Archive for February, 2021

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Dadirri, Complexity and social pain

February 6, 2021

One of the things I like about complexity theory, is that it admits what we can observe, namely that the world seems largely and beautifully ordered, yet it also seems chaotic and random: that life is painful and joyful. We of course cannot prove the world is random, because there could always be an order that is hidden, but we cannot just argue that because there should be an order that is hidden, there is no randomness. I’ve previously suggested that we don’t know whether the sense of multiple possibilities and unpredictability is in the nature of reality or in the nature of the tools we use to make sense of reality. The main point is that there is a lot we cannot fully understand, we may just have to live with it as best we can, and this can be hard.

If God exists, then God likes and wants variety, disruption and surprise for us. The best we can do is to make islands of order, by working with the unpredictability, or the nature of the world, rather than against it. That is we recognise limits to our control.

Emotional Pain

One of the problems complexity points to, as does depth psychology, is that if you suppress pain, disturbance or chaos, the relief will only be temporary. The chaos will surface somewhere else, perhaps in another form, and very likely will be more disruptive. We do not solve a long term problem by hitting it or ignoring it. This seems particularly true of emotional pain.

Chaos and emotional pain need a different approach, they appear to need Dadirri. Pain needs to be listened to. Not magnified, not feared, but attended to. Sat with in the context in which it is found. If it is pain at work, then sit with work, listen to work, and so on. Do not ignore the pain.

It may be the case that long term emotional pain comes when we are suppressing something essential for us. Keeping this something in check may be necessary, or it may be purely artificial and social (a matter of suppressing to fit in with our groups), but in either case, suppressing awareness of pain is bound to lead to chaos of some sort. We may be driven to do what distresses us, and what makes no sense to us. The pain may shield us from the pain of being suppressed by others, and perhaps makes us complicit in suppressing others.

Gently listening to the pain without criticism and retreat, can lead to what we have made unconscious. The pain can be shielding us from our deep wisdom, which would cause us to change our life, or change our approach to life.

Emotional pain can feel like ours alone, but it can also be collective, and shareable. When it is consciously shared it can become a public movement. The problem here is when that collective pain is used by a leader to control their followers, and to scapegoat others who have little to do with it, not to follow it to its source.

Social Pain

Black Lives Matter was a protest which grew out of shared pain. Pain that people were being shot by police apparently because their skin colour meant they did not matter. Pain that black lives in general did not seem to matter. Pain after long series of recurrent abuse. Sometimes this abuse may seem trivial, but the point is that it was repetitive, and it seems black people are generally not respected by the dominant groups. And of course, the response of many white people, was that this was all trivial or exaggerated: “All lives matter” implying “we suffer as much as you.” Indeed this may even be true, but it still implied there was no need to listen to black people, to sit with them and share their pain; their specific histories and experiences were being made socially irrelevant.

President Trump could have lead the way. He could have said there is a problem which we need to solve. He could have said to his followers, “let us listen to these protesters, as we are all Americans. We need to take what they tell us seriously, we must make sure we are with them on this”. People could have sat together, and shared presence. That might not be perfect, it might not have worked, but at least it would have been a recognition, and a start.

Of course Trump did not do this. He did not listen. He did not even offer rapport. He blamed Democrats and protestors for disorder. He portrayed their pain as a threat to the USA, and tried to shove what he saw as disorder down. He offered himself as the only person who could restore order, and that the way forward was repression. He appears to have decided that his power depended on being seen as strong and suppressing disorder. This probably worked to an extent and gained him respect in white supremacy movements, but ignored the problem. He did not solve the problem, and tensions between black and white Americans have probably intensified.

This is not just a Trump issue. This is how Western culture has worked for a long time. This is how we react to what we fear.

President Biden appears to face a similar problem with Trump supporters. They are clearly showing emotional pain. Now you may say an important difference is that the explanation for the pain of BLM protestors was based on real events, while the pain of Trump supporters seems based on fictional events. They think an election was stolen, when it seems more likely that Trump tried to steal it himself and lie about the results.

