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The Work That Reconnects Joanna and Fran Macy Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Alumni Workshop Cobb Hill Cohousing, Hartland, Vermont January 19 – 23, 2008
On an early snowy Saturday morning in January, three circles that Donella Meadows had inspired gathered together to delve into the journey of “The Work That Reconnects” with Joanna and Fran Macy. The circles were Sustainability Institute staff, Cobb Hill Cohousing residents and the Donella Meadows Leadership Alumni Fellows. The four-day workshop was a combination of new and old faces from a previous workshop with Joanna held 15 months earlier. Introductions were made by each participant naming one entity they wish to preserve that is now in danger. It quickly became clear that since the last time the group was together much had changed in the world and the need for the work to reconnect was stronger than ever.
Fran and Joanna	Joanna and Fran refer to our current period in time as The Great Turning and see it as the greatest social movement in history. The Great Turning is the shift that marks the end of the Industrial Growth Society that thrives on corporate profits, waste, products and consumption and moves to a Life Sustaining Society dedicated to preserving the Earth’s natural and human resources indefinitely. This will require a conscious and much quicker transition than the two previous revolutions in human history, the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Donella also talked and wrote often about this era referring to it as the Sustainability Revolution.
The environmental and social challenges that currently face human society are enormous. With this responsibility, emotions often emerge in the form of pain and despair that rarely are given a voice in the everyday world. These feelings are often a result of our concern and love for our world, and our knowledge of the species lost, climate changing, rampant hunger and increasing challenges of our times.
The Work That Reconnects is a spiral journey led by Fran and Joanna Macy. The journey includes four components and a full day was dedicated to each. The work that reconnects begins with gratitude, moves to honoring our pain for the world, then to seeing with new eyes and finally ends with going forth. Gratitude was celebrated through song, poems, letters, sharing, and acknowledgement of the gifts each participant brings to the world. The aim of experiencing gratitude is to strip away all familiarity so that we don’t take for granted all that we have while at the same time combating				The Journey of The Work That Reconnects
the feeling of not enough. The work brought to the surface and acknowledged feelings of awe and amazement that we are all alive and present for such a dynamic period, while grounding us and helping us orient ourselves to be fully awake during this challengingtime. Gratitude transitioned into honoring our pain for the world with a presentation by SI staff member Beth Sawin on the latest climate change data. Images, quotes and graphs of summer sea ice disappearing at a far faster rate than anyone had previously predicted was alarming, and jarring. But the message that we still have a narrow opportunity to impact the future and change course was comforting and celebrated with the premier of a shadow puppet show by Cobb Hill resident Jay Mead, depicting a future achievement of decreasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
I was reinvigorated at this reunion --- despite the fact that most climate, environment, economic, social measures are worse than our last reunion 15 months ago. I have been familiar with the Work the Reconnects for many years. A part of me has always thought and hoped that collapse is not going to happen — we will turn things around --- we have time --- people will wake up before the crisis. Lately I am not so sure. So I try to take solace in each turn of consciousness, each crawl in the right direction, and each acknowledgement of the “inescapable network of mutuality”. This session instilled in me an essential gratitude. When I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the state of the world or shaking off a bad dream, my feelings turn to being grateful for my warm bed, the cord of wood in the back yard, my community, family and friends, and all the Fellows, SI folks, Cobb Hillians, Fran, and Joanna. -Virginia Farley, Land Connections, Moretown, Vermont			The practice of honoring our pain for the world embraces despair as a vital feedback system that motivates us to find a response or solution. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1963 wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This idea of an inescapable network of mutuality means that the future is within us all and also that by suppressing this anguish and pain, we suppress in ourselves two critical weapons for healing the world, compassion and insight.
These two weapons are sited in an ancient Tibetan Buddhist prophecy of a time on earth where life is in great danger. This danger is not from an evil deity or malevolent extraterrestrial power. Instead the danger is a result from our own choices and relationships. It is in this time when the Kingdom of Shambhala emerges in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors who ultimately bring their kingdom into being by reaching into the corridors of power where decisions are made and guarded. By embracing compassion to move us to act on the behalf of other beings and our openness to the world’s pain and insight to realize that we are all interconnected so that each action undertaken brings consequences we cannot measure or see, we all have the potential to act as Shambhala warriors during The Great Turning. Our compassion for the world was expressed in a ritual called The Truth Mandala, and was a profound experience for the group. The ritual was organized to give space and a place for participants to share their pain for the world without having to justify or problem solve. The ritual embraces emotions of emptiness, fear, anger and sorrow that extend beyond our individual needs and wants. After honoring our pain for the world the focus shifted to seeing with new eyes. This focused on systems thinking and identifying common operating codes or norms, values, and assumptions of industrial society. Many of these codes are based on reductionist theory first introduced by the Greek philosopher, Parmenides who presented the idea that the universe is composed of divisible parts. A second theory incorporates the idea that when you take everything apart and examine it individually, you lose something crucial to the system, the relationships. The idea was expressed by another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, suggesting that all living creatures including humans are like flames, constantly changing, never static and interacting with the surrounding environment. Therefore by reducing the world to divisible parts much of the interaction and relationships occurring are not registered.
With this enormous paradigm shift, it becomes clear that to perceive our “inescapable network of mutuality” is a dramatic shift from mainstream culture. By exploring this paradigm shift with new eyes the power of the group is understood and the power of the collective is realized. Suddenly it is possible to understand that the common feelings of futility felt so commonly in the work of the Great Turning sprouts from the thinking that we as one person should somehow have the answers individually. In reality it is our interconnected networks that hold answers and possibilities, and ultimately the most powerful.		Presenting Group Work
Finally the group transitioned into going forth as the fourth day arrived. Slowly the group was grounded back into their everyday work and learnings, experiences, and revelations were incorporated into points of action for after the workshop. With renewed hope, a feeling of comradery, and a reassurance that we are in fact participating in something greater than any of us combined can imagine, the three circles that Donella had launched set forth to tackle their resolved actions to accelerate the Great Turning or Sustainable Revolution.
The Work That Reconnects Workshop Group
Sustainability Institute 3 Linden Road, Hartland, VT 05048 • Phone 802-436-1277 • Fax 802-436-1281 • www.sustainer.org