2023-08-03 (started; continuing for many days)

I started this at a week-long “summer camp” gathering at L'arbre qui pousse near Ottignies in Wallonia. It was very enriching: many really valuable conversations; meeting new people with unexpected connections; helping occasionally to look after one of the many infants…

The folk there were all connected somehow with Regens Unite, and there were a remarkable number of parents with young children.

I'm holding a number of topics in mind at present.

• The division of opinion between the different co-living etc. groups here in Belgium
• The way in which different people have different stories — what I call “healing narratives”
• That young parents have so much on their hands they probably aren't seeking anyone / anything, apart from what comes up as urgent
• More on stereotypes and bias against older people
• What are people actually looking for?

Actually I intend to write about these separately, later, and if and when I do I'll link them from here. Now, I also want to respond to the several articles I read on 2023-07-30 about the historic low of Antarctic sea ice on that date. The urgency of everything struck me then. This is not about some unusual lifestyle choice. It's about the likelihood of decent sustainability; the likelihood of being able to avoid huge wars, famine, displacement, and untimely death on a vast scale.

This has also coincided with the end of the EDE course I've been on, online. One of the most sobering sessions in the EDE was the one that I missed on 2023-05-13: Ecovillage Solutions to Climate Emergencies. It's one thing considering and helping with disasters in other parts of the world; quite another to contemplate the kind of dreadful global changes that seem now to be on the horizon.

We all have choices. We can try to ignore the dreadful part, and continue with our daily lives as we are used to, right up to the moment when we are forced to change. Or, we can find something constructive to do — something positive. For me, the EDE course has consolidated my recognition that quickly reducing our environmental footprint is essential; and coming together in community will be vital for any kind of decent survival. Thus back to RegenCHOICE. Let me give here the briefest possible outline.

1. We are likely to lose much of our way of life. We lose less, and we will have better quality of life, the more we learn to share resources.
2. The more we focus on and enjoy the real joys of living – connecting with other people; living in a learning and loving way thanks to the presence of others – the less we will be worrying about material possessions and the old-fashioned so-called standards of living.
3. We need to do this fast — much faster than is plausible by people slowly coming together around existing regenerative projects, businesses, intentional communities and ecovillages.
4. Thus there is an absolute priority on helping along with the processes of
   1. learning about what is really happening now, and how it looks like playing out
   2. helping people find others with whom they can successfully start new projects, etc.
   3. incubation; mentoring; coaching; or helping in any other way that leads these groupings to be successful in creating something genuinely regenerative and that works well in the larger ecosystem
   4. including all the personal growth and psychological issues getting i the way of community; collaboration; and finding one's personal and collective ikigai
   5. managing, disseminating, providing the knowledge commons and learning opportunities that help people most effectively to realise their regenerative dreams.

My role is not to try to do everything, but rather to add my piece of the jigsaw, which is RegenCHOICE, addressing mainly (b) just above. I also have written plenty on the structure of collaborative distributed wiki knowledge commons, but that's another separate topic. I guess that I need to focus on RegenCHOICE as the source of that particular vision, while helping as and when people ask me, based on my knowledge of education and the education system.