The Turn Towards Affection

December 5, 2012 Leave a comment
affection

|Photo by Patrizio Cuscito|http://http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirtaph/2282499034/sizes/m/in/photostream|

I think it could be said that so much of what ails us in this day and age stems from a severe case of fragmentation.  The combination of silos, specialization, segregation, industrialization, derivation (think processed food and “derivative” investment instruments), and abstraction has rendered us strangers and adversaries to one another, the larger systems that sustain us, and perhaps even to ourselves.  Hence the call that you see often in this blog for a more holistic view and picture, one rooted in an understanding of the systemic nature of reality.  It is also what drives our approach at IISC in terms of being more network-centric in bringing about progressive social change for healthy whole people, communities, and ecosystems.  This is fundamentally about work that reconnects us to what matters most.  And to be clear, this is not simply heady work, which keeps our minds separate from our bodies and emotional selves.  Perhaps no one says it better than farmer, poet, and land activist Wendell Berry, who in his recent Jefferson Lecture framed the solution to our current situation with the title – “It Turns on Affection.”  Below you will find an excerpt, that I shared this very morning with the Food Systems New England Network Design Team:

“I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”

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