Retrospective 2024-15

This is a retrospective of week 15, 2024 (2024-04-08–2024-04-14).

This week, I finished reading VISTA: Life and getting where you want to be by Elisabet Sahtouris and I started reading the following two books:

• Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines by James Bridle. James writes that “written language…has been responsible in part for our increased estrangement from the more-than-human-world”. “[T]echnological implementations of language”, I’m thinking of AI and Large Language Models, “exacerbates this estrangement still further”. We have shaped the world in the image of our computers. “Only that which is calculable is knowable”. This faith in computability “attributes value only to what it can count”, it “recognizes only what it can map and represent”, while “blinding us to what we don’t even realize we don’t know”.
• Change Your Story, Change Your Life by Stephanie Tolan. Stephanie hopes tyhe book will give us “a greater sense fo the importance of story in human life and the power of imagination”. The “book is, all in all, metaphor.” It’s Stephanie Tolan’s story about story.

I also listened to Heather Ensworth’s interview with Elisabet Sahtouris this week. Elisabet talked, among other things, about her new book:

The book is called VISTA, which is a world view… And the reason I love that Latin word is because it’s made of two smaller words… vita and visa pushed together. Vita is life and a visa gets you where you want to go… VISTA is life and getting where you want to be.

—Elisabet Sahtouris https://youtu.be/YZxXttGBg3U?feature=shared&t=1908

I was also thinking, as you were talking, about…the Sacred Circle or Council format,…where…you sit in circle and you hold this awareness that our circle is more than the sum of the parts… So that when we speak into the circle, we each hold a part of the whole. So it’s not about competition in order to come to some consensus. It’s, how do I find my unique truth that I give in service to the circle? That is what we weave together, to understand the wholeness of who we are as a community, to then really honor what is really in our the highest good for all of us. It’s really, again, holding that understanding of our interconnectedness, and our wholeness,…with everything else around us.

—Heather Ensworth https://youtu.be/YZxXttGBg3U?feature=shared&t=2808

I will post a review of Elisabet Sahtouris’ book next week.