Nevertheless the pain of loss is genuine, and expresses other pains. The chaos should not just be suppressed, or hidden and left to flourish were it can be used by those who are unscrupulous, which is what has happened before. Yes listening is a risk, and it may not work, especially if the listening does not seem genuine, or seems like an attempt to denigrate them.

Those who support Trump, support him because they saw him as one of them, and as someone who listened to their concerns. Someone who recognised the pain they felt. The pain of declining, or stagnant, incomes and status. The pain of medical debts and bankruptcies. The pain of being ignored or mocked by elites. The pain of feeling their country was no longer theirs, that it no longer made sense. The pain of life being unpredictable, but usually without return. The pain of feeling victimised. The pain of knowing their children will probably have it harder than they do. The pain of complete frustration. The pain of wanting revenge.

These are all real pains, and they are pains shared by many Americans. And sure Trump is never going to do anything about the causes. He continued the pattern of increasing the wealth of the wealthy, and poisoning the Earth and its peoples. He also tried to shut down dissent. But it appeared they could vote and act, and something precious, and lost, might return.

Biden would be wrong to follow Trump’s lead, even though desire for justice is probably strong. America needs a path of reconciliation. This means listening to people and sitting with them. Finding the causes of pain, and facing the pain, and helping people reconnect with their wisdom, and helping people to find a way to act and deal with their pain and problems. This will be difficult because some media and politicians find more power in stirring up that pain and forcing it to be unresolved, than they do in healing it; this is perhaps the visible part of the neoliberal conspiracy to boost corporate power, and it will be active. Dadirri will be difficult, but that does not mean it is not necessary.

The emotional. perhaps spiritual, pain of normal Americans has been ignored.

Furthermore, the results will be unpredictable but, we can more or less guarantee that, if we do not listen then the situation will get even worse, and much of what makes the US valuable will collapse, as the pain returns, less able to be pushed down..

The same is true of climate change. That is an emotional pain for those who see the world being destroyed, and its an emotional pain for those who deny the world is being destroyed, but fear their way of life is being destroyed for political gain. We need to listen rather than to shout, and we may need to listen to the world as a whole.

Dadirri means we take others seriously and we listen. It is more important to listen than to speak, until the insight comes.

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Why is social theory often ‘leftist’?

February 6, 2021

Despite the tendency for easy answers this is a difficult question, partly because there is no simple distinction between left and right. There can be hard distinctions between, fascist, conservative and pro-corporate thought for example, or the utilitarian liberal and socialist trends of the left.

In general (but not always) the right is pro-existing-hierarchies and authority, and the left is against those hierarchies and authorities. As I’ve said before, parties can switch position, depending upon who is winning, or how radical they wish to appear. Trumpism for example did not challenge corporate dominance in general, the capitalist system, the power of wealthy people, the sense of hierarchy in the US, or the idea of authoritarianism – it just challenged the power of corporations who were not wildly pro-Trump, ‘elites’ who were not pro-Trump, wealthy people who were not pro-Trump, media which was not pro-Trump, attacked protest by non-Trump supporters, and excused racial and sexual discrimination. On the other hand, a non-US citizen might say that the US democrats are largely a party of the Center-Right. In terms of the questions, there is also a real distinction between social theories such as sociology and economics.

It is reasonably obvious that mainstream economics is dominated by pro-corporate thought and aims to justify corporate power- and we could say, “well that is the type of thinking the corporate sector pays for, approves of, and that’s what it gets.” As a result, we end up with ‘social policies’ that reduce social life to a particular type of economics only, which make business the only relevant part of social life, naturalises corporate power and wealth, and aims to break up any opposition to corporate dominance – partly by suppressing consideration of any power or structural dimensions or, if you prefer, by the suppression of any ‘social considerations’ at all. In my view, Libertarian social thought tends to be of this type, although there are libertarians who don’t fall for that particular trap all the time (see C4ss), but they are rare. As opposed to standard economics, there is also political economy which tends to be more left in orientation, but it is extremely marginalised in mainstream thinking, even if it describes economic processes much more accurately (again in my opinion), and refuses to arbitrarily separate economic from political and social processes.

Given right-wing dominance of economics, then why is sociology, by comparison, more left-wing in orientation? Why is it not almost completely bought out like economics?

