.

Things feel like they are moving quickly – record arctic sea ice melt – activist groups linking up like they’ve never linked up before (e.g.  Awaken Ireland network connecting with Pachamama Alliance !) – I’ve even had a journal article published !  If for a moment, we ‘go slower, in order to move faster’, then what is it we need to be paying attention to ?

..

I’ve long been occupied by a simple model that suggests progress will come through three connections – connection to self, connection to other and connection to nature.  I find it useful to remember it is not all about me, but it is about me, it is not all about relationships, but we can’t do things without attending to relationships and it kind of is all about context / nature really – there are some things that just can’t be ignored.

There are three opportunities around at the moment, promoted by good friends, that particularly relate to these three connections :

(i)  Susan Coughlan is offering opportunities for people to ‘discover the clown within’ – starting September 15th in Dublin :  final-clown-2012-flier – (wouldn’t it be lovely if we all showed up with our clown within more obviously present, more often ?)

(ii) Anne Loftus is offering wonderful facilitation skills training in Clare in November for people who work with social justice and equality issues (and if you don’t, how can that be ?), using ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ methodologies  : to-course-poster-290812jpg1

(iii)   And Davie Philip is fostering knowledge around place-based and problem-based learning in October in the eco-village in Cloughjordan :  new-collaborative-learning

It’s great to see all this happening in Ireland, to witness the capacity being built of the whole system to undertake transformative work.

I’ve been part of some great work in the Burren in County Clare lately (thus re-using the picture above !) – the last piece of which was opened with this music ‘No time to sleep’

No time to sleep

Well worth it, if you have 4 minutes to spare

And finally, that article, here it is :

the-wisdom-of-belonging-in-a-time-of-transformative-change

Hopefully, it brings a lot of things together – including the needs for play, belonging and more socially just communities, so I like to think it all fits together.  The bit I found really interesting in writing it was trying to write from a point of opening things up, rather than from a place of ‘I know things the reader doesn’t’ (i.e. effectively a place of trying to close things down).  I found this challenging, but I’m left wanting to be challenged more.

(n.b. The formal copyright for this article rests with AMED as publisher, but they let me publish it as long as I acknowledge and reference its original appearance in e-Organisations and People, Vol 19(3), Autumn 2012 – so there !)