All posts tagged leadership

Solstice 2017: Visions Bright and Dark, and a Solstice Prayer

Here in the northeast US, Solstice 2017 has arrived with dark, gloomy, damp weather that matches the moods of many people I know.

It’s been a tough year.

When Trump & Co. stole the 2016 election, we knew we’d be in for a difficult stretch.

But who could have predicted the assault on civil liberties, the shredding of the already-meager American social safety net, the rigging of the economy for the super-elite, the blatant racism, sexism and callous indifference to the more vulnerable among us?

On a planetary scale, who could have imagined this year’s battering hurricane season, the raging wildfires, the inexorable melting of the polar ice caps, the steady loss of forests and species, even as the rape of the natural world by the fossil fuel and chemical industries continues unabated?

Here on Transition Times, I’ve been writing about politics and climate change since 2011, but never has the situation seemed more dire. We are all perpetrators, accomplices and frozen bystanders to the rapidly accelerating intertwined disasters of politics and climate change, gathering strength day by day.

25591989_625386244954_8388774816549944067_nAnd yet we continue to go through the motions of our normal routines. We buy gifts; we decorate our homes; we put out seeds for the birds and dream of flying south for warm-weather vacations. Like all animals, we are creatures of habit and it’s healthy for us to live blessedly in the present moment.

I don’t know if I will live to see another Solstice. I don’t know what “normal” will look or feel like a year from now. What I do know is that despite the harshness of 2017, I have so much to be thankful for right now, today.

This Solstice, I give thanks for the abundance I continue to enjoy: loving friends and family, good food and good cheer, health and the freedom to savor the sweetness of each day to the fullest.

I am grateful for the opportunity to write and share these reflections widely (via the World Wide Web, another institution under attack in 2017). I am grateful to everyone who has taken a moment to write back to me with a line of encouragement, a pingback that reassures me that I am not alone, that others are ruminating over similar issues, and what I’ve expressed has struck a chord that continues to resonate out through others into the world.

In 2011, those of us who were awake to the slow-motion disaster of climate change seemed like far-flung outliers, and it was partly to find kindred spirits that I was moved to start Transition Times. In these last days of 2017, I feel the presence of you kindred spirits keenly. It’s important for us to reach out to each other now, shining our lights brightly in the gathering darkness.

The wise ones remind us how important it is to not succumb to fear. As we wake up to the sobering reality of the vast planetary and political changes now in motion, we have to steady our spirits. Amidst all the turbulence it’s our task to stay centered and hold our own little lights aloft so others can see us, and see the way ahead too.

I used to write about keeping hope alive. Now that idea rings hollow; it’s no more than a child’s wish for comfort. What would I be hoping for? A return to the world I was born into, with its familiar abundance and stability? The realist in me knows that world is already gone.

Meg Wheatley counsels that we leave hope behind, not in Dante’s sense of “abandon all hope” as you enter Hell, but in the sense of entering into a more realistic and mature relationship with the reality of our time and place. Instead of hope, we must have faith, she says, that we will be up to whatever is asked of us.

We who are alive for these transition times find ourselves at the threshold of a historical moment unlike any humans have faced before. We must walk clear-eyed into an uncertain tomorrow, giving ourselves permission to feel deeply both the sorrow and the joy of each passing day.

My Solstice prayer:

May I have strength to keep the light of my spirit shining brightly, no matter how daunting the siege of the forces of darkness stalking our planet each day.

May I kindle your light with mine, and together may we illuminate a shared vision of a better world that we can help dream into being, not for ourselves but for our children and future generations.

May we work together for a loving, abundant, beneficent future for all life on our always-generous Mother Earth.

In gratitude, forever….to life!

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 23, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Gaia, Leadership, love, Spiritual Ecology, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 23, 2017

https://bethechange2012.com/2017/12/23/solstice-2017-visions-bright-and-dark-and-a-solstice-prayer/

Leadership in the End Times: Feminine Rising

“Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew/Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!/How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/Seem to me all the uses of this world!/Fie on ’t, ah fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden/That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely. That it should come to this./But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two./So excellent a king, that was to this/Hyperion to a satyr.”

—Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2”

You may remember Hamlet’s anguished soliloquy as he contemplates the death of his noble father, the rapid remarriage of his mother to his lecherous uncle, and the fact that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

In this male-dominated kingdom, an “unweeded garden,” young Ophelia goes mad and drowns (a possible suicide), the Queen shares a bed with her husband’s brother-turned-killer, murder plots abound and no one is safe, not even the idealistic, intelligent young Hamlet, who cannot unravel the mess of his kingdom without becoming unraveled himself.

Does this sound familiar?

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Margaret J. Wheatley

It would not be too much of a stretch to compare our own sorry political landscape in the U.S. to the “rank and gross” garden of ancient Denmark. And thus it did not surprise me to find Meg Wheatley, in her latest book on leadership, turning to history to explain our current moment: what she calls, following British historian Sir John Glubb, “The Age of Decadence.”

Here is Wheatley summarizing Glubb:

“Glubb studied thirteen empires in the Middle East, Asia and Europe…from Assyria in 859 BCE to modern Britain in 1950. The pattern of the decline and fall of these superpowers was startlingly clear. It didn’t matter where they were or what technology they had or how they exercised power. They all declined in the same stages and it always took ten generations, about 250 years.

