Posts tagged with "despair"
Positive Disintegration[i]
Since returning home, one of the activities that has lived in my head and has needed some processing, has been our envisioning of our personal utopia and dystopia, which we attempted to capture through making personal visual images.
When asked to physically place myself on the spectrum between the two visions in relation to where we believe the world to be heading, I found myself silently crying and unable to move. I have since wondered where this feeling welled up from, suddenly and unexpectedly. Of course it wasn’t a surprise to be confronting these ideas during this week, indeed it would have been strange if we hadn’t. But my emotion was overwhelming, and my inability to move - my inability to commit to the fear of my dystopia caught me off guard.
In trying to understand this since getting back, I turned to Joanna Macy’s paper ‘Working Through Environmental Despair’[ii] and found much that resonated with where I found myself standing on that day.
I think I was paralysed with fear…fear of pain, fear of provoking disaster, fear of feeling powerless. In the paper Joanna Macy discusses her ‘despair work’ and the connections between pain and power. She says,
Through our pain for the world we can open ourselves up to power. This power is not just our own but belongs to others as well. It relates to the very evolution of our species. It is part of a general awakening or shift toward a new level of consciousness.
The necessary but impossibly difficult movement from the macro ‘despair for the world’ to the micro ‘what action can I take?’ is a kind of ‘positive disintegration’ that is helping lead me towards a better understanding of why the the web of human connectedness must be made conscious.
[i] Coined by Kazimierz Dabrowski
[ii] Roszak, Theodore, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, (ed.), Ecopsychology, Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995
