"What is our responsibility to others?"
...looking down the planning road, what might a Local Power-Down Plan look like? The problems are not insuperable...I hope you'll join the discussion to solve them....
Handout:
Planning the Future We Want
All being an artist means is to have the courage to look beneath the lies spun to ensnare us. And though it takes courage to stand alone, when all your fellows are ensnared, once you look at truth baldly, you feel blessed, because, really, what else is there? And what a gift, the power to cut through illusion – propaganda, lies – and reveal truth – the shock of essential truth is food for the soul.
The current social arrangement has led to a cultural crisis of caring.
On a global scale, we’re experiencing the extension of the commodity form to everything, removing from our personal understanding how the goods we use were made, getting in the way of honest relationships with each other – engulfing and diminishing all of life…unless – unless we decide to make a better world.
What this extension of the commodity form, this separation of conception from execution – especially as we now make fewer and fewer of the commodities we use in our lives, importing ever more – means on the personal level is an end to wholeness and an end to a sense of agency in determining our own lives.
The job serves to remind us always of our dependent status through bosses, hierarchy, authoritarianism, disciplining, the note in the personnel file – with a veneer of scientific authority (via so-called “management theory”) bestowed on it all.
The separation of conception from execution means that we are made into instruments that realize the dreams of others, never our own. It means we have no time or energy to make sense of the world or to imagine how to change it through the realization of our own dreams.
Each of us longs to be recognized in our culture of invisibility.
Decisions that affect our lives happen behind the scenes. We happen behind the scenes – no one knows our true selves, save a fate-assigned few.
“We are too big for jobs” – but the longer we’re in a job, the smaller we get. I’m sure we could make an equation of it:
Size of the soul = the reciprocal of number of years worked times the ratio of total deferred dreams to the number of days of work-related depression. (I’m starting to feel depressed just thinking about it.)
The job keeps us from developing our wholeness and our wholeness is what makes life worth living. The job keeps us from uniting with our fellows, learning from our ancestors, and living respectfully with all life.
So…what can we do?
We can begin meeting and talking, considering some precepts, like:
Live simply,
Help each other.
No more settling
for less than what we want.
When we refuse to settle, when we decide to live our wholeness, we expand the realm of the ‘possible’ – for ourselves, and for the people in our lives – breaking that Groundhog Day curse we’ve been living under for far too long.
We need strategies; we need a plan.
We need approaches; we need a path.
We need steps we can follow,
And a view of the end;
We need patience to get there,
And a place to begin –
You have to have sound footing for a leap of consciousness – or of faith.
Each person’s “start-point” is when and where he / she – you / me – decides to start. That could be today, a year from today, or five years from today; it all depends on where you are right now. The important thing is to start.
A place to begin:
A circle dance – going around the room, sharing and talking, with lots of listening:
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What is your art (skill, gift, love – that which you do unbidden, without force)? What do you do really? Who are you really?
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Have you ever tried to live that art? What happened?
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Have you ever thought about only doing your art? If so, what stops you?
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If you could start buying the goods you use from someone here, if they were of better quality, and less expensive, would you?
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If you could turn to people here for your entertainment – film, spoken word, music, dance – would you? If not, what would stop you?
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If you could plan a future where we could all live our wholeness, fully, what would it look like? Don’t you deserve this? Do you want this for your children – or for all children?
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What if we started buying from each other, instead of corporations?
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What if we devoted our time, attention and allegiance to building the future we deserve, instead of to the job?
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What if we went beyond talking about these things and started doing these things? How would we start?
Little by little
we whittle and whittle
away the death-worship,
the denial of meaning,
returning to reverence,
to spiral renewal,
to springs out of winters,
and to all things communal.
Nascence to End Work Savings Endowment (NEWSE)
P. O. Box 3952
Berkeley, CA 94703
510.420.8054
nas2endwork@gmail.com
http://www.nas2endwork.org