Nuno da Silva: Meeting the Wild Beyond Our Fences

Dr. Elizabeth Debold Power of We, Uncategorized

Thursday, 6 June 2019: 5:00pm UTC; 19:00 CET; 10:30pm IST; 1:00pm EST-US

We are used to see substance, the material world, the visible aspects of being, but quite often we are blind to the invisible aspects of the living process, the movement that occurs as life unfolds. In other words, the process of co-becoming as life moves forward, as we meet each other and the world we are part of.

What can we learn with nature about emergence that can open new possibilities for our emergent we? Can we let go of our need to predict and control, of habits of relationship management? What would happen if we strengthen our inner gestures of openness to observe the otherwise and ourselves as we meet each other?

During this session, Nuno will invite us to experience exercises that bring awareness and further develop the qualities of attention, awareness and openness as they allow the full complexity and richness of a social situation to emerge, to present itself completely. It allows the situation to speak for itself.

Through those exercises, he will invite us to explore some of the following questions:
How can we get connected to what is alive in others’ processes?
How can we develop respect for what is in the state of becoming? For what is about to come, in a person, in a group, in an organisation? How can we become an organ of perception? How can we develop our faculties for really seeing? How can we develop a state of “not knowing”, a state of questing or intentional silence that enables us to learn?

Can we discover Emergence as the intelligence of the Wild?

Bio

Nuno Da Silva, curator of The Emergence Network, is an Educational Activist, a transition initiatives promoter, an aspiring permaculture practitioner and a father of twins with his life companion Jo, entangled with Life, the Universe, and Everything.

He left the business field, one and a half years after studying Economics in the University of Algarve, to do more meaningful work within civil society, running an international network of youth organizations, promoting understanding, peace and the respect of human rights among young people (www.yeuinternational.org).

In 2005, he was fully dedicated to the facilitation of alternative, out of school, forms of learning, training trainers and young activists all around Europe, Asia, Africa and South America in a range of topics from citizenship and active participation, to intercultural learning, global education, human rights, social inclusion, sustainable development, outdoor experiential learning, education through arts, project and organizational management. In 2009, he founded a cooperative of education, cooperation and development, called ECOS, in the south of Portugal (www.ecos.pt).

More recently, he worked for 4 years as a consultant in South East Asia, in the adult education National Directorate of the Ministry of Education of Timorleste managing a World Bank project. In 2014, he returned to Europe, totally disillusioned with the development and cooperation world, looking for alternatives to the current capitalist, planet-exhausting, poverty producing, dehumanizing system.

He aspires to be a midwife for the emergence of initiatives and experiments that can help us reconnect with ourselves, with each other and with our ecosystems, regenerating them and developing more resilient communities able to face the huge disruptions that are heading our way.