Partly because it is really hard to study corporate, or wealth elites, without being part of them or just flattering them. Even a person who has worked for years to be a trusted servant will be left out of all kinds of events. And the wealthy can take revenge, if they don’t like what is said about them.

As a result, historically, sociology and anthropology have developed studying people who are workers, marginalised, ‘colonised’ and so on. Given this happenstance, you would expect the studiers to develop a degree of sympathy for the people being marginalised, oppressed, impoverished or subject to arbitrary authority. This sympathy is intensified because the dominant groups rarely, if ever say they are being oppressive; they say they are carrying out their oppression and theft in the name of a greater good, because they are more talented, because God placed them there, or because they are looking after the oppressed. This tends to make the studiers somewhat cynical about the dominating classes, and any social ideology which asserts all is well and that the powerful deserve their power and privilege (which means the researchers tend to be leftish or centerist).

One response to this in the early days of anthropology was to argue for a derivative of conservatism, which was called ‘functionalism’. This asserted that no matter how irrational some indigenous behaviour looked to the colonisers and the military and western business, it was actually really important to the functionality of the society. You could not go around disrupting things and expect people to remain happy, content, or accepting of colonial domination. You really needed to understand people and respect them, to rule well. The best form of rule was largely to leave people alone.

We can see such conservative thinking in Edmund Burke – the idea is that society develops customs, traditions and behaviours which have a social use and contribute to social stability. With this attitude, Burke could also see the oppression and criminality of the East India Company in India and fight against it for years. This kind of conservatism does not take a pro-corporate position, because on the whole corporations will profit wherever they can, and if that profit is destructive of society or environment that consequence becomes entirely secondary – something no real conservative would believe.

Indeed, we might need to explain why it is that destructiveness has become so acceptable to pro-corporate people, especially when in some cases it seems suicidal.

Interestingly enough in the early to mid 20th century there were many social analyses which were conservative – things like ‘social credit’ (Douglas), ‘distributism’ (Chesteron, Belloc), ‘guild theory’ (Penty) and so on, but they were not pro-corporate and got wiped – although the people introducing GK Chesterton’s collected works for the Ignatius Press, pretend Chesterton would have approved of modern US capitalism – which is not at all likely. These movements stretch back to nineteenth century ‘patriarchal conservatives’ like Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin; the latter of whom insisted that a socio-economic system which did not increase wealth of the soul and beauty as part of its values and processes would be destructive. Ruskin seems to have ended up more influential on the left than on the pro-corporate right for what seem like reasonably obvious reasons… but Ruskin does tend to be a bit patronising and this gets in the way of reading him sometimes.

There is also the conservative social thought which argues that an elite or aristocracy should be trained to rule, because most people are not capable or interested in ruling. Once you have started to argue who this elite should be, and what they are protecting, the interest is more or less over, and this position is hard to justify to outsiders. Louis Dumont argued that Western Sociology was inadequate because it took equality as its starting point (which is disputable) while human beings are naturally hierarchical. I’d agree humans tend to be hierarchical; the question is how different the levels of hierarchy are, how immobile they are and what kind of conditions reinforce extreme authoritarian, exploitative or harmful hierarchies – which I guess are leftist questions, although they seem neutral enough 🙂

Sociology has been more left in orientation because the dominant pro-corporate form of the right, wishes to deny relevant social facts such as class, oppression, misery and so on, and claim that the current form of social life, only needs less control by the people over ‘the market’, together with more corporate power and all will be well again….. Sociologists tend also to be suspicious of ‘nationalist’ social theory because there is a documented tendency for ‘the nation’ to be a historical construct rather than an eternal reality, and because nationalisms have tended in the past to lead to authoritarianisms (proto fascisms), victimisation of outgroups, and war, because most nationalisms seem to need to construct outgroups, who can be slandered, or treated with contempt, in order to reinforce the idea of the national race being an important and superior group.

You could simply say that on the Right, pro-corporate social thought is false and only aims at building and justifying corporate dominance; conservative social thought was taken over by the left, or largely abandoned by conservatives; and fascist social thought is oriented towards getting people to follow the leader and attack some approved out-groups to make ingroup loyalty. That is it.

