The Autumn Equinox: a time for appreciation
The Autumn Equinox signals harvest time, and while we’re not (yet) growing food through CoLab Dudley, we have been building social soil, tending seeds of change and learning through experiments about what might contribute to a productive and regenerative social ecosystem in Dudley.
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be sharing yields from our first year of work on #emergentcultures. A series of short lab notes on Do Fest Experiments will focus on what we did this summer. They will be followed by more in depth notes on what we learned and questions generated which have informed our next design. We’ll be uploading resources we’ve created so that others can reuse, recycle and reimagine them. And we’ll be sharing our plans for the coming year in relation to:
- opening a creative hub on Dudley High Street
- everyday doing and making together
- change being led by members of our growing Collective
- activating spaces and places through creative interventions and projects
- supporting learning and knowledge sharing
But today we pause to appreciate our harvest and share gratitude.
Notable yields from the past year include:
- Holistic goals, which frame and focus our work and conversations.
- GUIDEing principles, which guide our behaviours, decisions and designs, and will help us demonstrate impact over time.
- Permaculture inspired designs for our work, which informed our convening, network weaving and experiments in 2019.
- Do Fest co-design and detectorism, including resulting collective learning and design questions.
- A supportive Collective of doers, social entpreneurs and creatives eager to work on projects and change together.
- A continually growing, connected network of Fellow Travellers around the UK and the world.
- Projects such as Crafternoon and Repair Cafe Dudley sustaining through convening by local doers, tinkerers and social entpreneurs using the resources already available around them.
We are particularly grateful for:
- The abundance of creatives, social entpreneurs and doers coming together, leading change and aspiring to build relationships to align around an aspiration to cultivate a kinder, more creative and connected town centre.
- New and emerging relationships with people from organisations located in St Thomas’s Quarter and people working on plans to improve St Thomas’s Quarter.
- People in our networks and the ideas, thinking and depth they help us bring to the work.
- The space and scope we are afforded as a social lab to develop systems mindsets and to learn about and apply systems approaches.
- Being supported to undertake slower, longer, deeper work than would be permitted under a business-as-usual approach.
Appreciation and gratitude contribute to an abundance mindset. Practicing them regularly can help you shift to this way of thinking. As can focusing on quality rather than quantity, flows of resources rather than scarcity of resources, and paying attention to real wealth and different capitals. I’ll be running a workshop on real wealth at a Reaching Communities in the Black Country event later this week.
Mindset shifts, such as to abundance thinking, are an important part of our work on #emergentcultures.
We’d love to hear what you are grateful for right now.
- What has come to fruition through your efforts?
- What unexpected ripples have you noticed?
In times like these, when the world is literally burning, gratitude seems a rather insipid response. Roars of outrage and cries of grief seem more what the moment calls for.
And yes, we need those, too.
But gratitude can have great power.
Gratitude is a practice, which means we must practice, build up the gratitude muscles as if thankfulness were a weight we practice lifting. It’s the antidote to envy, self-pity, self-loathing, resentment and fear. When we express gratitude to the world, we have that much more motivation to save it. And when we feel gratitude, we acknowledge that we are not all-powerful. We are dependent on others to meet our needs, and we have an obligation to give back.
Starhawk (https://starhawk.org)
