Minneapolis AIM graciously invited us to share their space tonight. Even though I've had a busy weekend and a Samhain (Halloween/Celtic New Year) ritual this afternoon, I knew I wanted to be at this one and see how it felt. I liked the room right away.
But before we even started our hosts invited us to a blessing and dinner. It was not on the agenda, but I was not that surprised at their generosity :-) More below the squiggle
This was also a non-standard General Assembly regarding the agenda as well the location. Last night we had approved doing a visioning and community building evening and no proposals unless they were urgent. So minutes, reports and announcements were quickly run through. I suspect our livestream guru was more comfortable, though there may have been new challenges with lighting and acoustics
Then Mike Forcia of AIM spoke to us briefly
Things I took away from his talk were that he is very glad the young have gotten the Occupy movement going, but hopes they will be able to tap into more elder wisdom. I refrained from pointing out I color my grey! Besides, as he pointed out later, just being older does not make you a true elder, it's having experience and wisdom to share. He reminded us to include working to rectify broken US govt. treaties with indigenous peoples along with our other social justice work. Most moving to me was his deep respect for Mother Earth and appealing to us to keep healing Her a top priority as the 1% think nothing of destroying plants, animals and environments to make money
Then we did a visioning walking meditation; I did not attempt to video this as I was letting myself get into it. At the end we called out words and phrases representing the kind of society we want to create.
Then we passed the modern day talking stick. The microphone went all around the circle and everyone had a chance to speak.
Our guidelines were to briefly say what you love about the movement, what could keep it from growing,and what you personally were contributing . And there were some true elders there; several said they had been waiting 40 years for something like this and were now filled with hope again. They had been activists back in the 60s only to see much of what they dreamed of buried.
Other common themes were loving the people, the energy, the direct democracy and acknowledging that there were communication issues or difficulties unlearning some of the ways society has taught us to be.
We ran out of time to do further small group discussion and ended with a song, which I admit I ducked out on. I love to sing, but I knew I was running out of time to drive home, do yoga and get this posted at a semi-reasonable hour.