What About You?
August 4, 2009 Leave a commentI was blown away by one of Adrienne Maree Brown’s blog posts last week. In writing “consider it…” she manages to lift a veil and give us a glimpse into a way of being that is significantly more free. I was blown away in so many ways, but I was particularly moved by the very fact that such words were coming from within our movement. There is now a corner of movement work where you can find razor sharp analysis powerfully combined with an understanding of Self that is nothing short of illuminated, it is no longer an either/or, and this is good news for all of us.
As I spend more of my time calling out this zeitgeist, I am breathing myself into that part of the work where hope is vibrant, potentiality brews and generative forces insist on creating something new. This is the part of paradigm shift that takes the idea of networks to another level by forcing us to contend with the unplannable and to devote more of our time to creating the conditions for emergence. This is the part of paradigm shift that makes the highest demand of us as people – and how we think about this “us.”
I am inspired, moved, driven by Adrienne’s words because if indeed we are to successfully engage with new forms of organization – new ways of being-with – then we must also conceive of our very selves in different ways. Who and what is the singularity of you? What is the specialness of you? What are you to do with the unique combination of historical events that have come to bear your very name?
As I make my own deductions, it seems to me that in Adrienne’s post the work of movement and the quest for liberation makes a direct claim on how you answer these questions. And I stand in collusion with her to say that if any of this talk about new paradigms, about networks, emergence and interconnection is to bear any fruit, then we better pay attention to what she is proposing. We can not pretend to remake the world if we are doing no work to re-imagine how we understand ourselves in it.
Who and how we are, and the ways in which we dare (or not) to conceive of our role in this story, will be a determining factor in what the world looks like once we have walked in it.
She said it best, so I’ll leave you with her words:
“history happens when all of those forces merge, and it is the fusion that advances through time.”
“consider – what are you being called to? why aren’t you listening?”