Daily pages - September 08, 2021

These are a few notes that I’ve written down that last few days that I wanted to get into my daily pages and expand on:

A composting cycle is really about rethinking. It’s not a big input/learning cycle, but there is learning as you find errors or questions in your personal universe.

I like this idea of composting as a mental activity. Like the composting of organic matter, it doesn’t look like there’s anything going on, but there are big changes happening. Ideas need time to mingle so connections can rise to the surface of our consciousness. I do think it’s a form of rethinking, but maybe one that is more like our default state of mind (Daydreaming) as opposed to an active process of self-questioning.

The important thing about working on ourselves, whether it’s learning or composting, is that we still need to ship creative work. We need to share what we’re thinking with others.

I’ve expanded on this a few days ago, but I wanted to add that this idea of self-work is partially the Work That Needs Doing pattern. The fact that self-work happens and we still need to ship creative work, that might be mostly in Creative Practice, but talking about how we may need a learning cycle or a composting cycle is probably just one of the options when you’re looking at Work That Needs Doing and deciding what Yours To Do.

Poet warrior

Last night they had the Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo on the radio and she read one of the poems from her latest work called Poet Warrior. I thought it captured a lot of what this book is about:

Poet Warrior reached for a gun.
She was given a paintbrush,
A saxophone, a pen.
These will be your instruments of power
The Old Ones said.
Though the gun gleamed and pranced
As a tool of takeover by governments
Even as it danced
Through the imaginations of revolutionaries
As the perfect tool for social change.
Do not be fooled, they told her.
Violence might be louder, tougher
And is often good looking.
The power of insight and compassion
Is fiercely humble and helpful.
Be ready for what the story of your age demands:
You will be tested.
There will be jealously, envy,
But the most difficult enemies will be
From your closest circle
Even your family.
You must act in a manner
That will cause no harm
To anyone, seven generations back
Or forward.
— Joy Harjo

I think that this poem captures the spirit of what I’m trying to say in the book. This is revolution through creation.

I’m revamping the Global Civilization pattern again by using an outline format. I’m trying really hard to stick to the format set as an example in Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. And rather than finding it too constrictive, I find that it brings a clarity that I want but have been struggling to produce.

A phrase in Jordan Hill’s The Coming Great Transition really struck me yesterday as the missing concept, or maybe that implied concept that I wasn’t making explicit, of the pattern. It is the idea that we need to be able to make the world better “without requiring any willing participation from existing social and political institutions.”

We don’t want to waste our time trying to change the institutions that have been successful in the current social system. That is recipe for heartache and endless frustration. We need to figure out how to create change without them.

In my notes, I point out that the current institutions are 1) centralized, 2) top-down power/control structures, and 3) sub-global in scope. In other words, they’re only concerned with a portion of the world’s population.

I’m struggling to find the right word/metaphor for what we are trying to do. Are we “doing an end-run”? That’s a football term, I’m pretty sure. Are we overcoming the opposition of these old institutions? Not sure they’re fighting directly, but maybe. Are they obstacles we’re trying to get around? Are we undermining the powers that be? (digging under the monster so it loses its footing?) Are we taking a different route to our goals? Maybe, but it doesn’t feel like a different road, it feels like a completely different kind of transportation. Maybe that the issue, that we’re dealing with a kind of paradigm shift.

The feeling I started with is this idea that we’re seeing something for the first time that already exists. We’re seeing with new eyes. We’re letting what divides us fade into the background and we’re looking for what connects us. We’re refocusing or changing our perspective, or looking through a different lens and the path is being revealed. Maybe we can think of it as the fog lifting and allowing us to see.

Anyway, regardless of how we’re describing what we’re doing, we can say that a pattern that would allow us to move forward despite the efforts or lack thereof by current institutions would seem to have three requirements that are polar opposites of the way the existing powers work: we need institutions that are 1) decentralized, 2) bottom-up or peer-to-peer power/control structures, and 3) global in scope.

That describes the nascent global civilization very well, I think.