image by christin▲

Recently, I experienced a personal victory. I finished a semester of graduate school completely, and made the previously tight grip of perfectionism on my life a little weaker. While I haven’t found out my grades yet, I am happy, and amazed that I finished this while also working part-time, keeping up with a consistent exercise schedule (that I slightly modified) and writing occasionally for this site.

I know that there’s a lot of you out there that choose to be super busy and super psyched about life, and so this may not seem like such a big deal. But for me it was, in comparison to what I would usually do and the way I usually would respond to the pressure of completing projects within a time frame.

My need to be perfect and make anything I did perfect showed up very strong while I was in college.  It took me so long to complete my papers and I wound up taking several incompletes that took years to finish. In the past, I let laziness, fear, and wanting to make things perfect do me in. I would put off doing my work because I didn’t want to do it right away, and thought I could put it off, thinking I’ll have time later, and it won’t take too long.  But all my projects always did take longer than I planned for partly because I had waited so long to do them.

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Summer is coming up—my favorite time of year when gardening takes priority over being indoors. This past spring, I really wanted to start my seeds indoors early, but I was so busy with graduate classes, so I pushed aside seed planting. Gratefully though, I did do a seed germination test with my leftover seeds from years past. Actually, what pushed me to test my old seeds was that I had committed to write about it for this site. It’s interesting how that works, but since I shared my thoughts with other contributors here—Megan, Uli, Sarah, Stella and Rich—I was bound to deliver on it. In the future, I would like to cultivate my interests to a greater extent to where my motivation is large enough to propel me forward, and sharing with others enriches it, reinforces it, but is not dependent upon it.

After the germination tests, I did cull a lot of old seed.  I am really enjoying the clarity and sureness of knowing that all the seeds in my seed storage box are viable. That may sound silly, but it’s a bonus to see the link between effort and results, because in life, it’s not always so clear. For the first time, this spring I looked out at my garden, and realized that its beauty is not only because of the intrinsic beauty that is nature, but also a result of the effort and care of my parents and me. I was moved more by the realization that the garden shows the efforts we have invested in making it beautiful than everything that needs doing.

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image by Jeff Kubina

Going through a tunnel not too long ago I had an odd, beautiful experience. I realized that the tunnel I was in, the mountain through which it carved, the dynamite that blasted it, and the person who had the idea to go through the mountain instead of around it, were all flowerings of the same thing. Spirit, the universe, nature, God, pick your term—whatever you call it, the same force that pushed those peaks hundreds of feet up into the sky also led to my being there at that moment, in a car going 60 miles an hour through the mountain’s heart.

In that moment, I felt it in my bones—we are not separate from nature. We were created by its workings, and as we express our desire to grow and evolve and create the new, we express nature’s own desire to do the same.

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This week was a juicy one!

• Monday and Tuesday we explored what it means to be Bright Green from the inside out.
• Wednesday, we looked into the Transition movement, and saw both the power and the unanswered questions in it.
• Thursday, we discussed how Transition might fit into Bright Green overall, and how different factions of environmentalism might organize our activities around a common set of values. (More on this next week!)

Today I’d like to share with you a video I saw on Rob Hopkins’s website, Transition Culture. “The Powerdown Show” is a series of ten 20 minute episodes, each going into a different aspect of the Transition movement. This episode is about the origins,  goals, and motivations of Transition. I found it really thought-provoking and also incredibly well-produced. My favorite part starts around 16:00, when different people involved with Transition each say what it means to them. The varied responses are all heartfelt, and the people are each glowing with inspiration—an incredible thing to see!

One more thing: Transition is having a conference this weekend, and as part of it, they will be streaming In Transition, a movie about the Transition movement, online at 1:45pm London time, which means 8:45am Eastern time in the US. You can watch the stream here.

The Powerdown Show - Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

If you’re reading in email or RSS and can’t see this video, click here.

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image by Neil D.

Continuing from yesterday’s discussion ...

Transition focuses on increasing resilience in communities by creating sustainable, local systems for producing food, generating energy, creating needed products, and transacting business. Life in the “Energy Descent,” as Transition calls it, can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling than the lives we in the developed world are living now. From the site of founder Rob Hopkins:

“How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march?”

When I first heard about Transition at the 350 Conference, I was with Sarah, who was already very familiar with it. She told me that she’d been contemplating moving to a Transition town, but she felt conflicted. How worthwhile is it, she wondered, to work to make one place resilient, when what needs to change in the world is on a global scale?

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image by Jeff Kubina

Have you heard about the Transition movement? The New York Times Magazine did a great piece on it a few weeks ago in their Green Issue—here’s their summary of what it’s all about:

“Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.”

The article goes on to say that Transition springs from a quite dystopian vision—Peak Oil and the impossibility of making a full systems switch before it hits the fan—but then takes a Utopian turn, putting new possibilities into the picture. Maybe a low-energy future can be a fantastic place to live! Maybe it’ll be better than what we have now!

