community organizing

so i decide it's movie-going month, just to do somethign different, and i go out to the guild to see the baader-meinhof complex, which fills me in on the decade-long spree of violence from the extreme leftist german group RAF, useful info for me culturally

and i see that mark rudd from the Weathermen, their american sixties counterpart, although not a fraction as destructive, is going to be speaking after the late show of the movie wednesday/tonight, as he is now a new mexico resident

since i won't get to that, i look up his blog, and it turns out he's (unsurprisingly) renounced the violence of his youth, but what i enjoy most is his systematic exploration of how he came to this

he goes on to promote nonviolent methods of activism, including educational forums and civil disobedience, and then specifically promotes something he undermined in his earlier violent approach--the community organizing movement that was so big in the sixties: talk to people, share experiences and ideas, get to know each other, and build community

and i know it seems obvious, but i've been having a gestalt around it this week, it just ties so much together

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over at the peace and justice center, there are dozens of posters and fliers and petitions to partake in, but i never seem to really connect enough to bother

meanwhile i am holding space for a group to practice empathy and nonviolent communcation, which is an often pleasant practice, but somehow never gets around to doing anything in the world

i attend a workshop on restorative justice circles, which i feel really excited about...but then the follow up practice groups are completely dead to me, with no sense of community, sitting in a cold, fluorescently-lit room watching the clock drag mercilessly by...leaving me to wonder if this inspiration too will just slip away into abstraction

i've been in men's groups professing to belong to an organizaiton committed to action in the world, but seen the groups inevitably end up recycling inner process work

and so on, begging the question of why it is so hard to bridge a gap between inner lives and the world

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and i think of the times i have actually had the space to connect to and speak not only my thoughts and experiences to others as Rudd suggests, but my visions for the world, my hopes and dreams, my values and goals...and have been attentively heard, or have heard another in this context, and there is a movement within me that is hard to describe

to paraphrase Dominic Barter, discoverer of restorative justice circles, when i went into the ghettos trying to teach nonviolence i was ignored; when i just starting talking to people, they would eventually open up about what their needs and longings were, and things became much more interesting

and that is a powerful conversation i want to have more of, to practice empathic listening yes, but within a context of what really matters to each of us, to develop a community around supporting one another, in whatever it is we are really here to do

isn't it bizarre how abstract something so basic to our human nature has become?

how bizarre is it that with all the empathic listening we rarely get to the heart of people's visions? how bizarre that most activists are so caught up in doing their thing they never get to hear and relate to and support others' dreams? and how bizarre that it takes me 46 years to come across a concept so basic it was apparently ubiquitous in the sixties?

community organizing, a place where autonomy and interdependence can meet, where the tools of empathy find purpose...i wish i could express the gestalt with a little more distillation, i guess it'll have to suffice for now to express my excitement at this form of deep inspiration that is also very doable