Bioneers: Part Two

Here are my edited, abridged, and paraphrased notes from two extraordinary panels. (Disclaimer: my own interpretations may be are inadvertently thrown in there! I'm also kinda biased toward quoting john powell, though sarah crowell is also my new hero):

Akaya Windwood of the Rockwood Leadership Institute moderated both panels. Beforehand she had told all of the panelists not to prepare anything.  "We spend too much time preparing for things we already know."  Better to have a candid conversation with wise people.  She also said, "After each question, I'm going to ask for silence so all of us in the audience can think about how we would answer it.  This builds collective wisdom in the room."

Her moderating and question skills were as powerful as the panelists' answers. Her questions were simple, direct, and the definition of what it means to be to the point.  She would also have the audience take a deep breath together periodically to remind us that the word "conspire" comes from Latin word for "to breathe together."

PANEL ONE: "Change vs. Transformation"


john a. powell - superstar philosopher based out of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University.  Oh how I want to go to his "Keeping it Real: The Practice of Diversity - A Conversation with bell hooks" on Oct 20 at OSU.
Brock Dolman -  dude who does much work on resisliency, permaculture, and ecological design at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Sarah Crowell - superstar artistic director for Destiny Arts Center for teens in Oakland, CA
Kristen Rothballer - managing director at Green For All and former organizer of the youth program at Bioneers


Akaya Windwood: [I missed the opening question because  I walked in late, but I assume is was something along the lines of the title.]

john a. powell: "'Crisis' refers to when the old has died and the new has not yet been born." [Shout out to the extraordinary teacher Gustavo Esteva!] "When positive feedback loops reach a critical point, transformation occurs--this requires a new language, a new grammar."

Akaya Windwood:  What is the role of grief or fear?


Brock Dolman: The most important water to bring back to the land has got to be tears.  Stifling grief is bad medicine.  [He was also into puns]: Scare City = Scarcity.  Bun's Dancing = Abundancy

Sarah Crowell: I was initially of afraid of working with teenagers because all I could think of was my own insecurity in those days.  Most people are afraid of teenagers.  But as a biracial, bicultural queer woman in straight world, I like to think of myself as a bridge-person.  After ten years of working with teens, my fear has dissipated...Teens are so cute!

john a. powell: In the sixties, historically white colleges started inviting many students of color, who came and transformed the institutions.  The students were ill-prepared to succeed by conventional definition, but they had their communities behind them, so they flourished.  In fact, that were too transformative from the perspective of the institutions, so now it's mostly middle class students of color who are admitted to the academy -- they are better prepared on paper, but they are flunking out because they're disconnected from their communities.

For a film example check out When We Were Kings.  George Forman was clearly the favorite to win the boxing match, but Mohammad Ali says, "I have 100 million Africans holding me up.  There's no way George Foreman can beat me." And Ali won...He did it by letting George Foreman pound on him for so long he became exhausted.  And then Ali knocked him out.  It was called rope-a-dope!

Too many of us have lost connection with our community, which means we've lost connection with ourselves.  This only leads to failure.

Akaya Windwood: What is justice?

Kristen Rothballer: The first thing that comes to mind is "just us."  It's just us here on this planet...

john a. powell:  Justice is fairness.  It is public love.  To often we think of love as exclusive love: you can only love one person.  [Then he brought it all back to the foundations of western thought. Talkin' about first the Greeks, then Enlightenment thinkers, specifically Hobbes.]  If you read these people with dispassion, they sound completely paranoid: 'First we need  a government  to protect us from each other, and then we need guns to protect ourselves from the government with is supposed to protect us from each other." [I mean seriously! is basically what he was saying. :)]

In the West, justice is all about stuff, contractual relationships, fear of the other, and it never seems to happen.

There are questions we need to address. For example, if you have food for a family of four, does everyone get a quarter of the food, or do some have specific needs that you have to take into account?

We're one of the few societies in the world that doesn't have a good samaritan statute.  In other societies, you see someone in distress and are able to help them, you are required to.  In the U.S., if you see someone in distress, you can let them suffer.

