Tag: Celebration

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Could we ever imagine life could be a different game? Life could actually be a playful, enjoyable, fun endevour full of explorations, revelations, great adventures and learnings? Imagine you could go and learn anything right now, what would you do? Do you have a dream of learning something – which has been gradually postponed until distant future? And this distant future of course never comes. What has been stopping you? We have been brought up to believe we have to know one thing very well and function within its boundary. ‘Free to Learn’ book gives a great perspective on an alternative to schooling – a way to live and learn playfully with self-directed motovation. It is about unschooling children but in a broader sense it is also about finding a way to unschool adults. In the context of EarthSkyLab ‘Free to Learn’ book is essential read for those who are passionate about giving kids freedom to learn useful skills right now and to follow their passion whatever it might be at any given age. The principle of free to learn allow to try various things early and fail without the judgement of the system. Peter Gray gives a perspective on what free to learn actually is, focusing on how rather than what, focusing on understanding why we make certain choices and how we draw effective conclusion from the experience we had following these choices. It offers parents to consider instrumental, shifting paradigm about education and learning from rules to principles. It perceives children as little wise creatures who know best what is good for them and benefit from intuitively following their innate drivers. And if we extend this thought further, it allows adults to consider themselves as wise creatures who can never stop learning. This book is a treasure because it pushes to look at learning through learner’s eyes and not through the eyes of the system. As shocking as it might seem to let go of familiar schooling systems, ‘Free to Learn’ offers a much more holistic and focused driven way to make use of our creativity instead of surpressing it. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Learn-Peter-Gray/dp/0465025994

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This is the lookbook I have gathered together with Evgenia.

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‘Continuum Concept’ message is for everyone. It talks about basic nature’s principle, which cannot and should not be violated, but often is. At the core of it – our most vulnerable time of live when we are least aware and least inclined to even work with that awareness – from birth through infancy to childhood when we are looked after by our parents and family members. ‘Continuum Concept’ looks at the essential human necessity of satisfying our needs for bonding, love, being cuddled and being close to another body.

Modern western civilization has turned many concepts upside down and certainly “upgraded” knowledge of how we should look afte the children when they come into this world. The author’ arguements are based on her experience living in Yequana tribe show that the reasoning of the civilized world of bringing up obedient persons by making them do what we want, leaving them crying, conditioning them into certain patterns of behaviour achieve a completely opposite effect. As it goes against many nature’s systems embedded in complex biological mechanisms it creates deeply rooted limitations and negative effects in one’s life. Experiences which come later in one’s live are based on the expectations and habits formed during the first years of life.

Jean Liedloff explains how roots of a lot of destructive emotions like fear, resentment, lack of sense of worth, poor boundaries, addictions and so on – all can be found in under-loved, under-cuddled, under-touched infants – resulting in broken continuum.

This book is a life-changing read and certainly is not only a practical guidance for looking after a newly born, but a greater view on human relationships from a compassionate place, where we are capable of seeing in each other that child left to cry alone, or made to do something that was not his or her choice, or not trusted the innate wisdom and sense of self-preservation, or deprived of touch and attention. I can recognize that baby in myself. I see that baby in you. Many of us have to consciously practice all life in order to restore continuum to become whole again ourselves, harmonize with society, nature, to be hopefully able to nourish continuum into the next generation.

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I am incredibly excited to publish online this first version of the EarthSkyLab Community Model. We have been thinking, researching, brainstorming and discussing this idea together with Evgenia Emets for as long as we’ve known each other. I’ve talked about these ideas with many of my friends and I am immensely grateful for everyone’s thoughts, comments, feedback and support.

Of course what we have written here is really just a series of ideas intended to spark discussion. This site is intended as a vessel to be filled with blog entries exploring these questions and refining the vision.

We are publishing this vision as an open model. Starting a community is a huge task, there is so much to consider, plan and agree on. I think that by creating a clear, easy to follow model we can make this process much easier thus enabling many more people to create a deeply connected community.

As I think back on my life I realise that I have been on this journey towards finding a new model for community my whole life. Growing up in a newly built but soulless block-long apartment in socialist Warsaw I viscerally experienced the absence of community in modern urban living. My parents had many friends but we knew no-one in our building or neighbourhood. I instinctively knew such an environment is not natural, deleterious to mental health. I didn’t understand it at the time, but remember feeling better visiting my father?s hometown, being in a multi-generational house, surrounded by extended family and familiar neighbours.

Since then I have been fortunate to have a few experiences of a richer community-fabric: expatriate life in Kuwait, university in a small rural town in Canada, the early days of electronic music festivals, burningman. Alas these were but brief glimpses of the joy of community, fuelling my disillusionment with big-city life.

At the same time I have been fortunate to experience many quite different realities – socialist Poland, petro-dollar Kuwait, Canada, Silicon Valley, 14 years in Japan – all these experiences made me realise how much of our reality is just a social convention. Conventions can be changed, we can create a new reality for ourselves which is of our own design, of our own choosing.

I hope you join us on the journey towards imagining and creating this model for life in a deeply connected community for the 21st century!
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I looked at my hands today in my dream – it was not easy but I did and I could see them, the wrinkles, the skin, the shape and then I pushed them against the Sun and the Sun was bright and shining through my fingers. I looked straight up and woke up ecstatic. – E Emets

EarthSkyLab came to me as a vision. I woke up one day and knew that I am going to start a community. I did not know why or how, but I knew this is what I need to do. In my vision I was shown a magnificent celebration, many guests coming to join. A bus driver was going around and picking them one by one and arriving with new group of people every time. Finally he arrived again and there was no one on the bus apart from himself. I was looking for the meaning of this in my vision. He looked at me, stepped down and joined us as well. He was the last human and he was joining us!

We celebrated beyond time and space in a place, which reflected all the beauty and magic – each of us and everyone was finally HOME. I was integrating this experience for many days and the only way I could verbalise this was COMMUNITY. This was not the first time when I heard that word, but it was the first time when I thought about what it means and what it means particularly in my life.

I started thinking who I can share this vision with, and who can be part of the group of people to bring this vision into the world. I sat and meditated and asked for guidance to show me a partner who is capable of making this happen and who is ready. I saw Victor and thought it was impossible – he was living in Japan at that time, on the opposite side of the world and seemed to be a very unlikely candidate. I had to surrender and wait.

A few months later I met with Victor in London – we spoke about our visions for Community and felt there was incredible resemblance and resonance in our visions. We joined our lives and decided to start a community together.

After months of focusing on making the vision clear and precise we have published it in the form of a set of Questions, Values, Ideas and Research Topics and are sharing it with the greater community of people, inviting all of you to feel what community means in your life and how each of the aspects we have identified in our vision resonate with you.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]