Tools for Regenerative Renaissance: A Regenerative Love letter
If you were ever curious how a “thank you” might be expanded from 2 to over 1000 words, and still overflow, here is a specimen for you.
Upon finishing writing this post, it became clear to me that, more than anything, it is a love letter. So I decided to frame it as such:
A love letter dedicated to the stewards of the regenerative renaissance
In it, I speak about my very personal and subjective experience navigating the Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance course in six weeks from February into March. I share what struck me in the specifics and in the aggregate effect in me of all of these specifics.
So, thank you too, for being here and for following along as I reflect on my learning journey. Let’s get into it.
I’m currently living in Athens, Greece, where I call home. When I happen to tell people here that I went to graduate school for technology policy, I most often get blank stares. It’s an obscure concept. Even I only had a vague idea of what it entailed, going into it.
We talked about lots of things in my masters. But it’s what we didn’t talk about that I’d come to find more fascinating; all of the unknown unknowns. Many of these unknown unknowns, concepts and terms like “steward ownership” or “horizontal organizations”, I never came across before the course that I discuss in this post. And despite studying technology in a business school, I didn’t have a single seminar about cryptocurrencies, or cooperatives.
Already, for most people from my direct environment here in Greece, this whole paragraph above is mumbo jumbo about stuff that doesn’t feel even remotely relevant to their lives.
This is something that needs to be acknowledged.
It’s so easy for one to go about their lives without ever coming across any of these concepts, ever having to understand them. Not to say that it necessarily points to a life of contentment with what is.
For some of us, I have an inkling, we weren’t ever really taught or told that we can imagine the status quo otherwise.
In fact, we’ve likely been discouraged from it.
Quite a shame, for a whole generation of young people, full of creativity, hopes, and dreams, to be (not-so) politely told to give these gifts up.
I dedicate this introduction to Greece: a place that aches deeply, but is still fighting itself.
Roads converging
I was thinking the other day about the probabilistic chain of events that led up to me crossing paths with the Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance course.
It’s not like I am part of any community of practice. You could just think of me as a stereotype of a young woman, fresh out of 6 years of university, having studied something mostly because they said “you have to.” Then, looking for just any job, again because “you have to”, and “finding something that aligns with your values is out of the question.”
“You’re exchanging your services and time for money”, someone told me last year so I’d stop resisting being a cog in a machine that isn’t working.
I went the other way. I resisted, with all the mindfulness available to me.
“What are you doing, if not applying to consulting firms or big tech?” they’ll ask you at the business school.
I am listening while I let my values speak to me
is the answer that I didn’t have words for, back then.
And sure enough, my values spoke. Gradually, I was shown to a whole new pocket of this world, and a wealth of different possible ways to experience the Western world, which before felt like an alienating and all-encompassing cloud of extractive capitalism.
The people of the Regenerative Renaissance
My eyes were opened to all the other people who took the road(s) less traveled by, in order to listen to something in their hearts that sang songs of compassion. For society, for the Earth, for anyone or anything. Such people have been a catalyst in my personal journey.
Phoebe and Stephen were inspirations like this. And so was everyone else that I met and shared space with at the Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance (TFRR) course.
TFRR was about the Regenerative Renaissance, just as much as it was about the tools.
Sure, we discussed existing projects. Sure, we looked at practical applications of abstract utopian solarpunk concepts. At a deeper level, though, something more was happening.
We were re-membering utopia together.
By remembering the people around the world who are living out their vision of utopia, or working within the limitations of their context (social, economic, cultural, political) to create a brighter future for their community.
So TFRR was also about community, about reconnecting the pieces of a regenerative future for the world.
There were many people in the course that I didn’t get to talk to. In fact, most people. Some of them, I don’t even know their names or what they look like. But I still feel a closeness with every single person who was part of this course.
I don’t know if we’ll ever cross paths again, but I know that if we do, we’ll have a lot to catch up on. Much like seeing an old friend. The fact that we once took this tour around the regenerative world that’s unfolding in parallel to our everyday reality, away from the awareness of most people, will be a fresh occasion for reflection and remembering.