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image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday about becoming Bright Green from the inside out, and realized I had more to say! Shocking, right?

First off, it’s not that we have to change ourselves before we change the world. That wouldn’t work very well, would it? It’d be like if the Karate Kid never entered a tournament, just waxed on and waxed off forever. No, training and engagement go on at the same time, each supporting and informing the other. As we open up to a new point of view, we automatically start to engage differently in the world. Meanwhile the experiences we have while engaging with life in new ways cause our ideas and values to shift even more. Internal and external evolve together.

Secondly, reading over yesterday’s post, I was reminded of a point made by the brilliant Daniel Quinn, who wrote the Ishmael books. He says something like, “We can’t base our hopes for the future on human beings suddenly being better than they are right now.”

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image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

We’ve talked a lot about Bright Green thinking on The Sunny Way, but I don’t know if we’ve ever really defined what it is. Here’s how Worldchanging founder Alex Steffan explains it:

“In its simplest form, bright green environmentalism is a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed. In short, it’s the belief that for the future to be green, it must also be bright. Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.”

As I’ve followed and participated in the Bright Green movement, I’ve noticed that it’s very focused on material changes—designing better, building better, living better. Worldchanging and other Bright Green resources do a great job describing what a Bright Green society might look like, but I wonder, what does it mean for a person—with thoughts and emotions and decisions to make—to be Bright Green? How does a Bright Green person see and operate in the world?

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This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had by now 2 monthly joint meetings, and I feel that the trust between us is building slowly but surely. Our facilitators are very experienced and our various activities have enabled us to discover and rediscover again that each of us, in spite of surrounding opposition and cynicism about the future of such gatherings, want to give this a real chance.

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image by Roberto Garcia-S

Alright—so the biggest good news, affirmed again in an awesome talk I went to last night—is that evolution is real and happening. It is always good to think about this again.

The speaker was Michael Dowd, a self proclaimed “Evolutionary Evangelist.” He transformed from a fundamental Christian into a preacher of the awe-inspiring truth of evolution and the practical as well as spiritual significance of the knowledge of it. For example: We now know how our brains developed over millions of years, from the amphibian/limbic part, to the mammalian/emotional bonding section, to mind and interpretative capacities in the neo-cortex and finally to the anterior cortex, whose neurons light up when we make the effort to hold ourselves to a commitment—say, a marriage vow.

As we all find out on a daily basis, our center of gravity unfortunately is not yet located in this more evolved part of our brains, so even if we make decisions or commitments in one moment, we are thrown by uncertainty and desires, left, right and center in the next. But knowing about the differences in these parts of our brains we can interpret our own experience, of lust, say, or of our willingness to sacrifice our principles to get what we want in a very different context.

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Uli’s pieces last week on the Economy of Consciousness and the potential for unlimited growth in that realm inspired me to write on the same topic. Let us know what you think!

Human beings grow. That is what we do—we experiment, learn from our mistakes and successes, and integrate those learnings into how we go about the rest of our lives.

This growth is reflected in both our external world—the material life we create—and our internal world—the culture and values we share. From communal tribal awareness and authoritarian traditional religious awareness through the Age of Reason and the Age of Aquarius, we have grown in morality, in care, and in the depth and breadth with which we are able to engage in the world.

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This is the second half of Uli’s piece on the Economy of Consciousness. Read Part 1.

Throughout the centuries, our self-awareness has grown increasingly subtle—when we weren’t sipping lattes made by robots but drinking from streams, we most likely experienced ourselves simply as bodies. We were living in hordes, communicating with each other in grunts and gestures without the slightest inclination that one day we would be talking about our feelings, much less discussing psychedelic drugs, philosophy, economic theory, or spiritual experiences. As we have conquered our inner reality, down to the processes in our brains, as well as the planet and space around us, we have also discovered our growing ability to choose— a partner, a profession, a country and our own identity—who we want to be.

There will always be more, not less. Further out and deeper in. The more we keep that more in mind as we look towards the future, the likelier our chance to discover and direct our most desirable destiny. A future, an economy, an environment built on a philosophy of less will never be able to satisfy us. This is where consciousness enters into the equation.

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This is Part 1 of Uli’s piece on the Economy of Consciousness. Read Part 2.

What would you do? TNK, or as you might call her, Tinka, X9, your housekeeper robot just cooked the eggs and made the coffee for you. Until you have to start work—at home, at 5pm, for three hours, maybe four today—this day is yours.

Not just this day. Every day. It has been like this since the big crisis of 2009 rattled the world and humanity had no option but to rethink its ways: a financial system in ruin, a planet on the verge of becoming uninhabitable, and wars sparked by the grotesque disparities between the have-it-alls and the have-nothings. On its way to material prosperity for all, the world had grown out of unlimited growth. So what would your day look like?

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