Tag: nature

SEED + SPARK: The Expedition

Posted on | by Sam

Now that it’s December 1, the start of our yearlong expedition — the one on which we’ll use nature as a model to reimagine the way(s) we learn and live — is less than two months away.

And yet in many ways the expedition has already begun, as we start to establish a plan, an intention, and a structure for the first nine months of 2021, and how we can spend them well.

You can join us in that work whenever you wish, via our Expedition Whiteboard. (And when/if you do, please introduce yourself in the Be HERE section.)

You can contribute songs to the emerging SEED + SPARK mixtape on Spotify.

And you can peer into the future by reading Seed + Spark itself.

Looking forward to learning more about, with, and from each of you in the months ahead. 🙂

Nature’s Design Principles: Relationships

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

Everything you see has its roots

In the unseen world . . .

Why do you weep?

That Source is within you

And this whole world

Is springing up from it.

–Rumi

 

In the beginning, everything was connected.

Along the way, some of us changed our minds.

And now, in the shadow of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, our survival depends on our ability to rediscover the wisdom we have lost.

In the end, it turns out, everything is connected, and at every scale — from the cosmologic to the subatomic.

“Exalted we are,” writes the American biologist E.O. Wilson, “risen to be the mind of the biosphere without a doubt, our spirits uniquely capable of awe and ever more breathtaking leaps of imagination. But we are still part of Earth’s fauna and flora, bound to it by emotion, physiology, and, not least, deep history.”

“There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events,” says novelist Richard Powers. “The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. Forests mend and shape themselves into subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within.”

This sort of deep relational weaving is central to indigenous cultures the world over. As American activist Winona LaDuke points out, “teachings, ancient as the people who have lived on a land for five millennia, speak of a set of relationships to all that is around, predicated on respect, recognition of the interdependency of all beings, an understanding of humans’ absolute need to be reverent and to manage our behavior, and an understanding that this relationship must be affirmed through lifeways and through acknowledgment of the sacred.”

Several hundred years ago, however, a new story began to emerge in Europe — one that was fueled by the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and that would come to shape the later thinking of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton. It was a story that displaced us from the universal center, and urged us to no longer view nature as something to which we were bound, but something to be, in Bacon’s words, “hounded in her wanderings, and bound into service, and made a slave.”

When, in the 17th century, Decartes proclaimed Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I exist”), and Newton developed a mathematical formulation that could provide a consistent mathematical theory of the world (i.e., classical physics), the narrative shift that had begun centuries earlier had finally been completed — away from the notion of an organic, living and spiritual universe, and toward a mechanistic, linear world of separable parts. 

It’s the story that has dominated Western culture ever since.

Recently, however, its foundations have begun to crumble. New discoveries in the fields of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism have necessitated profound changes in concepts of everything from space to time to cause and effect. As Einstein put it: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundations of physics to this [new type of knowledge have] failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built.”

In fact, the natural relationship between parts and wholes confirms what some have been saying all along — that the universe is not a clock; it’s a cloud. “As individuals and societies,” explains Austrian scientist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, “we are all embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities.” 

In fact, we are not just embedded in nature, but also to one another. “When you form groups,” writes Iain Couzin, who leads the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior at the University of Konstanz, “you suddenly have a network system where social interactions exist. We have traditionally assumed that intelligence resides in our brains, in the individual animal. But we have found the first evidence that intelligence can also be encoded in the hidden network of communication between us.”

This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature — a lesson that is equally true at the smallest scale.

“In the quantum world,” explains Margaret Wheatley, “relationship is the key determiner of everything.” Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent entities. These unseen connections between what were previously thought to be separate entities are the fundamental ingredient of all creation.

“In this world, the basic building blocks of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all bundles of potential. Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.”

This is why the path towards creating a living school requires cultivating the individual and collective self-awareness that comes from understanding identity — who (& why) we are; applying information — what (& why) we notice; and strengthening relationships — how (& why) we connect. “Although each of these three domains has its own dynamism and motion,” explains educator Stephanie Pace-Marshall, “it is their confluence and synergy that create the generative landscape essential for individual and system wholeness, meaning, and connections. Relationships represent the dynamic, self-generating learning network of our systems, and they establish its capacity for collaborative inquiry.”

But what does that really mean in the work we do with one another in our communities, our organizations, and our schools? 

