Welcome
Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
There is a field
I’ll meet you there
There are no new ideas
Only new ways of making them felt
Kaleidoscope:
Derived from Ancient Greek:
skopeō (to look at, Observe, consider)
kalos (beautiful)
eidos (forms or shapes)
In my childhood, I had a kaleidoscope.
It crackled with unpredictable arrangements on each twist and turn of my hand. The flimsy tube slipped my attention from the chaotic, hurtling world around and within me, into a quiet portal of complexity.
The kaleidoscope gave me opportunities to enjoy and participate in relationships between light, movement and matter. I witnessed how, with a twitch in my finger, new tessellations emerged.
Yet, if you tried to control the arrangement, you would find, time and time again, that you are no match for reflecting, refracting and diffracting light. While you could separate the kaleidoscope, arrange the parts to your own order and observe a frozen image, you would no longer be enjoying a kaleidoscope.
While much of my childhood didn’t solidify into coherent autobiographical accounts, momentary time-slips like these have stayed with me. I give much credit to these kinds of experiences for compelling me towards questions, people and places that offer ways to attend to the dynamic emergence of our lives.
This blog, Entangled Field/s Notes, explores my beliefs, perspectives, and approaches to working with far more complex systems than the kaleidoscope, including people, families, and communities. I write from many experiences of learning how even tiny changes can rearrange everything, and how we cannot separate ourselves from the systems we are interwoven within. How control is a short-lived fantasy.
My hope is to offer you moments to join me in wondering about complexity, relationships, and the possible responses we might experiment with as we navigate the troubling times we are in.
Images By Malens (Pexels)
The word entangled follows Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Nora Bateson and others, in appreciating the ways that beings, bodies, ideas, and environments are shaping, influencing, combining and co-constituting one another.
Here, entangled is not a synonym for connection. It is a word that articulates how who we are, and can be, emerges in relation. For example, your emotions, immune responses, cravings, and cognitive patterns are all influenced by microbial communities in your digestive system. Microbial flora are influenced by cultures, families, finances, soil health and geographies. All of this is influenced by ancestral experiences, migrations, recent and ancient histories.
The word entangled gestures towards webs of relations that generate fields. Embodied, ecological, relational, historical, political, imaginal, ancestral, cultural, linguistic, and professional fields are influencing, interacting and intra-acting with each other in powerful ways. We are entangled with/in these entangled fields.
I believe that how we sense, understand, relate to and respond within these fields matters. It matters to our species, to other species, to the past, the future, and the present. It matters to how we will navigate the significant changes of what has been named the polycrisis and metacrisis.
There is so much more possible as we practice ways of being that diverge from the stories we’ve been sold so far. My hope is to contribute questions, reflections and process thinking that support us to:
Nurture places where we can pay attention to how, to what and why we pay attention.
Cultivate the ethics, qualities and capacities we need to grow more compassionate futures together.
Consider and experiment with the responses that remain possible for us, within our webs and fields of relation.
You are welcome here, as I write about these themes and learn out loud. Thank you for joining me.
Warmly,
Footnotes:
POLYCRISIS refers to multiple distinct crises interacting simultaneously, entangled in ways that amplify their causes and effects, each making the others worse. Edgar Morin and Anne Kern argue that “there is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem” (p. 74, 1999). While polycrisis is a newer term in our lexicon, the experience of multiple, intersecting, combining, and existential challenges is, and has been, the norm for a great many people for a long time.
METACRISIS refers to the ideologies, ethics, values, worldviews and contextual conditions that underpin the polycrisis.
