A read from the weekend:
Murmurations: Returning to the Whole, adrienne maree brown, Yes! Magazine. Encountered via the Dense Discovery newsletter.
One of the first steps we can take towards generating internal accountability is to develop an assessment of why the world is as it is. This requires us to leap from the uninformed faith we have in the societal myths we were given as children, to the informed faith that we need in order to co-create the real world as adults. This informed faith is based not in cultural myths, but instead in lived experience, political education, and analysis. And this informed faith can allow us to embark on the right assessment, which then helps us find the balance between understanding the systems that have most deeply shaped us, and the responsibility we have over our own lives, choices, and impacts.
This makes me think back to something I linked last week: Seeing wetiko (in The Great Mind Virus).
How does this connect for me? I'm thinking of the impetus to see beyond social illusions -- see the water in which we swim for what it is. To move towards new systems that account for more than ourselves. To learn to unthink our core conceptions of politics and governance.
The fragmentation that has resulted from colonial constructs of race, gender, class, and power has wounded many of us so deeply that we identify more with the wound than with any experience of wholeness or oneness. Because we identify with the wound, we fight against each other over differences that don’t need to be battles. We opt in to these constructs, often without conscious choice.
I think what resonates for me in this piece is the idea that we are a species in denial. The articulation of the need to engage with that in meaningful and constructive ways without shying away from the harm of it all.
I want to live in a world where humanity has a more generous, encompassing view of what the world is and our place in it. I don't know how we get from here to there, but it feels like what's talked about here -- cultivating the ability to dispel illusions and accepting accountability -- is a fundamental part of it.
It hadn’t always. She’d grown up with flags everywhere, learning Founding Fathers history on base. To her, America was a myth, a dream, a story people told, and like a lot of first impressions, she had not realized just how right that one was until it was too late. ... Pop had fought for this country, and so had Mom in a sense, and so had all the beautiful, broken, uniformed boys and girls she’d grown up idolizing on base. But it was not her country. She knew it only through bad history and untold stories in languages Pop had not wanted her to learn. You had to work to know this place as it truly was—she’d had to work, in her own heart, to peel back the skin of what she was taught. To excavate.
—Max Gladstone, Last Exit