“The logic of this is very clear: each generation matures in better socioeconomic circumstances created by the preceding generation; thus, there is always a march to increasing materialism. In every generation, youth will have higher expectations for comfort than their parents. Improved material conditions create attitudinal changes that insist on still more material changes; and predictably, because of its wealth and erosion of morality, the civilization declines into decadence.” (Who Do We Choose to Be? 34).

The United States is nine years shy of its 250th anniversary. We are deep into our Age of Decadence, which Wheatley (following Glubb) describes as a time when “wealth and power have led to petty and negative behaviors, including narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fanaticism and high levels of frivolity” (35).

The pattern is clear; the writing is on the wall–even without the added wrench of climate change and environmental destruction, which Glubb, writing in the 1970s, could not foresee.

Wheatley’s questions for our time are essential. Given the stark reality of our epoch, what should we do as leaders? How can we stay centered and grounded in the midst of social turmoil and environmental catastrophe, and work in our own spheres to create “islands of sanity” in our communities?

As I’ve become more acutely aware of the transition times (end times?) we are living through in the 21st century, it’s become important to me to reach out and try to find others who are also aware of what’s happening—those who are not giving in to despair, but who are continuing to work for positive change.

All kinds of resistance and action are needed, from protesting the unholy trinity of Fossil Fuels, Big Pharma and Big Ag; to holding elected officials accountable; to protecting our dwindling wild places and wild creatures; and working to improve quality of life for people with few resources.

It’s all urgent and important, and taken together, it’s overwhelming, which is why, as co-founder Kenny Ausubel said at the Bioneers conference last month, it’s important for activists to come together to imbibe the “good medicine” of sharing our stories and knitting together our hopes and dreams for a better future. It was great to get a strong dose of that good medicine myself at this year’s Bioneers.

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Nina Simons addresses the Bioneers 2017.

At the Bioneers, it was the women leaders who especially inspired me. It was heartbreaking but galvanizing to listen to Kandi Mosset, of the Indigenous Environmental Network, talk about the horrendous impact of the fossil fuel industry in her home state of North Dakota.

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Clare Dubois at the Bioneers 2017.

Kandi’s litany of destruction was balanced by the visionary, participatory ritual created by Treesisters founder Clare Dubois, invoking a rise of feminine consciousness to balance each of us as individuals (men as well as women) and enable us to bring our planet back into balance.

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Nina Simons awakening women leaders. 

Starhawk’s regeneration workshop echoed a theme raised by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons in her women’s leadership session: the idea of composting what we don’t want, and focusing on generating more of what we do want and need.

But what if it’s not clear what we should compost in our lives, and what we should be growing? The way forward is murky in our times. I was reassured in my uncertainty by Joanna Macy, who ended her Bioneers session with simple but potent advice: “Cherish the questions.”

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Joanna Macy, wise elder at the Bioneers 2017.

I was also invigorated in my own work of purposeful memoir to find Meg Wheatley ending her new leadership book with a turn to the personal. From the wide historical sweep of her opening sections, she eventually narrows down to the particular center from which each of us operate: the self.

“We see the world through the powerful filters of self. The more we know our filters, the more we can see beyond them….The distinction between self-help and self-knowledge is important. There are thousands of self-help methods available to design a better you. But here, we aspire to high levels of self-awareness, not to help ourselves but to learn to trust ourselves in difficult situations….Our motivation is to be more in control of ourselves so that we don’t get in the way, and don’t give ourselves away, as we work in service to others” (275).

This is precisely the goal of my work of “aligning the personal, political and planetary through purposeful memoir.” In my workshops and online course, following the path I took myself in my memoir and laid out in my writer’s guide to purposeful memoir, we explore how our individual life stories have been shaped by political and environmental forces beyond our control.

As we learn about who we are in our particular time and place, as well as the ancestral baggage we carry, we can begin to “compost” what we don’t want to bring forward into the future, and envision “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” to quote Charles Eisenstein.

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Barbara Marx Hubbard, born the same year as Joanna Macy, 1929.

Yesterday I listened to Clare Dubois’ interview with the visionary thinker Barbara Marx Hubbard, who declared that we are living in the end times of a great evolutionary cycle. But in Nature, all death is also the opportunity for rebirth: compost leads to regeneration.

Ours is a moment of chaos and decay, but also a moment of great potential, when thanks to our enhanced powers of communication (the Internet) those whom Wheatley calls “Warriors for the Human Spirit” can find each other and work together to amplify our signal, increasing our collective ability to be a force for good on the planet.

In my lexicon, our task is to shift the destructive, aggressive Anthropocene to the balanced, harmonious Androgynocene. To do this, feminine leadership must come to the fore—in both men and women.

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Warrior for the Human Spirit AMY GOODMAN inspires young folks at the Bioneers 2017.

What would feminine leadership look like? Simply put, it is collaborative rather than competitive; nurturing rather than domineering; empathetic rather than arrogant; generous rather than stingy; putting the well-being of the entire system and all its components ahead of the individual striving of a few.