Despite this, there are many varieties of social thought in sociology and anthropology departments. My original professor in Anthropology was a well known anti-Marxist, an ideational functionalist and an early explorer of network theory, before it had been named. He was also a source of great encouragement to me.

One of my thesis markers was also a conservative expert in the work of Norbert Elias whose work I deeply respect. There are plenty of other people I have no idea of their political voting patterns, but they do tend to sympathise with people who are ripped off by the system.

So the reason why sociology tends to be leftist, is because of history, because of who they work with, and because right-wing social thought tends to support established authorities, the suppression of those people studied by sociologists and anthropologists, or is abandoned and rarely thought out persuasively in the Anglosphere because it conflicts with corporate power.

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Responsibility for climate change: Companies vs. people

February 2, 2021

Are customers of fossil fuel companies more to blame than fossil fuel companies, themselves, for climate change?

I almost think this is a distracting question.

I guess there is a possible argument, that the poor little fossil fuel companies are just satisfying customer demand and should not be held responsible for anything they do, as they are complete victims and slaves to the market, but I don’t hear that very often. It is, for example, not as apparently common as refusal to acknowledge there is a problem.

However, if we think ecologically at all, then we know that companies and customers are bound together in systems. Without people buying the stuff which the companies promote and try to sell, then the system collapses, or transforms. Without people selling, promoting and profiting from the stuff, then people could not use it.

If customers move into electric cars, or ‘green energy,’ then demand will lower, and ideally fossil fuel companies will move into more profitable areas, or go bust – especially as it gets harder to find profitable fossil fuel sources (as it becomes more dangerous and more polluting, with more energy required to get the fuel).

In this case, customers include large customers, like factories, steel makers, aluminium manufacturers, coal powered electricity generators and so on. So the economic system that supports fossil fuels does not just involve people who put petrol in their cars, but other large corporate entities. Change (should we want it) has to involve them as well.

Unfortunately, we know that, if companies own the government (or significant politicians), are established and seem respectable, they will get massive taxpayer subsidies and bailouts to allow them to continue trading. Or they may get government support for continuing fossil fuel use, such as governments buying supply in the national interest, or subsidising purchasers – this is, after all, how capitalism works in practice, and the more pro ‘free market’ the government, the more free they often seem about transferring taxpayers’ wealth to the big corporate sector to keep the market going.

It should also be reasonably obvious that over 100 years of fossil fuel usage, will have set up systems of habit, regulation, distribution, technology and so on, that favours the use of fossil fuels and the happiness of high level people in fossil fuel companies and stock holders.

If you want to change the system, then you need to look at all components of the system, which includes consumers, companies, government, technologies, energy availability, pollution, ecologies (and undoubtedly other factors) and try to work out the least painful and quickest way of avoiding mass damage, or total system failure.

This is difficult, and often unappealing, because there is:

  • huge uncertainty in change
  • usually a large cost in change
  • powerful people and groups who don’t want to risk loss of that power or profit
  • a media which tends to support established corporate power
  • the possibility that, if we go first, other people will take advantage of us
  • huge cultural and symbolic resonance with fossil fuels, the founders of modernity. Heroic miners and entrepreneurs, lucky breaks, huge riches and so on.
  • potential acknowledgement that we, ourselves, are partially responsible for the problem, which can be morally unnerving
  • hope that we really don’t have to risk anything, or suffer anything, to get by.

Few people would want change from fossil fuels, if it was not for:

  • increasing difficulty finding and extracting fossil fuels (it is possible ‘peak oil’ has already occurred)
  • wanting to clean up poisonous pollution and smog
  • wanting to lessen environmental damage
  • wanting to stop climate change.

If you don’t care about these factors, or are taught not to care about these factors, then moving out of fossil fuels is low priority, and the potential loss seems extreme.

The problem is, in this and many other cases, if we don’t attempt controlled change, then we will have uncontrolled change thrust upon us, as the existing system breaks down.

