Adventures in Creative Futures:
Through Enlivening Transitions of Blessed Unrest, Complex Joy, and Fractal Flourishing
Greetings, fellow traveler!
If you’ve stumbled upon this post, it’s likely that you, too, are a human being who aspires to reimagine futures beyond dystopias and utopias, and to co-create the worlds our hearts know to be possible.
Most likely, you’ve found yourself here after reading my book review of the Routledge Handbook of Creative Futures in the Journal of Awareness Based Systems Change (Volume 4, Issue 1). I offer this personal, reflective essay as an extension to that more traditional review. Whereas that review provided an overview of the book and my perspective on its strengths and limitations, this essay offers a glimpse into my personal learning journey engaging with the Handbook’s 52 contributors through its 37 chapters.
My favorite part about reading this volume twice through was the experience of being in dialogue with these 52 bright human beings, each engaged in the hopeful, necessary work of co-creating life-affirming futures. Sitting with the book as a whole, I delighted in the resonance of similarly inspired voices sharing diverse, complementary ideas and practices. And, just as importantly, I felt enlivened by the generative tensions between diverse contributors. These experiences of resonance and tension both greatly contributed to my practical insights valuable to my own path.
In the hope of furthering dialogue around the synergetic possibilities and creative tensions within the Handbook’s 37 chapters, I offer my personal reflections and emergent insights in this reflective essay. Through it, I explore how — as a whole more than the sum of its parts — the Routledge Handbook of Creative Futures (hereafter, The Handbook) invites us to grow:
- beyond the limits of modernity;
- toward reparative and regenerative economies of fractal flourishing;
- through enlivening transitions of blessed unrest and complex joy;
- emboldened by the renewable energies of (r)evolutionary love for people and place.
Although I imagine that folks who have already read Routledge Handbook of Creative Futures or my review of it would enjoy this essay the most, the themes explored are likely to be of interest to anyone seeking to cultivate enlivening change in the world in service of more flourishing futures where we all get to be alive, well, and free.
However you happened to find yourself here, and wherever you are in your own journey — welcome! Let us explore the myriad possibilities of co-creating just and regenerative futures beyond the limits of modernity.
1. Growing beyond the limits of modernity
One of the most refreshing insights generated by my readings of The Handbook is the invitation to focus less on limits to growth and more on limits of modernity imposed upon human growth and development. With this subtle flip of association, my innate desire to transcend limits becomes an evolutionary strength again.¹
Don’t get me wrong — all contributors and I agree that our current modes of economic growth violate the planetary boundaries that allow for life on Earth to regenerate.² Yet, several contributors also remind us that Earth’s living systems (including human systems) are, by nature, designed to regenerate abundance and collective wellbeing among human and more-than-human beings.³ Contrary to projections of the Anthropocene, we humans are not, by nature, parasites destined to destroy our host through economies of unrelenting extraction and toxic waste (E. Walsh & Abell, 2023). As contributor adrienne maree brown asks, “How do we remove the limitations that humans put on ourselves that cause us to be miserly and cruel?” (2023, p. 306).
The collective voice of the Handbook appears to answer: we must transcend the ideological limits of modernity. As contributor Vanessa Andreotti suggests in Chapter 16, “Gesturing toward decolonial futures,” most of our inability to adjust course and address wicked problems reflects the “failure of western culture to produce grown-ups.” (2023, p. 144)
Beyond the Limits of Maslow’s Hierarchy
How, then, does western culture produce grown-ups? As contributor Allan Combs suggests in Chapter 16, contemporary theories of human motivation and development still focus primarily on individuals and build on Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.”
Although Combs acknowledges the innate yearning of all living beings toward co-evolutionary complexity and wholeness, he ultimately offers an unequivocal recommendation that individuals focus first on “settling the deficiency needs” (e.g. biophysical survival needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy) before “pushing ahead into spiritual work and transcendence” (e.g. high-level growth needs). He cautioned that “failing to do so is a prescription for denial and failure to grow as a person.” (2023, p. 49)
Contributors Andreotti and Báyò Akómoláfé see development differently, from decolonial perspectives.
