Four Levels of ‘New Story’ Activism
By Marie Goodwin
This is an excerpt from a longer posting at Marie’s blog, Personal Mycology
People seek to “change the world” through activism on four different levels, no matter what the activism’s focus: the personal, the family, the community, and the world-tribe. What I have noticed about activism is that like so much else in life, what level you are focusing on at the moment changes throughout life; it ebbs and flows in phases, and brings richness and bounty to all of the other work we are doing in the world. But often people are working on all levels at the same time, and while this helps life feel coherent and joyful, it can create burnout and stress.
New Story activism is no different from other types of activism in this respect. We know that the personal and small acts have power; we know equally that a world tribe, a new cultural story is growing and we want to be part of that as well. Part of the “new story” is re-localizing (in all its many facets) and the Commons, so this work too is important. And we also are aware that relationship work (partnerships, marriage, sex) and what defines family is undergoing a fundamental shift. Then there are the children, if we have them. How do we prepare and include them in the new story? How do you prepare yourself? Yoga? Therapy? Reskilling? Planting a garden? Homesteading?
Can you pick out any one part of this cultural realignment that isn’t important. How can you? They are all important! But doing this work on all the levels all the time is a very difficult task indeed.
Let’s take a deeper look a what activism on “the four levels” looks like? I will focus on “new story” activism, but I think the levels apply to any sort of activism one might do.
Level One
Sometimes we feel called inward to work on our personal “stuff” — work that requires most of our energy and time. It demands that we sit on the cushion or work with a therapist, see a life-coach, or work on our physical strength to attain goals like a marathon, climbing a mountain, or competing in an Ironman competition. We write our novel or children’s book. We focus inward and work on our demons and joys. By the age of 50 or so, this bell rings loudly for many activists and can’t be ignored. And this, all of it, is a type of activism. As I grow older, I find that this work becomes more insistent for my attention. I have placed self-care and internal work on a back burner for much of my life, but I no longer feel the leisure of time and so must now more fully attend to it.
Level Two
Another type of New Story activism is focused on the level of home, children, partner, extended family and friends. This level is often about outsourcing less and simplifying (Radical Homemakers style). This type of activism can take the form of a permaculture project or green renovation for your home. It can be nursing an aging relative or a friend with cancer. It can be educating your children at home or nurturing an infant. It can be focused on home birth and attachment parenting, or growing and storing your own food, or building a root cellar and stocking it. Activism at this level can be about voluntary simplicity on almost any front, including re-skilling just about everything that needs to be done that has been outsourced to our consumer culture: medicine, food, energy, water, education, entertainment, making clothes, and wildcrafting. There is a LOT of work to be done at this level, although this type of activism is often undervalued because it has traditionally been in the hands (for the most part) of women. Often activists assume that this level of work will be done by others or outsourced to the State: the state will educate their children, they will buy food in grocery stores, go to big pharma for medicine. They will flush drinking water down the toilet because water, like oil, feels like it is in endless supply. If there was an emergency tomorrow and the stores ran out of food, they would starve because they haven’t considered this level of work important enough to merit their focus. But it is the essentials of life…it was the entirety of life for most people before industrialization. But now — in this age of Amazon, Whole Foods, and McMansions — it is an afterthought to most — at their peril.
Level Three
The third level of activism is community work; anything that strengthens the ties of community. And this is where my work with the Transition Town movement fell, but this could be working in soup kitchens on the weekend, church volunteerism, advocacy for public art, or running for city council… anything that deepens the discourse in communities around making their collective lives better and stronger by working together. This activism is knowing and working with people directly in your community, the people you see every day when you walk down the street in town or wave to as you pass by their home in your car. It also includes work done to increase or preserve your local commons: public lands, public banking, water sources, green spaces, open space, land trusts, community farms, etc. This is the work of networking with and learning from others. And it is tough, demanding, thrilling, fulfilling, maddening, beautiful work. And it is critical if we are to survive the crises that sit at the edge our collective understanding of the world: economics, environmental, and resource depletion. Like dark clouds on the horizon, we know the storm is coming.