As I have argued previously, in working with systems, we cannot proceed by dogma. We have to proceed experimentally, and observe what the results of actions are, and change our actions and responses as we go along. This is something people, in the West, seem to find difficult. That is another reason why practicing Dadirri might be useful, as is the joined process of sitting with our fears and griefs so we do not run away from them and the problems they know about.

Allocating blame is not the answer, but helping the system to change could be.

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Dadirri and US politics

February 1, 2021

This post probably won’t make that much sense if you do not read the previous post, Dadirri and complexity.

I am not a US citizen, so take this as you will.

The US is, in my opinion, broken. Trump and the Republicans, again in my view, have broken it.

While I think Republicans should probably acknowledge this (given what they claim about being the party of responsibility), and it would make life easier for all if they did, it seems highly possible they will never do so. It would mean admitting they were wrong.

In our society, that seems hard for anyone to do. Admitting error no longer seems to mean mean you can now move on, and refrain from doing it again. Nowadays admitting error, is admitting a grievous sin and moral failing. It means loss of status and condemnation from your own, as well as the others. It is, effectively, wrong to admit being wrong. If you admit one thing you did was wrong, then everything you ever believed and did could also be wrong. People would laugh and mock you. You would be swept away by those who are more confident. If it feels good, do it again.

This is a kind of pathology of positive thinking: admitting a ‘bad’ supposedly makes for more bad to come. This means the ‘bad’ is never faced, and never acknowledged.

However, allocating blame, and contradiction, is far less important than acknowledging the brokenness, and sitting with that brokenness and all we feel and all that is. Blame, or reasoning it all out at the start, is not Didirri. Didirri or receptivity is openness to the reality of what is. It represents a pause, a being with whatever is present, an acknowledgement of reality, so we may proceed or carry on.

One possibility is that the US may never be repaired.

Perhaps some may not want it to be repaired, because it is useful to them for it to be broken, or because repair would admit the damage they caused. But this does not matter. Blame does not explain, nor does it heal, it may just reinforce the brokenness – especially if we start with blame.

The reality seems to be that Americans will have to live with that brokenness. They can be still, and open to possibilities that arise from that brokenness, or they can rush on and say things are not harmed or brush the harm to one side. What if we were open to that brokenness? To the possibility it may never be repaired, but we still have to live?

If we refuse the brokenness, we may never be receptive to solutions. We may never sit with those who do recognise the problem, or with any others. We may not be able to face the silence, and the possible confusion, or pain, of recognising complexity. But those who wish to move on peacefully have to respond to the situation and its full complexity and respond fully. We have to respond healthily to wounds, not ignore them or punish them. That takes Dadirri.

The problem is probably never the ‘them’ but always the ‘we’. We can act, but we cannot peacefully make ‘them’ act.

This is difficult. Society is not geared for silence. The media does not like silence, as they exist for noise, they exist for advertising, they exist for your involvement, they exist to tell you things. Politics exists for drama and noise, displays of conviction and condemnation, not for being together. Business exists to tell us what to do, and what to buy, and how important business is, not for a peaceful soul.

What in the US leads back to silence, to shades and complexity, to perception?

Americans supposedly believe in prayer. Can they sit with God and wait for silence to speak? Can they admit life’s complexity? Can people admit there is something to heal, which does not mean the others become like them? Can we surrender a desire for control, or to only see the ‘positive’?

Can people stop rushing? Will they listen, and by example of that listening, show the way?

Receptivity may not be easy, but we can all stop and start to listen, and be open, without demanding a result.

Anyone can start.

That might be enough to start something new.

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Dadirri and complexity

February 1, 2021

This comes from the discussions in the ‘mythos’ group, and celebrates that thought.

I want to start by quoting Aboriginal Elder, Ngangikurungkurr woman, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr.

The whole piece is short and can be found at:

https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri

Its a bit odd to speed it up, so please read the whole if you can. She writes:

What I want to talk about is another special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness….

When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening.

In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting. Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years…

There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.

My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness….

Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course – like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth…

We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.

I’ve also been reading Raimon Panikkar on receptivity. A similar point is being made. It is helpful to humans just to be open, to listen, to be aware of whatever is happening, with no rush to judgement, no interruption, no necessity to understand immediately. To refrain from our words, and our criticism of what is – even when what is, seems to someone else presenting what we think is a misunderstanding.

