#036 Manoeuvre
Soon It will start Rupert Sheldrake's course on Advaya, exploring the big question in Science. He is a scientist, I mentioned his ideas on the morphic resonance field before, and his banned TED talk as well. He has many published books and I am really excited to attend this lecture series and Q&A with him. Advaya is a global platform for transformative education that sits at the intersection of ecology, wellbeing, and community. I feel their intersections are really close to the studies, research and classes I do.
Today, they posted something on Instagram that sparked my writing. A carrousel called "horoscope for healing" and since we are in a temporal cycle about healing, it got my attention. I searched the message on my sign, Virgo, and it was saying: "When the mind moves faster than hands can tend: stop, listen, integrate, manoeuvre". Manoeuvre means a movement or series of moves requiring good skill and care. Since we've been talking about a proper intelligence we access from our hands, from our craft, as the main purpose of the wave of the Blue Hand, this message came as beautiful synchronicity.
On top of that, I also attended this week a book club session from Futuro Possível talking about Joana Macy's work on Active Hope. She is an ecophilosopher, 93yo, and most of the ideas we are discussing today, she was nurturing the movements before. The subtitle of the book highlights how relevant her ideas are: "How to face the mess we are in without going crazy". She writes about three different stories of the world, honoring the pain of Earth and trusting the spiral of life. We were discussing specifically the chapters she talks about our relationship with a large view of time and the importance of the dreams to catch and inspire vision.
My contributions on the day were about Roman Krznaric's studies on long-term thinking and how to be a good ancestor, and also the amazing work about dreams being published in Brazil, from neuroscience to indigenous perspectives. I mentioned some in our issue #003 Dreams of Abundance.
Roman is also one of the many guests of the podcast Long Time Academy, in partnership with Headspace. I really recommend this series. It brings a short version of most of the subjects I've been studying during the last decade. I'll keep here the episode about the importance of Decolonizing the Future.
Going towards a more personal approach, this week I also came back consulting Richard Lewis' book "When Cultures Collide". It was a gift from my friends Filipe and Rodrigo Turra. The author summarizes different temporalities shaping individual habits and collective behaviors as how culture is expressed in different countries of the world. The focus is more entrepreneurial, but it provides a lot of sense also to someone living abroad. Recently I had an episode where my Brazilian openness was misread. At first, I felt really frustrated and sad, but after some reflection, I realized that in order to feel grounded in a different culture I need to also navigate by its rules. I recognized that I need to be aware not only of how I will act but how people from abroad will read and react.
To understand better my feelings about it, I started the Atlas of the Heart from Brene Brown. So emotional and beautiful, her work is pivotal to me since she became a reference for how to put research data and personal narratives to work towards the goal of teaching new kinds of literacy. She talked about it with Oprah at the beginning of the year and I'll keep the conversation here.
Still about my self-investigation journey – on living abroad, on my feelings, on time – I also feel sharing how therapy has been important to all my discoveries and finding new questions. In Europe is not common to have people say they do therapy. In my case, weekly and consistently for 6 years now. But I recommend it to everyone. It is also part of my way to deal with so many layers of my world and my reality since I'm always studying, researching, interacting with, and experimenting with a lot. In fact, we all are.
It started in 2017 when I was teaching about the zeitgeist and the new protagonists of our time, traveling Brazil from South to North. It was my birthday and I knew that soon I would be living in another country. I was invited by some friends to a creative writing class with Cris Lisboa, writer and founder of the free school Go Writers. Cris arrived at a house of 7 gay guys she never had talked to before and, step by step, made all of us reflect on things we never had thought about before as well. Questions about the way we see the world and put ourselves out there. Time passed, and we became friends and started to teach classes together. But this was the day I first said: maybe I should start to do therapy.
"Be bold to be you". A friend told me about the kin of today. The Yellow Planetary Warrior invites us to perfect our skills of fearlessness. In the Yorubá culture, Ogun is the orixa force of the ancestral love manifested in defense of his community. It is the warrior that keeps the community together. It teaches us that love goes stronger from the recognition of the importance of the place where came from, the family that nurtured us, the community we belong. Ogun is love at war for its people.
Such ideas about time and love are also expressed in a really poetical way on the Wild Arrow 6, narrated by indigenous leader Ailton Krenak with English subtitles. He mentions many ideas from the studies of José Arguelles such as "the pulsar of the Law of Time" and the consequences of the technosphere against the biosphere". I feel so happy to see the ideas I research and study connecting to each other. The field is the same. It's one. So I will conclude this "manoeuvre" today with this video that I invite you to watch to feel inspired to live your authenticity while also finding resonance with the spaces you are in, as part of the cosmic dance.
Bold to write with love,
Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes
NS1.34.12.25 Thursday 23 June 2022
#036 Yellow Planetary Warrior
