Much of the vision and mission of Femme Fire Productions is founded upon the belief that we are in the midst of a massive global transformation -- what some call "The Great Turning" (see David Korten and Joanna Macy). The Great Turning is the revolution from our current Corporate-Industrial Age to a Life-Sustaining Age. Femme Fire's mission is to serve, nurture, empower and guide others (through the vehicles of various media, events, retreats, and coaching/mediation services) to foster positive change toward sustainability. It also documents aspects of the Great Turning change process and the voices of the individuals, groups and organizations leading the way.Now is a time when each of us is asked to step fully into our creativity, courage, personal power, resourcefulness, leadership, strength and vision. Our planetary situation is dire, and it's futile (and also counterproductive) to bury our heads in the sand, go along living just as we have been, and/or hope that the chaos will simply resolve itself or go away. We are asked to respond and change; indeed, the planet, and our continued survival in the arms of Gaia, demands this of us. Many leading scientists and activists feel a sense of urgency; some sadly wonder if it might, indeed, be too late for our species. I act with the clear vision, faith, and conviction that it is not too late, while doing my best to keep my eyes wide open and not look away from the fear, pain and suffering. As a species, we are all grieving deep inside (some more conscious of and sensitive to pain than others... these are the healers). We're yearning for what is good, wholesome, life-serving and deeply primal to our human beingness.
Turnings (or revolutions) have happened twice before in human history. First when we changed from nomadic (or semi-nomadic), fairly egalitarian groups of hunter gatherers living in extended family clans and tribes to the establishment of agriculture. This eventually led to the development of sedentary societies of villages and towns. The Agricultural Revolution, which began about 10,000 BC, formed the ground for human civilization to develop. High population densities, complex labor diversification, trading economies, the development of non-portable art, architecture and culture, centralized administrations and political structures, hierarchical ideologies and depersonalized systems of knowledge (e.g. property regimes and writing) all developed during this Age. This first revolution radically modified the natural environment in which we lived, primarily due to the introduction of irrigation and specialized cultivation that allowed for surplus production and storage of food.
It also drastically altered our relationship with the natural world. Human culture gradually began to shift away from a Goddess-Mother oriented worldview, in which we saw ourselves and our Earth as fundamentally interconnected and one, rooted within a sacred honoring of the life force through our passage from birth to death. Mother-child / earth-child bonded imprinting prevailed in all aspects of our lives and throughout our lives.
The second turning, or Industrial Revolution was the period during the late 18th and early 19th centuries when profound socioeconomic and cultural changes were brought about by major innovations in agriculture, transport, mining and manufacture in Great Britain. And, of course, this revolution eventually spread to all parts of the world and gradually transformed into our current industrial-corporate complex. Almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way by this major turning point in human society. This revolution took us even farther away from our ancestral rootedness in the natural environment. By this time, the dominator society (with all its damaging implications for and oppressions against all things goddess, mother and female) was firmly established and entrenched. Women and children had become chattel and property of the father-dominator-state to be oppressed and exploited, much like the gradual exploitation and degradation of the planet and all indigenous peoples of color.
If we look around us, we can see the Great Turning underway. The signs and indicators are visible, while the shifts and movements toward a sustainable, life-serving way of life and New Culture are still somewhat invisible and underground. This revolution is being driven by a myriad of factors, including population expansion, erosion and pollution of our natural environment and its interconnected systems, together with depletion of oil and other resources fundamentally necessary to continued life on our planet. It is heralded by crumbling socioeconomic systems and deteriorating infrastructure, massive political unrest, social inequalities, coupled with profound changes that are taking place on a cultural and environmental level. The Life-Sustaining Age's foundation is built from grassroots activism, spiritual consciousness, women's emancipation and liberation, intentional community, feminism, deep ecology, environmentalism, scientific data and theories, social justice, human freedom and equality... and let's not forget huge quantities of magic, faith, hope and heroism.
As Joanna Macy has so clearly affirmed and I wish to also affirm, this is an absolutely amazing time to be alive! It's also an opportunity to tap into all the divinity, personal power, strength, fortitude, love and creativity that we can muster within ourselves to meet the huge challenges we face. It is absolutely crucial to build human solidarity through community and cooperative, collaborative, grassroots endeavors to meet the demands of this revolution and live into a truly Life-Sustaining Age. A key component is the empowerment of women to stand up, be seen, heard and ACT UP! Our gifts, talents and womanly ways of being in leadership and community, in relationship and in communion with creative forces are urgently needed!
What do inner peace and balance have to do with all of this? And how do those qualities relate to the idea of "sustainability"? Sustainability, in its broadest sense, is the capacity to endure. In the human domain, it is the potential for long-term maintenance of well being and balance, which in turn depends on the well being of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources. The connections are clear, and so is the path that brought us to where we are. This is good because it also partially illuminates the path back to sustainability. This obviously begins with the re-establishment of mother-child / earth-child bonded imprinting that has been damaged or broken, through deep re-connection with the natural environment. Planetary healing also requires a return to honoring of all that is female and mother in each of us; regardless of our gender, we are all originally xx females.
It is clear that human well being is systemically related to the natural world and maintenance of healthy ecosystems. One need only go for a walk in a forest, beach or meadow to feel the healing effects of nature upon the human system. Each of us feels our sense of well being and flourishing rise while in communion with nature. Most sustainability experiments and projects, such as ecovillages, are primarily looking at this over-arching, systemic relationship to the environment and its ecosystems, while often overlooking, giving short shrift to, or completely ignoring the deeper, more profound inner dimension of long-term maintenance of human well being.
What is perhaps not so clear to many is that in order to create a sustainable world society based upon wise utilization of natural resources requires the personal growth of the individual collectively. For instance, one of the cornerstones of a Life-Sustaining Age would be world peace. To fully achieve world peace requires inner peace within each individual, with absolutely no desire to do harm because to harm another would be to harm oneself. While this may have been common knowledge and true for our species long ago (and possibly still is true for some of the few remaining peaceful, indigenous peoples on our planet), to achieve sustainable levels of inner peace and happiness requires deep connectedness to all that is alive. Peace also requires genuine empathy, acceptance, compassion, equality, sharing and cooperation.
As someone who grew up within the dominant culture, then lived within intentional communities in the counterculture for most of my adult life, it has become abundantly clear to me that we, as individuals, have a lot of learning and growing to do (as well as undoing of previous cultural conditioning) before we are able to effectively cooperate, share and live with one another in peace, with genuine happiness and well being that is easily sustainable. Time and time again, I've seen the effects of misunderstandings, judgments, personal woundedness and pain, emotional violence ... all leading to interpersonal conflicts. Healing needs to happen between the planet and ourselves, women and women, men and men, women and men. Few of us are immune, yet most live in denial of this truth.
The Heart of Sustainability resides in the ability of the individual to grow in awareness, consciousness to sustain a deeply authentic place of inner peace and happiness. None of us can be truly free from suffering and fully at peace within ourselves and our world unless all of us are free from suffering. When one person (or any sentient being) is harmed, oppressed, silenced, suffering or in pain, the community on the whole feels this and is effected by it, whether consciously aware of the impact or not. The only clear route to genuine inner peace is to first face one's inner pain (which we all carry due to the condition of our planet and human society), do the necessary personal growth work (perhaps a lifelong process for the next generation or two), and then learn to embrace our collective pain in order to transform it into sustainable happiness and well being of a Life-Sustaining Age. This argument in support of personal growth, internal peace and balance as the heart of true sustainability can be extended to most aspects of the human family living within a Life-Sustaining Age.
