Notices by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin✨ (bethsawin@spore.social), page 2

A facilitator of groups (including many with people in deep uncertainty regarding job security, grant funding, projects & more) closes every meeting by reading this poem which opens the last chapter of the book. If it gives even a temporary boost of courage or clarity that makes me so happy! ❤️

A book group in the UK is meeting chapter by chapter and applying what they are reading to their own lives and work - I get to join them at the end of the journey and I'm so curious!

Someone who is handing out gift copies of the book to friends and colleagues tells people if the are too pressed for time to read the book from cover to cover to just open it every day to a random spot and read a paragraph. "I tell them it will definitely have relevance to their day..."

Definitely not a vision I had, but I can see it. Since we are afloat in complexity all the time a little droplet of a story or a concept about well ...being afloat in complexity... could offer a moment to reflect or re-find one's center, or look at a situation or a problem in a new way.

If you are using the book, please let me know how - here or in a DM or whatever is easy. I am so curious!! And the book is on your "someday" list my publisher Island Press offers a generous 20% off with the code #MULTI

...uncertain step by uncertain step because what else are you going to do. And you'll discover that bodies are miracles and also messy and that love is strong and that suffering and meanness are everywhere but so is kindness and that almost everything is fragile even when it doesn't look like it

but that people can face things they've avoid for decades in the face of no alternative and nothing is solid and change is real and possible and, as Rilke tells, no feeling is final, just keep going.

...navigating the ice on crutches under the February stars (or February sleet, depending). A dimension of cascading impacts from interventions, but also of resilience of the human body, and more than anything a dimension of realizing you are more resourceful than you imagined.

...from my dimension to yours, is that you are probably stronger than you realize, your friends and family are probably more brilliant and resourceful than you knew, and when your backs are against the wall, what really matters will get clear, and you will move forward...

Hi friends, if you have missed me I have been pulled into an alternate dimension known as caring for a relative with a complex and serious illness, a portal to a dimension that includes 12 hour long emergency room visits (2 of them), ice storms, power outages, tracking doses, insurance calls,

hospital bureaucracy, agencies that should co-ordinate but don't, unexpected drug reactions, brilliant nurses, saline flushes, alcohol wipes, the laundry that comes with a sick person, but also a broken washing machine...

I know there's a bigger slide into crisis than the one my family is in right now, a slide I thought I'd be paying deeper attention to than I can, for now. Something something FAA, something NIH, something vaccines, something climate something justice. For now all I want to offer..

You, we, are made for these times. We know that because here we are, the only ones who can change the future. You only find out how dedicated you are to the future when put to the test.

Try, I know it is hard, to disrupt the patterns that drag back to some past systemic structures that are trying to resurge. A giant whirlpool can be poked at, confused, redirected, dissipated. Especially when it contradicts the instructions and requirements for fitting in to the living Earth.

High fidelity to a just and life sustaining future, at staff meeting, at the dinner table. In community, at the resilience hub, the warming center, the library, wherever. Make that future already here if only microscopically.

tiny actions, in chaotic circumstances seed change in unpredictable ways. Try - I know it is hard - to let go of what the future will be, and act in the moment with the highest fidelity you can to world you want to see emerge on the other side of chaos.

We could be heading toward lock in of something worse, we could be in an oscillation that will flip to something life sustaining. The only prophecies to count on are self-fulling ones. The best way to make it 'over' is to assume that it is. Instead remember...

Reminder: A system's behavior can get chaotic in advance of transitions or transformations. Don't assume that today is the end point of anything. Today is a moment of multifold potential.

I've been posting some about my November ankle fracture & the lessons that have come along with with it. (Here's a snapshot: no more cast & I can take the "boot" off when sitting down"🎉). It's interesting to me, how the lessons percolate into my awareness their own time.

One lesson I just wrote a little piece about for next week's "letter from the director" email, about how you can't rush the healing of a fracture, whether its your ankle or the division between society and nature or climate and health. Sign up 👇🏻 for that https://www.multisolving.org/#newsletter