Dadirri, or receptivity, is just listening and being, not judging, not interrupting, not interfering, not even attempting control or to get a ‘good’ result.

It seems possible to suggest that this is the first call of complexity – when we realise the world is too complicated to fully grasp. Just to sit with it, and listen, without thinking we understand, or even trying to understand.

By this listening we allow the complexities to exist with us. If we are split, we allow our split without shutting it down for what we think is the best result. We accept any dark thoughts or fears that arise, without condemning them, and without obsessing over them. They are there, they are part of what is. Without judgement. We accept cheerful, good thoughts, without praising them and without obsessing over them, or trying to stop them from passing. They are all thoughts. We sit and listen. We accept the noise of cars and drills, and jackhammers. They are part of what is. They may not be the wind in the trees, or the calls of birds, but they too exist. We cannot separate from what is, however much we wish to. We cannot understand everything, however much we wish to. Some understanding will be symbolic, and need not to be foreclosed.

What we might call ‘bad’ is present and a judgement. What we might call ‘good’ is present and a judgement. Recognising either can be a mode of force, if we push one side and suppress awareness of the other. In Dadirri, we just be open and receptive to what is, and what flows, and what becomes. As the Elder states: “There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.”

It seemed to me that many of our problems stem from a refusal to be receptive or to practice Dadirri. From a desire to separate from, or control, what appears to be the case.

In politics we rush to condemn, rush to argue, rush to self-defense and justification, before we have even heard what other people are saying. We perceive people as opponents rather than accept them as just being. We take them as bad, as harmful. Indeed we will probably rush to condemn our opponents for rushing to judge.

We don’t just sit together, listening and feeling and receptive, leaving aside desires for control or victory. Perhaps this seems impractical, but as long as it seems impractical, the longer we will refuse to try it out.

One person, I’m sorry but I forget who, recently asked something like; “What if the Australian prime minister just sat with Elders, rather than told them what his policies were, or told them what to think. Wouldn’t that really indicate a change and a new mode of being together?”

Another story I remember, which I may have got wrong, was that a mining company was talking to Aboriginal people about what the company offered, and they were getting more and more worked up as the Aboriginal people did not speak. Eventually one person said something like “How can we reply till we have properly heard what you say, and thought about it?” They might also have added “and heard what country has to say”. Maybe the latter is just romanticism, but that is the point – there is a lot to hear, to be open to. And this is so, nearly everywhere.

You can’t make urgent decisions urgently, without full listening to all beings involved, and the web of their interactions, as best you can. And that takes time, and lack of pressure, lack of push to conclusions. Life is complex. That is its nature and life needs attention, openness.

“There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.”

It also means that you may change your course, as more listening proceeds and you hear what was previously silent or ignored by accident.

It is not entirely silly to say that the uninvited, or the excluded, will come back strongly and unwelcomingly, unless we are ready for them, or welcome them in advance.

Sometimes, we may have to recognise that something is broken and cannot be fixed. We still have to be, and be receptive to that brokenness. We may never be able to ‘fix it’, but we still may have to live with it, and not always automatically force it together when it is unwilling or incapable.

Receptivity means being open to the possibility that events appear unpleasant. It does not mean denial of what is. We cannot fix things if we deny there is a problem, or if we fixate on what we think is the problem, or jump straight into what we think is the solution, rather than being open to the complexity of the problem and its branching out all over the place first.

This slips into caution about positive thinking. Positive denial, is simply denial of what is. This is a refusal to listen, a refusal to learn, a refusal to accept what was unintended, or to acknowledge the ignored that came back offended. It denies complexity and life.

Denial is not receptivity. Denial, as I understand, is not Dadirri. Useful positive thinking is listening, and assuming that something will arise that can be enough at this moment. It is assuming no difficulty is too great, although recognises it may be difficult the less we listen. Receptivity does not deny difficulty, it allows what is to be what it is, and for us to feel the way forward slowly and quietly, and be open to the responses that are engendered by what we do.

It allows complexity to be, and finds the best way through.

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