Andreotti (2023, p. 145) observes that formal education does not “prepare us well to address wicked challenges and the complexities, uncertainties, ambiguities, pluralities, paradoxes, unequal power relations, and conflicts that are inherent in them.” She suggests that by continuously integrating mental, spiritual, cultural, and ecological development, other living wisdom traditions can help us “learn how to live, to age, and to die well” (2023, p. 149).
This is integrated perspective on development is consistent with theories of human motivation advanced by Indigenous scholars who see the world from a holistic, relational paradigm, with more expansive conceptions of time and multiple, interrelated dimensions of reality (Blackstock, 2011), as reflected in the image below.
Here, optimal well-being is achieved when the four dimensions of experience (physical, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive) are in balance at individual, family, and collective (even ecological) levels. In this model of development, each individual (and their development) is understood to be an integral part of larger social and ecological wholes, over many generations. The responsibility and capability to nourish a community-wide family is handed down from generation to generation. Because knowledge can vanish as people pass on, each generation sees it as their responsibility to perpetuate their culture by adding to the tribe’s communal wisdom and passing on ancestral teachings to children and grandchildren.
The highest level of personal development within this paradigm is, then, the capacity to further cultivate place-based, cultural and ecological wisdom and pass it on to children, enabling the gifts of life to continue in perpetuity. Here, spiritual development is integrated from cradle to grave, generation to generation, with age-appropriate rites of initiation and development. This is in strong contrast to prevailing modern view, fed by Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” that individuals are likely to fail to grow as a person if they do not meet all of their “deficiency needs” before pursuing spiritual development.⁴
Beyond the Limits of Adulting, Adultism, & Addiction
Consistent with these Indigenous theories of development, contributor Vanessa Andreotti imagines a world beyond the limits of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” Beyond simply adulting to survive within an oppressive modern world, Andreotti sees the possibility of eldering — “for becoming good Elders and ancestors for all relations” (2023, p. 149).
Similarly, Akómoláfé (2023, p. 63) explains that modernity’s orientation to development insists upon an “abandonment of play” and “a rejection of things that are childish and acceptance of adult-isms, a becoming serious.” Could another one of modernity’s oppressive “isms” threatening life-affirming, co-creative futures be adultism, a systemic structure designed to suppress the wisdom, power, and Aliveness of youth?⁵ Under the influence of adultism, responsible adulthood is about “becoming serious” and becoming able to make it on one’s own.
On this pathway to adulthood, we become dependent on modernity’s hyper-individualistic, extractive, exploitative, exclusive mode of economic development to meet our “deficiency needs,” even as many of our careers send us careening toward ecological collapse. As Andreotti notes (2023, p. 145), modern models of human and economic development include “lots of incentives for hedonistic, narcissistic, and hyper-individualist behaviors, where consumption is a mode of relating to the world.”
We become addicted to the unsustainable “comforts, securities, and enjoyments” of modernity and complicit in the unrelenting cycles of structural violence that produce them (2023, p. 144). And, as contributor Nick Walker observes (2023, p. 318), we develop “the intolerances and rigidities that are inimical to creativity.”
And yet, underneath all this conditioned narcissism, self-defeating addiction, and enculturated rigidity of adultism, we — as all living organisms — have a primal yearning towards connection, vitality, and integral wholeness, as Combs emphasized at the outset of Chapter 5, and as Canty suggests in Ch.11, “Inhabiting brilliance: Wrestling the gifts of narcissism.” Once we can name our affiliations and addictions, we can begin the path toward healing and regeneration.
2. Toward reparative and regenerative economies of fractal flourishing
How might we work with this innate urge to merge, heal, and grow symbiotically in our common home, Earth?
Remembering our way forward, remembering our way home
This compendium makes abundantly clear that we cannot create our way out of the mess we are in without sober consideration of our past — including the root causes of wicked problems we face and the roots that give us strength and foster connection with Earth and one another. We must remember our way forward; we must remember our way home.
Part V contributors make clear that remembering is not about “looking backward,” or “dwelling in the past.” (Re)member-ing — is about reconnecting with all our relations and wisdom traditions and engaging in co-creative learning and action. Remembering is about reparation of harm, regeneration of wellbeing, and — hopefully — rematriation of lands and waters.