How can we attend more intentionally, and see more clearly, the webwork of ways in which we are all interwoven?

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, a higher level of relational attunement is not just what allows us to build healthier cultures; it’s what allows us to comprehend the full weight of our spiritual role in the cosmos — to be, as Wilson put it, the mind of the biosphere itself.

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’” said Einstein, “a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and our feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion  to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty.”

This is, in part, the gift of the art of Liz Lerman, who helps us see what a truly trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-media approach to storytelling can reveal about who we are and how we connect.

It’s what we learn from the science of honeybees, whose deeply democratic, highly-effective form of life-or-death group decision-making helps demonstrate what a high-functioning collective intelligence can actually engender.

It’s what the work of UCLA psychology professor Dan Siegel makes visible, by providing us with a scientific definition of that most elusive of all human features — the mind — and helping us understand precisely what connects us both internally and externally.

And it’s what we can see and feel throughout the halls of Crosstown High, a public high school in Memphis, Tennessee that has crafted a student body, and a school campus, that are meant to tap the collective wisdom and shared culture of an entire city. 

“Mutuality is the principle of the individual body as well as the law governing the interplay of all bodies. It is the key to understanding reality,” explains biologist Andreas Weber. “To understand ourselves, we have to recognize ourselves in other living creatures. To be mirrored is a central element in the formation of human identity.”

Virginia Woolf put it another way. “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern. The whole world is a work of art . . . Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God.

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

Nature’s Design Principles: Identity

Posted on | by Sam

The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Living School: Learning from Nature How to Build a Better World, by Design.

More than four hundred years after it was written, people around the world are still reading, performing, and wondering about Hamlet. 

Why?

The simple answer is because it’s the world’s most famous playwright’s most famous play. But the complex answer is because the title character and we, no matter our culture or our age, are kindred spirits. 

Like every young person everywhere ever, Hamlet has visions of his future that don’t align with the visions the adults in his life have for him. He is an artist and a dreamer — a person more comfortable in the world of ideas than the world of actions. And he is in love.

But Hamlet is also the future king of Denmark, which means he is bound by custom to avenge his father’s murder — a duty that leads to his own untimely death in no small part because the act of killing goes against his very being.

No matter your age, then, to read Hamlet is to watch a fellow human being struggle between staying true to his own sense of self and accepting the role society has assigned him to play. And so Hamlet’s struggle illuminates a central question we all must wrestle with — a question not coincidentally posed by the first two words in the play:  

“Who’s there?”

This is a new question for us, homo sapiens sapiens — the being who knows, and who knows he knows. That’s because for the great majority of our time on this planet, human beings have viewed the world almost entirely through the prism of “we,” not “me.” 

As foragers, we lived in unquestioning obedience to the unknowable marvels of the natural world. And in the earliest civilizations, we lived to serve the needs of our Gods in Heaven – and then, later on, their hand-chosen emissaries on Earth.

In these long chapters of the human story – which make up more than 93% of our history as a species – our ancestors were most likely to find comfort, and a sense of identity, through their ability to fit usefully and invisibly into a larger community.

To stand out from the crowd was undesirable, since, in reality, doing so could mean ostracism or death. 

To walk in someone else’s shoes was unnecessary, since, in effect, everyone wore the same shoes.

And to wonder about the world was to focus one’s gaze outward, or upward.

Over time, however, the human gaze has shifted. 

Beginning with the rise of the great religions, continuing through the citizen revolutions in France and the Americas, coursing through all of Shakespeare’s plays, and running right up to and through the age of social media and the Selfie Stick, we humans have begun to increasingly look inward – for better and for worse.

At the same time, a wave of new discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology have taught us that our need to understand “who’s there” is more than just an exercise in navel-gazing; it is the way we deepen our empathic capacity to connect with our fellow creatures.

“We are learning,” says the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, “against all of the prevailing wisdom, that human nature is not to seek autonomy — to become an island to oneself — but, rather, to seek companionship, affection, and intimacy. The conventional belief that equates self-development and self-consciousness with increasing autonomy has begun to lose its intellectual cachet. A growing number of child development psychologists now argue the contrary — that a sense of selfhood and self-awareness depends on and feeds off of deepening relationships to other people. Empathy, in turn, is the means by which companionate bonds are formed.”

