Eco-democracy circles

All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown, crooned the late Harry Chapin before the fateful day when his VW Beetle took a different lane on the New England road just when Charles and Di were going to captivate the world with their fairy tale, souvenir book nuptials. Ah, but that was many years ago.

Today, I hit the road running in facilitating circles of relationships and networks of trusts among students at Shenyang Aerospace University in Liaoning, China. In my private diary, I dub it as “See Are See,” which is my code for seeing/living Reality as it is (“are” being the verb for existence and essence as YHWH was the symbolic term in old Judah); CRC is also China Resurgence Circle, China Reality Check, or Citizens’ Reformulation Circles. The intent is to open the door to profound humanness discourses in indigenous communal Buddhist, Taoist, and socialist metaphors and forms.

We thought of starting a Chamolinian (Chamorro/Carolinian) Resurgence Circle back in the good old days when taotao tano and taotao tasi were still unjaded terms but political meanings and racial distortions got into the C-words so we dropped the idea like hot kamote. We are part of a global Christian Resurgence Circle (tenuously holding on to the Christian term since its notoriety is more for its anomalies than its promise of authentic existence) clothed in imperial theocratic patriarchy that obscures the logos’ liberating, but that is part of our tradition, and until we intone the extreme unction on it, we live in confessional humility for all its distortions and excesses.

We are on the nostalgic side, (we even attended a Catholic Mass so we can listen to the Chinese priest chant the liturgy in his ESL) so CRC—See Are See—will do fine in the meantime. We belabor this point because one of our colleagues, who read our four-part series on Eco-Democracy, wanted to know how I walk my own talk.

Last semester, we were asked to join a Japanese, Nigerian, and Chinese group perform Zhongguo and English songs at a university song, skit, and dance evening performance. I did. In turn, I invited the group to drop in at my one-room flat Friday evening for conversations. They came, all eight of them, plus a couple hangers-on and they walked into a room with a mantle cloth on the coffee table, low music on the background, and candles in a couple of strategic places—in short, intentionalised space.

It did not take long before the conversation that began with computer games and the latest in fashion and digitized gadgetry turned into their rationale for coming to the university, their struggles with the irrelevance of their studies, and whether they will come out prepared to meet the realities of life when they are educationally certificated. Neither coercive nor manipulative, the conversations led into existential significance. The group decided to meet weekly thereafter.

What we know is that individual identity and vocation emerges out of community and not in isolation, and the group’s individual glocal identity (amazing to see the not too divergent views of Chinese, Nigerian, Japanese, and Filipino-American humans on the impingement of global times) had more in common than initially thought.

In any social grouping, I watch out for four dynamics: one, is the nature of the group-think, our imaginal constructs that situate us from the cosmos to the cell; two, the symbols that rehearse common understandings of vision and mission; third, the manner by which we declare our vision of reality; and four, the strategic demonstration and embodiment of that vision in our communal existence. In brief, the word, the rites, the vision, and the mission, all wrapped in the gracious disciplines of time management, space design, role definition, and story articulation. These four dynamics and the wrap-around gel make/break a group, and it applies as much to the seemingly reactionary tea party as it does the progressive ones.

I am in the business of building small communities, in China, circles of ESLs dealing with the content of profound humanity, ecology-contexted and democracy-guided. Eco-democracy is in the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, yes, snacks in between, and, of course, classroom times!

This may not be specific enough if one is looking for a prescriptive manual of operations, but the virtue of human circles is that content and form are provided by the participants rather than on the recommendation of renowned experts. The circles are intended to be self-sustaining and self-reliant, aided by infrequent but regular assemblies and symposia on methodology on the four group dynamics for interchange and synergy.

Anyone can do a similar feat as long as we understand the American adage, “One can get anything done if one is not too concerned about who gets the credit.” Face is a big deal in China. We leave it outside the door in the circles! Eco-democracy is nothing more than a planetary context, and a democratic form of deliberation that honors the unique value of each individual. No big schemes, and funding requirement is nil. But profound humanity, Chinese style, stands a chance at moving on.

All my life’s a circle, sunrise and sundown.