Can we achieve this before human civilization crashes and the entire planetary environment hits the reset button?

We have a ringside seat on the action, my friends. And we don’t have to stay on the sidelines! Each of us has a role to play in nudging our world towards a tipping point, for good or for ill.

If you can get clear on what you want to cultivate—in yourself, your communities, and the planet—you can then act in your own sphere to create an “island of sanity” around you. Once you feel clear, grounded and strong enough, you can reach out to likeminded others and welcome them in to your circle.

And then, let the world know what you’re doing by sending out encouraging messages in bottles (blog posts, tweets, photos) through the Internet. You never know where the ripples will spread and who your message will reach in a time of need.

It’s important that we counter the constant mainstream litany of bad news with positive stories of the better world that is regenerating through the compost of our civilization right now. It’s happening! And the more we share the news of the new shoots and beneficial micorrhizal networks we see, the more vigorously they’ll grow.

 

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 4, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Leadership, New stories, Resilience, Social change, Uncategorized, women's leadership
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on November 4, 2017

https://bethechange2012.com/2017/11/04/leadership-in-the-end-times-feminine-rising/

21st Century Leadership: Learning to Love in the Digisphere

Life in the digital age is accelerated up to speeds that previous generations (say, anyone born before 1900) would have found incomprehensible. The demands on our time are more intense than ever before, and decisions made in the blink of an eye or the tap of a finger can continue to reverberate for months or years, spinning out of control if caught up in the wild eddies of cyberspace.

We all know about cyber-bullying by this time—how it can drive some people, especially vulnerable young people, to despair and suicide.

We’ve also learned how dangerous random tweets and photo messages can be in a digital world where nothing on the Internet is really private.

This environment calls for leaders of tremendous personal strength and integrity—but it is not an environment that creates such people. Digital life–with its endless distractions, easy avatars and a million ways to cheat–seems to breed a kind of aimless cynicism. Even people who are motivated enough to attend retreats on “finding your purpose” are likely to be surfing through their lives, perpetually seeking the next answer or thrill or coveted consumer item.

In such an environment, how can we mentor people of all ages to become the leaders the world so desperately needs now?

We might begin by discussing the qualities we’d like to see in our leaders, and thus in ourselves. Although we still cling to a heroic ideal of leadership, enjoying the feeling of following a charismatic, forceful and self-confident leader, the truth is that leadership in our time is becoming much more decentralized.

The saying “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” attributed to the Hopi, has never seemed more apt than now, when each of us has the potential to assume a leadership role in our digital and real-world lives.

For example, are we going to join a digital mob assault of someone who is vulnerable? Or will we refuse to join in the feeding frenzy, or even take a stand in defense of the person who’s down?

How can we use the power of the World Wide Web to enhance thoughtful, in-depth communication, rather than allowing it to serve as a platform for name-calling and threats?

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There is a world of difference between movement-building through the media, as in the #BlackLivesMatter movement or One Billion Rising, and vicious personal attacks on individuals that can quickly escalate into the digital equivalent of terrorist attacks.

The technology that enables this behavior is so new that we have not yet had time to establish codes of conduct or to fully weigh the ethical considerations of a Twitterized world.

Giving children access to the Web without the guidance of their parents or teachers is the equivalent of letting a teenager get behind the wheel of a car without having any learner’s permit or driver’s ed.

We have a whole structure for training young people about the dangers of alcohol, drugs & sex…but next to nothing in place that mentors and supports them–or us older folk either–in becoming responsible citizens of the digisphere.

And since this is where all of us spend a vast proportion of our waking lives, and where, increasingly, the collective human consciousness is being developed, it certainly seems like an essential place to begin a discussion of ethical, responsible, and purposeful leadership.

Ironically, to understand the digisphere and our place in it, we need to take the time to disconnect. Like a mental cleanse or fast, time spent untethered to the Web is time that allows us to reconnect with our own internal voice, our own inner guidance that has always been there for us, since we were the tiniest of infants.

IMG_9158Human babies know instinctively that they like warmth, gentle touch, smiling faces, eye contact and gentle, friendly voices. These human preferences do not go away as we age. Humans, like other mammals, are hard-wired to love and to enjoy being loved.

This is the kind of experience that it’s very hard for the digisphere to conjure up. For all the online dating services, the Skypes and Google hang-outs, the endless news feeds, there is still nothing that beats personal, real-world human connection.

Of course, any leader today is going to have to be an adept user of the media. But the primary values behind the use of media by a leader worthy of that title must be true to the ancient and ageless human value of love.

Leadership, in essence, is putting oneself forward in loving service to others and the broader community. There is no formula for it, and it will look different in every specific context. But at the base, at the bedrock, a good leader acts out of love.

Can loving leadership be taught and practiced in the digisphere? In the 21st century, this is seeming like an increasingly urgent question.

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 16, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Empathy, Leadership, love, Media analysis, Mentoring
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on February 16, 2015

https://bethechange2012.com/2015/02/16/21st-century-leadership-learning-to-love-in-the-digisphere/

Jesus Christ, Thomas Berry, and the New Shamanism: What the World Needs Now

Christmas Eve. The night of the year that we celebrate the birth of a baby who would grow up to reveal himself as a seer, a man with a direct connection to the Divine.

