Transition Albany

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:

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.

“THE WORK THAT RECONNECTS”

www.joannamacy.net

Joanna Macy is a Buddhist teacher, writer, activist, and scholar who has been developing teaching tools to help us respond to the perils and suffering of our world for three decades.  She is giving a one-day workshop on The Work That Reconnects on February 14th at Common Circle, Berkeley, from 10 to 6pm. This is a very special opportunity to spend time with one of the elders of our age, someone whose life has been dedicated to helping people feel connected to the world they live in, fully in touch with their own emotions, and warmly connected to one other.

A group of 15 of us, mostly from Transition Albany and Transition Richmond (the Richmond Rivets), had a touching day experiencing some of Joanna’s tools on January 24th, courtesy of Pam and Tatyana at Sarana Community Acupuncture Center, 968 San Pablo Avenue, Albany. Anne Symens-Bucher, an accomplished workshop leader in her own right and assistant to Joanna Macy for four years, introduced deep and inclusive exercises designed by Joanna to put us in touch with the power, liberation, and solidarity that come with owning our collective grief.

Joanna’s work has been embraced by the Transition community, which is well aware that, as we let in the information coming our way about climate change and the end of cheap oil, we can be sideswiped by fear, grief, anger, helplessness – the whole gamut of emotions. If we have no place to air these feelings we are likely to stuff them and gradually deaden our response instead of letting our creativity and resilience come up with solutions.

Joanna is leading a day-long workshop in Berkeley on February 14th, 2010 – sign up at http://commoncircle.com/wtrevent. The cost is $95 before Feb 10th, and $145 thereafter. I attended a weekend workshop on The Work that Reconnects in Bolinas with Joanna in December 2009. I was thoroughly impressed with the potency of the simple exercises we did. I’m usually rather skeptical of workshops but I “warmed up” in the room of mostly people I hadn’t met before very quickly.

Every Transition Town has a “heart and soul” element, and we are starting our own group for airing feelings and lending mutual support during challenging times, on Thursday, February 18th at 943 Madison Street, Albany. Come for a potluck at 6:30 pm if you would like, and please RSVP to transitionalbanyca@gmail.com or call 510-528-2261.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world – we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other”. Joanna Macy