Lawnmower World
~ Nora Bateson
Attending to vitality
requires morale.
and also gives it.
Each day is impossible. Each day is in service to possibility.
I am a meadow, living in a world of lawnmowers……
Knowing the clanking culture of destruction like my own hand… in my own hands,
with my own hands.
The same hands that heal and hold babies.
Knowing also that life outlives un-life.
Tiny, fragile, determined little green things all wiggling around
being pulled into life, pushing into Iife
Together:
They are in the darkness, lost, and on their way,
Each new organism is ancient,
Arriving in a continuum.
A million years, a hundred trillion family members,
A single moment of all living things, is infinite generations of backward and forward.
Happening. Right under my feet, right into my breakfast, right there, right here!
Meadowing,
Tending the delicate interplay, the deep time, the moment, the possibility of ongoing worlds of:
Bacteria, insects, plants, fungi, rodents, birds, reptiles and mammals – me.
Learning…
Doing, in fractal musicality… a composing of forms.
Such doing is allowing for the doing that moves among,
Among-ing us in creatura.
The lawnmowers will come, with relentless appetites.
The whirling blades of productivity and efficiency.
and the meadow stands no chance.
They are fast and cold, sharp and brutal.
They do not have the silence of either predator or prey.
Smashing metallic things do not worry, or cry, or scar or fall in love.
They are unfeeling, unknowing, un-sensing, un-alive.
Then, yes, those other guys,
the dandelions, the horsetail,
The punkrockers.
Unstopped by the carousel of twisting knives.
I am learning grace from them.
Garages fill with poisons that promise to knock them out.
Ha.
It is a fool’s task to un-life the world that gives us life.
Horrible hubris.
With an infection in our connection.
Meadows still tickle themselves with fluttering, scurrying, slithering organisms.
Slime and rot and stink,
Mess and mistakes, and muddles…these are the messages of morale —
to fiber the souls who meet another day in the lawnmower world.
~ Nora Bateson 2023
The International Bateson Institute
A Social-Benefit Thinking Group
The International Bateson Institute (IBI), registered in Stockholm, is a non-profit foundation for transcontextual research in ecology, economy, social change, health, education, and art. The International Bateson Institute supports a new kind of research that encourages and incubates projects, which examine the interactions within complex systems.
The underlying premise of the IBI is to address and experiment with how we perceive. Their work is to look in other ways so that we might find other species of information and new patterns of connection not visible though current methodologies. They call this information “Warm Data” and Nora Bateson hosts Warm Data Labs around the world.
In Combining, Nora Bateson invites us into an ecology of communication where nothing stands alone, and every action sets off a chain of incalculable consequences. She challenges conventional fixes for our problems, highlighting the need to tackle issues at multiple levels, understand interdependence, and embrace ambiguity.
The book is an embodiment of her recent work on Warm Data and offers a radical ecological approach to many of the key issues of our time: climate change, political upheaval, education, health, food and relationships.
There will be no community
without first communing.
~Nora Bateson