The week before....

We are playing The Game of Transformation this weekend and I want to write about the week before I get too distracted by that.

We started the week with student led learning. We talked about inner sustainability and how we sustain ourselves emotionally, socially, spiritually as important factors to our overall sustainability. It brought up a lot of interesting ideas of how sustainability is usually, in my experience at least, seen through the environmental eye and there are these other aspects that are just as important and that we've been talking about all this semester. How do we start to think about taking that home? I talked about my support networks outside of Findhorn and that our FCS group can still be one of those networks after we leave here. It was a lively and thoughtful conversation and we were all engaged and fully present.

In WorldCon this week we looked at Quantum Physics through the eye of What the Bleep do we Know? and Holistic and Reductionist Science with a guest speaker. The movie was fascinating and raised a lot of questions for me about my perception of the world and truth. I want to watch it again as there was a lot I didn't understand. The next day our class was a bit difficult for me because I felt we were being thrown so much information and no time to even think about it. It was partly the teacher and partly the morning and partly ourselves. I took notes and as I feel somewhat saturated overall at this point in the semester, I hope to take a few weeks after I get back and just process and go through and write down my thoughts and feelings and questions and try to delve deeper into what right now feels like too much to process. The "Human Challenge of Sustainability" is a lot to tackle in one semester. The program does a great job but it's also SO MUCH. So I write it down know in the hopes of gaining new insights later.

After a short reflection session with Deborah on Wednesday where we were able to voice some of our concerns and loves of the program in general and our classes, we had the rest of the day to ourselves. I had my first interview for my Group Dynamics project, and then worked on getting as much done as I could in the free time.

Thursday was a day full of Applied Sustainability. We talked about eco-villages and the issues that surround them and then did a short design exercise in dealing with 4 specific issues. I worked with social and economic inclusion. My experience of ecovillages has been within the industrial world and mostly contains upper-middle class white people. These are the people who can afford the programs and thus are the people to cluster to these organizations. We looked at how to involve more diversity of age, ability and social and economic status. The group was fairly scattered and we came up with a lot of good ideas but didn't synthesize them all together. I am still thinking about this issue and want to try to address it and look at it in this context.