Participatory Inquiry, episode 114: Flourishing
“In a network, there’s a place beyond lurking, beyond popularity contests, where we rediscover how to coordinate our flourishing. Let’s meet there.”
@johnkellden
You’ve made a makeshift digital camp together with a few select others in the fledgling networked global village. How are you exploring? What generative situational assessment and awareness, engaging in what stories out of which, performing what tasks, returning to what criteria and measures of generative review? What are the necessary and sufficient criteria of places where we grow in ability to coordinate our flourishing?
primeval and unsettled wilderness
“The fecundity and flourishing diversity of the North American continent led the earliest European explorers to speak of this terrain as a primeval and unsettled wilderness — yet this continent had been continuously inhabited by human cultures for at least ten thousand years.”
— David Abram
How are we going to inhabit Gaia for the next ten thousand years? What plateaus, places and evolutionary trajectories are we considering when crafting our scenarios?
“That indigenous peoples can have gathered, hunted, fished, and settled these lands for such a tremendous span of time without severely degrading the continent’s wild integrity readily confounds the notion that humans are innately bound to ravage their earthly surroundings.”
— David Abram
Our flourishing requires clarity, specificity and responsibility.
brought together in ways that serves
Our generative review needs to include a sufficient understanding of recursion, a recursion where response-ability, reach and resonance are brought together in ways that serves our reflexivity, our ability to model and re-model our living memory, a recursion-over-experience, a recursion-beyond-behavior. Feedback characterised by synthesis, selfhood and service.
“The measure of the whole is greater than
the sum of the measures of its parts.”
— Heinz von Foerster
The necessary and sufficient coordination of resources is an essential part of the premise for what feedback and what systems we rediscover, re-design, develop and deploy, what networks we traverse, what platforms we populate.
“In a few centuries of European settlement, however, much of the native abundance of this continent has been lost — its broad animal populations decimated, its many-voiced forests overcut and its prairies overgrazed, its rich soils depleted, its tumbling clear waters now undrinkable.”
— David Abram
We are finding ourselves between stories. The old one, where old, white, entitled western males ravaged, decimated, overcut, depleted, and conquered nature, is on its last legs.
a sufficiently diverse ecosystem of stories
The new story needs to be a sufficiently diverse ecosystem of stories. Stories that moves us to meet in new ways, stories that attracts our gathering in new places, stories that achieves a coordination of situational awareness, will turned knowledge flow and intelligence in service to what old, obsolete behavior we leave in the old makeshift camps and what flourishing we choose to instigate and nourish.
Participatory Inquiry, episode 114: Flourishing