I believe that we all have the potential to have such a connection. In fact, I think it’s our birthright as humans, and it’s an ability we share with other animals as well.

All of us animals sleep and dream, and during our dreams we experience the same non-ordinary reality that the prophets and mystics have been telling us about—men like Socrates, Jesus or Mohammed who heard the voices of divine spirits.

For the past two thousand years or so, Western philosophy has been working steadily to wall off the connections between the natural world, including other animals, and human beings.

But in our dreams, those walls come tumbling down, as we visit landscapes and mingle with animals whose messages we strive to remember and interpret when we awake.

Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry

I am very intrigued by the recognition of religious scholar and eco-philosopher Thomas Berry that what human civilization urgently needs, in this time of ecological crisis, is to re-open the psychic channels connecting us to our planetary home.

He calls for a revalidation of the “shamanic personality”; shaman referring to a human being who can enter non-ordinary reality at will, and access valuable wisdom from the spirit world (or the Divine, as Western tradition would call it).

Berry argues that every human being is “genetically coded” to have access to the wisdom of the dreamland, whether in sleep or in the trance of deliberate shamanic journeying. And, he says, this is where we are going to find the solutions to the ecological crises we face today.

Change is not going to come from politics and protests, Berry says. It’s going to come through a psychic shift in which “we awaken to the numinous powers ever present in the phenomenal world around us,” which manifest themselves in human beings in our most creative moments. “Poets and artists continually invoke these spirit powers, which function less through words than through symbolic forms,” he says, continuing:

“In moments of confusion such as the present, we are not left simply to our own rational contrivances. We are supported by the ultimate powers of the universe as they make themselves present to us through the spontaneities within our own beings. We need only become sensitized to these spontaneities, not with a naïve simplicity, but with critical appreciation. This intimacy with our genetic endowment, and through this endowment with the larger cosmic process, is not primarily the role of the philosopher, priest, prophet or professor. It is the role of the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging once again in our society.

Tree spirits. Photo c. J. Browdy 2014

Tree spirits. Photo c. J. Browdy 2014

“More than any other of the human types concerned with the sacred, the shamanic personality journeys into the far regions of the cosmic mystery and brings back the vision and the power needed by the human community….

“The shamanic personality speaks and best understands the language of the various creatures of the earth….This shamanic insight is especially important just now when history is being made not primarily within nations or between nations, but between humans and the earth, with all its living creatures….

“If the supreme disaster in the comprehensive story of the earth is our present closing down of the major life systems of the planet, then the supreme need of our times is to bring about a healing of the earth through this mutually enhancing human presence to the earth community.

“To achieve this mode of pressure, a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural world, a sensitivity that comprehends the larger patterns of nature, its severe demands as well as its delightful aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish so that other lifeforms might flourish.”

Another way to name the “sensitivity” Berry is talking about here is, quite simply LOVE.

The same love practiced and preached by Jesus Christ, but expanded to include the entire earth community, not just the human branch.

tree heart

Tree heart. Photo c. J. Browdy 2014

I am continually amazed by the generosity with which the natural world gives and gives to support the cause of a flourishing earth community. Death comes that life may continue. A clearcut forest patiently begins the work of recreating itself, from the soil bacteria on up. There is no such thing as guilt or blame in the natural world, only endless patience and a resilient creativity, always seeking better paths towards the goal of abundance and teeming myriad forms of life.

Thomas Berry says that we humans, as part and parcel of the earth community, are genetically coded to participate in this great unfolding of exuberant life.

For a long time (at least since the time of Gilgamesh, who harshly slew Humbaba, the guardian of the forests, and cut down an entire cedar forest just because he could) human culture has been working tirelessly to sever our connection to the divinity immanent in the natural world.

“In relation to the earth,” Berry says, “we have been autistic for centuries.”

seeingBut now, “the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature, through our genetic coding….Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe” (Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 210-215).

There is a lot to ponder here. Berry seems to be proposing that in our genetic make-up is an ability to communicate on a deep level with the earth, including other animals and life forms. Under the spell of Western civilization, we have allowed ourselves to become alienated not only from the natural world, but also from our own innate ability to commune with “the dream of the earth,” through our inherent shamanic/psychic powers. We have been content to delegate the connection to the Divine to others—prophets, seers, priests—rather than to cultivate within ourselves that “sensitivity” to divine inspiration and that access to the powerful creative pulse of the universe which we all experience in dreams.

This alienation has led us inexorably to the hairline edge upon which human civilization now perches. After 10,000 years of a stable climate, warmly conducive to the development of prosperous human communities, we are on the brink of another great break in planetary history, this one brought on by our own insensitivity and inability to listen and understand the many cues the natural world has been giving us.

If a new Messiah is to arise and lead us to safety, it must be one who can reawaken in us the loving ethical responsibility that all humans are born with.

I believe that the potential to become this leader lies dormant in each one of us. My question this Christmas, which is really a question for myself above all: how are you going to manifest, in your own life and in the larger earth community in which we all live, the divine LOVE that Jesus Christ, in his purest form, represents?

