How a climate circle is like bad jazz

What’s to say that when you place eight strangers in a room with unique life situations, processes, fears and joys it will be harmonious. Chances are it won’t. Just because we all care greatly about our shared habitat doesn’t mean it will be straight forward when we sit together. We are each of us stepping off the street with our own stories and injuries, injustices and anxieties that come from being alive in these times – literally hard baked-in to our musculature and bones and contacting styles – and then sitting down to process them without a map, for 90 minutes. We’re inviting the rarer, rawer feelings like frustration and fatigue, defeat, despair, panic, denial, anger and hopelessness and with them quite naturally come all of the ways that we’ve found of keeping ourselves safe; numbness, anger, ‘facts’, fury, being an ‘expert’, being a facilitator, silence, whatever.

So why do we do it? A member last session used the word ‘cadence’ which helped draw our attention to what our own unique ‘cadence’ or trauma response might be - in our bodies, in our stories, in a group? Maybe yours is the low and anxious hum of doomscrolling while saying nothing to your friends or a droning, repetitive battering of reading scientific journals and talking to everyone you know, mine can be a panicked staccato outburst or a leavetaking, a breathless collapse. Not being able to change your same, unvarying cadence can be maddening. Like a sort of tinnitus only you can hear. But… put them together in a room and we notice how each sounds distinctly different to the other and slowly, painfully, discordantly, together they begin to make a kind of sense. Sometimes it’s simply the relief of putting it out there, putting it down. Sometimes they actively jar as they jostle for attention. Sometimes it’s simply recognising we need it all, all of it in a choir. At best we begin to respond, readjust, intuitively harmonise with each other. At worst it’s an almighty din. The hunch is that by better hearing our cadences we can each and together grow our range. 

Across the world those in the far right are coming together as disparate, unlikely bandmates singing along to the same tune and it appears to be getting louder. But we are also coming together around a shared songsheet, one which lets, as Joanna Macy describes, our own suffering connect us to the suffering of the world - and learning how to improv with strangers rather than stick to a one-note refrain. 

Curious. Come join us on Wednesday to make a noise.