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Come find me at robhopkins.net
Showing results 11 - 15 of 46 for the month of March, 2008.
Today was sound, the presenter or speaker today was Richard Olivier who combines Shakespeare’s work with eco stuff. The play we were doing today was ‘As you like it’ which was good as well as being funny, in the first session today Richard told us the play and in the second half of the session talked about the character we where most interested in and the part of the story we felt we were at.
Richard Olivier is the founding voice within Mythodrama and he works at the leading edge of bringing theatre and the arts into the development of authentic leaders. He has been a leading theatre director for over 10 years. His workshop was called the Journey of Renewal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. For Richard the play has many parallels with Great Turning and the times in which we live. The play is about leaving a Garden of Eden and then returning to it.
What was possibly the worst kept secret in the Transition world was revealed last night on BBC Radio 4’s The Archers. For those of you from outside the UK, the Archers is a fine British institution, a radio soap opera based in a rural community called Ambridge. It began in World War Two as a way of getting information out to farmers and rural communities, but it proved so popular that it is still with us. I must confess to having listened to it religiously since the age of about 7. Anyway, last night, the first mention was made in the programme of the possibility of Ambridge becoming Transition Ambridge. One of the characters, Pat Archer, a dedicated organic farmer, raised the idea. She decided first to discuss it with her friend Cathy, who asked her what this Transition stuff is all about…
The afternoon session focused on Seeing with New Eyes. For this session, Joanna gave an overview of systems thinking, arguing that the time of the Great Turning will be a time of a return to a deep understanding, to what Tich Naht Hanh calls ‘Interbeing’. When we go out into the world to take our part in the Great Turning, we need more than just our feelings, they come and go, we also need a grounding in the new comprehension of the world that is emerging in systems thinking.
Session Two began with a very moving piece where four people read out a list of endangered or extinct species while Joanna played a drum slowly. This then led into an extraordinarily powerful exercise called The Bowl of Tears. Three large bowls of water were placed in the middle of the floor, representing the tears of Gaia, and a musical lament was played to accompany a slide show of images of social and ecological breakdown, deforestation, pollution and so on.
