Why do you do it? What is your answer?

[Katrien Vander Straeten]

Today I met with some good people whom I met over the last couple of months working on school recycling. They are concerned parents, some of them environmental activists. We were talking about a huge fair of all these good efforts in our town, when one of them asked me: Why do you want to organize this? 

 

I can't describe the silence that fell, not because of the question, but because of the expression on my face. It was a moment of truth for many of us, myself most of all. In fact, I surprised myself. I promised myself, that very moment, to be truthful. 

 

I said: I don't do it because I think I am going to change anything. I believe it is already too late. But hell I want to go out in a blaze of community, comforted and embraced by friends. Truly Transition is that for me. It is the only way to make everyone come peacefully together around this terrible truth. I added that that's how I feel and that if they feel differently I will celebrate that.

 

Well, let's just say I shocked them - the very people I am now wooing to become fellow initiators! But I want to be honest. I don't know, now, if I've scared them away. Time will tell.

 

What do you say when they ask? 

 

I guess we started some of the Heart work.

 

Katrien

 

[Alex]

Oh Katrien. We should have lunch some time. I've been practicing truthfulness for years now, but it's trickier than it seems. Mostly because there're many ways to express the same truth. I pick based on what I think will maximize the chance that my message is really received.

 

The question "Why?", is particularly intense. The real answer lies with our values and I don't think most people are used to communicating directly about them. I've found that answering in "story form" can be incredibly well received. So my story (and I emphasize that it's *mine* the whole way through with my pronoun use) might go:

1) I've read about the diminishing availability of our Earth's fossil fuel supplies (action or background info)

2) I feel worried about our community's ability to withstand the coming necessary transition off fossil fuels (feeling - hopefully people can connect with the emotion I'm feeling)

3) [pause, and then] So I'm thinking that re-localizing our food system by supporting local farmers/CSAs/Coops can make for a softer landing. Do you want to join our "Sustainable Food" group to help make it happen? (solution and/or request)

 

I included #3 b/c sometimes people, out of an inability or unwillingness to just sit with negative emotion, will push it away or dismiss it. I don't want that to happen - I want them to join me. We need all hands on deck! My current thinking is to include something about the solution at the end and some request for engaging right now or in the future.

 

>Well, let's just say I shocked them

I suspect the shock came from their inability to relate to what you said. This might be because your answer didn't include emotions they could connect with. Maybe it could have been more "heartfelt" (I put that in quotes b/c I'm sure your answer was from the heart, but I mean that it didn't include heart-like things - like emotions).

Probably, you haven't scared anyone away permanently, but you probably didn't "pull them in" as you might have wanted. If you stay on this course, I think it's possible that people will be scared off though simply because they don't understand you. 

 

>But I want to be honest.

This is probably a uniquely, really bizarre time in the human psyche. People that think about our predicament and see it's size might feel a lot of really strong, negative emotions. You might bottle these up, meditate upon them, or try to talk it out with someone else. But that someone might not have the emotional space or willingness to listen at that time, and so the message isn't received as "can you understand this deep sadness that I feel?", it's received as all manner of other things.

 

Being conscious of this (and conscious of how conversations I'm in end up going), we make clear that we're going into emotional territory. Maybe we do this by setting time aside for it (though, by the time it rolls around, you feel fine :). Or maybe we need to figure out a way to create emotional space for this on the fly. I haven't figured this out yet.

 

>What do you say when they ask?

How about: Because when I learned about all of the ecological problems we humans are creating for ourselves, I got worried about the path we're on and realized that we need to live *with* the Earth instead of just *on* it. I'm doing this because I want to live in a world where humans are living in harmony with allll the Earth's living beings.

[David Eggleton]

Alex, your considerations yield nourishing fruits, enabling you to pack a lot of wisdom in these paragraphs.  Thanks for investing and sharing as you do.

A general conclusion I recently articulated:  We are to face and move forward, taking considered steps and engaging authentically with the lives around us.  This is to live in process and participate in creation.  No alternate ways combine life enhancement and life affirmation so well.

So glad to be in this with you both.

[Katrien Vander Straeten]

Hi Alex,

 

I celebrate your story and the passion with which you tell it. It's my story too, 99% of the time. Positive, hopeful, action-packed, and I believe it 100%. But, for me, all that work is the road to community, not the end goal. So I don't believe that that story, about "landing softly," is the same truth expressed differently as "let's go out in a blaze of friendship". There is a fundamental difference. We really should get together over lunch and discuss it.

 

About my honest moment, this was a special audience. My listeners were people who have worked on some of these issues for years, and they have been telling that story too, one way or the other. I've had talked with them personally and they've told me about their frustration (and their successes) with that story. So when I said what I said, I knew we were in the "inner circle" as it were. I could - I *had* to be - honest. And of course the emotion was on my face - sorry not to have added that to my message. I was smiling, because it is a wonderful l dream that I have there - a bit melancholy, I'll admit, but as intensely beautiful a future for my family that I can imagine, doom or no.

