Reckoning with Collapse: Living into Community from Warsaw to Stroud
This post is the third and last in my May travelogue collection.
Following the NGL (Nonviolent Global Liberation) retreat in Poland, eight of us, in various configurations, went on the road via van and train, offering various events over the course of sixteen days. This trip was conceived last August, …
How Far Can We Go Together? Nonviolent Global Liberation Retreat, Poland
This post is the second in my May travelogue collection.
Some years ago, when the number of retreats and intensive trainings that I had led or co-led was well over 100, I stopped counting. Each one is its own unique configuration of purpose, players, relationships, content, context, location, and even …
Living Wealth: Provision, Romania
This month, I am in Europe, in six different places. I am planning to write bits and pieces about the different parts of my tour. Here is the first installment:
Robyn is from the US and Lars is from the Netherlands. Some ten years ago, life inexorably called them to …
The Powers No One Can Take Away From Us
Over the course of the last several millennia, more and more power and wealth have been concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In a very literal sense, this currently deprives the vast majority of the world’s population of the capacity to truly shape our lives. Without enough …
Restoring the Flow of Gifting in Community
A little over a year ago I wrote a piece about how humans, historically, have broken off from the flow of energy and resources that the web of life both nurtures and relies on through the mechanisms of exchange and accumulation. I also included in that piece a range of …
Can We Un-Skew Resource Distribution?
In August 2018, at the end of one of the Nonviolent Global Liberation (NGL) retreats, the retreat team sat in the center of the circle and began to engage in a fully transparent process for distributing the money that people who participated contributed. I have now participated in such processes …
Nonviolence: Commitment, Capacity and Community
In the mid 1990s I went on a backpacking trip with a friend that turned into a relational nightmare. Reverberating from the intense conflict, we set aside time to reweave intimacy and understanding. At a certain point, she expressed what seemed almost like anger directed at me for not protecting …
Interdependence in Action: How to Change Agreements with Care
In 2004, a few days into the first of four week-long retreats of a yearlong program I was co-leading, one participant, who I will call Barbara, informed the program leaders that she was intending to leave the program after the first retreat, because it wasn’t what she had signed up …
From Personal to Global Trauma: The Through-Line
A guest blog by Sarah Peyton
When Kim was a tiny person, maybe three years old, just when our human sense of actually existing-as-a-separate-being-with-a-self starts to emerge, Kim lived in a family where people were frightened, and angry, and sometimes kind, and sometimes scornful. When Kim would start to dance, …
Increasing Prospects for Collaboration Even before Starting
I’ve been in the collaboration “business” for about 20 years now, working on all levels, from the most internal inner conflicts, to the most ambitious efforts to create at least a model of what local to global collaboration could look like. Up until the last few years, the bulk of …