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 24, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Community, Environment, Leadership, love
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on December 24, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/12/24/jesus-christ-thomas-berry-and-the-new-shamanism-what-the-world-needs-now/

Help Wanted: Willing Ring Bearer Seeks Quest

All week the energy of the summer solstice seemed to build in me. After a week of rain, the sun burst through and we had a whole week of clear, low-humidity days in which it appeared that you could see the plants growing happily, stretching their roots down into the soil and their leaves up towards the bright sky.

My peaceful backyard in the Shire

My peaceful backyard in the Shire

In anticipation of several weeks away (I’ll be making my annual pilgrimage to Nova Scotia soon) I spent a lot of time out in the garden, planting vegetables and annuals, weeding flower beds, mulching and staking and tending.

morning lettuce

morning lettuce

pumpkins

pumpkins

Garlic; note the gas tank in the background

Garlic; note the gas tank in the background

It’s always hard to leave a garden in the summer, when you know the minute your back is turned the invasive weeds will grow with vindictive vigor, the slugs will multiply and munch away at the lettuce, and the Japanese beetles will arrive to decimate the roses.

However, I must get away from the confines of my little corner of the world to clear my head and ready myself for another year—for me, as a lifelong academic, the year always starts with the fall semester of school.

Last night, in honor of the longest day of the year, my son and I took an evening hike up a local mountain, and sat on a rock ledge facing west as the sun slowly and majestically dropped towards the horizon.

Eric in woods

We were happy to find some friends up there—a caterpillar with beautiful markings, making its way up an oak sapling, and a pair of orange-and-black butterflies, sunning themselves just like we were.

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solstice sunset

As we walked down again in the last rays of sunshine, I couldn’t help thinking about the strong contrast between the peaceful, lovely landscape of my home ground, where for many of us the most urgent question of the day is “what shall we have for dinner?” or “what movie shall we watch tonight?” and the social landscapes that cry out to me every day when I read the news headlines—arid, violent, rigid, harsh.

Reuters photo taken June 11, 2014 in Mosul, Iraq

Reuters photo taken June 11, 2014 in Mosul, Iraq

 

This summer solstice, as I sit in my peaceful green American haven, Iraq is again descending into crazed sectarian violence. The news reports that “militias are organizing” or “Mosul was taken” focus on the politicians playing the mad chess game of war, and the young men drawn into the armies as battlefield pawns. There is no mention of the mothers, sisters and grandmothers of those politicians and young men. The women rarely surface in the headlines, and when they do, the news is not good: a woman who dared to go out to a rally stripped and gang-raped, for example.

We hear about women obliquely in the reporting about the incredible surge of refugees living in camps this year: of the 51 million people living in refugee camps under U.N. supervision, half are children—which means that a high percentage of the other half are probably mothers and grandmothers. But that is in inference I am making by reading between the lines; those women are invisible in the official story.

Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, now Jordan's fifth largest city

Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, now Jordan’s fifth largest city

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I have to recognize the incredible privilege I have as an American woman, living in the heart of the heavily guarded gated community that this country has become.

Other people around the world are paying the price for the peace and plenty I have here in my home. And not just people—the animals and insects and birds and forests are paying the hugest price of all to maintain my privileged lifestyle.

How long can I continue to live comfortably with this knowledge?

The more time goes on, the more I see how prescient J.R.R. Tolkien was with his Lord of the Rings series. Berkshire County, where I live, is indeed “the Shire” of legend—peaceful, productive, green and jolly. Outside our borders, far, far away, the armies of Mordor are mobilizing in the midst of lands laid waste by the industries of the Dark Lord. Few in the Shire are worried; the chance of those nasty people and industries actually coming here seem remote indeed.

JRR Tolkien

JRR Tolkien

In Lord of the Rings, it is Gandalf the wizard who serves as the bridge between these two very different landscapes. He gives Bilbo, and later Frodo, the charge of becoming the change agents who can make all the difference. The fight against the Dark Lord is fought on many fronts, but the quest to destroy the Ring of Power is paramount, and in order to destroy the ring Frodo must journey to the heart of the dark Empire itself.

I can’t escape the feeling that here in the quiet Shire where I live, ordinary people like me are being called upon, as Bilbo and Frodo were, to step up to the immense and dangerous challenge of resisting the darkness that is brewing on our borders.

But in our case there does not seem to be a Gandalf who can give us a mission and guide us as we set off on the quest. Not even the wisest leaders of the environmental and peace movements seem to be able to provide that kind of leadership. Worldwide, those leaders who claim to know with absolute certainty what is right and what to do are precisely the ones who are fomenting war and leading us down the path to environmental, civilizational suicide.

That must be why I am drawn to study with those who are exploring other epistemologies, outside of the normative range of politics, science, philosophy and religion.

Right now my bedside reading includes Anne Baring, Pam Montgomery and Pamela Eakins, along with Brian Swimme, Martin Prechtel, Bill Plotkin,  and Daniel Pinchbeck.

spring meadowWhen I look out into the green world stretching up towards our beneficent Sun, or glowing brightly under our sweet white Moon, I can see and hear the harmony that life on Earth evolved to sing. Put water and sunlight together, wait a few billion years, and you get this incredible lush planet, pulsating with life.