“The brain is a social organ, made to be in relationship,” explains psychiatrist Dan Siegel. “What happens between brains has a great deal to do with what happens within each individual brain . . . [And] the physical architecture of the brain changes according to where we direct our attention and what we practice doing.”

As far as words go, empathy is a new one – it didn’t even appear until the early 20th century. It comes from the English translation of the German word einfühlung, which was used to describe the relationship between a work of art and its subject; it was later expanded to include interactions between people.

Those interactions, according to Rifkin, are what give rise to a deeper human capacity for making sense of the world. “Empathic consciousness starts with awe,” he contends. “When we empathize with another, we are bearing witness to the strange incredible life force that is in us and that connects us to all other living beings.

“It is awe that inspires all human imagination. Without awe, we would be without wonder and without wonder we would have no way to exercise imagination and would therefore be unable to imagine another’s life ‘as if’ it were our own.”

In other words, we have slowly flipped the paradigm of human understanding: 

It’s not the world that makes us wonder; it’s our wondering that makes the world. 

Or, as the Chilean biologist-philosophers Francesco Varela and Humberto Muturana put it, “the world everyone sees is not the world but a world, which we bring forth with others.”

This epiphany is changing more than just our understanding of the brain. In recent years, scientists in fields ranging from biology to ecology have revised the very metaphors they use to describe their work – from hierarchies to networks – and begun to affirm, as physicist Fritjof Capra says, “that partnership – the tendency to associate, establish links, and maintain symbiotic relationships – is one of the hallmarks of life.”

Going a step further, scholars like Siegel have even suggested that the very thing at the center of our most personal sense of self — the mind — may not be as distinct as we’d thought. “Mind emerges as much in relationships as it does from physiological, embodied processes including brain activity,” he explains. 

“Relationships are the crucible in which our lives unfold as they shape our life story, molding our identity and giving birth to the experience of who we are, and liberating — or constraining — who we can become. . . If we consider that our minds are a part of an interacting, interconnected system that involves our bodies and our brains, as well as the environment in which we live, including our social relationships, we may be able to reconcile how the mind is part of one system that seems to be in two places at once.”

That isn’t just flowery prose; it’s how living systems operate in the natural world — by existing and creatively organizing within and between a boundary of self. Although this boundary is semipermeable and ensures the system is open to the continuous flow of matter and energy from the environment, the boundary itself is structurally closed. 

A cell wall is a good example. It’s the boundary that establishes its system’s identity, distinguishes it from and connects it to its environment, and determines what enters and leaves the system. But because this meaning of “boundary” is as much about what it lets in as what it keeps out, the end result of this arrangement, according to the German biologist Andreas Weber, is a notion of self in which “every subject is not sovereign but rather an intersubject — a self-creating pattern in an unfathomable meshwork of longings, repulsions, and dependencies.” 

The Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela agrees. “Life is a process of creating an identity,” he says. Every organism is “a meshwork of selfless selves.” And these principles of life are universally applicable.

What’s true for the microorganism, in other words, is just as true true for the megalopolis.

But what does that really mean in the daily whir of our personal and professional lives? And how do we intentionally build our empathetic muscles in the service of building a living, thriving school? 

As you’ll see in the stories and examples that follow, our work begins with a commitment to hold the space, and make the time, to allow all members of a learning community — from the youngest to the oldest — to understand that each person’s sense of an individual self emerges, as Siegel puts it, from not only our inner life, but our “inter-life” as well.

The science of the human brain — particularly its bi-hemispheric structure — has allowed us to integrate two very different ways of making sense of the world, and our place in it. 

The art of the American writer James Baldwin is a direct challenge to the myths that have shaped our shared sense of what it means to be an American. 

The insights of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn offer a window into the ways our understanding of the mind shape our capacity for well-being. 

And the genius of the June Jordan School for Equity, a public school in San Francisco, is in its ability to foster a strong sense of collective identity that can provide clearer support to each student’s more precarious individual search for who they are, and what they value.

In the past, says Weber, “with our craving to build a new and better world we have thoughtlessly given up that one crucial sphere to which we are linked by the umbilical cord of life. We have attempted to sneak away from our Siamese connection with all other human beings. We have tried to escape from ourselves.”

In truth, we need to be many to become one — and one to become many.