What does it mean to rematriate? In “Entangled Landscapes: Healing as a Path to Sustaining Food Futures” Chaiti Seith makes a strong call for “consciousness shifting work needed to rematriate lands and waters to the care of Indigenous peoples and returning lands to Black farmers and farmers of color” (2023, p. 181). Rematriate does mean “return.” However, unlike the legal term “repatriate,” which signifies a transactional transfer of ownership, “rematriate” is more: a return to care. Others have explained that “to rematriate is to return the sacred to the mother.”⁶
Might this be the healing work needed to address modernity’s epidemic of narcissism? It sounds like what is needed to remember our way home — home in our bodies, home in our neighborhoods, home in our bioregions and in our common home and source of all life, Earth.
Toward reparative & regenerative economies of fractal flourishing
Pathways of reparation, regeneration, and rematriation may also be what’s needed to return “home” to the heart of economics. It is time that we remember that at its roots, economics (eco, home; nomos, norms) is a word that helps us think about (and reimagine) the norms by which we self-govern and care for our home.
The general consensus among contributors seems to be that the current principles and paradigm upon which our global economy is organized threaten all life in our common home. Pursuit of profit and Gross Domestic Product are not only failing to make most people happy, they’re also intensifying division between haves and have nots while destroying the planet.
Instead, many contributors recommend re-organizing our economies around norms and principles conducive to collective flourishing in thriving living systems.⁷ Lent suggests that we could set humanity and more-than-human nature on a course of indefinite mutual flourishing if we were to self-organize our economies around ecological principles of symbiosis, circular flow, harmony, balance, and “fractal flourishing.”
The principle of fractal flourishing is essential for reimagining the integral functioning of a global economy. In Lent’s words, this principle holds that “the well-being of each person is fractally related to the health of the larger world. Individual health relies on societal health, which relies in turn on the health of the ecosystem in which it is embedded.” (p206). The reverse is also true; the ecological whole depends on the wellbeing of each of its parts. The sobering reality is that our dominant global economy has normalized relationships of exclusion, extraction, and exploitation more than those that contribute to fractal flourishing in living systems, such as integrity, reciprocity, or liberty (Walsh 2023).
This is, however, good news. The possibility of fractal flourishing has (r)evolutionary potential: healing (a return to wholeness) in one part of a living system has potential to contribute to healing of the whole. This means that care of one’s self and one’s consciousness is a powerful leverage point in the transformation of larger systems. As Sandra Waddock mentions in Chapter 25, systems scientist Donella Meadows underscored this point as well; the two most powerful leverage points for transformational systems change are (a) the power to shift paradigms, and, even more powerful, (b) to transcend them.
Queer insight: Wholes are (sometimes) less than the sum of their parts
There is, indeed, remarkable creative freedom available when we look around the world through a lens of fractal flourishing, imagining the multi-scalar, interdependent possibilities available for returning to wholeness.
Even so, contributor Sacha Kagan brings attention to a queer, critical insight about the urge to merge: “the whole is more than and less than the sum of the parts” (2023, p. 123). This insight is queer, in that it challenges either-or, binary thinking to fully engage the complexity of living systems and harness the power of creative tensions (e.g., between the extremes of “reductivism” and “holism”). This insight is critical to our efforts to co-create convivial futures because it disrupts propensities to overlook the potential tyranny of holism in a world structured by inequitable, oppressive power dynamics.
Other contributors also bring attention to the hazards of holism, most notably Vlad Glăveanu (2023, p. 88) who shares insights from “the Romanian way of life under a totalitarian regime.” He observed that in order to create the utopia of a communist state, a totalitarian regime used brutal force to align and cohere the masses into an efficient whole. In the process, he observed that “Society was hollowed of its dynamism and diversity under the pretense of equality and following the ‘common good.’” (2023, p. 89)
The hazards of holism are usually far more subtle, and surprisingly easy for systems thinkers like me to step into. It’s easy to assume that I’m thinking through a living systems lens when, in fact, I’ve slipped back into operating out of a machine mindset. This is likely also the case for people who Sandra Waddock and her colleagues would call a “transformation catalyst,” TC for short. In Chapter 10, Waddock (2023, p. 230) defines TCs as follows (emphasis added):
“TCs, whether they call themselves that or not, recognize that for most important issues that might be subject to transformation, there are already numerous existing change initiatives underway. Catalytic actions are needed because, as ecologist Paul Hawken (Hawken, 2007) wrote, such initiatives are frequently rather small, unconnected, and highly fragmented. … The issue that TCs address is that many change initiatives tend to work without reference to, or sometimes knowledge of, each other, a situation that Hawken called “blessed unrest.”
