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Join us for an online workshop exploring what it looks like for you and your peers to nurture life in this time of great planetary crisis. Future generations of all species will be impacted by the choices humans are making in this time. What ways are you called to nurture life?
Work That Reconnects facilitator Jolie Elan added nurturing life as a fourth dimension of the Great Turning to recognize this often overlooked but essential work that is so necessary for the Great Turning to be possible. Nurturing life can take the form of anything that contributes to the nurturing of life including raising children, or not raising children.
Many younger people are waiting longer these days to make the decision about whether they will be a parent or not, and increasing numbers are making the choice to limit procreation. Dominant society has many pressures to procreate and have a nuclear family, but parenting can also take many other forms–it doesn’t just have to be of a particular human child. While parenting is a source of joy for many, choosing to parent at this time also carries its own particular set of challenges with such difficult present-day circumstances and an uncertain future.
This workshop will open with a panel discussion between Molly Brown, Aravinda Ananda and Jo DelAmor about adding nurturing life as a fourth dimension of the Great Turning.
Molly Brown (co-author of Coming Back to Life) wrote a chapter in Coming Together in the Great Turning: Collective Liberation and the Work That Reconnects sharing updates to the Work That Reconnects, and includes nurturing life as a fourth dimension of the Great Turning. This is newer for some people in the Work That Reconnects who are used to Joanna Macy’s three dimensions, so this panel will open up the reasons for adding nurturing life as a fourth dimension of the Great Turning.
Aravinda Ananda is the host and primary organizer of this Nurturing Life workshop. Given her desire to work for the welfare of all future beings and the continuation of life on Earth, she spent much of her life certain that she would not spend her time as a biological parent in this lifetime, and then at age 39, she made a different choice. She is a facilitator of the Earth Leadership Cohort program–an immersion in the Work That Reconnects for people in their twenties and early thirties and her current focus is on supporting humans to be the medicine needed in this planet time.
Jo DelAmor is a Work That Reconnects facilitator, a Work That Reconnects Network weaver, and author of the book Raising Children in the Midst of Global Crisis. She offers Work That Reconnects workshops for parents including an eight-week program called “Parenting in Tumultuous Times.”
After the opening panel discussion, we will have a series of opportunities in the whole group and small groups for people to grapple with some questions around what does nurturing life look like for you in this particular planet time, including if relevant for your age, questions such as to parent or not to parent or what kind of parenting are you called to or not called to.
One of the whole group portions will include an opportunity for younger generations to explore their process and the complexity they have faced with discerning whether to be parents in this lifetime, or what parenting will look like for them. Recent Earth Leadership Cohort alumni–Rachel Payne, Julia Levine and Alex Chambers will offer some opening thoughts, and then others from younger generations are also welcome to share.
While an intention of this workshop is to offer a supportive space especially for younger generations to set down some of what they have been carrying and be heard in the anguish of this moment, people of all ages are welcome to attend to explore these tender topics and will have an opportunity to speak with others in your generation in breakout rooms.