Human beings have flourished so well that now we have become overpopulated, an invasive species that is destructively taking over every last environmental niche on the planet. In a normal terrestrial cycle, we would go bust, our civilization would collapse, and with time the earth and the sun would gradually rebuild life in endlessly new creative forms.

Is that what is coming? Or will we be able to be the Gandalfs of our own generation, waking ourselves up out of our complacency here in the beautiful American Shire, and conquering the inner and outer Dark Lords that are laying waste to the planet?

What is the quest that is mine to carry out? What is yours? If we at least start asking these questions, with the greater good of the Earth in mind, perhaps the answers will emerge in time to set humanity on a better path.

solstice sunset dark

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by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 22, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Empathy, Environment, Fossil Fuels, Media analysis, Politics, Resilience, Spiritual Ecology, War
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on June 22, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/06/22/help-wanted-willing-ring-bearer-seeks-quest/

21st Century Leadership: On Overcoming Fear and Negativity to Work for a Livable Future

This week, coming off the exhilarating high of the 2014 Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, I started teaching a brand-new class at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, “Leadership and Public Speaking for Social and Environmental Justice.”

We spent the first day just working with the concept of Leadership—thinking about great leaders and what qualities they possessed that helped them achieve their goals and bring so many others along with them.

And then we thought about what might hold us back from stepping into our own potential as leaders.

The number one obstacle to becoming a great leader, at least from the perspective of the dozen or so students in the room that day, is FEAR.

They quickly generated a long list of very specific paralyzing fears, and as each fear was voiced, the nodding and comments in the room made it clear that it was widely shared.

I certainly recognized many of my own fears on their list, which I will append at the bottom of this post, along with our list of the qualities necessary for great leadership.

A big part of my motivation for offering this class is simply to help students face and learn to work with their fears and insecurities, rather than doing what I did at their age, which was to allow my fears to push me back onto the sidelines, an observer rather than someone who felt empowered to be out in front leading others.

It’s been a long journey for me to learn that, as Frances Moore Lappé and Jeffrey Perkins put it in their excellent little book You Have the Power: Choosing Courage in a Culture of Fear, “Fear is pure energy. It’s a signal. It might mean stop. It could mean go.”

Frances Moore Lappe

Frances Moore Lappe

I remember when I invited Frances Moore Lappé to speak at Simon’s Rock a few years ago, she began her talk acknowledging that being up alone on the stage, in the spotlight, made her nervous. But, she said, she has learned to recognize that fluttery, jittery feeling as a sign that she is doing something important, something that matters—and to let the nerves (what some might call the adrenaline rush) work for her rather than against her.

As someone who for many years was overcome with stage fright every time I had to speak in front of an audience, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

JBH 2014 Photo by Christina Rahr Lane

JBH 2014
Photo by Christina Rahr Lane

It wasn’t until I was nearly 50 that the multitudinous fears I had been carrying around with me all those years began to melt away, and I can’t say I know for sure what did it, other than forcing myself, over and over again, to get up there in front of audiences and DO IT ANYWAY, because I knew that a) the work I was being called to do was important, and not just for myself; b) if I didn’t speak about the issues I wanted to focus on in that particular time and place, no one else would; and c) there was absolutely no good rational reason for me to be afraid of speaking to the audiences I was addressing.

Clearly, one necessary ingredient of leadership is a willingness to walk with the fears, risking encounters with whatever devils those fears represent.

We’re out of time: climate change demands extraordinary leadership, now

If I am propelled now into doing all I can to catalyze leadership in my community, whether in the classroom or through the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, it is because I know that we no longer have the luxury of time to stand silently on the sidelines observing, as I did for a good part of my life.

There is simply too much at stake now, and things are happening too fast.

There are some signs that the American political and intellectual establishment is finally shaking off its lethargy and beginning to at least recognize that yes, Houston, we’ve got a problem.

The most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report pulled no punches in documenting and describing just how dire our immediate global future looks, thanks to human-induced climate change. And for a change, this “old news” was immediately carried on the front page of The New York Times, which has been ignoring and downplaying the climate change issue for years—and strongly echoed by its editorial page as well.

melting-polar-ice-caps

Yes, it’s true—climate change is real, it’s already happening, and there is no telling where it will lead us. If governments immediately start to act with furious speed and concentration, there is a chance we could backpedal our way into a precarious new normal, keeping our climate about as it is now.

If this kind of leadership is not shown, then all bets are off for the future—and we’re not talking about a hundred years from now, we’re talking about the future we and our children and grandchildren will be living through in the coming decades.

In short, we are living through extraordinary times, times that demand extraordinary leadership. And not just from politicians and heads of state, but from each and every one of us.

As global citizens with a stake in our future, each one of us is now being called to turn off the TV, get up off the couch, step out of the shadows, and SHOW UP to do whatever we can do, to offer our skills and talents to the greater good.

For some that will mean showing up at the 350.org climate change rally in Washington DC this month, demanding that our Congress and President represent the interests of we the people, not just the fossil fuel industry.

Teachers like me can start to offer students the tools and skills they will need to become the 21st century leaders humanity needs—leaders who see the big picture, respond empathetically to the plight not just of humans but of all living beings on the planet, and have the resolve, drive and courage to stand up and lead the way towards implementing the solutions that already exist, and innovating the solutions that have not yet been imagined.

