As we approach the end of Birak with its see-saw winds, interspersed with becalmed days where it is just too hot to do anything except seek shade, I wonder how many of us experience this as unsettling? I notice it here in Niergarup, not just in myself but in my dogs George Bear and Skye Lark. I remember well, the same Birak winds used to stir up all the animals we cared for on the farm on which I was raised.
Events this season around our country and beyond our waters are also unsettling. Are we at a critical time in history? With polarisation, inequality, misinformation, the widespread adoption of AI and our uncertain geopolitical context, the future of people and planet seems more uncertain than ever. I remind myself there have been other seasons in the days of all our ancestors where they may have also felt just so. Yet what season do we now find ourselves in?
The Austrian born social systems scientist and attorney Riane Eisler describes what we are living through as a regression – a backlash against progressive political and social policies. It was learning about Riane’s work around dominance and partnerships that led me to a unique learning organisation and academy called Small Giants, and its Mastery of Business & Empathy which I completed last year.
Like me, Riane had been a lawyer in her early career and she went in search for answers, for different ways of doing things. For much of my earlier life, I had been too busy getting on with the work. And whilst I was brave in some ways, I wasn’t always brave for myself.
Even so, there had always been an inkling, a tiny voice. In my first year of university I studied anthropology, and learnt that other cultures had means of exchange other than money. Later, near the culmination of my law degree, I was told by a lecturer that money was the only method of exchange. I held up my hand and informed the class about what I had learnt before. And the lecturer with a huff said ‘rubbish’. I felt shamed in front of my peers, but also dismayed, as I knew what I had said was worth having a conversation about.
Imagine if instead my law class had been encouraged to debate money as an idea, which is how it was first conceived. It would have been a helpful thing for young minds with stars in their eyes to think about money in this way. And perhaps consider how laws meant that money, for better or for worse, became the dominant means of exchange in our society. And what might this have taught us about how to regulate new means of exchange like cryptocurrency, or indeed how to place a value on care work or nature? These are just a few of the things I have noticed, and back in my university days, I wasn’t able to ‘notice what I was noticing’, with thanks to MBE guide Simon Fieldhouse for this important prompt.
Over time, and not all at once, I had the privilege and chance to live differently. To slow down. I also became a mother and started to see the world anew through the eyes of my children. As well as starting to notice more of what I was noticing, I listened more to my voice. I was seeking a more just, compassionate and ethical way of doing things. I wondered if it might be possible to conserve and regenerate nature and at the same time, bring ourselves back to nature?
I found this, and more in the MBE. There were what the MBE guides calls tools, models and frameworks, and what Nobel prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine describes as ‘islands of coherence’ in a ‘sea of chaos’. It is worth reciting the quote in full as it is helpful in these uncertain times:
‘When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.’
As well as systems thinking, we considered the MBE mandala – the role in organisations of strategy, governance, storytelling, operations, finance and the most influential of all, culture. Nothing was prescriptive, and we learnt that this could be the way of doing things in a truly emergent organisation; an organisation in service of life with reciprocity at its heart. As well as rich reading, listening and viewing resources, many case studies of for-purpose organisations were presented to the MBE cohort and demonstrated that there are real organisations doing the work. The diversity of guest speakers was extraordinary, and included Katherine Trebeck (Wellbeing Economics), Jay Coen Gilbert (B Corp), Ronnie Kahn (Oz Harvest), David Ritter (Greenpeace), Dane O’Shannassy (Patagonia) and Tim Dean (The Ethics Centre), to name just a few.
Throughout the course, the MBE reinforced the idea of paradoxical thinking; to think beyond the binary. What my basecamp guide Gayle Hardie often suggested was to think of ‘both’ or ‘and’ instead of ‘but’. To clarify, let’s take an example from history from Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano’s book ‘Children of the Days’:
‘In 1867, the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in his country.
In 1876 he patented gelignite, better known as blasting jelly.
In 1895 he established the Nobel Peace Prize. As its name indicates, the prize rewards anti-war champions. It is financed with the fortune he harvested on the battlefields.’
So, Alfred Nobel fostered both war and peace, and two things can be true at once. The MBE invited us to embrace paradoxical thinking as a way of cultivating empathy towards yourself and others, as well as to our ancestors and our descendants.
Aside from all the knowledge and inner work of the MBE, our cohort indeed talked about money in the way my younger self had hoped to do, and beyond. We also reflected upon what a good life and a good society looks like. This looked different for each fellow, and over the two days we shared of good society presentations, with each one, our individual and collective spirits were lifted higher and yet higher.
Our Good Society Retreat and the Night Sky there, and Our Good Life Booklet
For me, I was compelled to think about Australia and our pluralistic democracy where power is distributed between local, state and federal governments. Australia is the country I have been fortunate to call home for much of my life, and even in these uncertain times, I believe Australia is a good society.
Even so, there are changes I hope to witness in my lifetime; changes to ensure Australia continues to acknowledge the truth of the past and at the same time courageously journeys towards becoming a flourishing island which embraces compassion, tolerance, reciprocity and a fair go for all. A fair go not just for the people who call or will come to call Australia home, but for all living things on our planet Earth, and their descendants. For this reason, at the culmination of my MBE journey, I presented a modest proposal for a good constitution for the good of Australia.
Aside from this idea of what Australia could become, the most life-changing part of the MBE has been that I have found my voice. For some time, I had felt lost. I now know I was never lost; I just needed to tend to my broken heart, or as my Aunt Helen would say, do some weeding in my garden. If I had truly been lost, I wouldn’t have felt so unsettled. My voice was always there, just small. And now it’s bigger. And the giant part is that I now see the world in more colour than ever before.
Thank you Small Giants. Thank you to the MBE guides who each in their own way had so much to share, Gayle Hardie, Tamsin Jones, Simon Fieldhouse, Joel Pearlman and Khalid Malik. Thank you to the Ed of this fair and joyful e-zine for his gentle mentoring. And thanks to the beautiful people I shared this journey with. We are all now connected in this cosmos beyond borders and waters, and I wish you all well as you continue on your path to the stars. Let us all remember with our heart, head and hands to ‘notice what you are noticing’, and these words from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, originally published in 1943:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
One final thank you if I may. To my husband dearest, our daughters and my mum, sister and brother, and to dad and Aunt Helen in the stars – you are gifts to me and to life, and this MBE is for you as much as it is for me. I couldn’t have done it without you.
And one final thought. Has not the future always been uncertain?
By Madeleine Cox
* Madeleine Cox was raised on a farm on Bindjareb Noongar country and now, together with her New Zealand/Aotearoa husband, lives with their children in Fremantle/Walyalup. She loves exploring places and ideas, and connecting with people and nature. This has prompted Madeleine to start writing independently, after many years work as a corporate and government lawyer, and service on not-for-profit boards in the health and education sectors.
~ For more articles by Madeleine Cox on FSN, look here.
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