The word "private" comes from the Greek word (prive) for DEPRIVED.  But it has become our dominant form of living.  [It's cray-cray!]  Before the 1970's all porches were constructed in the front of the house.  After the 1970's they were all constructed in the back!

Sarah Crowell: [She told a story about the struggle of one of her black teenagers who was struggling with going to prom because she was worried about sweating out her straightened hair.  The story ended triumphantly and she went to the prom in an afro.]

Teens have an incredible passion for justice.  They are constantly questioning everything.

The word "justice" gets so stale.   It is fairness, but the word 'fairness' just makes me think of an adult yelling at a child.  Let's think about how justice is sexy!  It's all about: how do we work together and be creative enough to share all this joy!

Brock Dolman: Private property = private poverty.  [He also said to check out someone -- Marteen Pratel? -- for more on the idea of MUTUAL INDEBTEDNESS, but I can't find this on the google.]

Akaya Windwood: What is the gift of individuality and the role of solitude?


Brock Dolman: A 'niche' is not a place, as it's commonly misunderstood to be.  It's a job description, a role for the individual in the larger community.

Sarah Crowell: In solitude, I can remind myself of who I am so that I can again move forward.  It keeps me in a state of movement.

john a. powell:  When we quiet down, we see our feelings.  We see the ego coming and going.  We think of the ego as a solid thing, but it's actually fluid.

[He tells a Descartes joke:]  Descartes walks into a bar.  The bartender says, 'Would you like a shot of whiskey?'  Descartes says 'I think not' and disappears. [This was followed by much laughter :)]

The real decision making does not happen on a conscious level.  [This is so deep!]  Check out the book The Illusion of Choice.  Only 2% of our cognitive emotional processes are directly acessible to us consciously.  And that's where the ego is.

The individual is different than who we think she is.  She is fractured multiple, complex, situational.  If we sat for long enough like the Buddha did, we might reach his conclusion that there is no permanent self.  But does that mean we're blah?  No.  We get stuck in this dichotomy of 'John Wayne vs. blah.'

In Joseph Campbell's A Hero of a Thousand Faces, the hero explored into order to bring back new knowledge, experience, relationships to his or her community.  In our society, the hero only explores for him or herself.

Akaya Windwood: Okay, let's make some magic.  We know that language and story create reality.  Tell us your deepest vision.  What is emerging?  What is on the other side of this wave?


Sarah Crowell: I often have my teens freewrite, and usually their pens hit the paper immediately.  But one time I asked them to freewrite on 'what the world would look like without racism,' and they all looked at me like 'are you kidding?'  But that began a great conversation.  I said, 'if you can't envision it, how are we gonna create it?...Even though you can't imagine it, write about it anyway.'  ...Their writing was stunning! [She obvi couldn't recount it all right then.]

We have to remember we're all the future--not just the youth.

[She recounted an experience of a group of people, I forget who, with the goal of envisioning bliss.] The first thing that came was a lot of poetry, a lot of dancing, a lot of singing, a lot of really good sex, and seeing the beauty in each other!  There we're so many tears -- It was like I saw beauty in this person for the first time.  What if we operated daily from this place?

[Then a woman in the audience said, can we envision bliss right now?  And Ayaka Windwood was like "Aw hell no!  We've gotta get this panel finished on time."  Best moderator ever!]

Kristen Rothballer: Farmers are the true stars.  I think of the seed exchange that happened last night--that's our future, literally!

john a. powell: I am not an atheist, or a theist.  I'm not an agnostic either. [Whatev's dude, don't get too full of yourself :)]

What do we want from God?  What does God want from us?

These two questions are the vision.  I don't need my own individual vision right now.  I need to listen.  We need to listen.

Some famous author once said, "Hope is nostalgia for the future."  [Everyone was like, mmm, aw yeah, that's deep, mmm!]  ... I try to live without hope [??], but with full engagement.

[Then it ended and this white woman walked up to john a. powell and was like "Every year I choose someone here to be my teacher, and this year, it's you...I've never heard of you before this conference...Do you write?" #fail

But he was cool.  He was like, punch your email into my iPhone, and then it'll automatically send you my electronic business card.  Next.]


Phew! That took me longer than expected!  The notes from the next panel will have to be "To Be Continued..."  But it's like, do you really need more right now?