England's green and pleasant land

I realise it is an unfashionable cliché, but I am in England and it feels like coming home. I was born in London, so perhaps that is a good enough excuse for feeling an attachment to the motherland.

What I love about England’s green and pleasant land is the evidence of layer upon layer of people working with the natural landscape. Worn, comfortable buildings that have been re-purposed over the centuries as monasteries, hospitals, schools and libraries. Tiny rooms, cobbled streets, ivy growing on walls, wildflowers on river banks. I also love witnessing the reversal of British imperialism as people from Britain’s old colonies have gathered here in their millions to produce a new culture.

I feel surrounded by signs that power is always temporary; and that people and nature can grow together in, if not exactly harmony, at least an always changing tapestry. It shows that the infinite game eventually overlays our finite endeavours. It is harder to grasp this in the new world where the environment is marked by people bulldozing their way through nature at a speed impossible at the time Europe was first inhabited.

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Deep democracy

No one is so rich or powerful that they are immune to the rootlessness, loss of meaning and loss of love that accompanies

flattening all values to material values,

uprooting people in the name of economic growth,

losing the big stories that tell us of our place within historical communities of memory and hope.

 

Worldwide, people express an urgent need for faith, hope and charity,

for the life-reviving experience of guiding ideals within functioning communities,

for the prophetic sense that justice will come

 

And for advancing toward that day together in friendship and meaning.

 

The time is right for rebuilding the public square,

for a democratic deepening of our hearts and minds,

for shaping our diverse lives within and toward the Beloved Community.

 

Concepts and most words by Judith Green, from her book Deep Democracy. Selected, paraphrased and arranged by Niki Harre.

 

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Winners and Losers

Sometimes the only common intention we have been able to establish with each other is that we have each wanted to win.

The result of such union is separation, always separation;

it divides us into winners and losers, those who have achieved and those who have failed.

It becomes difficult, now that some of us have won and some of us have lost, to find a game that we are all willing to play together

even though this is the game that we have always cherished most.

 

Insights and most words by Bernard de Koven. Selected, paraphrased and arranged by Niki Harre

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Infinite play

Last week I stood for four hours to listen to the young British singer, Jake Bugg. He clearly found it painful to be in front of a large audience and only talked three times. Each utterance was brief and so mumbled I couldn’t make out the words. But he sung with such intensity that every fibre in his body seemed to resonate with the beauty of his voice. He has a gift, and he offered it to us. That is an infinite play. In another sense, the teenage girls and boys around me were also playing an infinite game. They were singing and dancing and looking out for each other. They showed Jake that they loved his talent and could fill in the gaps he left with their cheering and clapping and laughter.

In the end, life takes place in our exchanges with each other. Sometimes we can plan our infinite play, by setting a goal or following self-imposed guidelines. But sometimes it just flows from our intuitive ability to conjure up a community.

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Holding our finite games lightly

I was talking with my friend John the other day about how to navigate through life when almost all your time is taken up with finite games. There’s the mortgage with its lifetime of repayments; not to mention the dread of dropping house prices. Ha! Loser! You bought at the wrong time. Now you will never, ever be able to win at the game. Then there’s the body project, trying to keep up with the barrage of health advice to eat this or that, exercise in this or that way, avoid nasty chemicals, and most of all not get stressed or once again - you lose! A debilitating disease awaits you, probably the very one you were trying to avoid.  And of course the family, with its obligation to supervise children in playgrounds made of plastic and plan your holidays around their locations, weddings, ailments and other peculiarities. Gosh, family is the most important thing.