This paragraph may be paraphrased as “Catalytic actions are needed because” of “a situation Hawken called “blessed unrest.” Herein, “blessed unrest” is a problem wherein many well-intentioned people are simultaneously working on similarly inspired initiatives that are small, unconnected, and fragmented, and therefore inefficient and ineffective. The responsibility of a TC is to get these similarly inspired people together in a room to better align and cohere their efforts to increase efficiency and collective impact.
At first glance, this makes perfect sense. Most of us have likely witnessed or experienced the costs of fragmentation and siloed actions around complex challenges that are important to us. I certainly have. And, although I’d never called myself a TC, I have facilitated collective impact initiatives — including the Austin Housing Repair Coalition — that realized the kinds of transformations being described (E. A. Walsh, 2019).
And yet, because of these transformational experiences, and because my approach to such facilitation has been profoundly shaped by my understanding of what Hawken calls “blessed unrest” that this description of TC’s generated a surge of questions to my head:
What? Blessed unrest is the problem? Isn’t that the phrase Hawken used to point to the magic behind “How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming” (the subtitle of his eponymously named book)? Wasn’t he speaking to the hidden dimensions of inner life that enable remarkable co-creativity, ensemble leadership,⁸ and the kinds of self-organization and emergence that can heal and regenerate life on Earth? How did Hawken define “blessed unrest?
When I opened a copy of Hawken’s book and browsed to Chapter 2, “Blessed Unrest,” the opening lines were from a familiar quote that defines “blessed unrest” as the words were voiced among two avant-garde dancers and choreographers, Martha Graham and her dear friend, Agnes de Mille. At the time, de Mille found herself “stuck” in her creative expression and questioning her work.⁹ In response, Graham wrote (as quoted by Hawken):
There is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique… You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open…. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the other. — Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper
Without context, it may be difficult to see how a quote that appears to center the uniqueness of individuals could possibly be a portal to the magic of catalyzing transformational systems change beyond modernity. Yet, when we remember that these women were dancers and choreographers in 20th century America, two things become apparent: (1) they were both breaking mores of modernity by saying “Yes!” to their Aliveness, and (2) their artistic expression was, at core, co-creative. As such, they also surely experienced — and generated — what Amelia Terrapin of Mobius Methods calls the “magic of ensembles — deeply connected, effective, and creative teams guided by a shared sense of purpose.”¹⁰ Surely, they had developed their capacities for what Handbook contributor Patricia Wilson described as “Ensemble Awareness” where “the practitioner becomes part of a living system that generates its own evolution each moment” (2023, p. 347).
Ahh, I thought. Yes, this makes sense, with my own experience. If I wish to help a diverse group of people engaged in fragmented initiatives evolve into a deeply connected, effective, and creative team guided by a shared sense of purpose, I must learn how to practice blessed unrest. I, and those answering a similar calling, must learn how to catalyze transformation within our selves. We each must learn to keep our channel open — open mind, open heart, open will, ready to move with attunement to the beat of the collective (e.g. through practices of generative mindfulness discussed in Chapter 37, somatic practices explored in Chapter 34, awareness-based creativity practices in Chapter 35, and more). We must listen for — and pursue — what makes us each come alive, which is, by nature, uncomfortable, disruptive. And, as we listen — to the multitudes within ourselves, and in multitudes to which we belong — we will learn to compassionately embrace the aliveness of conflict and harness its creative tensions.
The queer truth of the matter is this. This aliveness — this vitality — this queer, divine, dissatisfaction — is the source of catalytic transformation. This blessed unrest is infectious. We light each other up. We shine in the full spectrum of our true colors. And this is what catalyzes transformation when a group of atomistic people or initiatives come together to see if they can work together. This is the magic that emboldens our courage to disrupt oppressive power structures, “like an immune system protecting its host from toxins,” as Lent (2023, p. 210) writes, drawing inspiration from Hawken’s vision of blessed unrest. This is the essence of the regenerative social fields that help ensure that the urge to merge doesn’t become oppressive or deadening, but rather opens new fields for co-creative expression in service of life.
