Indigenous Wisdom, Deep Time, Dreaming and Imagination
The following are reflections on some of the threads of how it came to be that at the time of the Harvest Moon in 2020 the CoLab Dudley team were reaching out to trusted creative practitioners with convening abilities. And designing ways to bring them into relationship with each other, with Dudley High Street, with our ways of working, and with local creatives.
Thanks to the deep work and diligent tending of social soils over many years by some incredibly generous folk worldwide there was fertile ground for convening around challenging yet nourishing ideas during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As life on the land around us burst into high-definition colour in the sunniest spring on record, an abundance of invitations to connect and explore through online convenings also blossomed.
I can see looking back that I was soaking up the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures of all kinds of wonderful offerings and putting ideas carefully into a basket to carry back to feed our work on Dudley High Street.
Looking into this basket in October sparked the idea to shape four seasons of work to begin in winter 2020. It would centre around growing relationships and collective dreams through playful invitations to local people to journey to the High Street of the future.
The invitations will be designed by people with a diversity of creative practices; from architects to poets, dancers to sound artists. We call them Time Rebels, inspired by Roman Krznaric, because of an intent to nurture long-term thinking and intergenerational justice.
Emergence Magazine Community Offerings
In March 2020, as humanity struggled to make sense of the implications of a viral pandemic and half of the world’s population was heading towards lockdown, the thoughtful folk at Emergence Magazine asked themselves how best to respond to the crisis. As we have each discovered in the streets and neighbourhoods we live, uncertainty in times of crisis breeds fear and anxiety, but it can also uncover opportunities for greater connection and attention to the threads of relationship that so deeply connect us.
The Emergence team felt that it was important to find new ways to come together as a community and to create spaces for support, creativity, and inspiration. Since March they have beautifully convened a range of deeply nourishing online programs which aimed at providing a space where we can connect through the power of story and reflect on the deeper themes emerging at this time.
The first of these offerings I signed up for was the monthly book club. It met weekly, on a Thursday evening for members in Europe, the friends we made on the other side of the Atlantic were joining around lunchtime in thier local time. We read a book a month, with suggested chapters to read each week. Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder opened each week’s gathering with a reading from the selected chapters, and then 300 or so of us would head into groups of 5–7 to share reflections on the book, using thoughtful prompts generated by Chelsea. The final weekend of each month featured an interview with the author of the book we had read that month.
This book club was a delightful invitation for me to revisit two of my three favourite reads of 2019; Robin Wall Kimmer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants and Rob Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey. (My other top read of 2019 was Rob Hopkin’s From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want… which we will come to.)
All of the books and writers selected for the book club, in different and beautiful ways, make visible the threads binding us to our histories, and invite readers to connect with people and places of the past and the stories of our ancestors.
Indigenous Wisdom
Braiding Sweetgrass opens with the story of Skywoman Falling:
In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling. The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers. In the beginning there was the Skyworld.
Emergence Magazine has recently published an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s new introduction to Braiding Sweetgrass which asks an interesting question of the various tellings of the story of Skywoman:
Reading this a week after finishing Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes is a curious thing, and prompts a question for me about who is telling the stories of Dudley High Street, or all of the High Streets? (For a wonderful taste of what Elizabeth Lesser is offering in Cassandra Speaks, check out this interview on Brene Brown’s podcast.)
In convening people we are calling Dudley’s Time Rebels I have been deeply heartened how early and how often they have indicated an eagerness to spend time on Dudley High Street. This brings to mind a chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass about Becoming Indigenous to Place. It tells the story of Nanabozho, First Man. He understood that all the knowledge he needed in order to live was present in the land. His role was not to control or change the world as a human, but to learn from the world how to be human.
I trust that our time rebels will tread lightly and look and listen deeply as they (re)discover the High Street. Their creative practices will lend themselves to multisensory, multi-perspective and multispecies observations. They will be paying attention to patterns, relationships, facts and data, problems and opportunities.
In drawing on these observations to co-create all kinds of experiences and spaces I wonder how might we, as time rebels, avoid the trap of seeking to control change and instead contribute to creating the conditions for thriving lives (of all species) on and around Dudley High Street? I ask as someone brought up on notions of agency in changemaking, and now have a growing sense that perhaps such agency isn’t real and it is stewardship we should focus on.
