A ‘Tasting’ of Excerpts from the New Kosmos Quarterly
UNLEARNING TOGETHER
(image) Feature | Change the Worldview, Change the World
Gender, like race, is a social construction, which is to say, a story. And the stories of sexism and racism that have cast such a pall over our history and our present illustrate the power of worldview and narrative in generating and maintaining systemic oppression. Stories become structures, systems, policies, and practices that have profound consequences on the bodies and in the lives of people in targeted communities.
Can we not see systemic racism, sexism, and other oppressions as functions of the same dominant worldview that is destroying the Earth? Settler colonialism at planetary scale? When I interviewed Thomas Berry in 1996, he told me, “If a particular society’s cultural world—the dreams that have guided it to a certain point—become dysfunctional, the society must go back and dream again.” – Drew Dellinger
(image) Feature | Grief, Collapse and Mysticism
“…we’re not talking about the grief over a death. We’re not talking about a period of grief. At some level, being alive on this planet as this great unfolding happens is to be living in grief in a permanent sense. Because of the amount of destruction and death that is not only happening but is so very visible if you choose to look. It turns grief into a permanent type of practice.” – Martin Kirk
Book | Forgive: The new practice and mantra for Black Men
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“I want to respect that there is no one size fits all forgiveness. There is no one size fits all reconciliation. Some people may never get to where they want. But if you want reconciliation, if you want personal liberation, then again as James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is confronted, can be overcome, but you can’t overcome anything, until it’s confronted.” And I confronted myself. I confronted my father. And I’m just suggesting that people actually take a good look. Take a good look at what it is that you’re wanting to confront. Don’t look away from it. Don’t look away from it. Look at it. Be with it. Work with it. And believe in yourself. Believe in your capacity to love. Believe in your power to love. ” – Ulysses Slaughter
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Article | Dynamic Governance: A Social Technology for Organizations
The organizations that we generate inherently reflect the quality of our own consciousness in the moment. Organizations that want to be relevant vehicles for our work in social change during these kaleidoscopic times need to “unlearn” linear, disconnected, and static approaches to governance. They must commit to ongoing transformation in sync with incessant societal shifts. Therefore, we—AND the organizations that serve us—are poised by existential necessity to deliberately take the next evolutionary step in consciousness. We stand at the proverbial evolve or die precipice. – Pamela Boyce Simms
(image) Essay | The Migrant Quilt
…The 17 quilts in the project bear the names of people who have died each year crossing the desert in the Tucson Sector. Patched together with denim, work shirts, embroidered cloth, and bandanas left behind on the desert floor, the quilts are scrappy in design and raw with the truth…Names of the dead rise off the surface in bas-relief like rogue wildflowers pushing up through the desert floor, commanding the same kind of attention as the white crosses we see strung with wire in and around the slats of the border wall. – Valarie Lee James
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Conversation | Social Breakdown and Initiation
Orland Bishop: We’ve lost the context of the genius. The genius is guided by the Muse and so there’s always a sense that the inspiration for the genius to become active is the fact that there are entities or intelligences that are the source of what the genius utilizes to express this unique capacity. Music is not just in the person’s capacity to play, it’s in the spheres, in the harmony of the spheres. It’s already there and it’s discovered and played.
(image) Charles Eisenstein: Yes, Mozart would just write it down…
Orland Bishop: Right, exactly. So these frequencies are distributed throughout the cosmos so to speak. It’s within the environment in nature and the deep superconscious of the collective. So part of it is that we’re always drawing from something through our perception.
Charles Eisenstein: That’s why initiation is necessary because it’s an attunement to something that’s already there.
Orland Bishop: Yes, and when the spirit self separates from the physical body, there’s a recapitulation, a remembering, of the primary agreement of what the self brought to the world and a witnessing of: did I fulfill it, did I live into this intention? It’s not a moral thing of beliefs. It’s whether I truly made the effort to overcome self-interest and deposit into the world my will, leaving my signature with it that’s free from ‘me’
Gallery | Absence Presence
…As more an intuitive rather than rational artist, I’m interested in the invisible manifestation of movement that resides below the surface of knowing. In the process of creation, that invisible world shows me what is there, and its gentle but guiding hand always comes up with more interesting and surprising results than I could have imagined. – Barbara Schaeffer
(image) Assenza 4If you have not subscribed yet, we offer subscriptions on a sliding scale from $0-$60. It is not possible to access the Quarterly without a user profile, so please subscribe now.
I would like to subscribe now at the $30 level. Is there a form? Please advise.
Dear Mary, You can subscribe at: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/checkout/. Thank you for your interest in Kosmos. We welcome you into our community. Nancy Roof