Photo by Alexander Rotker on Unsplash.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Here is the original audio and the AI-generated transcription, in all its glorious imperfection. It definitely needs some editing. Stay tuned for the updates. This is the rapid prototype for the presentation for the afternoon of December 13, 2022 in the Trimtab Space Camp presentations. (See the Miro presentation – Agora | Neo Bauhaus.)
I’m waking with the weight of the world on my shoulders having one of those Lightyear experiences where it feels like everything depends on me, and I don’t trust myself to be able to follow through on what is expected of me. How can I represent the Design Science Synarchy Seed or the Design Science Studio in general? As I was practicing my embodied affirmations, I was reminding myself that I am enough, and I am infinite, and I’m worth the time and the effort. That is often what we need to do as artists. People think that money makes the world go round. I left a Vancouver design studio in 1990, where the owner had said this. I left to find out if he was wrong. My hunch was that love makes the world go round.
I stopped to read my friend’s museletter, and read about Thich Nhat Hanh, the man who taught her how to love.
“His repeated instructions to come back to the breath no matter what stimulus threatened to pull me out of the present moment helped me to transcend trauma, heal chronic pain and learn to love myself.”
As I read Veronica Anderson’s article, Zen and the Art of Knowing Yourself, I realized that I’m telling a very personal story of my own struggles to find love—and to find love in the most unexpected of places: within myself. I met my friend Veronica in the Design Science Studio. My experience in this first cohort had come to an abrupt stop when my wife’s father died from a COVID infection. And I took on the responsibility of executor of his will. Not knowing what this responsibility might entail, I stopped my work as a design mentor for Designlab, and ended much of my involvement with the Design Science Studio one month before the graduation show.
My project in the Living Systems Collaboratory was to design an interface for navigating metaphysical gravity. If you’re familiar with the work of Buckminster Fuller, you might recall that he referred to love as metaphysical gravity.
In the middle of a pandemic in February of 2021, we did not know how to do anything beyond what we had been doing for years. Our daughter came to stay with my wife and I while we tried to organize a burial and to manage the financial details of my father-in-law’s estate. But emotionally my wife and I grieved alone, stuffed our feelings, and kept busy. We sold my father-in-law’s house and found we had resources to do some things we had dreamed of doing. However, we were still in the middle of a pandemic. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wanted to be with my chosen family, the Design Science Studio. So I signed up to continue where I left off at the end of February. I had been a pod leader in the first year. The second year, I was asked to support the new cohort as a co-captain of a pod of twelve people in our new cohort of 144 people, and to help moderate the new Discord server. I found myself learning about conflict resolution and how to be a calm presence in the midst of heightened emotions. It was clear that we needed to learn a trauma-informed approach to leading a group of traumatized and often under-resourced artists and creatives.
That is how I connected with Veronica Anderson. My partner in the Design Science Studio has been my conversation partner in the builders collective, Brad Jarvis. The idea of the builders collective—a reimagining of the Bauhaus design school in the post-World War I experiment in democracy that grew out of multiple systemic crises in the Weimar Republic of Germany in 1919—was my way of building a community of love. Brad and I knew that we would need a trauma-informed approach to build a healthy community. So we reached out to Veronica because we learned from our interactions with her, in the Design Science Studio sessions, that she was an expert in healing from trauma. I also realized that her project HOMEdash.earth was an interface for visualizing the Heart Of Mother Earth (HOME). In her mission to build a world that loves itself, I recognized the connection to my project, an interface for navigating metaphysical gravity. To me, it felt like we were working on the same project.
So I found a way to collaborate with Veronica Anderson at the beginning of February. I hired her to be my ensoulment coach, and we have been meeting weekly to help me learn to love myself and to slow down, to rest, and to heal, to transform my inner architecture in order to transform our outer architecture.
In the midst of this process, I was asked by Roxi Shohadaee to help her with a pitch for funding from the Migros Fund in Switzerland at the end of June. I had been involved in the core team of the Design Science Studio at the beginning of 2022, along with Veronica Anderson. That work came to an end with the end of our 11-day event at the end of April and the beginning of May. Roxi just needed some help with writing. So I wrote as much as I could. I’m not sure how helpful I was. We soon learned that the funding from the Migros Fund was available only for companies and organizations based in Switzerland. What stood out to me was the words I used to end the document. It was to slow down. It included the following phrase.
By slowing down, we allow nature to regenerate and we allow ourselves to heal.
