Author: gracesmuggler

Check out the amazing skill of the painted turtle.

Life is absurdly resilient sometimes.

“Starlings’ murmuration consists of a flock moving in synch with one another, engaging in clear, consistent communication and exhibiting collective leadership and deep, deep trust. Every individual bird focuses attention on their seven closest neighbors and thus manage a large flock cohesiveness and synchronicity (at times upwards of over a million birds).”

-Sierra Pickett

“My dream is a movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration, the way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, dance collectively through the air — to avoid predators, and, it also seems, to pass time in the most beautiful way possible. When fish move in this way, they are shoaling. When bees and other insects move in this way, they are swarming. I love all the words for this activity.

“Here’s how it works in a murmuration/shoal/swarm: each creature is tuned in to its neighbors, the creatures right around it in the formation. This might be the birds on either side, or the six fish in each direction. There is a right relationship, a right distance between them — too close and they crash, too far away and they can’t feel the micro-adaptations of the other bodies. Each creature is shifting direction, speed, and proximity based on the information of other creatures’ bodies.

There is a deep trust in this: to lift because the birds around you are lifting, to live based on your collective real-time adaptations. In this way thousands of birds or fish or bees can move together, each empowered with the basic rules and a vision to live. Imagine our movements cultivating this type of trust and depth with each other, having strategic flocking in our playbooks.”

-adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, page 71.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn,
Dissociation,
Depression,
Anxiety,
Numbness,
Overwhelm,
People-Pleasing,
Overwork,
Somatization,
Hypervigilance,
Avoidance,
Insomnia,
Inability to get out of bed,
Difficulty being with others,
Difficulty being alone,

Post-Traumatic Reactions —
They all deserve care. 

–Renee Roederer

If you’re feeling stressed in any way, I just want you to know about this thing that happens. I want you to imagine it and smile.

I have a friend who lives on a farm where they raise sheep. And every night before sunset, all of this year’s lambs, who are now functionally tweens, get together in a little tweeny bopper gang and run around the farm en masse. It’s a thing they do.

As they near dusk, they just get the urge to be with their peers and exert their energy in a collective romp around all the grounds of the farm. A little gang. Of tweeny bopper sheep. Running around together. In the joy of adolescence.

I just want you to know about these tweeny bopper sheep.
I want you to know that this happens every day.

—Renee Roederer

Bees bumble from flower to flower, using the navigation of bright colors to bring them to life-giving nectar. They collect it and covert it to honey to care for their young, and by extension, the whole hive.

But they have no idea about something else. . .

They have no idea they are pollinating the world’s food supply.

It helps me to remember that. The lives of bees are already so intricate and complex even in what they do intend, but beyond that, their work yields more life and complexity than they know.

Maybe this can remind us:

Individually, and especially collectively, our best intentions, our best connections, our best work, our best loves, and our best visions may yield more life and complexity than we know too.

– Renee Roederer

Here’s a mind-blowing fact: There are more living organisms found in a single teaspoon of soil than there are people on the earth.

More than 7 billion living organisms. In just one spoon-full.

That’s incredible. 

And like us, every organism in the soil is supported by the sun, a burning sphere of hot gas, fusing its energy 93 million miles away from us. This means our lives are sustained by an

enormous, far-away source of heat and light

and

tiny, nearby creatures, so numerous that we could barely begin to count them.

There are always more forces sustaining us than we can easily see. 

So how much more? 

In the earth? In the Spirit? In the dreams? In the relationships?

– Renee Roederer

Did you know that every time we take a step, we have about 300 miles of mycelium stretching below the surface?

Mycelium are the highly connective, thread-like strands of fungi that do so much to transform our world. They help plants communicate and spread nutrients. They transform the ecosystem.

Here’s a great Ted Talk by mushroom expert, Paul Stamets: “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.” Enjoy!

This week, I’ve been listening to Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds on audiobook, read by its author adrienne maree brown. The book opens up analogies to us through biomicry, inviting us to learn from nature-inspired innovation and organize our human living, loving, and changing through these patterns of nature.

Today, I’d like to share a quote about fractals. We often live in patterns: The small mirrors the large. Likewise, the small can shape and change the large. If we want to change big things, we can start small and let our largest values show up in our small, day-to-day interactions, especially through our relationships. If we want liberation, love, wholeness, and interdependence to be lived on the large scale, we must practice it as lived right where we are in the relationships we have and in our day to day living.

adrienne maree brown says,

“A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.

“How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale…

“This awareness led me to look at organizations more critically. So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo. We have singular charismatic leaders, top down structures, money-driven programs, destructive methods of engaging conflict, unsustainable work cultures, and little to no impact on the issues at hand. This makes sense; it’s in the water we’re swimming in. But it creates patterns. Some of the patterns I’ve seen that start small and then become movement wide are:

— Burn out. Overwork, underpay, unrealistic expectations.
— Organizational and movement splitting.
— Personal drama disrupting movements.
— Mission drift, specifically in the direction of money.
— Stagnation — an inability to make decisions.

“These patterns emerge at the local, regional, state, national, and global level — basically wherever two or more social change agents are gathered. There’s so much awareness around it, and some beautiful work happening to shift organizational cultures. And this may be the most important element to understand — that what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.

“Grace [Lee Boggs] articulated it in what might be the most-used quote of my life: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place where we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.”

-adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, pages 51-53

* If you’d like to read the book, you can find it here:
https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html

It’s a new month.

This month, I’ve decided to reflect upon, choose, and act upon what it means to say, “No.”

This might mean…
— saying no to tasks that aren’t best for us to do,
— saying no to what brings down our energy,
— saying no to beliefs that no longer serve us,
— saying no to narratives (external, internal, or cultural) that are painful distortions,
— saying no to injustices,
— saying no to systemic ways of doing harm,
— saying no to old patterns we no longer want,
— saying no to doing too much,
— saying no to unreasonable expectations,
— saying no to… (fill in the blank)

And I’m also going to reflect upon, choose, and act upon this realization:
When we say “no,” to some things, we are making way to say “yes” to other things.

We are making space for our best affirmations, intentions, and priorities.

Want to ponder this with me?

–Renee Roederer

I learned something really fun about turkeys yesterday. Enjoy!

Getting Turkeys to Gobble in a Group

-Renee Roederer