OASES Transformative Learning Network

Some beautiful gems curated by Maria Popova around Music and the Mystery of Aliveness and the sheer preciousness of aliveness. Nourishment for the soul in these troubling times.

Music and the Mystery of Aliveness “We are a music-making species — always have been, always will be — and music’s capacity to explore, express and address what it is to be human remains one of our greatest communal gifts.& #82…

I haven’t posted for many months. I am now deeply moved to share this from Bayo Akomolafe about a course entitled We will Dance with Mountains. Bayo’s voice together with others who he works with engages with learning in the cracks, at the crossroads, with failure, in our lostness and disconnection, creating finding other ways of re/sponding and being in these times of crises. I cannot say what I want in a few words apart from how important these voices are at this time. Go to Bayo’s web page or follow him on Facebook to get a sense of this program. This is a course for fugitives.

W H A T I S T H I S C O U R S E A B O U T ?

For a year and many months, the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the globe like a relentless fever, rolling into cities from Auckland to Zacatecas, touching down in remote villages, haunting the once unbothered intimacy of touch, slinking across interlocked limbs, swimming in mid-air, inscribing African bodies with its biological imperatives, upsetting the confidence of foresight, blowing through heated Euro-parliamentary arguments about the best ways to conduct war, scratching the sky open, building diplomatic consulates in evasively novel variants whereupon its compelling terms of endearment could be enunciated to the human-folk.

In the months since the first vaccines were announced to an exhausted global order, a slightly inflected normal has begun to return against the soundtrack of a persistent viral irruption. The engines are humming; the administrators have rushed to unbox the old tools, to polish the flagpoles, to tighten the old bolts, and reassure every citizen of the viability of the previous. But there’s something different: something molecularly off-track. Not everything has returned the way we once recognized them – not even ourselves. There is a jarring chord of failure – perhaps now amplified – that innervates our once cheery song of things. Perhaps now more than before, our optimisms seem cruel, our postcolonial hopes dashed, our efforts for justice tinged with cynicism. It seems like things want to fall apart. It seems like we’ve been stolen from home. Where do you go when things fall apart, when home has been taken away from you, when the cracks appear?

There are rumours that the cracks are not so foreboding. And that there might yet be a strange abundance in those ruptured places. Legend has it that a stolen people arriving on Brazilian shores centuries ago found a way to weave a posthumanist politics of care, a new theology of smelling and eating and tasting and sensing, a treasonable altar of gods and goddesses in their fugitive terreiros. They shut their eyes and danced with hyphenated deities; they choreographed strange sanctuaries. They stayed with new sites of power.

Perhaps that unsettling counter-imperial strain of failure that reframes the normal, calling for new response-abilities, new dis-abilities, and the making of sanctuaries, stirs in our epidemiologically inflected landscapes, in this age of the “hyposubject”* and the fugitive. Perhaps there is nowhere else to go but into the cracks. Perhaps our deepest activism is this dancing that might yet be.

*hyposubject: A term by Timothy Morton. “Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out

Creativity in the time of Covid-19. Read Maria Popova on Zadie Smith and others

Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit “There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love… Love is not something to do, but something to be expe…

Beautiful piece from Mary Oliver on creativity.

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

A complex, nuanced, integrating of a range of perspectives, feminist, critical Marxist, post humanist, talk and conversation, alluding to the deeply flawed necropolitics and necroeconomics exposed so visibly by the coronavirus. From Judith Butler, one of the most important and agile thinkers, from my perspective, of the last 30 and more years. I’m inspired by her understanding of power and non violence.

See this from last week.

Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence Judith Butler presents a lecture and live Q&A chaired by Amia Srinivasan that draws on her new book, which shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connecte...

Like many of the earth’s systems in these strange times, the university sector is in the midst of obvious systemic change. For most of us, the old normalcy is not something that can be got back to. As a member of Australia’s academic community, it seems to me this is a really important time to learn together and explore what all of this is telling us about what it means to be alive and to work in this sector?
Please join us for 2 conversations: Friday 7th August 4-6pm & Friday 14th August 4-6pm AEST on zoom.

An online Warm Data conversation: what is being revealed in Higher Ed Two connected Zoom conversations: Friday 7th August 4-6pm & Friday 14th August 4-6pm AEST.

Maria Popova’s marvellous and beautiful Velocity of Being on the joy, wonder and value of reading.

A Velocity of Being One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and ex*****on. When we dream up a project, we invariably underestimate the amount o…

The wonderful Nora Bateson on dwelling and learning and responding in the liminal, in our mutual interdependence, in the vulnerability of uncertainty.

“I am resisting the antiseptic distance, and diving into relationships of mutual learning. Relationships in which there is an acknowledgement that it is a violence to reduce ourselves and each other to definitions, titles and labels. I am not gone, or fragmented, I am real and confused and unscripted. As such I am no source of tricks or easy methodologies. I am not interested in technique. It obscures the unsearched for complexity. Rather I am a sea anemone, all tentacles sensing into our combined vitalities and learnings exploring our mutual dignity. Noticing paradoxes and contradictions, tones and strangenesses. There—in the warm data of our interactions is where entirely unanticipated possibilities are to be found”.

Swerving The work of the coming decades is not the work of manufacturing, of software development, or of retail seduction, it is the work of caring. Caring for each other and the biosphere. In that care the…

The Alchemy of words and why art matters in these terrible, dark and beautiful times.

The Great Work: Alchemy and the Power of Words – Emergence Magazine Recalling a visit from a dark figure in a dream, who reappeared in his novel “The Wake,” Paul Kingsnorth reflects on writing as an alchemical process, one involving transformation, discipline, and purification.