Group. Contact me with any questions too, andrewcartermacdonald . . . at . . . gmail. . . com. To hear more about how this unfolds, be sure you're signed up for the monthly update at the top of the page. Comments of any kind welcome at the Compost Heap! Back to Articles |
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