By Solveig Nilsen-Goodin
My experience of participating in the Organizing in the Biocommons Course was like wandering in the wilderness: assumptions and frameworks constantly disintegrating and re-integrating as I struggled to understand the core of what is “wrong:” what is driving this ecological-economic-spiritual crisis we are experiencing. I “hit bottom” in the session on capital, where the immensity of the crisis felt completely overwhelming. But all throughout the course, we had also been grounding ourselves in the sacred story and power of our faith tradition, of the biosphere, of the cosmos, of what is “right” in the universe! And by the final session, something within me shifted.
On the other side of the despair, I discovered an inexplicable joy, a joy in the experiential discovery that the story of what is “right” is so much bigger and more powerful than the tragedy of what is “wrong.” In the context of this learning community of people willing to look at the sources of the crisis, I discovered that that bigger, more powerful story is not only accessible to us in community, but is urgently calling out to us like a voice crying in the wilderness: there is another way! In the OBC process, we are discovering and creating that way together.
[To learn more or to register for the next course which begins September 28th, click here!]
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