3. Enlivening transitions of blessed unrest & complex joy
The truth about transitions is that they are uncomfortable. Yet they need not make us miserable or miserly.
The Handbook’s diverse contributors invite us to be with and learn from the discomfort, rather than denying or numbing it. Thankfully, throughout all parts of the book, they offer many practices and processes of blessed unrest and “everyday creativity” that can help us stay with the trouble and grow beyond the limits of our well-patterned rigidities and fragilities in the face of disruptive change and wicked problems. As we engage Vital Absorbing Creative Interests (VACI) together, we grow our capacity to co-creatively meet the challenges of Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) times and overcome modernity’s addictions and afflictions.¹¹
As we collaboratively engage these practices to say “Yes!” to our Aliveness, we can further disrupt adultism by joining contributors Tuesday Ryan Hart and Gabrielle Donnelly in “Taking a radical stance for complex joy in the work of shaping change” (their title for Chapter 33).¹² Importantly, centering joy in their work is not about tone policing or toxic positivity. As they say, “we don’t demand that people experience joy but seek to create the conditions for joy to arise.” (2023, p. 314) They explain that complex joy is emerges through struggles that becomes the renewable energy source that powers the work ahead (2023, p. 314):
“It is joy that is hard won after we have seen each other’s faults, perhaps caused each other injury, and come out on the other side seeing each other more fully and with meaningful work that we are willing to do together. When this kind of complex joy can be accessed and becomes the fuel for the work rather than a sense of duty — we can do this work because we want to, not because we must. The necessity of the work — and it is necessary — doesn’t take away joy. It can add to it and amplify it. It is a joy that allows us to imagine more wildly, work with more skill, and continue to walk this long, necessary road of change.”
Moreover, cultivating complex joy in systems change work can make more room to engage, metabolize, and learn from grief, while also learning to accept death as an integral part of life.
Báyò Akómoláfé, Vanessa Andreoitti, Nina Simons, Annecke Campbell, Autumn Brown, and adrienne maree brown see this as a necessary growth edge for human beings in the 21st century. These and other contributors bring attention to the power of collective ritual to create sanctuary spaces that can help hold and engage less comfortable emotions (e.g., sources and forces of Aliveness) in ways that allow for individual and collective healing and co-creativity. Held within a field of compassionate and appreciative awareness and collective presence, grief, guilt, anger, rage, and even despair also help reveal our deepest commitments and longings which can guide our co-creative futures.
Akómoláfé suggests that through shared practices of joy and resilience, it is possible to “convene a new ecosystem of response-ability” (2023, p. 68). In contrast to responsibility under adultism, this response-ability affords us the freedom to respond to challenges and callings as they arise, beyond enculturated rigidities and fragilities. Although several contributors emphasize that any one of us can only be response-able for our own state of being, they also suggest we can create unifying social fields that support others into their own paths of healing, response-ability, and cultivation of the renewable energies of love.¹³
4. Emboldened by regenerative energies of complex joy & (r)evolutionary love
The more we practice blessed unrest and complex joy together, the more vitality we experience. As we harness these vital energies, we become more emboldened and attuned in our co-creative actions, growing our collective power and wisdom as we contribute to life-affirming futures of fractal flourishing in our common home.
In other words, we grow our capacity to harness the energies of love of the healing of ourselves and our world. As Simons and her colleagues at Bioneers say, this is “revolution from the heart of nature.” This kind of (r)evolutionary love is the only truly renewable and regenerative source of energy and power we have discovered.¹⁴ As Simons explains in Chapter 31 (2023, p. 298):
“[Love is] the only quality I know that — the more I give of it, the more I receive in the giving, making it regenerative. Love is also the only wellspring I’m aware of in myself that is fluid and endlessly flexible, and also fierce, determined, and persevering … ”
Those of us who have been enculturated by western, dominant culture are unaccustomed to understanding love — let alone delight — as a source of power.¹⁵ As discussed by contributors Angela Wilkinson and Betty Sue Flowers in Chapter 8, significant international attention has been invested in global transitions from fossil fuels to so-called¹⁶ renewable resources (e.g., wind, and solar), yet such global energy transitions are “ultimately about changing our relationship with each other” and require “a shift in underlying societal power structures” (2023, p. 76).
