Talking About Hope

Meg Wheatley of The

Margaret J. Wheatley of Berkana Institute is offering a 3-hour webinar We Have to Talk About Hope: An Invitation To Explore Our Dependence On Hope on Zoom from 7-10 a.m. PT on Friday, December 2, 2022. Prices for this seminar are: Regular tuition: $150; Sponsor tuition: $300 to fund scholarships; and Scholarships for those who can’t afford $150. Register here.

Meg Wheatley asks: Do you rely on hope to motivate you? Are you afraid without hope or optimism that you’ll sink into despair and hopelessness? How exhausted and overwhelmed are you? When you feel grief, sadness, powerlessness, do you reach for hope to motivate you into action?"

"Every time we rely on hope, we always bring in fear. Buddhist wisdom teaches that hope and fear are two sides of the same dynamic. You already know this from your own experience. Think of when you put great hope and effort in a project, cause, or person. You worked very hard for its success, but then it failed from causes beyond your control. How did you feel then? The problem with hope is that it’s bipolar."

We reach for hope as the antidote to despair, but actually hope is the cause of despair. ~ Meg Wheatley

Berkana Institute is 501C3 non-profit "concerned with the flow of beings into their new forms through gentle, penetrating, and pervasive action. To promote blossoming, Berkana requires the qualities of modesty, patience, fairness, and generosity." They are Pioneering a New Paradigm for Leading Change; Advancing Community Engagement Processes; Sponsoring Trans-Local Learning; Invoking Women’s Leadership; and

Summoning Warriors for the Human Spirit"

I first became familiar with Margaret J. Wheatley through her earlier books: Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (1992); Turning to One Another (2002); The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter (2005); and Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Darin to Live the Future Now (2011). There has been a lot of change since then and I have yet to read Meg's lates book, Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (2022)

The YouTube video above, from Michael Dowd's TheGreatStory channel, is a June 2022 "post-doom" conversation between Michael Shaw and Margaret J. Wheatley, titled Finding Solid Ground in 'The Age of Threat.'

Michael Shaw is Director and Producer of the documentary Living in The Time of Dying featuring Jem Bendell, Catherine Ingram, Dahr Jamail & Stan Rushworth. The film is “an unflinching look at what it means to be living in the midst of climate catastrophe and finding purpose and meaning within it.…The people interviewed in the documentary, all highly regarded and well known spokespeople on the issue, argue it's too late to stop catastrophic climate change but in no way too late to regain a renewed life giving relationship with our world.”

Find out about a Climate/Collapse Support Group on Friday October 28, 2022 from 4-5:30 p.m. PT from the Living in the Time of Dying Facebook page.

You might also want to watch the May 2020 conversation between the late Terry Patton and with Meg Wheatley on Michael Dowd's TheGreatStory channel.

Even if it may be "too late to stop catastrophic climate change" do you still have hope?