Combining

This is a book of extraordinary subtlety and brilliance, combining prose, poetry in a different font, paintings by her associates, and collages with text boxes. Like her father Gregory before her – often directly quoted in these pages – Nora lives in the interstices, in the inbetweenness, in the deep archaeology and ecology of language and coalescing prefigurations. Douglas Rushkoff rightly characterises the book as a masterwork, adding: ‘please, yourself of this heartfelt, brilliant, yet entirely accessible guide to the live experience of complexity. Bateson shows how to engage with our personal and collective challenges less as problems to be solved than as systems calling for understanding, compassion, and harmonious engagement.’ Indeed, she often makes the point that current problems are the result of previous solutions, which means that we must deeply question and reshape our very thinking processes, as Charles Eisenstein has also argued.

The very formulation of problem and solution is itself a left hemisphere abstraction based on linear rather than systems thinking – it is an illusion to separate inherently interactive dynamic processes. The word solution appears in ‘Nora’s list of words to be careful with’ where she pertinently remarks (p. 246) that ‘a solution is a linear endpoint to a problem defined in linear causality. Complex problems do not operate within this linearity. Solutions are not what we are looking for. Solutionism is not appropriate in the complexity/systems world…. If you look for solutions, you won’t find them because the problem identified as needing to be solved is a consequence of multiple contextual interactions…. The thinking that has produced an understanding of our world as a mechanistic, separated, or siloed system also defines our current global crisis as such…. Instead, let’s talk about changing the conditions within which interrelational interdependence can take place. Most problems today were once solutions…. The world needs to get used to systemic work having outcomes that are not visible, measurable, or guaranteed.’ As an alternative, she proposes improving the quality of our responses to systemic or complex problems, rather than thinking in terms of solving them. This extract gives the reader a good sense of the Bateson style of thinking.

Other words to be careful with are change-making – through research, Nora has learned that systems do not change, they learn. This insight was also central to the work I contributed to in the International Futures Forum where one of our prompt cards read – ‘Sit in the messiness for a while.’ Another word is agency, ‘where I am me, but I am not me; I am also my context.’ Development is another linear term tied to the idea of progress. Impact is yet another buzzword, which should be replaced by influence in terms of creating enabling conditions for new interactions. ‘Metrics’ require decontextualization. The word ‘stewardship’ implies ownership rather than partnership, while ‘strategy’ is also a linear word.

Following on, Nora offers her own glossary containing some new words such as symmathesy as strong contextual mutual learning as the process of all living systems learning to be in their world. A double bind, in which we find ourselves, is a transcontextual trap, while another new word is aphanipoiesis whereby ‘there is an unseen coalescence of experiences that is submerging into an unnamed, unknown cache – forming what will later be emergence – sometimes insidious… sometimes life-giving.’ She also refers to an ecology of communication whereby communication in ecology is more than a signal as it resonates into many relationships both past and future. Life is always making life, meadows are ‘meadowing’ – just this morning I was reading a passage in Eckhart Tolle where he was suggesting that we should ask what Life wants, as the response will always be dynamic and creative. As we move into the uncertainties of 2025 and beyond, we absolutely need the kind of processual and contextual approaches articulated in this book. In this sense, it is a book to sit with, to ponder on, so as to allow a new way of being to seep inside. In one of her poems, Nora poignantly asks ‘how do you pack when you have no idea where you are going?’

Instead of the meta-verse, Nora offers the meadow-verse, illustrated by Vivienne Leung in a way that really makes it come dynamically alive as the reader follows the meandering text along branches with ladybirds….’ Trillions of organisms in and on my body are communing…. I am not a visitor, but always a host. And – always a guest enjoined to honour, celebrate, dance, sing, love, tend, embrace, contemplate, draw.’ We are Life playing, ‘learning and shifting as time swirls through us’ as members of an ecology of being. In her dedication to the way in which we know, Nora writes that ‘these untamed and unmappable phenomena are reminders of uninvited possibilities to be alive together beyond illusions of control. To these possibilities, I offer everything I am.’ And so should we in being authentically alive as unique expressions of life’s becoming that we all are.

For Nora, something has to matter, but ‘that which matters takes time to tend. Time to remember, time to become so intrinsic it is in our bones it takes air, and water, and earth, and memory. It takes hard work, day in, day out, generation after generation. That which matters is unsayable in words. And is communicated through us….Infinity matters in a world of faster, cheaper, more, more, more.’ I’d like to finish these remarks on the personal, as Nora is also a mother, and I loved her impassioned poem Mama Now. Here are a few lines: ‘

Your eyes will see the derailing of assumptions,
Your hands will hold the crumble of the old matrix….

I can fix your breakfast, but not the culture,
And when you ask about how to be a good person,
I cannot lie to you.
Everything you touch in a day is in some way bloodied.
You have been born into an edgeless violence.
But I will not judge or measure you against a bygone metric.

When you say you need a goal, I offer you an expired ticket.
Superficial memes roll off the tongue right into your bullshit detector.
Success in the existing system is not going to do you much good.

Your integrity is your rage, and I will nourish it.
Your dignity is your curiosity, and I am tiny beside it.
Your courage is your pain, and I will sing to it with you.

We will riot together.
We will notice the nuance of small graces in the day.
We will wash the grit of loss for each other.

I am your mama, and your future is the story of a storm.
I am your cabin, your boots, your rucksack.

Do yourself a favour by making this one of the first books you order in 2025 and keep it close beside you as your companion on the way, as inspiration, as solace, as shelter, as guidance, as bold vision, as outrage and courage, as a wellspring of transformation for which we all yearn so deeply - and which can only emerge from within through the Power of the Spirit, through wielding the sword of justice, freedom and truth to cut through the Gordian knot of insidious corruption and ubiquitous web-like control.