One of the things I appreciated about the Soviet Union when I spent a year as nanny to a British attaché in Moscow in 1973 was the appearance of the storefronts. While I would never have called myself a communist, the stunning lack of artifice in a store named “Produce” or “Shoes” or “Books” deeply appealed to me.
I was reminded of this as I reviewed my experience at an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium last Sunday in Oakland’s Chinatown.
Awakening the Dreamer is a masterfully compiled multimedia collection of video excerpts, music, photographs, quotations, animation, live presenters, dyads, group processes and wisdom snippets – from Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hahn, John Robbins, Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai and Vandana Shiva, among others – that, in only four hours, clearly distils the facts and elicits and presents answers to four questions:
How did we get here?
What is possible for the future?
Where do we go from here?
I had just watched the climate docu-drama The Age of Stupid and was keenly aware of the precariousness of our position on the edge of collapse as cheap oil, the fuel behind our consumer society, runs out and its effects as climate change grow more severe.
A key concept of the symposium is that we have been “entranced” by years of “marketing” to believe that we need something outside ourselves to be satisfied and that ever-increasing consumption is the answer. Although it is clear that our addiction to consumerism is driving climate change, perhaps we are not so much “stupid” as hypnotized. Stores and manufacturers in our capitalistic world proclaim their wares with brand images and logos that we have been conditioned to feel we cannot live without. What does the name “Safeway” actually have to do with food, for instance, or “The Territory Ahead” with clothes?
The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium was put together several years ago by the Pachamama Alliance in response to a heartfelt plea from the indigenous Achuar people of Peru/Ecuador, whose shamans had predicted that the world was on the verge of a terrible catastrophe, which only industrialized countries could avert. The version I experienced was a recent improvement that is taking the Bay Area (and beyond) by storm as more and more attendees are inspired to become facilitators and bring the symposium to their own groups and associations.
At the crux of the event is the revelation of one basic assumption under which we have been operating for centuries, the reversal of which will make it inevitable that we reduce our consumption, care more for the earth and each other than for profit, and rebuild our lives in resilient communities. Can you guess what it is?
I saw the Symposium as offering a beautiful, compact introduction to the Transition concept, so I was delighted to hear this morning that the Pachamama Alliance and the Transition Network are currently formalizing a partnership to do just that.