It felt these last two years had gone by so quickly that I hadn’t had the time to really grieve the losses and appreciate the new ideas we had been learning, the new growth that we were experiencing, and the transformations that we were witnessing. It was all happening so quickly, and we felt like we had to move faster to try to keep up with all the changes.
But something happened to me on July 31, 2022. That Sunday morning, I was listening to a podcast episode from Plum Village hosted by Jo Confino, working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change, and Brother Phap Huu, a Zen Buddhist monk in the tradition of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in the Plum Village community. The podcast is called The Way Out Is In: Zen and the Art of Living. Something about this episode on the Pathways through Busyness, Overwhelm and Burnout (Episode #34) really resonated with me. I sent a message to Veronica that morning in celebration of the completion of six months of work with her since February.
The gifts we bring to the world are slowing down rest and healing.
This is a wonderful way to feel into being a revolutionary change maker.
I went for a run through the forest on a trail that was still closed due to the atmospheric rivers that had devastated our area in November of 2021. The focus of our municipality was not on restoring forest bathing for the residential community, but on the deal that the City of Abbotsford had made with the Trans Mountain pipeline to help pay for the new clubhouse for the Ledgeview Golf Course. I chose the mountain biking path as my entrance to the trail as a way to avoid the barrier and the sign at the entrance of the trail that declared DO NOT ENTER.
In my haste to exercise and stretch my legs along that mountain bike trail, I turned my right ankle inward and heard a sound that was a little disconcerting. I fell on the path and quickly recognized I had injured myself. In the summer of 2009, I broke my left ankle and had surgery to repair my fibula, which needed to be held together by titanium hardware and screws. It took me four months before I was back to speed skating in December. I know what a broken ankle feels like. When I was able to put weight on my right ankle I was relieved that it was not likely broken. But I suspected that my ankle was badly sprained. And I knew that the recovery might take a while from a bad sprain. As I tried to walk, I went very slowly. It would be a long walk home as I tried to make my way out of the forest and back home. I was limping. I could see my ankle already swelling in size.
I made my way to the spot where I had been navigating to as my destination. It was here in the forest sitting on a boulder at the top of a hill overlooking the Clayburn Creek valley at the bottom of the cliff where, one week earlier, I had felt a sense of connection to the heart of Mother Earth. On this day of celebration and reflection. I wanted to feel that sensation again. I could feel the warmth of the sun as it filtered through the tall evergreen trees of the hills and the valley. I could hear the water flowing over the creek bed. I adjusted myself so that my ankle was in the most comfortable position possible, as I enjoyed the sense of presence and my awareness of this moment of connection with the Sun and the Moon and the Earth.
As I sat there, a hummingbird flew straight toward me from the direction of the valley below me. It hovered in front of my left shoulder for a moment, realized that my burgundy red shirt was not a gigantic flower, and just as quickly flew up and away. I had been listening to the waters flowing in the valley below, and—because of my experience of growing up in the influence of the white American Evangelical Christian media industrial complex, because my father owned a Christian bookstore in the bedroom community of Tsawwassen in the Metro Vancouver area—I couldn’t help but contemplate the words of Psalm 23.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil:
for thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
Back in 1991, I named my company Bauhouse Visual Communications. My vision was to build the house of love.
Bauhaus Building, Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius, 1925–1926.
The Bauhaus built a society on the ideas of a new vision of a collective future built on the technologies of the modern industrial world. They inadvertently created a world that took their socialist utopian vision of an architecture of the people by the people, and instead fashioned an authoritarian, capitalist, industrial economy, dependent on oil and gas to move humans around their modernist, minimalist, steel, glass, and concrete skyscrapers and cities. To me, these forests of human architecture were cold, lifeless, and oppressive landscapes that turned our living, organic world into dead, lifeless machines for exclusively human habitation.
I was convinced we needed a new architecture, and that new architecture would need to grow from the new habits, rituals, and practices that formed from the hearts of human beings. As it was, those hearts had hardened our habits, rituals, and practices of our modern life of industrial engineering and architecture as pathways and structures that now covered the Earth with highways, cities, airports, cruise ships, and tankers for transporting the products of human industry. It has taken five centuries of colonization to manifest this world. Our hardened hearts have been clogging the arteries of the heart of Mother Earth for far too long.
To become healthy, we would need to slow down, rest and heal. This hummingbird seemed to me a symbol of the need to recognize our need to reconnect to ourselves, to others, and to the Earth to build a world that loves itself. Veronica’s project had become my project.
A #senseof VALUE. Images courtesy of Mark Smith.
