First it was Teresa, a gorgeous German “girl” just days short of her twentieth birthday. We met at another friend’s birthday party. Teresa was living life as an adventure, filled with ideas and interests. She spoke English a mile a minut, with lots of mistakes.  Easy to understand English but for instance she said po-LIT-igan for politician and confused “economy” and “ecology”.

But she shared her thoughts and feelings in unmistakeable vividness.

That was Saturday night. Sunday Lynn and I went to Kingston to see young blues singer, Matt Anderson, 6’2″, 400 lbs., a lot to love as Matt puts it. We’d seen him before and wanted to catch the vibe again. Matt’s a generous musician; he gives it his all from the first moment, completely comfortable with what he’s doing. I’m not a big fan of the blues, and I’m not sure “the blues” covers all Matt does or is. He writes his own stuff, one-of-a-kind outpourings they seem to me, and a few covers, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” was one.

He’s a complex enough guitarist who never loses the driving sense of what he’s doing. The music comes right on through. And I had a smile on my face about the whole time. It’s watching an unselfconscious stepping back to let some truths about being human, about being Matt, come through.

I’m an amateur guitar player. What I got from Matt is that it’s not about getting all the notes right, or performing; it’s about being in or with the music, with other people.

Matt shows that music’s about the energy. So does Teresa. They’ll likely never meet, but they’ll go through life doing much the same thing. I aim to do it more myself.

www.Radical Relocalization.com needs raw organic input just like a garden.

The articles over on the site are stored in The Compost Pile. It and the whole site will benefit from your comments and input. Go ahead and toss in whatever you got on the top of your mind, and thanks!

Andrew

The evolutionary mind is a window that’s always looking out on this possibility, at least that’s one description of what it does. It sees what can be and sets about creating it, not out of effort, but just doing what it does. It’s not interested in bad guys and has already moved past to the possibility. It’s like playing a game of cards when you know what you have and playing the game to get to a win you can see. The people on your team are the ones who are going the same way too. You know you’re in a strong position because the other guys can’t see you coming.

The future’s like the elephant in the story of the blind men who each try and describe the elephant based on the part of it they can touch. Except that the future is a far vaster beast than the outside of one elephant. The evolutionary mind has some real sense of the whole beast. They’ve been dreaming of each other and are connected.  But still each moment is only dealing with one “part” of what there are also no parts of, the seamless future.

Everything is different for me when I’m in my evolutionary mind, dancing to the music of the evolutionary mind. It’s a beast.

Lurking just under the surface of relocalization efforts are the important questions, the answers to which govern our lives.

Here are just a few:

• Who’s in charge and what authority do they have?
• How do decisions get made and how are changes made?
• How are miscreants within our community handled?
• How do we treat people who disagree with us?
• What is the role of weaponry in protecting citizen assets?
• What role could a local currency play?
• What’s the mix of seriousness and lightness that can help or efforts?

And  many more. Some of these questions are uncomfortable because they strike to the heart of who we think we are. And who we think we are is very much at issue here, as the future will doubtless demonstrate by challenging us to the core.

Sooner or later, all these questions are up for revision and ordinary people like us are going to have to do the thinking. If we put it off till later, I think we’ll have already made a decision to not talk about them. (That is pretty much what we do now.) So later when we really need to, we’ll resort to our default – what we’re already doing.

This page is where I hope we can discuss an issue that’s over at Radical Relocalization that looks at the Hard Questions. There needed to be a place for others to feed in (in addition to those with whom I’ll have “interviews) and this is it.  Best to be thinking about these things now, rather than waiting till the manure hits the windfarm.

So your comments are most welcome.  I’ll answer all (unless they’re obvious flame-baiting).

The relocalizing initiatives I’m part of in Frontenac County are here, and the website to support relocalizing is here. This blog is my personal daily ruminations and meditations on the challenge and opportunity presented by the transition we’re in.

I don’t have to tell you these are times of unparalleled change. Even change is changing and it’s all changing us. It’s becoming clearer that we can’t avoid profound effects from climate change, and we seem blithely willing to assume business as usual in the face of peak oil, even though it’s not going to be business as usual.

So I’m back and looking forward to a frank examination of how humans respond and can respond to change of this magnitude. Change for which we’re ill prepared by evolution. This is where we get our crucial experience. We do have the brains and the heart . . . if we’re ready to engage them.

Full steam ahead . . . or rather, full human engagement with a challenging future.

I was thinking this watching Lynn at the computer reading The Archdruid’s Report, John Michael Greer being one of a number of writers and thinkers I keep tabs on. She, like most of our friends  get their info from thousands of different perspectives on the net; mainstream is just one of them.

Collectively we act like the black market economy in a country – say Peru – that’s strangled by official regulation and inefficiencies. Human ingenuity simply finds its way around the obstructions and that’s just what we’ve done.

This is happening everywhere in the internet world and you’re part of it too – you’re reading this! And what would be the equivalent of this post thirty years ago?

The power of the blackmarket information economy isn’t diminished because one doesn’t believe in it. Just as a driver has no choice but to respond to different traffic patterns, so we all must react and respond to the different information flows our there. Buying patterns, networks and affiliations, time spent on civic projects, the very structure of what’s out there in the world changes as the info economy changes. Everyone comes up against it wherever they are on the political spectrum.

