Plants growing between the cracks
Tending complexity and relationships in the current crisis
I’m noticing an increase in the importance placed on perception of complexity, and responding with complexity to what is inherently a complex situation right now.
I’m noticing places and people who usually wouldn’t give much airtime to this need to tend warmer, deeper, more imaginative places suddenly opening to put resource and time towards this.
I’m noticing the usual competitive exploit/take/demand behaviours quieten, become somber, softer, die back.
It feels like cracks in the pavement where suddenly little plantlings are able to grow, there is sunlight being shone on patches of soil that have been struggling for a long time.
The mass movement and excitement around not going back to sleep, and not going back to normal, can be seen as a flurry and scrambling to dig out the watering cans from the dusty garden shed, and rush to water the seeds and the soil that reveal themselves now.
We do not need to plant new seeds. They were there all along. What we do need to be doing now is offering very real solidarity and mutual support to the work and projects that have the infrastructure in place already, many of the relationships and context already, to grow into the cracks and become so stable and resilient, put down such hardy roots, that if and when the time does ever come for someone to come and try and up-root them, identify them as weeds that must be torn out at the root, that it is impossible without uprooting the entire pavement along with it.
We each represent our own meta-network, different degrees of overlapping, that we can help organise. We can imagine large circles of overlapping influence and organising that can happen, and ways to support those who have capacity to use that privilege of capacity to contribute to organising. We can tend the relationships that make up these meta-organising circles: we need to remember that relationships are just as important as central nodes and are what allow real ecosystems to grow.
If you look at the diagram you can see the importance of the tending of relationships, we need both nodes and relationships to create biological systems of connection and resilience. The dimension not possible to see on this diagram, is time — who is a node and who is a connector can and will shift over time, in fact it must — for a dynamic slime mould like intelligence.
Everyone is a leader. And we must allow them to be. Leadership must not stay locked in linear hierarchies — it must flow, in new paradigms of networked, distributed and partnership-based leadership. Across generations, timezones, identities, positions of power, and race.
Resources must flow. Don’t hold back. Nature doesn’t hold back. Sometimes it waits until it’s turn (like plants vernalising) — but it doesn’t hold back.
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Phoebe Tickell — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on complexity approaches, systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development.