We might do well to pay attention to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s location of the Windigo in systems science. The Windigo is a legendary monster, its essence a hunger that will never be sated… Born of our fears and failings, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.
In terms of systems science, the Windigo is a case study of a positive feedback loop, in which a change in one entity promotes a similar change in other, connected part of the system… In the natural as well as the built environment, positive feedback leads inexorably to change — sometimes to growth, sometimes to destruction. When growth is unbalanced, however, you can’s always tell the difference.
Stable, balanced systems are typified by negative feedback loops, in which a change in one component incites an opposite change in another, so they balance each other out… Negative feedback is a form of reciprocity, a coupling of forces that create balance and sustainability.
This leads me to consider: as Dudley’s time rebels journey to the future High Street, what might they discover about forces which came into relationship to create balance and sustainability? Who are people who might help align these forces?
Deep Time
Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey is a most astonishing journey to take as a reader; “at once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world.” (www.underlandbook.com)
Below the surface of Somerset, Yorkshire and London we are taken into deep places and introduced to deep time and dark matter. Beneath Paris, The Carso in Italy and the Slovenian Highlands we travel through an underground city, discover starless rivers, and are confronted with our violent histories. Things get colder and deeper in time in Norway, Greenland and Finland. Underland, as Alice Troy-Donovan writes in The London Magazine
asks an urgent question: Are we being good ancestors?…
The Anthropocene stands, Macfarlane suggests, for a supposedly authoritative version of a story that has been told for millennia: a permeable relationship between the human and nonhuman that is acknowledged as much in the pan-psychic beliefs of indigenous peoples as the various writers, thinkers and mythologies that Macfarlane draws on in Underland. Only by understanding the deep past can we imagine what the deep future might look like — and it is through this understanding, of the long-standing reciprocity that has existed between humans and underworlds, that we can learn how to be good ancestors…
If the Anthropocene tells a story of one-way influence — from humanity to nature — Underland is interested in complicating this, in part by considering how language might reveal a more reciprocal relationship between the two. Humus, meaning ‘soil’, merges into humando, ‘burying’ and then humanitas. Macfarlane is attentive to how words reveal an already close, permeable relationship between humanity and the earth. We are beings that bury and are buried, and Underland traces the ways in which we have left our subterranean markings deep into the pre-Anthropocene past.
Reading Underland got me curious about deep time, as well as the worlds below our feet, so back in 2019 I’d taken myself on a Deep Time Walk around my local nature reserve. The Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walk co-created at Schumacher College in 2007 by ecologist Dr Stephan Harding, and is available in a range of media including an app, from a UK social enterprise:
It’s difficult to describe what arises, so I suggest you take yourself off on your own.
What does all this have to do with our work on Dudley High Street? Perhaps when first encountered, not a lot… but that’s the funny thing about time. As time passes you find that ideas might spiral around, bubble up in unexpected places, ebb but then flow again.
Let’s move into dream space.
Dreaming and Imagination
Moral Imaginations
On 11 April 2020 (mere weeks into the first UK lockdown) Phoebe Tickell shared a short story in a thread on twitter culminating in an open invitation to write an ending together through weekly sessions of anyone interested. The story was published on Medium a day later:
I read and re-read The Story of the Impossible Train on while sitting outdoors on warm sunny days during this first lockdown. It totally captured my imagination and I signed up for the group session, although I felt incredibly nervous about it as I didn’t know what to expect. I took part in a couple of these Friday night moral imagining sessions, and was overwhelmed by the power of group imagining. The Story of the Impossible Train continues to evolve, shared again in November 2020 with illustrations. You can also watch a beautiful animated video of the story.
Taking part in a Council of All Beings during a #moralimaginations session evoked feelings and shifts in thinking that have stayed with me since. I’m grateful to Phoebe for this courageous convening and thoughtful shaping and facilitation of the sessions. It got me wondering about what forms of collective imagining might feel safe and accessible to people who live, work and play on Dudley High Street?