Well, a day has passed and in the meantime two of my friends have called me and without betraying their confidence I can say it was a positive thing for them. 

I believe many of us have this fear, either acknowledged or not, either a certainty at the center of our rhetoric or a tiny niggling possibility in the backs of our minds, that this is not going to end well, that we won't land softly. As for myself, I feel I can acknowledge it now without letting it bring me down in despair and inaction and unhappiness. It's been years and some grey hair in the making, and maybe tomorrow I might think differently again. But today it comforts me and its seems to have comforted my friends as well.

Tomorrow we meet about Earth Day and they will be assured of my deepest commitment, knowing where it's coming from.

Hey, I love this, the having to write it all out and especially the openness with each other that we practice here. Thank you!

 

Katrien

[Alex]

David and Katrien - I'm glad you found my paragraphs and paragraphs helpful. Honestly, I sometimes worry about having written too much so I try to make it as concentrated as possible, hanging/holding on to the idea that I'll be asked for clarification if need be.

 

Katrien - When you first wrote, "I guess we started some of the Heart work." I was going to say, "not really, if that's how you did it". Having read that your audience was ready for what you had to say leads me to think that yeah, maybe you drd got started on some "Heart work".

 

Another example of "the message sent" not being the same as "the message received" - my note only mentioned a softer landing. I never said "land softly". One might say that it's telling that you interpreted it this way. At the same time, it's telling about me because "softer landing" doesn't specify what it is we're in for otherwise. How about, "softer than the really rough landing we're in for"? That'd be the "truth" I'd share with a "special audience".

Though, to be perfectly honest, that's not really my truth because I'm not sure how rough of a landing I think we're in for. Anywhere from rough to really rough, I suppose. I also don't know (or have a sense of) the time horizon. Certainly I don't find myself thinking about it too much because I'm already doing all I can (as best as I see it). I could use some more "here's the deep do-do we're in" conversations. I know Judith is interested.

Speaking of which, Judith wanted us metrowest/worcester Transitioners to get together. Another opportunity.

[Glenn Saunders]

I bet it felt great after saying that!

 

I'm so proud of you, regardless of whether you've broken some TT commandment or something.

 

[Tom Mazur]

Katrien said:

I believe many of us have this fear, either acknowledged or not, either a certainty at the center of our rhetoric or a tiny niggling possibility in the backs of our minds, that this is not going to end well, that we won't land softly. As for myself, I feel I can acknowledge it now without letting it bring me down in despair and inaction and unhappiness. It's been years and some grey hair in the making, and maybe tomorrow I might think differently again. But today it comforts me and its seems to have comforted my friends as well.

 

As Ive been poking around on the forum and blogs the past few days, Ive been noticing there seems to be some energy that speaks of "doom and gloom" as a thing that cannot be looked at with love-- as the enemy itself-- not here necessarily in this thread, but in many threads -- this thing we call "negative" or "doom and gloom" or "not end well", this MAY JUST become a fact... it may just come to be, we dont know... we dont know!

 

but whatever comes, and whatever is looking at the notions of what may come, and whatever hopes for things to come or not come-- whatever looks at the future, and believes there is such a thing- that can be met with love, with peace, with care, with "hospice" (as a friend of mine recently put it) -- there is nothing doom and gloom about learning to be a hospice worker, to meet whatever suffering there may come to be-- there is nothing negative about palliative care-- and these things MAY well be needed for our planet, for our dear Mother who we love--  we LOVE!-- this is not negative in any way-- and I see this love clearly in Katrien's post -- Love DEMANDS honesty about what is existent NOW-- not what may come in the future-- because we dont know-- and so, if some of us are healers, and we feel the pain and suffering caused by fear of a future that NONE of us can know with any certainty, then hospice (honesty) is the most loving of acts, the most positive of acts, even if the medicine stung a bit at first. (and even if the care-worker was a bit unsure of their technique)

 

there is no question of Heart work in this

there is no question of the Heart work of this entire group-- here you all are, loving and caring enough to be here, sharing looking struggling considering... there is no question of it here-- see that, see that alone, and there is nothing but positive to come, no matter what happens.

[Katrien Vander Straeten]

Wonderful, Tom. That is exactly it. The tension between the uncertainty of now and different kind of uncertainty of the future need acknowledgment so that we can be honest with ourselves and those we interact with, our friends and loved ones but also those for whom we raise awareness. Honesty, hospitability (inclusion!), all come together in "hospice." What a beautiful and fitting word!

(My mother used to a palliative worker, and it was work she *loved* more than anything else she did and, is doing, in her life. She has always said, that there is so much love there, in dying.)

I won't let fear and hatred of that possibility erode my joy of making new friends, building community. And trying to ignore or  deny it isn't much  better either, actually comes down to fear and hatred as well. So, accept it as a possibility, embrace it. And move on!

Where else is there to go? But let's go together.

Kaat