BEAMing from the dome in Three Sisters, Oregon.
That evening, Mark Smith called me. He informed me of what happened the day before. Roxi Shohadaee and Nicolás Alcalá and Nico’s girlfriend, Amanda Joy Gilbert, had been in a catastrophic head-on collision. We wondered what to do. Roxi and Nico had been leading the Design Science Studio over the past couple of years. They hold the vision for a movement led by artists who are engaging in the work of culture creation and systemic change to respond to multiple systemic crises. The vision is a sort of new Bauhaus.
We are calling all creators fine artists, designers, performance philosophers, ecologists, systems thinkers, to co create in service of a world that works for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.
—In the words of Buckminster Fuller
We would be realizing Buckminster Fuller’s vision of a World Design Science Decade from 1965 to 1975, and reimagining that effort for our current context.
Creators in the studio apply their whole system’s knowledge to create revolutionary art, experiences and messages for a regenerative future that works for 100% of life.
Roxi and Nico and Amanda Joy had been severely injured in a motor vehicle accident in Ibiza, Spain. The shock and trauma of this news was devastating to our community. Mark Smith reached out to his friend Clare Hedin, and I reached out to my friend Veronica Anderson. We recognized that our fledgling organization of the Design Science Studio had not had enough time and energy and resources to be able to create the resilient structure needed to be able to easily recover from this catastrophe. The best we could do at this moment was to come alongside our injured and suffering friends and their families in this moment of tragic loss. We learned that the occupant of the other vehicle that had been involved in the accident was deceased.
We formed a group called the Design Science Synarchy and met to think through the best way forward, as we gathered in support of the grief and recovery process. We gathered Wednesday of that week. We were amazed that Roxi and Nico were able to join those of us from the friends and family and the two cohorts of the Design Science Studio who could attend the online Zoom session to support Roxi, Nico, and Amanda Joy, who was in a coma at that point. In that meeting, I recalled the moment when Roxi had been in conversation with one of our visionary leaders in a Design Science Studio session. Roxi had looked out her window and explained that there was a hummingbird hovering there. Roxi’s conversational partner said, “The hummingbird is my spirit animal!” I added that slowing down, rest, and healing is our gift to the world.
The three Design Science Studio members who had formed the Design Science Synarchy—Veronica Anderson, Mark Smith, and myself—have continued to meet over the last four months as the DSS Synarchy Seed, and we chose to adopt the words I had written for the Migros Fund pitch as our vision.
Design Science Synarchy Vision
By slowing down, we allow nature to regenerate and we allow ourselves to heal.
By slowing down, we can remember how we became the empathic social species that thrives on cooperation.
By slowing down, we breathe in and breathe out and remember that we are not over nature. We are nature. We remember our nature as those who care for each other.
By slowing down, we remember to care, to share, and to be compassionate.
By slowing down, we create a culture of peace and love.
By slowing down, we learn to navigate metaphysical gravity.
These last four months of slowing down, resting and healing had been a confirmation that the hummingbird was right. By connecting to the earth, we can connect to ourselves and connect to each other to make a world that loves itself.
For culture change, artists always lead the way. Solstice Creativity Festival, December 21st, 2022. A partnership of the Design Science Studio, the Vision Train, and The Institute For Aliveness.
I’m excited to announce that the Design Science Studio is alive and well. We are working in partnership with The Institute for Aliveness to celebrate a Creativity Festival, featuring workshops led by some of our Design Science Studio creators, artists and change makers.
I will be offering a workshop on the participatory process of growing senses for co-creation and collective proprioception, so we can learn how to navigate metaphysical gravity.
And my friend Veronica Anderson will be guiding us in a workshop on our inner architecture and outer architecture.
We would love it if you could join us in making a world that loves itself.
(See the co-operating manual for being human, PDF file.)
Your design senses are impeccable, Stephen, I love the style of the first diagrams very much. Of course, I love the entire weaving of this post even more, a beautifully complex story. Somehow you managed to get it all across in its entirety! I am humbled to have been a part, thank you for sharing your elixir with us all. I am feeling a #senseof hope seeing the way you are stepping forward as a life-centered, heartful leader, our world needs the power of your peace!
Stephen... Thanks for including me in your post in the various ways we’ve woven. Looking at it all in context now I just noticed the synchronicity of the hummingbird in your story and lead image with that of the hummingbird in the letter “A” for the #senseof VALUE I created over 5 years ago. I’m honored to share this path with you and Veronica.