Wisdom is being shed every single second. Intuition means being aware of your environment in very moment, as wisdom comes in from human beings, the natural world, from all around us.
Judith Orloff, M.D.
During this COVID crisis, wisdom IS being shed every single second, perhaps now more than ever. When the world as we know it is suspended and we sit with ourselves, the people we love, the people we care for and about, we tune into this wisdom, in new ways. Beneath the disruption and fear, there is a place inside each of us where wisdom speaks, offering guidance, not only for how we might get through each day, but for what matters most as we emerge into the chapters that follow in our personal, community, and organizational lives.
At the heart of Theory U is the assumption that the new is being born within and around us. Our responsibility is to listen in fresh ways; to see, feel, and sense what these new possibilities might be and blend our thinking and sensing in the service of discovering and creating new pathways.
Social Arts
Social arts engage artistic and creative processes to facilitate positive transformation in individuals who participate, in groups, and society at large. Practice in the Social Arts offers ways of strengthening our sensing awareness.
In our role as Pathfinders, we can practice a wide variety of imaginative frameworks, including engaging in social art to clarify our collective current reality and uncover new pathways for action. There is a need to expand our collective knowledge through legitimizing other ways of knowing. We can seek to expand and validate the wisdom inherent in all people by tapping into these three intelligences and multiple ways of knowing.
1. intellectual
2. emotional
3. body knowing…perception through our physical senses
Practice in Social Arts includes the use of many modes and media to support people to see themselves and engage more intensely in changing the patterns that limit development.
Some art forms that invite collective engagement and activism include:
cultivating relationships and safe spaces for mutual discovery,
asking great questions,
using group graphics to make visible and harvest insight,
making maps and sculptures to see and shift current realities,
using movement to explore deeper knowing (learn more about Social Presencing Theater),
inviting generative story telling,
making artifacts and art to make visible issues and insight,
practicing the Arts of Hosting,
co-creating public art, etc.
In the words of a Presencing Institute Senior Practitioner, Manish Srivastava,
“When all languages fail, and there are divides in gender, generation, class and race… embodiment and art helps us communicate and connect with our deepest longings and sadness, creating the field for systems transformation."
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought humanity face to face with the fragility of our ego. At the same time it offers us a new portal, or a pathway, to imagine a different future.” Manish poses that,
“Such imagination is not possible with our habitual, ego-centric way of thinking. That’s why we need to bring forth the artist from within and source deep creative wisdom from our bodies. To tune in and ask — what is my personal, social and earth body really longing for?”
For the full interview with Manish, go here
Why Wisdom Maker Flags?
As one way to bring forth the artist within, we are inviting people to create Wisdom Maker Flags as artifacts. Our Wisdom Maker flags are inspired by the tradition of Tibetan Prayer Flags. Prayer flags are found throughout the world when people create small fabric squares to transmit their dreams from place to place. Prayer flags express the universal human desire for the promotion of good health and good fortune not only of one’s person, but also for the people, animals, and the things one cares about.
3000 years ago animist originators of the Bon religion first conceived the idea of using cloth icons, fluttering in the unending Mountain winds, to transmit their prayers and their dreams from place to place, and more usually, from earth up to the deities in heaven. Prayer flag practices are disproportionately favored by lay-folk over members of the formal religious community. This practice continues to evolve and flourish because the practices respond to basic human needs and concerns; the increase of good things and prevention or violent suppression of bad things.
About Wisdom
Some people think of wisdom as a high minded word, however Tibetan prayer flags honor the natural wisdom of ordinary people. Arawana Hayashi reminds us that,
“We trust that human beings individually and collectively have wisdom. In fact, we could say that people have all the wisdom they need to solve the world’s problems. We can trust that the wisdom will come and will crystallize into insights, innovations, and fresh ideas.”
For more from Arawana Hayashi you can go here
Stephen Batchelor offers this perspective,
“…wisdom is really the result of reflective inquiry.
It’s the result of dwelling upon your life, its meaning.”
For more from Stephen Batchelor’s interview with Krista Tippett, go here
An Invitation
We invite you to join us in the process of making Wisdom Maker Flags, engaging in personal reflection that may lead to collective societal healing and development as we journey to build a better community that includes the gifts of all people. It is our vision that the creation of Wisdom Maker flags can make space for inspiration to enter, in the cracks where we live, the gap between what is and what could be. The collective vision we create via flags captures the message of what could be, as one way to express messages about what people want to do to clarify healing vision for ourselves and our communities.
Ocean Vuong, award winning poet, novelist, and essayist, invites us to consider finding “something else” when language fails us,
“What happens to our language, this great, advanced technology that we’ve had, when it starts to fail at its function and it starts to obscure, rather than open? …the great loss is that we can move through our whole lives, picking up phones and talking to our most beloveds, and yet, still not know who they are. Our ‘How are you?' has failed us. We have to find something else.”
To hear Ocean Vuong’s interview with Krista Tippett, go here
We welcome you to join us in our first Wisdom Maker Flags Zoom call as we search for “something else” to communicate our experience and visions of a desirable future.
May 12, 2020
3:00-4:30pm (Eastern)
Our first call will be a simple exploration, so that by learning more you can decide if this is something you want to do. If you are planning to join us, please contact Beth Mount, graphicfutures@earthlink.net.
Co-initiated by: Beth Mount, Gail Jacobs, Kirk Hinkleman, and David Hasbury
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