Dear LO,
- Ten twelve weeks ago our neighbour left for Texas. After a few weeks of
emptiness the ancient cottage garden sprung the most enormous blossoms.
These were flowers of a kind that neither Anona could classify nor I at
first encounter even imagine. This was April and they were like something
from an equatorial forest - I kept looking down out of my wondow at them.
I had to believe because they were there. Even now they are there. What is
more they come and go and they move around the garden. A while ago I met
the owner of these spectacular blossomings. Elizabeth. Elizabeth is about
somewhere between two and three years old, she has hair like the wheat in
the fields and eyes like sky. Elizabeth watched me come and go as I have
watched the flowers in her garden come and go. I am now a kind of 'strange
attractor' for her, as her 'flowers' were for me. Now she has begun to run
to the cottage wondows downstairs whenever she sees or hears me come and
go. She presses her face up to the wondows and she smiles at me and waves
her tiny arms around. I do the same. The world is more real for her now
than me. She has what some call 'beginners mind'. For a 'beginners mind'
possibilities abound. I had a shock a few days ago in conversation with
her mother. It seems that while I was thinking that Anona was my life
partner, that she and I were about the same age it appears that in fact;-)
Anona is my mummy, and that Elizabeth and I are about the same age and
that we are apparently becoming great friends. The empirical evidence for
the mummyhood of Anona toward me is that she 'looks after Andrew'. There,
what could be simpler than this metanoia.
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing nothing less than everything)
And al shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(TS Eliot, Little Gidding)
Child
The late Donella H Meadows wrote a paper in 1997 it was as a result of an
outburst at a meeting concerned with growth, limits to growth and finding the
leverage points (Jay Forrester was her teacher/mentor). She was in her own
terms 'simmering' (filling up in entropy production;-) again in her own words
she realised that all these 'informed and educated' ( read clever) people
were leveraging the wrong places, so she stormed up to a flip chart and
reeled of almost spontaneously in reverse order of priority the leverage
points as she saw it for a more sustainable world wellbeing and wellbecoming.
9. Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
8. Material stocks and flows
7. Regulating negative feedback loops.
6. Driving positive feedback loops
5. Information flows
4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints)
3. the power of SELF ORGANISATION ( Donella's emphasis)
2. The goals of the system
1. The mindsete or paradigm out of which goals, rules, feedback and
structure arise.
She elucidates these through some dozen pages. Then there is one more page.
This below is that page transcribed; it's good news for idiots and
children everywhere who believe that the recently opened intuitive human
heart is the truest point of leverage. I would never have found her essay
unless I has typed into the google.com search engine -
spontaneous+irreversible+self+organisation+child
"- Sorry, but to be truthful and complete, I have to add this kicker.
The highest leverage of "0" is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of
paradigms, to realize that no paradigm is "true," that even the one that
sweetly shapes one's comfortable worldview is a tremendously limited
understanding of an immense and amazing universe.
It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and
to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole
realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not knowing.
People who cling to paradigms (just about all of us) take one look at the
spacious possibility that everything we think is guaranteed to be nonsense
and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no
control, not even a reason for being, much less acting, in the experience
that there is no certainty in any worldview. But everyone, who has managed
to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it a
basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose one
that will help achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a
purpose, you can listen to the universe (or put in the name of your
favorite deity here) and do his, her, its will, which is a lot better
informed than your will. It is in the space of mastery over paradigms
that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down
empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and
have impacts that last for millennia. Back from the sublime to the
ridiculous, from enlightenment to caveats. There is so much that has to be
said to qualify this list. It is tentative and its order is slithery.
There are exceptions to every item on it. Having the list percolating in
my subconscious for years has not transformed me into a Superwoman. I seem
to spend my time running up and down the list, trying out leverage points
wherever I can find them. The higher the leverage point, the more the
system resists changing it-that's why societies rub out truly enlightened
beings.
I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work
at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously
casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do
with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with
strategically, profoundly, madly letting go. "
Copyright: Donella H. Meadows
End citation.
In the entire article I cannot see the word "child"... At, what is a
'strange attractor'?
Love,
Andrew
Andrew Campbell
Oxford
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