Our media likes to bombard us daily with all the bad news on the planet: wars and random violence, natural disasters, corruption and greed, unemployment and health crises, environmental degradation…the list goes on and on. The cumulative effect of this constant negative litany is a feeling of hopelessness, despair, powerlessness and paralysis—the antithesis of what is needed for energetic, forward-looking, positive leadership.

Simply becoming aware of the extent to which your daily absorption of bad news depresses your spirit is a step on the road to switching the channel, metaphorically speaking, and beginning to focus on what can be done to make things better.

This is not pie-in-the-sky rainbow thinking, this is about doing what is necessary to ensure a livable future. One of the most important qualities of good leaders, my students and I agreed, is positive thinking and a can-do spirit.

If there was ever a time these qualities were needed, it is now—and in each and every one of us.

 

NOTES FROM Leaderhip & Public Speaking class, Day One

Great leaders are:

Charismatic / magnetic

Trustworthy

Change agents

Have something to say that resonates with others

Have a unique/original/relatable idea

Tenacious

Resilient

Creative

Empathetic/loving/caring

Passionate

Fearlessness/being able to embrace your fears

Engaging

Good organizers of people

Able to motivate & energize people

Good collaborators

Good at building teams; good team captains

Good at delegating

Synergizers

Convincing & persuasive

Unswayed by negative feedback & challenges

Self-confident

Able to overcome adversity

Able to share vulnerabilities

Focused/single-minded

Evangelical

Able to attract other strong people

Able to withstand criticism; thick-skinned

Good models: “be the change you want to see”

Articulate

Able to communicate with different groups of people & in different forms of media

Chameleons–able to get along with different kinds of people

Diligent/hardworking

Initiative-takers

Visionary innovators

Able to be humble and stay strategically under the radar

Good at self-promotion

Have good decision-making skills; decisiveness

Understanding of sacrifice/self-sacrifice

Generous

Assertive; firm but not attacking—“real power doesn’t need to attack”

Clear on what they want; clear goals

Intuitive

Considerate

Have common sense

Have a strong moral compass

Have a sense of justice

Want to be of service to the greater good

Want to build merit

Cautious when necessary/ not impulsive

Thoughtful

Resistant to corruption

 

JBH rainbow treeWhat holds us back from becoming leaders?

Fear

Fear of responsibility

Fear of judgment

Fear of failure

Shyness

Fear of being seen/heard

Fear of not being seen/heard

Fear of letting people down

Fear of being replaceable

Fear of fulfilling certain negative stereotypes (“Ban Bossy”)

Fear of being perceived as manly (if you’re a woman)

Fear of not being “man enough” (if you’re a man)

Fear of not being feminine enough

Fear of not being a good role model

Fear of having the minority opinion (saying something unpopular, not being able to

convince people)

Fear of being part of a marginalized group & expecting not to be heard/respected

Fear of leaving someone behind / a voice behind / not hearing other issues (ranking & hierarchy)

Fear of neglecting other issues

Fear of not being taken seriously

Fear of being too passionate

Fear of creating conflict

Fear of wading into controversy

Fear of taking a stand

Fear of changing your opinion/selling out for success

Fear of losing your authenticity

Fear of being politically incorrect

Fear of being perceived incompetent

Fear of not having what it takes

Fear of not being ready / not knowing what your “issue” is

Fear of being seen

 

Negative Qualities that may hold us back

Closemindedness

Righteousness

Malleability

Empathy—taking things too personally

Numbness/alienation

Staying under the radar

Aggression

Defensiveness

Being gullible, believing what you hear, not being discerning

 

What Systemic/Structural Circumstances Hold Us Back?

Acting to save others instead of trying to achieve your own goals/authentic mission

Youth

Education

Social upbringing

Poverty

Not having access to audience—tools to connect

Race/class/gender/sexuality/etc—social categories

Location (geographic)

Language

Filial piety—not wanting to go against expectations & will of family & society

Influence of media on self-esteem

 

6 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on April 5, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Activism, Alternative Futures, Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, Community, Education, Environment, Leadership, Media analysis, Uncategorized
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on April 5, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/04/05/21st-century-leadership-on-overcoming-fear-and-negativity-to-work-for-a-livable-future/

Daring to imagine a brave new post-patriarchal world

When was the last time you uttered the dreaded P-Word?

Patriarchy, that is.

Somehow the word itself comes out sounding like a challenge, even when it’s not meant as one.  Calling attention to the fact that men still rule the world is considered poor taste.

Women who dare to use the P-word in conversation run the risk of being labeled as strident femi-nazi ballbusters, resentful unfortunates to be avoided if at all possible.

Am I exaggerating?  I don’t think so!

What happens when we all agree to participate in the collective delusion that gender equality has been achieved?  Who loses and who gains?  What opportunities are lost and forfeited?

I’m tired of living in a society that calls strong men “leaders” and strong women “bossy.”

I want to encourage more girls and women to step into leadership roles in every public arena, and be applauded for it by both men and women.

I want to see all leaders supported by excellent child care, fabulous schools and reasonable flex time at work.