All of these games offer moments of fun, human warmth, giving of your best and so on, but the overall effect is that there is no room to move. Was life always like this we wondered, for other people in other times? What does it mean to play an infinite game in this context? Well of all the answers human wisdom has provided, the one that floated to us while we sat in my Honda Logo on that warm autumn night, is to try and hold your finite games lightly. To know that ultimately and perhaps even right now, they don’t really matter. To remember that there is relief in failure, the relief of not having to try anymore. Hope, as Joanna Macey has written, can be exhausting. Every so often, instead of being inspired to climb the ladder of success by those who have done so before you, try being inspired by those who failed. Good people who tired their best at the very games you are playing and lost. They, just like those who won, have a place in the grand human narrative. Liberation, we figured, doesn’t lie in giving up all our finite games but in trying to grip less, care less, fear less in relation to them. Maybe if we do this, the infinite game will become more apparent, more alive, more beckoning. Maybe we will see how we already play it as best we can, and with that insight be able to take it to the next level. 

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Why are we scared of farmers?

It is widely accepted that education and medicine are part of the commons. We (or our representatives) are responsible for making decisions about these institutions, as we know they exist to serve us. Teachers, doctors and nurses have expertise that most of us greatly respect, but they do not have the freedom to run their services as they wish. The rules are tight and our vigilance is keen. It is different with farmers. Maybe this is because farmers own their land. This means their rights and freedom are always part of any conversation about their land. The farmer’s personal gain is seen as central to farming itself, in a way that the doctor’s or teacher’s personal gain is not. Yes, it is good if teachers get satisfaction from their work, but this is first and foremost because it makes them better teachers. Farmers on the other hand, have a right to satisfaction because of the entitlement that comes with ownership, and we must fight to put boundaries on their activities in order to protect the land as a whole. The emphasis, therefore, is totally reversed. Yet land is an even more ancient and fundamental commons than hospitals and schools. The latter, after all, are the products of people and are secondary gifts, not the fundamental gift on which the whole system is based. 

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What haunts us when we strive for social change

Here is Alistair McIntosh on the shadows that haunt us when we strive for social change: “We fear the whole process getting out of hand. Can we handle it? Where might it all end? Won’t people think that we’re peculiar, and then there’ll be no way back on to strait-street? We also fear that if we engage the Powers it might be for the wrong motives. It may just be ego; indeed, we know ourselves, and so we realise that to some extent it will be ego! Also, it may be that the corporation, or the Government, or ‘the system’, or whatever it is represents an unresolved complex with a parent or some other authority figure from childhood. There’s nothing really wrong with the world – we’re just projecting our own crap out on to it!” (Soil and Soul, p. 124).

Yep, that’s about it. Just when I feel the energy of a group of like-minded people, hear about a positive breakthrough on the world stage, reach a new insight; simultaneously in that moment is doubt, prodding me. But I think I’ve got a solution, or at least a way of standing back from the problem and realising that it is actually our friend.

The solution is faith, but not necessarily as you know it. Over the past two weeks I’ve been re-listening to a CBC podcast series called After Atheism, and it has a lot to say about faith, particularly the episode featuring John Caputo. As a non-Christian I’ve never understood faith, assuming it to be a sort of mental gymnastics through which people “believe” something with no evidence for it being the case. I am so far from being able to do that wilfully, it seems like a directive from the Queen of Hearts. But these scholars present faith as something else – a choice or calling or intuition to act as if something is true, while always knowing it may not be. Without knowing our choice may be false, there is no faith. There is no sense of freedom, as it could be no other way. No freedom, no faith, only a sure reality. Now “sure reality” would be fine, except that when it comes to questions like creating a better world, it is simply not an honest position.  No one can really know what it takes; it’s not that kind of problem (although we all pretend at times, as our political, rhetorical games make certainty pop out like a cat’s fur balls).

So my faith, is something about the worthiness of working towards a world of human and ecological flourishing – a world that aims for all life to be as good as it can be – to express its character, and, especially as it matures, to be aware of allowing other life forms to do the same. It is faith because it feels like a calling lodged somewhere deep inside of me, but I also know it is possible to be human and feel differently. I know this for a fact, because of the times I see through my faith – I see how a successful talk grows my ego, I remember how I was told I was argumentative when I was 13 and knew it to be true so what better to pit myself against than global capitalism?; and so it goes on. Occasionally, just occasionally, I think that maybe the right is right after all. 

