Meditations on an Emergency

What does it take to change course?

In the days after the election, the MIT U-Lab program held their final live session of the year. Otto Scharmer pointed us to the U Model, the guiding model of awareness-based systems change (see my last post for context). The U Model is a visualization of how we can tap into the collective to sense our world, and to problem-solve and act, together. It follows three layers of depth: Open mind, open heart, and open will. All of this leads to our emerging future possibility, the dream we all share for a better world.

But Scharmer pointed us to the bizarro U Model, the evil one, a mirror image: Closed mind, closed heart, closed will. The upside down U leads us down a path that may sound familiar: Denial, blaming, abuse, self-destruction. Where open will evokes courage and hope, closed will speaks to fear and despair.

It's a two-roads moment. How much farther will we travel down the road to self-destruction? Brawling in the back seat like feuding siblings while nobody drives? What does it take to change course?

Open Mind, Open Heart, Open Will

The clue is in the U model: Open mind, open heart, open will.

In the past weeks, I’ve heard a new story, one that gives me hope. For outside the U Lab and the Changemakers Lab, I’ve heard a collective call for something different.

One of us, Caleb, worked as a bartender in Seattle until 2016, when Trump was first elected. He felt a call. We need to talk to each other, he told me recently.

So he found a truly strange activist role, as a “meta credible messenger” for a peacemaking organization in Oregon. He took his love of people and his bartender’s gift of gab to right wing rallies during the COVID era. His job? To listen.

He told me, We need to listen without constantly turning everything into a story.

He told me, We need to let the language work.

I asked him for his vision for us, and a poem rolled out of him:

Recognition in the eyes

Slowness, ease

In the spaces between worlds,

People in states of openness

And deep curiosity,

Increasing ease with

Inextricable flow of joy

And sorrow too

Gardens, music, festivals, circles…

[Open Mind]

And another of us, Ahlay Blakely, led us in song:

Courage is not the absence of fear

It is the feeling of this fear

Being afraid

And showing up anyway

And then, after we 200 humans quieted, she said, We need to love bigger.

And then she gave us a meaningful look.

You know who I’m talking about.

It’s the people we hate.

And then she asked us, Am I alone in this? Is anyone else here thinking this way?

And I raised my hand.

And another of us, Jared, Executive Director of Beyond Us And Them, told me a beautiful and completely improbable story about how he brought talking circles into the California prison system. How he slipped in through a prison chaplaincy program and taught a group of prisoners the indigenous practice of talking and listening in circle. How these hardened men opened up to each other, how violence dropped, how the prisoners began starting their own circles.

And now those circles are running throughout the California prison system, and also in schools, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies.

And then the most unlikely thing happened (though in hindsight, inevitable)… Eventually the cops and formerly incarcerated people circled up…together.

[Open heart]

And then a couple weeks later I was sitting across from Grady (mentioned previously), a trauma-informed facilitator for Collective Justice NW, a local organization that does similar circle work inside and outside of the Washington State prison system.

And I wish you could have been there, to feel the incandescence of his love. Having spent most of his life, (and nearly the entirely of my life span) locked in a cage, he was now throwing himself into the collective liberation. How he has driven thousands of miles around the state picking up men and bringing them to talking circles. How you can call him anytime. How when he shows up to a clemency board hearing the board members lean in and listen (he has helped free about a dozen people from prison).

In our conversation, I was reminded of a question a veteran asked me, a question that continues to haunt me: Evan, how are you going to get me in the room?

So I asked Grady the same question, and he said:

Courage; the desire to change.

[Open will]

Meditations on an emergency

What follows when we open our minds, hearts, and wills?

Agency: We take action with our bodies.

This is what Scharmer calls awareness-based collective action.

It is the antidote to our present predicament—the perfect storm of dislocation and helplessness we find ourselves in.

On the one hand, we are catastrophically unmoored from our world. It is the fundamental rupture that Scharmer terms the polycrisis. And what elders in the Pacific Northwest grief community call the primal wound, the break in belonging. It is our disconnection from self, from each other, and from the earth.

And on the other hand, we are frozen in despair and hopelessness, what Scharmer and Eva Pomeroy term the collective depression:

“The number one problem facing humanity today is not climate change or inequality or war. It is not the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI). Rather, it is our sense that we are powerless to change any of it.”

What if we can make change? What if that is in fact our purpose here? That through our minds, hearts, and wills, change comes through us?

“As we move through these challenging times, it is important to remember that none of us are here by accident. We entered this world with the express purpose of facilitating the changes that are manifesting during this time, and we brought with us the gifts needed to accomplish that task. None of us are out of time or out of place, though many of us remain out of step with our true path. Our unique imprint is essential to the larger pattern that is unfolding.”

Sherri Mitchell, author, Sacred Instructions; Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change

Penobscot Nation