When women and men take time off to focus on their families, I want to see that time recognized as valuable—indeed, essential—to maintaining a healthy society, and rewarded by Social Security accrual down the road in retirement.

Last week I spent time with two young mother-writers who came to present their work at the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers.  Both spoke of how hard it is to keep their professional lives going strong while also nurturing their families.  I certainly remember that struggle myself, and it’s not all in the past tense!

Hillary Rodham Clinton, late bloomer?

Hillary Rodham Clinton, late bloomer?

Is there any wonder that women are so often late bloomers when it comes to our professions?

But actually, let’s do away with the term “late bloomer” too, at least when it comes to women who do what makes perfect sense: focus on their families during their 20s and 30s, and get back to their careers when the childcare pressures ease up.

Those women have been blooming all along, or at least they would be if they lived in a society that supported and applauded their efforts, and encouraged men to share the burden of housework and childcare equally.

The patriarchy locked women in the domestic sphere for many long centuries, while devaluing “women’s work” as lower-paid and lower-status.

It’s time for us to celebrate women’s work as essential and invaluable, while also insisting that the whole category of “women’s work” has to be dismantled. We don’t need a gendered division of labor anymore, in the public or the private spheres.

What we need are strong, capable leaders to step up and help us evolve quickly into the resilient, collaborative, respectful human society we know we can be.

4 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on March 12, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, Community, gender studies, Leadership, New stories, Parenting
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on March 12, 2014

https://bethechange2012.com/2014/03/12/daring-to-imagine-a-brave-new-post-patriarchal-world/

Leadership revisited: from ruthless and reckless to thoughtful and wise

This week I finally had a chance to see the new documentary film that has a lot of people buzzing, MISSREPRESENTATION, written and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom.  The film clearly and graphically makes the argument that women are systematically objectified and dumbed down in the media, and that this is connected to the on-going gender disparity between men and women professionals.

Having taught women’s and gender studies classes for more than a decade, the film didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it presented the information in a slick, well-argued way that had the audience gasping, nodding and cringing by turns.

I was somewhat disappointed with the conclusion of the film, however, which mostly urged the audience to take personal action to challenge the misrepresentation of women in the media and in business and politics, and to personally resist social pressure on women to focus on how they look rather than how smart they are and what they do.

Yes, raising personal awareness and mounting personal resistance is important.  But what’s really needed is systemic change.

A great illustration of what I mean by systemic change came my way this morning through a New York Times reprint of a Reuters piece by Chrystia Freeland, “Cultural Constraints on Women Leaders.”

Freeland discusses a new study by University of Toronto business professors Soo Min Toh and Geoffrey Leonardelli, who asked a simple question: Why aren’t there more female leaders?

You can read the article yourself to find out more about how they answered the question.  What interested me most was the author’s conclusion: that even in societies that have been relatively open to women’s advancement, “the one thing women around the world have failed to do is create paradigm-shifting companies.

“None of the great technology start-ups — for example, Google, Apple and Facebook — were founded by a woman. Nor were any of the leading hedge funds, the innovators in the world of money, established by a women. Women are not just underrepresented in this space of transformative entrepreneurs — they are entirely absent.”

Freeland concludes that “the final frontier for women, even in societies that allow them to lead established institutions, is to be ruthless and to take big risks, essential qualities in world-changing entrepreneurs. Instead, as the authors found of female entrepreneurs in Malaysia, women often have to “lead as if they were mothers or teachers.”

This conclusion just demonstrates the extent to which even a very intelligent woman like Chrystia Freeland is still a prisoner of her social indoctrination.

Because the point is that it’s those risk-taking, world-changing entrepreneurs–all men–whose reckless leadership has so endangered our planet that we live in constant fear of the “sixth great extinction event.”

It would be a profoundly GOOD THING for our planet and human civilization if our leaders guided us “as if they were mothers or teachers.”

Yes, I am writing this on an Apple laptop which I love, with my iphone on the desk beside me. Yes, I use Google and visit Facebook daily.

But is my attachment to these gadgets and conveniences more important to me, or the world, than our very survival as a species?

What good will my iphone do me when global heating goes out of control, leading to food shortages, storms of biblical proportion, and general lawlessness and fear?

The mother and teacher in me knows that those who look to me for guidance depend on me to choose a safe, wise path.  I will not lead them over a cliff.  I will weigh the risks and benefits and make the decision that benefits the group as a whole.

That is not true of the risk-taking cowboys who have led us to the brink of environmental, financial and social collapse as the 21st century dawns.

We need more men and women to come forward as responsible leaders and tell old-school folks like Freeland, in no uncertain terms, that her ideas of leadership are profoundly flawed.

It will do us no good if women achieve leadership success in the same old masculine terms.  If we are to survive the challenges that await us in the coming years, we need to change the paradigm of successful leadership.

Lead as if you were a mother or a teacher.  Let’s try that on for size.

3 Comments
by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on March 16, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative Futures, Mentoring, pedagogy, Social change
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Posted by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D. on March 16, 2012

https://bethechange2012.com/2012/03/16/leadership-revisited-from-ruthless-and-reckless-to-thoughtful-and-wise/

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