Be the effect
On liberation, learning, and changing systems by shifting how and what we see
Hello. And it is February.
There is lift and light and stretch and so so much to revise (re-see) and essay (try).
I sense wide-open landscape for us right now. (Land= sky-dream-spirit-ocean-being.) To play, create, build new systems, find new ways of seeing and being. To connect with the richness of LEARNING. What is learning? What is its essence of aliveness? How do we create/allow living systems of learning? How do we create/allow the aliveness of ourselves?
I’m grateful to be able to share this essay with you. I’ve asked for it to be beautiful and simple and true. I’ve done my best. It has some layers and turns. I hope you will stay with it through to the end. It’s both an offering and an invitation.
If you’d like to play with its theory of change in practice, please reach out. :)
Learning as living as play as breath—the unfolding of soulful expression—wide open and free, bewilder and wilder more. Listen, delight, notice, awe. Dance, drift, connect, find. Weave, overlap, remember, love. Wonder in joy, as joy. Whole. Dissolved. Defenseless. True. Intrinsic to who we are and why we’re here.
This is what I’m sculpting—what I see, what I speak, what I share. I stand in liberated curiosity, as liberated curiosity.
What I describe is not far away or reaching. It is here. Vibrant as the rich and varied moss alive in the chants around us that spell, misspell, and unspell all we need to see.
My poetics is policy. What we do is shift how we see.
My theory of change: Be the effect.
Embrace learning as alive, whole, dynamic, and interconnected. We are the system. We are the effect of the system. All system change happens inside each of us.
Let yourself pause and be with this. Sense into your aliveness. Sense into the essence of learning. You are not a human who lives in nature, you are nature. You are not a human who is part of a system of learning, you are learning. You are the plant on your desk, the soil under your feet—the biome you breathe and eat is you. You are the questions you ask, the drawings you make, the conversations you have, the songs you sing—the expressions you form are you.
The trees know. The moss knows. The oceans know. The birds know. The bees, the wind, the horses, the seeds know. The stars, the mountains, the mud, the worms know. Our skin, our breath, our blood, our souls know. These are our guides, essential to our seeing, and being, of learning.
Where we are:
-One word shifts the structure of water (Masaru Emoto; Veda Austin).
-One season shifts the network of soil (Zach Bush; Farmer’s Footprint).
-A single open-hearted wish transforms the frequency of your cells (Joe Dispenza; HeartMath Institute).
-Awe syncs community and builds health (Dacher Keltner; Greater Good Science Center).
-All systems, as all beings, are alive (Carol Sanford, Indirect Work).
None of this is new. And, it’s all new because of how we can now see it, access it, integrate it, and live into it.
We create what's possible through our own aliveness congruent with the aliveness of the systems we want.
Simply:
Claim the effect you want.
Make it grand, spectacular, beautiful, for everyone, beyond your wildest dreams. Way beyond anything that would “fit” in a mechanistic view of learning system change. Love. Joy. Wholeness. Liberation. Liberated curiosity.
Be the effect.
See it, speak it, create moments of it, share it with others, sing it, dance it, meditate with it, dream it, pray it, walk it, read about it, align with it, know it, choose it, claim it fully.
This is not fickle or wishy-washy or abstract or unreal. To be as effect is a series of choices. It is everything you think, say, and act upon. It is where you say yes and where you say no. It is what you choose to read and watch. It is which conversations you engage with and those you leave. It is of discipline, of habit, of what you decide to hold sacred and align with throughout your days.
Expand what and how you see.
Once you stand as/in effect for a few hours or a full day, you will see how much exists that continues old frames and past ways of thinking, and seemingly resists your presence as effect.
The work is to notice what seems to interrupt you, especially that which seems “reasonable” or “responsible” or “natural” or “intuitive” or “obvious” or positions itself as something that “has to” be done or “can’t change” easily. Allow yourself to witness. Notice, but don’t go in. Don’t push against. Don’t try to fix. Don’t argue. Don’t engage with anything not congruent with you as the effect.
As Plato’s allegory of the cave suggests, even when we experience a consciousness shift in what’s real, we may be tempted to believe that the shadows projected on the cave are more real (The Republic of Plato, Book VII). Thus, even as we grow to accept the resonance of future-present beingness (to live as the effect), the automaticity of our habits, our instincts, or what we thought was “intuition,” may pull us back to old frames and understandings.
You may find yourself sliding in and out of awareness (getting tugged into dramas that seem unavoidable). You may notice yourself trying to “fit” your new learning into old frames with “action steps” or methods of “application.” You’ll likely have moments of feeling like a cog in a complicated machine of which you have no control (“If only [they] would/n’t do [that].” “Nothing can happen until ___.”).
Simply notice this. Notice all that fragments, boxes, ranks, compartmentalizes, or controls learning. What tries to fix, tinker, offset, minimize, supplement, redistribute, improve, or restructure learning. Notice for anything that rests its theory of change on mechanistic shifts—incremental, scalable, behavioral, causal—and perpetuates old paradigms that control away the aliveness of learning. And remind yourself that you are not, nor is learning, nor is any system of learning, a machine.
Remember moss grows vibrant where it is. It doesn’t wait for the system to change. It is the system. It is the effect of the system. And it is magnificent.
All of us who are alive now have only known mechanistic learning systems. We have been nurtured to invent mechanistic ways of “improving” such systems. And we have been rewarded (acclaimed, funded, promoted) for doing so.
I am no exception. This is my work, too. For most of my career, I engaged with “problems” and fought and argued to make changes and innovations inside learning systems. I was doing my best. I was acting from what I knew then.
I know differently now. I see differently now. And it is because I know so well the old frames that hold on tightly inside systems of learning that I can also see how to move beyond them, how to shift what we see, and how to collapse causal outcomes of “hope” and “dream” and “aspiration” into what is alive and vibrant and real and unlimited now.
This is liberation work from the inside out. Everything expands from what and how we see.
love+light, Melissa
I’m here for this work. For teaching, for guiding others, for learning alongside, for sharing.
This is the landscape in which I’ll be playing and writing throughout February. If you’d like to join, become a weekly paid subscriber here:
Learn more about me and my work: melissaabutler.com
I would love to dive deeper into this. Curious. 😊
Thank you for sharing this wisdom.