Place Corps Friday Digest: Systems
Cohort after their Place Story Presentations at the GWI Greenhouse
It was 11°F this morning, but our hearts are still warm from the Place Story Presentations this past Friday. Congratulations! So now, as always, let's delight in reflection on your meditations and navigations of place.
A few ideas still lingering for us: What is a perennial experience of place? What rituals remind us of home in our body? How do we give ourselves permission to create and actively shape our roots? Place stories are constantly evolving and shapeshifting; there is something very special in the practice of noticing and discovery in relation to our places. Or in other words written by Mahmoud Darwish, "I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home." [I Belong There, 2003]
This past week, we welcomed educator Faith Gilbert to campus for the kick-off of the very exciting course, Enterprise and the New Economy. This is an ongoing series in preparation for the Practicum; throughout the course, you will explore, design, and implement developing skills for a new and just economy.
We also attended a public discussion in Troy, NY on transportation, urban planning, and climate change. We attend these events as thinkers and designers who are researching systems in anticipation of changing them as part of the Just Transition. Next week, we will be spending time away from campus with a full day lobbying in Albany and a visit to the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, MA. Then, work-study begins the following week.
Our word for this week is SYSTEMS. In astronomy, we define systems as a group of celestial objects connected by their attractive forces. As a noun, we can mean a set of things working together as parts of an interconnecting network. So then, a system can describe the whole or parts of the whole; the trick is to look for the interrelationships. What happens when we begin to notice not just the structure, purpose, or function, but also how a system is expressed, what surrounds it, and how it is influenced by its environment? From the pathways a bee takes to its hive to the flow of traffic in a city, systems interrelate and connect back to us. As change makers, designers, and builders: what is your positionality in the systems you are working to change?
"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."
― Rumi