Working together in a time of monsters

Some Halloween reflections on endings

Dear Lynne,

So many threads to pull on in your rich last letter! I’m particularly interested in how you talk about how we navigate shifts and changes in our lives, and how it feels like we are living through a time of collective shifting and changing.

We’ve talked a lot about the zeitgeist here before, about the fact that there might be many “spirits of the age” present at once - and that there are multiple levels of reality that we are all dealing with at any one time. Like you said, as humans we tend to change, or make changes, when the pressure builds up in us enough to do so. Like you, I’m horrified that so many of the very visible, very zeitgeisty shifts we are seeing are towards the right, towards a world built on fear and exclusion. But at the same time I am feeling a sense of change that feels more hopeful.

I wanted to share with you some of the experiences and thoughts I had at the Deceleration Assembly last week in Birmingham. The Decelerator¹ is an amazing service dedicated to supporting better “endings” - whether that’s closures, mergers, or other big changes - in UK civil society. The Assembly was their first attempt at bringing together a bunch of people working in this broad space.

It was a beautiful gathering of over 100 people, and as always there is real pleasure in just being in a room with friendly, open, curious folk. I love the feeling of being in a room of people all paying attention to the same thing (and I wonder if this collective attention is a precursor to the collective devotion we’ve been talking about…).

It was a really nicely planned event, with insights from funeral directors, ritual holders, conflict specialists, financial specialists, and more. I have three parallel streams of thought swirling around in me that I wanted to set out here and get your reactions to!

We’re living in an era of endings

There’s that Gramsci quote which is overused but I’m going to use it anyway.

It’s not new or original to point out that we as a society are on the verge - already in? - collapse. Even if catastrophic climate change wasn’t around the corner, the post WW2 social contract seems to be breaking down. Continued austerity means that it’s hard for us to even imagine what decent public services might look like. People are increasingly aware that the social safety net is not to be relied on. All the wrong people are being blamed. And against this backdrop, funding for civil society is shrinking

I was thinking a lot about William Bridges’ book Transitions. He talks about there being a liminal space - Gramsci’s time of monsters? - in between something ending and something new beginning. That space is, he says, always uncomfortable and disconcerting. What might it mean to navigate this time together? It feels crucial to me that propositional work has to be part of this time - we have to rehearse the future together that we want to see².

We’re going to see lots of organisations close in the next few years - maybe that is the rehearsal we need

I wrote here about how we should maybe develop a “Memento Mori” practice in our organisations, always considering that the particular legal structure we are operating within might have outlived its usefulness. There are going to be more and more endings over the next few years, and that means that lots of us are going to be kind of accidentally developing skills in endings and transitions. It’s not going to be fun, but it might be part of the rehearsal for the new world that we actually need.

“Grief is the hum in the background of all our lives”

This is a quote from Amber Jeffrey from the Grief Gang, one of the speakers at the Assembly, and it really hit me. It is rare to be in a space where grief was actively named and welcomed in various different ways, and it really got me thinking about all the unprocessed grief both in my life and in my family. Especially in stiff-upper-lipped British culture, we have a tendency to brush grief away, to not really feel it, and I wonder what it would mean to hold it more actively.

Especially at this time of year, I find myself craving some space to sit with old grief. One of my friends held an ancestors’ party last year, where a bunch of us - many of us strangers to each other - came and shared food and told stories about people we’d lost, and it was both simple and sweet and deeply powerful.

can we welcome the monsters?

What does all this mean for earth centric holistic organisations? I wonder. There’s something here about the fractal nature of all of this - my own personal grief feels very connected to the meta-endings that we’re living through, but I don’t expect an organisation to help me with that! But maybe getting more into the habit of talking about and sitting with the potential for organisations to end well, even projects to end well, might help us all develop more of the personal skills we need for the challenges that lie ahead. We started this exchange thinking about seasonality and the effect of different times of year - is this the season for asking ourselves questions about what might need to end?

One thing I deeply appreciated about the Deceleration Assembly is that they didn’t try and neatly sum everything up, so neither will I. Instead, they ended by playing everyone this Kae Tempest track, so that is how I will end too:

Lots of Samhain / Hallowe’en love!

Kate

1. They are also on Substack here -

Iona Lawrence

- well worth a subscribe!

2. Healing Justice London’s work is a wonderful example of this kind of propositional work