Integral Cities Upshift

by Marylin Hamilton

I have been observing 2022 as the Year of Transition and the Year of (Re)Connection. But for cities it may well turn out to be the Year of Recalibrating – or at least the Year of the Eve of Recalibrating.

Recalibration is built into the fundamental Integral Intelligence – it occurs as the 4 quadrants upshift from one level of complexity to another.

Recalibration is necessary to consolidate and integrate our new learning – because we don’t just ascend a new step on the staircase of development and everything we have ever known stays the same.

Rather we must reinvent our operating system to benefit from our new learning. This is necessary for effective capacity building for Meshworking – the Intelligence that responds to life conditions by combining the most appropriate operating system with the most appropriate structures.

Recalibrating asks us to learn how to live at a new frequency of life. (Recalibrating is necessary as we traverse the Power scaffold from Power Over, Power With and Power As – whether that be for individuals or for organizations.) But when we do the work, we will be able to look in the mirror as an individual or look at the group or organization as a collective and see that we have responded to the change of life conditions that brought about the transition from one era or one epoch to another. We will see the path that Evolutionary Intelligence has taken.

So, when we look back at 2022 and recognize the transition points and pattern reconnections that have emerged, we may be able to  recognize that our recalibrations were necessary and inevitable in the grand process of change. Recalibrating will open doors to Cities of Peace, to the Unitive Narrative and to Living Cities serving a Living Earth (more here>).

In 2022, the unexpected return to war in Europe has been a shock of disconnection to generations of Europeans who had thought they would never again witness conflict at this scale on their landscape. The ripple effects of the invasion by Russia into Ukraine have upended energy markets, food distribution, manufacturing costs, quality and cost of living , climate change strategies, regenerative economies and probably most of all, mutual trust and respect between peoples. It has given licence to other rebels (like North Korea and Iran) to test the strength of moral constraints of a range of human ecosystems from COP26 and COP 27, to NATO, to the EU and to the United Nations.

As time moves us from 2022 to 2023 we feel the dissonance of our disconnections, while at the same time we sense a deep longing for the promise of coherence in new and re-connections (if not recalibrations).

For all the lessons of incoherence and uncertainty that Covid 19 has taught us – perhaps one of the most valuable lessons is to watch how the biosphere of the virus has transmuted and transformed to evolve new ways of connecting so that it can survive. Contagion itself has been modified so the severity of symptoms we experience is less, even as the propensity for spreading the virus widens and speeds up. These are hard lessons when viewed as biology through a micro-lens – but may be very fruitful lessons when viewed as metaphors through a macroscopic lens. How can we make peace contagious and even imagine Peace Rooms in our cities?

Does 2022 mark the year when we quietly admit that “something profound has to change?” Have we become ready enough to disconnect from life-destroying behaviours so that we can connect in new ways for actions that support Life, Aliveness and Evolution? (Read more here.)

Does 2022 mark a Time of Transition on an epoch scale? This year seems not just to be shifting through first order change.

This year seems to have all the indicators of second order change.

Are we living through not just a change of season but the transformation into a different era?

While the traditional media report an unremitting litany of change negatives, tragedies, undoings and threats –  around the world clusters of humans (from small to medium to large groups) are experimenting with how to human well (better, best …) (see the list and click on what they are doing here).

In scattered seedbeds we are incubating whole new phases of becoming. We seem to be moving from inward-focusing- individual-thriving-beings to outward-focusing – if not outreaching – and collectively emerging swarms of intelligence.

Could this indicate we are maturing from the species stage of competition that brought us to the state, where we finally can open to stages of cooperation and collaboration because the challenges we have created for Earth, biodiversity, climate change, and pandemic have created sufficient dissonance in our life systems that our very survival is at stake?

Dare we recognize that life can be good, optimistic, and even hopeful?

It seems that the people who belong to these enabling practices – even movements – are beginning to notice that we are no longer practicing on our own. Other groups that we can see across the street, across town, in the same bioregion – and even on the other side of the world, resonate with what we are learning, how we are living, and where we are aiming to go.

Is it possible this is not a temporary transition – but one that is gathering enough energy, information and matter to contribute to a quantum shift?

Is our beloved Spaceship Earth – Gaia – waking us up with seeming disasters of climate change, pandemics and war – so that we realize that for the survival of humans and all life, we MUST change?

Is the Sacred Season 2022, the shift-space/time-wave for body, mind, heart and soul to build into a tsunami of epochal change? Are we ready to start the recalibrating learning journey for the next 100 years?