When I began writing The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, I wanted to offer some of the benefit of my experience, including my many mistakes, to groups who were organizing without a top-down, hierarchical structure. I’ve been living and working in such groups for more than forty years, and I felt like the many dreadful meetings I’ve endured, the in-fights and the painful conflicts, as well as the glorious moments of collective creativity and spiritual ecstasy, should all count for something. I saw so many groups struggling with the same issues, whether they were spiritual circles, working groups, communities struggling to organize or activists planning a protest. And I had a few insights that I felt might be helpful. […]
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The Fifth Sacred Thing shows us a vision of a positive, resilient future, where at least one city has achieved environmental balance and social harmony. Applying the ethics and principles of permaculture to the production of The Fifth Sacred Thing will embody the message of the film and generate ecological, social and financial returns. […] Lammas morning—I woke up and saw that during the night we’d reached our first funding point on our Kickstarter campaign for The Fifth Sacred Thing ritual. […] I woke up this morning and somehow in the night I’d turned sixty! I guess if you escape dying on the barricades, car accidents and fatal diseases, it happens…But mostly I woke up feeling happy. In sixty years, I have actually learned a thing or two and one of them has to do with happiness—that it’s a process, not a destination. […] We’re just about to take that big leap, from the The Fifth Sacred Thing movie project being my Secret Dream to becoming a Big, Public Dream. Really scary—on so many levels. But as we say, “Where there’s fear, there’s power.” And it’s so, so exciting! […] Working on something big, like a book, for me is a bit like diving underwater. It requires a kind of ruthlessness, putting everything else aside—as much as that is possible. […] My new book is out today! It’s a picture book for kids, with wonderful illustrations by Lindy Kehoe, published by Mother Tongue Ink, the wonderful women who put out the beautiful WeMoon Calendar each year. […] |
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