Snapshots of our sessions
I will not elaborate too much on the guest speakers that joined us, other than to say that they fueled our inspiration tanks every week. In fact, there was a positive feedback loop, whereby every week the audience itself came back more and more engaged and ready to learn and ask questions and discuss.
One session that definitely stood out was Week 4. Sam Slade from Percolab joined as a guest speaker and led us through experiential group exercises for horizontal organizing. These exercises will probably be something to remember for everyone who participated. Really, it was an experiment of relating to another -effectively, a stranger, in this case- in ways we are not used to, with an attitude of radical openness and transparency. I can say for myself, I hardly see this around me.
In one exercise, we were prompted to share openly in small groups a few things about our finances. I noticed a sense of resistance and uneasiness in me. These are often discussions that invite highly judgmental attitudes. Naturally, there may be a fear associated with that, one that may not be so easy to let go of…
Besides Sam’s session, I could not go without mentioning the bonus session with Charles Eisenstein.
Listening to Charles speak was good for the soul. Not because he’s airy-fairy; rather, because he’s not.
The regenerative future, and the “Great Turning” towards it, he said, is not a certainty, in his opinion. He used to think otherwise.
It can be off-putting for members of communities of regenerative practice to hear this, and probably more off-putting for solarpunk visionaries.
The regenerative future, too, is a probabilistic outcome.
We don’t know whether it’ll come to be — that doesn’t mean that people should quit bringing life to this future. For some, rather, bringing life to this future is the way of life.
The effort won’t be a sunk cost, even if the future turns out otherwise…
Our precious guides
I want to dedicate part of this letter to Stephen and Phoebe, who brought the essence to this course. The two of them may not have occupied much time during the sessions. And the time that they did occupy — the first half of each session — was mostly a waterfall of information. A handing out of tools.
What it wasn’t so much, is their personal experience of and with these tools — Where did they find them? How did they use them?
Reflecting on this, maybe I would have liked to have heard more of that personal perspective. Perhaps I’m saying this because I know Phoebe a bit better and the projects she’s been involved in, and I’ve had a glimpse enough of her journey to know that I would love to hear her talk about it. Same with Stephen’s.
Even though that didn’t happen, their unique fingerprint came through anyway. It was very present in everything about the course — how the course was structured, facilitated, guided. All done with great care, the greatest care. Care in the details, care about everyone’s experience navigating the course.
The course itself was a reflection of its content:
regenerative, dynamic, human, experimental, welcoming, creative, supportive
All of these qualities Phoebe and Stephen managed to imbue into this 6-week course. It only feels fitting to acknowledge that it takes skill to carry out an experiment like this. From creating a course to creating community, all from scratch.
I told Phoebe right from the get-go: the seeds that are being planted during this course will go a long way.
Diverging again
To close this letter, I’ll give a picture of what I am walking out of the course with.
I’m obviously walking out with tools: tools for more effective and inclusive meetings at work, ways to support local cooperatives or farmers practicing regenerative agriculture, to mention a few.
More than that, I am walking out feeling part of something big with a sense of home to it. “Ecos” (<οίκος= home) captures this best.
Most importantly, I’m walking out of this course with a new lens of looking at the world around me. A comprehensive picture of new ways of doing, that support and enhance our being — and that of the planet.
I don’t know precisely how this new lens will manifest in my life after the course, but I do know with certainty that it will.
The tools for the Regenerative Renaissance are ever-evolving, growing, changing. They’re facilitating an ecosystem that is so alive, because its purpose is to be alive.
And so, this lens, this way of seeing and understanding, is what will stay with us as we each continue on our journey.*
A final heartfelt thanks to everyone who was part of this, and for these two beautiful people that made this learning journey possible.
Signing off,
Melina
*That, and of course the stellar course notes and the course Wiki currently under construction, our shared online toolkit.
