Learning Spirals — fellow traveller learning notes on testing out new practices in a pandemic

Local knowledge: a wild garlic foraging spot shared in our conversations about sense of place

We have popped our shared learning below from the first in a series of conversations with our Fellow Travellers convened on CoLab Dudley’s Virtual High Street. These conversations are intended to support our collective learning as we all navigate change in ever more uncertain times.

We are lightly framing these conversations in terms of questions rooted in the practice of commoning. The beginning of these conversations started here in a lab note we shared 2 weeks ago as the reality of the pandemic revealed itself: “Germs of change: how might the triad of commoning help us reimagine and begin practicing possible futures during the COVID-19 pandemic”

This opener led to a cathartic and honest conversation last week with fellow travellers as we focussed upon:

What have we been thinking in relation to what our work will look and feel like over coming weeks/months?

How have we been adapting our work and applying creative solutions?

Are we / how are we considering a longer view, and what tactics might help that?

To this end we each discussed one thing that we are trying out at the moment — from mindsets to practical stuff — that we are finding the most fruitful or helpful in your work. What we found was that we are all …

trying out new, as well as old & trusted practices to help re-imagine ourselves in this moment. At the same time we are beginning to reflect upon what these experiments enable for our future moments from the personal to the global scale.

Here are our notes on the practices we are experimenting with:

1. “The things I will let go of list” — stuff that has been on the to do/ must do/ feel obliged to do list for so long that really wasn’t that crucial to begin with that needs to be let go of! *— Nick & Ali are experimenting with this
2. The revisiting of new daily structures to give order to chaos, enable focus and purpose — but also exploring new content through this re-structuring like alternative curriculum add-ons for the kids while home schooling — Karolina is experimenting with this
3. Carving out new spaces, rhythms & times of day to be present for yourself and your family — Karolina, Ali and Lorna are experimenting with this
4. Revisiting sense of place as old & new neighbourly connections are forged — via acts of kindness, reaching out, gifting, reciprocity, creative solidarity at whole street level, sharing of local nature based knowledge like where to forage at the moment for wild garlic, shared growing spaces — we are all experimenting with this
5. Noticing and nurturing new healthy spatial neighbourhood flows and redefining what our roles are in our immediate local neighbourhoods — eg use of parks previously made unusable by cars & busy roads; bikes brought out of garages as our preferred form of transport now; or creative window displays, and shared growing spaces — all enabling new connections to nature in our local spaces - Ali, Jo & Karolina are experimenting with this
6. Balancing action or actively embracing the possibilities of this new context with the necessary care for our own emotional and mental health in a time of crisis — we are all experimenting with this
7. Noticing and nurturing slow living patterns in our lives to try to decouple from our collective addiction to outputs / units of labour/ efficiency — wondering on the what & where focus of our respective ‘care wealth’ will be. This is so key to the social life of commoning — Nick, Lorna and Ali are experimenting with this
8. Putting hope in action and for weaving more regenerative patterns into “living where we live.” What would it look like to respond to COVID-19 “from the ground up”? *Taking “ground up” in its double meaning of a) grassroots, local, responsive and resilient like the Puerto Rican ”mutual aid centres” features in the “The Response” documentary; and b) “ground up” as literally from the soil, getting back in touch with soil and food cycle as a way to healing ourselves and our planet.) — Sam is experimenting with this
9. In times of uncertainty and flux part of the necessary work maybe the work on ourselves as new world-views & linked behaviours become possible partly through the enforced new socio-economic context, through the reorientation and reimagining of the agency of natural & common spaces, and through our new interaction with time & the routines and rituals that invites.

*P.S. the emerging ritual or practice of “the letting go list” has taken on all new big, beautiful, creative and collective life in the minds of the CoLab Dudley team and CoLab Dudley Collective. So much more to follow! We are excited.

An invitation to explore the social life of commoning in this context

We agreed to reconvene on 8th April to explore these practices and experiments some more in terms of the social life of commoning. To aid us in the next exploration we are asking ourselves the questions below inspired by patterns of the social life of commoning identified by Bollier & Helfrich:

How might we cultivate shared purpose & values?

How might we ritualize togetherness?

How are we modelling and inviting the practice of gentle reciprocity?

How might our response invite a deeper communion with nature?

If you would like to join us on 8 April then contact Lorna at: lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk.

Future conversations with fellow travellers will also look at the patterns of peer governance through commoning and provisioning through commoning. But firstly, to explore the concept of the social life of commoning behind these first set of questions you can access Chapter 4 “The Social Life of Commoning” from Free, Fair & Alive - the insurgent power of the commons by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (2019) here.