emergent strategy shaping change changing worlds by adrienne maree brown

Some of us know humans aren’t meant to be the center of creation. Some of us know there is no supremacy amongst us as a species. We know each other’s pain and complexity now we know we are one interconnected ecosystem-so far the only planetary development specifically like us. We live inside the lineage of relatively ignorant imaginations, which were obsessed with protection and domination. We live (and die) inside of systems that were imagined centuries ago by those ambitious and narrow minds of colonists and patriarchs. 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 informed faith is based not in cultural myths, but instead in lived experience, political education, and analysis. 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. 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. We must become accountable to our time, our earth, our species, our people, and our loved ones, from the inside out. We are cultivating within ourselves a transformative practice that helps us heal from what the world has been, while generating what the world will be. This, to me, is the work of internal accountability.

So I put these two wisdoms in direct relationship with each other more and more often these days: given the time on the clock of the world, how do we need to transform ourselves to transform the world? How do we need to be? How do we need to grow ourselves in order to both spark and cultivate the kinds of species’ evolutions we want to see? What do we need to practice? It’s her birthday month, and here she is, spirit teaching. I see her speaking them with her hands cupping the future in front of her. Grace visits me with the insistent memory of her words.

Each one of us is an individual practice ground for what the whole can or cannot do, will or will not do. Which means my thinking, my actions, my relationships, and my life create a front line for the possibilities of the entire species. The world, the values of the world, are shaped by the choices each of us makes. And as in any war, there is a front line, a place where the action is urgent, where the battle will be won or lost. The way I think of it now is in the framework of the imagination battle: there is a war going on for the future-it is cultural, ideological, economic, and spiritual. Grace also said, “We must transform ourselves to transform the world,” which is taking me years to understand and embody.

Emergent strategy shaping change changing worlds by adrienne maree brown