Level Four
The fourth and final level encompasses large scale activism that collects and energizes the “soul family,” the “world tribe,” or the “blessed unrest.” The cracks in our collective paradigm are growing wider, and more and more people are coming to understand that we are in a time of deep transition from one story to another. Cultivating that new story, seeding it with a deep respect for our planet and its inhabitants, is a pressing and foundational aspiration for activism. And it is critical, not only to ourselves, but for the children of my children — the 7th Generation. I feel my friend Drew Dellinger’s words from his poem Hieroglyphic Stairway ringing in my ear on a daily basis:
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
In my work as an activist I have found this; you can work on one level very effectively, two if you are a person of sound health and lots of energy. If you are working on three of these levels, none of them will be at the depth you are likely seeking, and it will lead to frustration, overwork, mistakes, and more stress than is reasonable to carry for any length of time. If you are working at all four levels, you are on the fast-track to burnout. Implosion might be a better word.
But what do you give up? Look at the descriptions above again. What should you leave behind? Where do the cuts come from? As I’m writing this post, I can’t find one place, not one, where I want to cut corners and limit my work in the world. They are all critical, all deserving. All of them call me.
Maybe it’s not about choosing between the levels at all, any more than focusing on our bones vs. our blood or our tissue or our organs in an effort to be healthy. We are so entangled that working on any level impacts and influences all the others. In that way, my immediate attention to one level (whichever calls most strongly to me) will reverberate throughout the others in a beneficial way. That awareness relieves the stress of needing to find the One Right activism. It all counts.
The second half of the article (which Kosmos didn’t reprint) eventually gets there, basically that all of it counts and that there is a time and a place — seasons perhaps — for the different levels. We are too impatient with ourselves, too desirous for change.
I really appreciate your careful ‘teasing out’ of the various threads of activism. Discernment and discrimination are vital for those of us strongly called to ‘save the world’. Being scattered rather than mindfully focused dissipates what we have to offer, and as you rightly point out, leads to frustration and burnout. Such a pity, when we are the ones called at this time to step up with our unique gifts to meet these challenges. We are in unprecedented times. For many of us who have been tuned to the earth for some time, our hearts are cracking open, our minds are stretching to embrace new possibilities, our bodies are humming in resonance with the earth… and this clarity about how our energy is to serve, moment by moment, to support the emergence of a new story for all creation, including human beings, has never been more important. Thank you for this article, and I look forward to more of your thoughts in the future.
That appears to me good logic Margaret. We all have individual amounts of energy to see us through each day, dependant on health etc. and it appears to me that the best thing that we can do is use it for the greatest good for the greatest number on the level that we consider the most important at the time.
Many people have some sort of understanding that we are here on Earth at this time, to contribute to the awakening. Unfortunately, most people do not really know precisely what their purpose is. They know when they are not “on purpose” because frustration levels rise. If we are fortunate enough to actually know our life purpose, it becomes easy to prioritise what is important for us and what isn’t. Obviously, all the aspects your write about are important, but no one person can be all things for all people. Since our life purpose requires first of all, that we learn those things that we need to learn in this lifetime, in order that we can actually do what we have come to do, then learning becomes a priority. The problem in relation to purpose is that some of us think we know what we are here to do, but don’t understand that until we become the person who has the energetic frequency which supports that “doing” then we will not achieve our purpose. Getting to the level of energetic frequency may involve just becoming healthier and more active. It may involve letting go the programmes that hold us back and keep us stuck in a variety of negative attitudes or beliefs. It may involve developing skills. It may involve developing a network of friends and colleagues who will work with us on a complicated task. Before we can even think of achieving our life’s purpose, we need first to prepare. The length of time we spend in preparation often involves a very long and frustrating journey and for each person the priorities will be different.