The gap is widening between the two info economies. By and large daily papers and mainstream television make the following assumptions (though many of their writers and editors individually may not):

• that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about democracy and service rather than access to oil
• that continued growth is possible and desirable
• that peak oil is far away
• that power equals political power
• that money and political power aren’t wedded
• that the move for change comes from the top down rather than the bottom up

By omission then, the whole phalanx of possibilities that become visible when you no longer assume the above are invisible within the context of the mainstream news. So as a reader, my perspective – and I myself – become invisible. The result is that I only read the paper now to flash through for human interest. I read it like someone would look at a magazine in the waiting room, as a diversion. To use an even worse insult, as bathroom reading. And I’m less interested in diversion than I used to be.

Increasinly when I see someone reading the paper at Tim Horton’s (doughnut shop), I think of her as I would a cigarette smoker, as a holdout from a dysfunctional lifestyle, someone who hasn’t grasped what’s available here.

The gap between the two economies is hard to measure because the two don’t officially exist. Nonetheless they’re real. I’m in the unofficial reality right now writing this, and so are you Good Reader, reading it.

We watch their stories with the old man, as he saves them to the video  he’s creating.

Only one of the people arguably was doing anything positive for the planet, a British windfarm developer who is roundly defeated in his attempts to promote a windfarm in Bedfordshire. The message, as in all the vignettes, is that, well, it’s the age of stupid so nothing much succeeds. Yes, the future in 2055 is bleak indeed, though we’re seen very little of it, just a few hints of ill-defined desolation.

The film looks at today and sees only the stupidity and denial. They’re there in spades, but there’s also a dawning intelligence isn’t there? One that’s fanning a flame of real possibility and action for us. Problems and solutions arise together.

But The Age of Stupid sees the problems only. It sells our folly back to us and doesn’t provide hope, light, or insight. The intent I imagine, is that we’ll be wiser by witnessing this, but the takeaway message could easily be cynicism and hopelessness.

My bet is that human creativity and courage, people working together in concert, women and men sensitive to evolution’s new imperatives can perhaps find a way through. That going for that is the real shot we have.

But that’s The Age of Possibility, and quite another movie.

I will definitely be on his call. With Richard’s long experience in this area, I think this will be  great place to be for new and experienced hosts and conveners.  But there’s plenty of room for conversation and I’ll go ahead and have “my” call too.  (See below.)

You can hear an inspiring interview with Richard Flyer here. Among other things it outlines how and what they did in Reno (a lot). You can contact him here.  I don’t know yet what costs are involved with his call.

I’m inviting interested hosts to get together virtually this fall (a teleseminar, webinar, conference call or . . . ), at no charge or for cost, to imagine new possibilities for ourselves, to hear how and what others are doing, and to see what support we could be to each other.

Comment below or telephone me if you’re interested.

While most of us recognize that media is mediated, this media-savviness is mostly drowned out by the tidal wave of emotion-driven quasi-information that conservatives and progressives alike baste their points with. For watchers, our intellectual reservations in any moment is a poor match for our visceral and sensory faith in the ongoing stream of what we see and hear. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to believe the reality of our eyes and ears and take what they offer as real. This problem is compounded many times since we’re all in it together.  It’s that tricky Matrix again! (As I’m writing this a dog we’re house sitting is barking at a cat-shaped fabric art piece he’s taking for real.)

Our problem with media is similar to the problem that faced the Buddha as a young man. According to legend, he was raised in a  princely palace and not allowed to see the reality of human suffering and death outside the gates, till one day he accidentally saw a sick old man. He left his filtered world to find out what was outside it for himself. This finding out, his “enlightenment,” took time and effort.

That seems like how it is for us. We can choose to stay in the comforting world of our media illusions, which at least we know, or to step outside of their charms into an apparently desolate landscape. “Apparently” because we don’t know what we’ll find out there till we’ve left here. We imagine it’s bleak from this side of the off switch but from the other there could be a whole new world of possibility. We don’t know if it’ll be a rebirth or the end of hope.

Or both! Like for the Buddha what we see may not be pretty but having seen it, we have the possibility of something great we couldn’t have found in our naive innocence.

But just like it was for him (according to the story), the understanding doesn’t come easily or without a price. He subjected his own experience to a rigorous ongoing examination to separate truth from fiction. I’m not a Buddhist but I get that the only way to separate truth from fiction  is to momentarily step outside our experience and look at it critically. To exercise some version of mindfulness in other words. Holding the emotion-based blameosphere of the contemporary political landscape up to this light, one quickly sees the projection and disregard for fairness and balance.

But then we could hold the tone of the entire conversation about who’s right and who’s wrong up to examination. With a little respect for truth on our own part, we can tell when others are showing respect for others’ views,  rather than trashing them.

For my money, the interesting things happens on the other side of the off switch from the mainstream media. The conversations that bring the possibility of change, and that are more fun to boot, aren’t the one’s on radio or television. Like our dark night car ride talk, they’re the one’s that involve actual people – often face-to-face – getting on a wavelength with each other that they can see and hear and feel makes sense.