Now, if I am relentlessly trying to understand “reality” in order to take a position on what a better world might look like and how we can create it, these doubts are paralysing. But when I call it faith, a choice to play, the doubts lose their seriousness. Not that they can be arrogantly brushed aside, but they can be seen as a necessary part of the play. There is a story that when the South Island of New Zealand was created, the gods realised it was dangerously beautiful. This meant people may become spellbound, unwilling to tear themselves away from simply drinking in its majesty. Therefore sand flies (pesky little bugs that adore human flesh) were brought in to keep us on our toes. Our doubts, then, are a necessary part of not simply taking for granted the beauty of our own vision.

Hey people, we might have got it completely wrong! Wow, isn’t that liberating – to know you could spend your entire life on the wrong track but it actually isn’t your role to fuss over that endlessly – unless you want that to be your role of course. After all, in 100 years all new people – assuming someone played their cards right.  

So, go forth in faith I say. Not the faith that distorts the mind into “belief” but the faith that frees the mind from having to know before being what, most of the time, we are called to be. 

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Homeland versus The Bridge

When I first watched the US TV series Homeland I was completely captivated, and told many people it was the must-watch show of the decade. Then my husband, Keith, and I watched The Bridge a Danish/Swedish detective series. At first, I found The Bridge ugly. It featured the grey panoramas and bleak cities that dull rather than enliven the spirit. However, gradually, its warmth crept up on me. The main woman, Saga, whose un-brushed hair irritated me at the beginning, became so vulnerable and beautiful in her struggles to be a good person. In the final scene of the first series her hair seemed to say it all – how impossible it is to get all the details right. We then started on the third series of Homeland.  Now the characters seemed stereotypes, representing different ways to be a person, but not actual people. As Keith said, “It is as if they have no personality.” I still think it is brilliant television (more on why in another post) but it is a show of archetypes, it conveys messages about politics and war, naivety and arrogance. The Bridge is a show about people who cannot quite be placed, who are subtle, complex. If these shows say something about their cultures, then perhaps what is most interesting about the US is how they play at power. It is as if the culture has become jammed by the stories of their success, making it difficult to move fluidly – one must jiggle between positions or leap from one to the other. The Scandinavians, on the other hand, seem freer to be nuanced individuals – their public story being more humble and less certain. Have the Americans forgotten that winners look desperately uncool as soon as they take fall for the illusion that their victory is real? I guess that is why some of their best art tries to point this out.

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Temptation

I had a tempting proposition this week. I was asked to be an occasional panelist on a late night TV show.  It was flattering – I felt briefly fluffed up, like a proud chicken strutting around the yard. But my feathers soon settled and acute ambivalence kicked in. My thoughts went something like this: It is such a great opportunity to influence public conversation, it is so late it will ruin my evening and probably the next day too, what if I get seduced into making trivial points, it will improve my public profile and so make it easier to attract people to the infinite game, well yes but it is also a distraction from my writing about the infinite game, well yes but the infinite game itself is the point not your self-imposed writing schedule and it is such a great opportunity to influence public conversation…

Ah temptation, how do we know if it is a diablo, thrown in our path to lead us astray or sent by the angels to light up that same path?  Here is what I’ve figured out. We all make plans. I don’t mean grand plans, just ideas of how life will be for the next while. If you like your plan, whenever anything comes along to interrupt it, you become agitated. Sometimes it is easy to reject the intruder, even if it takes a bit of work. Sometimes it is easy to accept it, because its angelic character is clear. Sometimes, often, it isn’t one or the other. Ambivalence follows. It is painful because it requires us to try and predict the future (that little thing). We’ve already got our plan, damn it, and imagined the flow of events, and now, wham – can and should we adjust? It is the question mark itself that causes the pain, it leaves us dangling, hoping, wondering, when we just wanted to get on with it.

By the way, I said yes.

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