Whooo has it taken me a while to get back to here. “Here” being this writing space and “here” being the place where I reside internally, where I know who I am and how I can be useful. It’s been a long pause but I feel ready to participate again.
I’ve taken the initiative to be less of a consumer of information in my third career phase and have asked an expert in Critical Librarianship for her course reading list, so that I can get back to being comfortable in my activist roots – similar focus, older audience, differently-aged me.
The first reading was an excerpt Tools for emergent strategy facilitation from the text Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, . Love tools, love protocols, love facilitation strategies, love systems, and this was like diving into a familiar yet unfamiliar rabbit hole, where I discovered new tools and resources to inform future work:
- Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing
- Protocol and Principles for White People Working to Support the Black Liberation Movement
- The Ruckus Society
- The DARCI Accountability Grid
- The World Cafe Method
Instead of feeling old, or like I’ve been out of touch for too long to jump back in, I am open to accepting that times have changed, ways of supporting and being allied have changed. The old words from my mouth were coming from a good, but uninformed place. Here I am now, ready to learn, ready to lead in a following way.
As the author adrienne maree brown so succinctly and rightly said, “I know there is this idea that we grow less radical as we age, and that relinquishing radical positions is a way this manifests. This keeps people from allowing themselves to be open to their own new emotions, their new understandings. I think the truth is that, as we age, we realize the world is more complex, and we allow ourselves to get woven into that complexity. I am more radical now than I was ten years ago, although it may not look like it. I am more radical in my body, I am more radical in my clarity about the apocalyptic future and my belief that connection to each other is the most important thing to cultivate in the face of hopelessness—we don’t want to cling to outdated paradigms; we want to cling to each other and shift the paradigms. The world is changing all the time.”
Indeed, agreed, let’s read.
MmePrice 