Everyday practices of creativity shared by contributors throughout the Handbook cultivate our response-ability for (1) disrupting dominating, oppressive power dynamics in everyday interactions, and (2) cultivating liberating, regenerative power dynamics. In effect, through such everyday praxis supports just and enlivening micro-transitions between supremacist power sourced by scarcity consciousness and liberatory power sourced by abundance consciousness (Suarez, 2018; E. Walsh & Abell, 2023)
Some contributors also draw attention to the kinds of global infrastructures that could systematically harness such (r)evolutionary collective power and wisdom. In Chapter 21, Riane Eisler points to the national prosperity experienced through investment in “caring policies” and infrastructures like “universal health care, high-quality early childhood education, generous paid parental leave, and elder care with dignity” (2023, p. 203). Jeremy Lent (Chapter 22) points to the imperative of investing in infrastructures for cooperative and circular economies where nothing is wasted, as everything (and everyone) is a gift and a resource with a place to belong in the regenerative cycles of wellbeing. Picking up on these themes, in Chapter 24, contributors Guiseppe Allegri and Renato Foschi report on the tremendous success of many experiments in Universal Basic Income (UBI), especially in regard to unleashing the creative potential of individuals and communities.
Conclusion/Bringing it Home
In summary, the diverse contributors of the Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures offer context, frameworks, everyday practices and collective processes that support us in growing beyond the limits of modernity, toward reparative and regenerative economies of fractal flourishing, through enlivening transitions of blessed unrest and complex joy, emboldened by the renewable energies of (r)evolutionary love for people and place.
Creativity in this context is about saying “Yes!” to Aliveness, increasingly showing up grounded in our appreciation for people and places, centered in our commitments, and open to possibility. Together, we grow our capacities to become response-able, generous, and accountable elders, drawing on living traditions and practices shared by the Handbook’s contributors that help us shift “the ways we relate to knowledge, to language, to pain, to politics, to our own bodies, to our unconscious, to the metabolism of the land, and to life and death — learning how to live, to age, and to die well.” (2023, p. 149).
As we tap into our deeper sources of awareness, inspiration, and love for people and places, our imaginations will become more radicle — that is, brave enough to root themselves in the soil that sustains us. As we tend these regenerative fields of potential with our radicle imaginations, we will likely surrender our utopian (no-place) and dystopian (bad-place) visions of modernity to co-create (eu)topian (good-place) futures for all with each (r)evolutionary moment and movement along our unfolding paths.
Pathways toward fractal flourishing through blessed unrest offer neither comfort nor enlightenment. Yet, they are guaranteed to afford us the delights of good trouble and being fully alive in our living world.¹⁷ As Grace Lee Boggs, expressed, “A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind” — and this Handbook helps us embark on such a (r)evolutionary era of Enlivenment.
Footnotes
[1] As contributor Anthony Weston observes in Chapter 28, when we “flip expected associations” to get out of our mental ruts we can open portals to creative futures (2023, p. 264). [Back to text]
[2] Moreover, the only image to appear twice in the Handbook is the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s visualization of nine planetary boundaries. [Back to text]
[3] Fritjof Capra, Jeremy Lent, Vanessa Andreotti, Sarah Pitteollo, Chaiti Sethand, Autumn Brown, and adrienne maree brown all bring this ecological truth into focus. [Back to text]
[4] Some of you maybe sitting with me in the apparent irony that Maslow’s renowned theory of human motivation was actually significantly shaped by his experience of cultural immersion as a 30 year old white man, living six weeks at Siksika in the summer of 1938. Siksika is the name of the people, their language, and the Blackfoot Reserve. As Teju Ravilochan explains in his essay “The Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow’s Hierarchy,” Maslow visited Siksika with the intention to test the universality of his theory that social hierarchies are maintained by dominance of some people over others. He expected to see the quest for dominance alive in Blackfoot culture, the same as he observed in the white cultures he observed more readily. Instead, he discovered a culture with astounding levels of cooperation, minimal inequality, restorative justice, full bellies, and high levels of life satisfaction. He was astonished to witness a culture where self-actualization was the norm, not the exception to the rule. This greatly expanded his sense of the possibilities for human beings and our sources of motivation and potential for development. His theory of a hierarchy of human needs and motivation was innovative in that it reflected this expanded sense of possibility. Ravilochan’s essay is worth reading, especially because he directs readers to the work of many Indigenous scholars of human development and motivation. This essay also reflects updates he made after criticism from earlier drafts, modeling humility, responsibility, and capacity for growth. [Back to text]
