Dag: 17. juni 2017

Billedlig talt: Widening Circles by Pat van Boeckel

Throughout my life I have heard the message, again and again, that the end of the world may be near. The atomic bomb, leaking nuclear power plants, climate change: these are just some of the items on the list. The good news is that we as humans are still around. Yet, with every new calamity that takes place, people want to bury their heads in the sand again.

Photo: Stills of Joanna Macy from the film Widening Circles by Pat van Boeckel.
Photo: Stills of Joanna Macy from the film Widening Circles by Pat van Boeckel.

I made a plan for setting out to meet Joanna Macy. She is an American environmental activist, already for fifty years, standing firm in protection of Earth. She developed a method that supports people in coping with the ecological and social crises of our times. Dealing with it without succumbing to apathy, despair or cynicism. She calls this “The Work That Reconnects.” Presently, trainings in this are provided all over the world. At the moment, Joanna is 88 years of age. The widening circles around her are teeming with life. As I travel along America’s West Coast, I meet several people who have been deeply influenced by Joanna. Each in their own way gives a personal expression to the practice of The Work that Reconnects. Moving to action rather than to throw in the towel.

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Letters from the Past to the Future. Received. / Nora Bateson

Credit: Kai de Fontenay / Father and daughter, Cambridge 1978

We live in a world in which distrust and greed and violence masquerade as common sense, and in which the pathways of distrust and greed and violence are rapidly becoming self-validating. By following those pathways we create the social and international structures, the premises upon which we must live. By choosing the «common sense» of distrust, we choose also the progressive truth of distrust. We cause horror to become the only pathway to wisdom. 

Gregory Bateson, letter to the UC Regents 1979.

I keep these letters from my father, Gregory Bateson to the University of California Regents close. While they are not personal mementos, they are beautiful treasures that speak deeply to me. They remind me how to think with a bigger heart, and bigger perspective. His wisdom in these pieces continues to be a source of both goodness in the world, and of dire warning. For those of us who consider ourselves “systems thinkers” I think these letters are worth studying. They illustrate a kind of perceptive reach into the meta-meanings of events and deeds that can otherwise be taken at more surface levels, and misunderstood.

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