Livable Futures: A Living Biome
Who are you?
Norah Shaw
What is your project?
Livable Futures is a living biome of ideas and practices that inspire and activate even as we face conditions of crisis and uncertainty. Join our community and discover with us the transformative power of creative solutions. Through our diverse offerings, including our podcast, newsletter, and a myriad of creative projects, events, and workshops, we provide a space where creativity meets resilience, and community thrives in the face of uncertainty. Grounded in diversity, justice, and collaboration, we are seeking and sharing ideas for livable futures we hope will empower individuals to become part of collective effort for human and more-than-human wellbeing.
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A link to your work:
A preview, snippet, or glimpse of your work in progress:
Arriving, Turning Toward, Centering, Softening
Techniques for dealing with the trouble and finding creative intention During this blisteringly hot summer of 2023 here in the northern hemisphere and elsewhere in the world with the extreme weather of climate change so present for many of us, I’ve been returning to foundational resilience practices and I’m hoping they will be supportive for you as well.
I find strength in these practices as ways into motion instead of the paralysis of powerlessness. They support continued commitment to taking right action from a place of peace and intention rather than the fear, rage, and sadness that come through our bodies. Allowing those feelings to be present is important. And then what?
I started crafting this practice over the years in my teaching and then in 2015, when I finally started to turn toward my own fear and grief around climate change and the painful connections between anti-blackness, colonialism, misogeny, and environmental destruction.
Always evolving, this practice remains valuable to me today and I’m excited to hear how you use it or adapt it for your own life and well being.
Four Practices to Support Resilience
For those craving short and sweet today, here it the outline version. It is already enough to get you started and free up energy for the work at hand:
Arrive, take time to breath and be with where you are and how you feel. Notice what you notice and let that inspire motion.
Turn, turn toward climate change or whatever fears you are avoiding at the moment, personal, political or both. Put your fear somewhere in space, turn toward it, and notice its contours.
Center, De-center, Re-center, around nourishing ideas, practices, people… who are the allies and ancestors showing up for you today? Where your focus goes, energy flows.
Soften into Intention , breath, release the tension in your muscles, act from there.
That’s the basic score (as the dancers in this community will know, the term score is a term we use in improvisation to indicate a set of instructions or instigations, kind of like a recipe for movement) and it may be all you need today…
In six months, I hope to be shipping regular essays and podcast episodes for 500-1000 happy readers who participate actively on the chat/notes threads. Receiving iIvites to do more in person events and Livable Futures pop-ups. Two more performance rituals completed and documented in the Newsletter. Great new interviews to build subscriber community.
Always love feedback on how the project is framed and any barriers to entry or better ways to invite folks into finding support and inspiration in these practices for living in uncertain times.