[5] Modernity’s limiting “isms” include racism, materialism, militarism, settler colonialism, paternalism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, jingoism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, neoliberalism, and other intersectional structures of oppression. Leanne Alaman (2024) adds adultism to this list, defining it as “the persistent devaluing, dismissing, and degrading of the wisdom and power of youth motivated by fear of the Aliveness (i.e. power) of youth.” Following Alaman’s lead, I will hereafter capitalize A in Aliveness, to bring attention to the vital, renewable energies moving through each of us and all living beings. [Back to text]
[6] See All My Relations podcast, “Rematriate” episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/bm/podcast/rematriate/id1454424563?i=1000607762495 [Back to text]
[7] For example, in Chapter 14, Kagan employs practices of queering question and reimagine norms for convivial futures. In Chapter 4, Capra recommends adopting the 17 principles of the Earth Charter. In Chapter 16, Vanessa Andreotti envisions a shift from our modern economy based on scarcity mentality, exclusive property rights, and constant accumulation to an “EarthCare” economy rooted in cognitive, affective, and relational justice cooperating towards system balance and metabolic health. Together, Chapters 21 and 22 emphasize our responsibility to disrupt relationships of domination and co-create cooperative relationships governed by nature’s principles. [Back to text]
[8] The concept of “ensemble leadership” was introduced to me by Dr. Alan Bush, as shaped by his background in choral singing and sustainability science and ongoing research at the intersection of resonance and resilience. He further evolved the concept of “ensemble leadership” through conversations with a collaborator working within a public housing ecosystem (Wilson et al., 2018). [Back to text]
[9] For further context, see https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/10/02/martha-graham-creativity-divine-dissatisfaction/ [Back to text]
[10] As quoted from Terrapin’s website, https://mobiusmethod.com/ [Back to text]
[11] Vital Absorbing Creative Interests (VACI) is a tool used by SMART Recovery to support people with substance dependencies “to rediscover passion and joy in life beyond addiction’s confines.” https://smartrecovery.org/vital-absorbing-creative-interest. VACI practices are similar to resilience practices identified by generative somatics practitioner Staci Haines (2019) book The Politics of Trauma: Healing, Somatics, and Social Movements as well as the many creative practices in the Handbook. [Back to text]
[12] As Ryan-Hart and Donnelly note (2023, p. 313), “If we begin to believe and act as if there is no room for levity, fun, or joy in the work, we become serious people doing serious things (i.e, saving the world, as the saviour complex is an insidious danger trap) and we do it with a furrowed brow and our hands tightly gripping our goals so that they don’t slip away.” This is inimical to co-creative futures. [Back to text]
[13] Vanessa Andreotti, Autumn Brown, and Nina Simons each brought attention to the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own inner work, and resisting tendencies to attempt responsibility for others’ emotional reactions or healing processes. [Back to text]
[14] Inspired by the revolutionary, evolutionary work of Grace Lee Boggs, I have written about “(r)evolutionary” power in the past (E. A. Walsh, 2021). The qualities of consciousness associated with such (r)evolutionary power are akin to “revolutionary love” as practiced and written about by Valerie Kaur. [Back to text]
[15] Maya Angelou expresses this powerfully: https://allpoetry.com/Touched-By-An-Angel [Back to text]
[16] We call energy sources like wind and solar “renewable” because wind and solar are naturally renewing. However, we tend to ignore the reality that creating the infrastructure to harness these renewable energies demands significant use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. Even before the advent of energy-intensive economic developments like bit-coin currencies and Artificial Intelligence, it has been biophysically unrealistic to meet ever growing global energy demands of a speculative economy based on relationships of extraction, exploitation, and exclusion. (Thackara, 2017). [Back to text]
[17] I thank beloved community builders John Lewis (1940–2020) and Howard Thurman (1899–1981) for their leadership in embodying these possibilities. [Back to text]
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