Sidebar: when imagining is uprooted
I have remembered that back in 2004 I led a programme of community visioning activities across Dudley borough, to help inform the development of a Community Strategy for 2005–2020. We trained people from about 50 community based groups to lead visioning workshops and asked them to draw together what emerged. The ideas shared inevitably got translated into public sector speak (‘strategic priorities’, ‘delivery in partnership’, ‘local area agreements’) and squashed into ‘themes’ which suited organisational infrastructure; jobs and prosperity, environment and housing, community safety, individual and community learning.
These don’t sound like dreams or imaginings.
The dreams and imaginings had been taken from the places that they had grown from… by me. I handed the words describing them, post-it note by post-it note to people who didn’t know the texture, the warp and weft of the social fabric of those places. People unaware of the kinds of labour and time it takes to generate, tend and sustain healthy social ecosystems in the neighbourhoods of the borough. Because I didn’t know that either.
So if we can create safe spaces for collective imagining in 2021 how might we ensure shared dreams and associated collaborative actions are held in the hands and hearts of those they belong to, while imagination is met halfway by others who can help?
The Department of Dreams offers some ideas and tools…
The Department of Dreams Re_ Festival
In June 2020 the wildly talented and deep thinking team behind Civic Square launched the Department of Dreams with the stunning Re_ Festival. They write:
Dreams overlay, intertwine and make sense of relationships between ourselves, others and our environment. This makes them an important site for unlocking who we want to be in the world and overcoming blockers.
On the first day of the Re_ Festival Rob Hopkins made a powerful argument for us to play a part in unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want (this is the subtitle of his inspiring book, From What Is to What If).
As well as sharing a dazzling array of hopeful stories, Rob also drew our attention to the Imagination Sundial developed by Rob Shorter.
The aim of the Sundial is to act as a heuristic or design tool for how we might set out, intentionally and skilfully, to rebuild the imaginative capacity of people, organisations or nations. Underpinning this is the belief, as set out in ‘From What Is to What If’ that we are living in a time of imaginative decline at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative.
This decline has been noted by various researchers, and its implications are profound but rarely discussed. We believe that this decline is first and foremost underpinned by the rise in trauma, stress, anxiety and depression which, neuroscientists have shown, cause a reduction in the hippocampus, the part of the brain most implicated in imagination. As Dr Wendy Suzuki put it recently, “long-term stress is literally killing the cells in your hippocampus that contribute to the deterioration of your memory. But it’s also zapping your creativity”.
While CoLab Dudley Team member Jo Orchard-Webb kept a keen eye out for more on this tool (it feature in future lab notes), I pursued a deep time thread through the festival. On offer (and available to re-watch) were fantastic workshops led by Sarah Drummond and Rebecca Squirrell from We are Snook on longer term thinking, and by Ella Saltmarshe and Bea Karol Burks of the Long Time Project about Creating the Long Time.
The Re_Festival took place a month before the publication of Roman Krznaric’s eagerly awaited book The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, so his session on How To Be a Good Ancestor was also a top pick.
From lockdown offerings to dreaming on Dudley High Street
In Underland and Braiding Sweetgrass, and through #moralmaginations and Civic Square’s Re_Festival I found myself exposed to a myriad of pasts, an interconnected web of histories, humanity in relationship with all beings, humanity falling out of relationship with other beings. And in all I heard whispers, stories, songs and declarations of hope and reconnection.
These are some of the ideas, learnings and experiences which shaped a way of approaching our work in 2021, which fellow lab team members were quick to build on, expand and bring into action. Our next lab note will describe this approach and initial actions we’ve taken.
Let’s close here with some bold and uplifting words from the Civic Square team, who we are fortunate to learn from and with as Fellow Travellers, and are delighted to have brought closer to our work, as Strategic Partners.
We believe there is real hope for a brighter collective future, but it can’t be decided by a few people through a few frames. Department of Dreams deeply recognises the role of catalysing public and community dreaming, imagination and foresight, as well as personal and collective reflection, processing and loss. Working with visionary doers, thinkers, artists and designers, the purpose of the Department is to forge bold new regenerative futures that weave together the dreams of many.
