Building Your Lifeboat
If you have gone down The Rabbit Hole you may feel some urgency for building your Sacred Lifeboat and if you studied the Hope page you may feel empowered to get on with it. So, with our intention for you to do this in your joy, we introduce you to some ideas on how to build your own lifeboat.
It seems obvious that you will want to "build a community" as the base of Lifeboat. This always sounds so easy, yet our experience suggests that it may be more of an art than a willful construction. Unfortunately we have found that "community" is a bit of a lost art. So we want to walk you through some of our learning and some of the resources we have found available. Also note current learning events. Community-Building Symposium
Last year we launched an ambitious experimental project called In My Village which grew quickly to 380 people then, as quickly, disintegrated. We learned some powerful lessons. The most significant was that we can't build community! We discovered that we can form small circles of people who learn to love and trust each other. And if these circles get to know, love and trust each other we discover it feels like community. I've come to call these circles archetypal family unity. They are the basis of community, historically and everywhere. My partner in this project, Tej Steiner, went on to develop Heart Circles and wrote a simple wonderful book I highly recommend.
However most of us live far from blood family, which means we need to consciously reach out and recreate family. It starts with the first phone call as you gather others to share your intention and help them learn. You may invite them to join you in creating a group with a shared intention. Part of this might be mutual learning about our situation in the world. You will have a group and can begin gathering with intention. We suggest the following:
 Small Groups
I belong to a small group we call the Relentless Optimists (The name comes from the recognition that it is "Far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism."). The structure we offer for this group could be the beginning of your lifeboat. Build your base of community together, and then, as a bonded group, explore what to do to prepare for the new culture and/or survive the collapse of the old one.
Conversation Cafés
We have begun building our own Sacred Lifeboat. We wanted to use the most powerful new processes available which effectively catalyze conversations that matter. We found a book called The World Café and have easily used these ideas to launch deep sharing oh how to build our lifeboat. We call these get togethers the Lifeboat Café. We saw deep listening and powerful sharing immediately. We invite you to get the info. on how to do this simple and powerful process and get started now!
Food
From our study and experience, you might want to start with food. There is something both essential and nurturing about food as an opening conversation and possible project for the group. We found a fun example of how food can be seen and used to build new culture. Have you heard of the slow food movement?
Social Inventions
We then suggest that you learn about social inventions as a cognitive understanding of what your group will be doing. Building a lifeboat will involve projects that involve several people, which are social inventions. We want to include here several social inventions that are already in place so that we do not have to reinvent them. There already exist hundreds of examples of people choosing to live together in wonderful, kid-friendly, minimum automobile, shared food, living arrangements. This movement is called Co-Housing. It is already being done, so there are those who can teach us, as we get ready to build our own living lifeboat.
Money
As you grow deeper into the progress of being together and studying how the world works you will get to money. This is a very important part of a truly evolved community as it usually shows up as complementary currency.
We provide this site as a toolkit and as inspiration for you to build and launch your own sacred lifeboat.
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