Members from the Organisation of Noetic Ecology (ONE) facilitated the “Masiyembo Workshop” between 15th – 17th June 2018 in the Bitou Valley, South Africa.
The purpose of the gathering was to bring together like-minded practitioners and facilitators to initiate conversations around shared aspirations for enhancing human-nature connectedness on the Southern Cape.
‘Masiyembo’ is an isiXhosa word which can simply translate as “back to our roots” but actually infers a more profound remembering of the far away places of our distant ancestors. This was a time when people were deeply connected with each other and their environment. This was a place characterised by warm welcomes, openness, sharing, peace and authentic joy – true expressions of the human spirit.
Even as practitioners immersed in the field of helping others ‘to connect’, we increasingly find ourselves working as disparate siloed groups, stretched and separated by the demands of modern life.
So, prior to emphasising a need for ‘outcomes’, this workshop first created the space for allowing people to come together and be together, without the pressure of needing to establish set deliverables.
This process drew on Theory U methodologies and integrated aspects of the SUSPLACE toolkit and proved to be very effective in creating a space for open communication and inspired creativity to emerge.
The gathering concluded with newfound friendships, collaborations and shared commitments toward pursuing a masiyembo vision.
Specifically, four key areas were identified:
- Growing our community
Organising and participating in intentional group gatherings for sharing, connecting, creating and growing collective aspirations. - Developing an experiences network
Co-creating a regional web of walking trails, wilderness journeys and other learning experiences that support the masiyembo messaging and serve to involve and inspire diverse user groups. - Regenerating our culture
Remembering, reimagining, rediscovering, redesigning, and recreating practices for bringing us into greater interrelationship with earth and all its living and non-living elements. - Collaborative association
Building a bottom-up decentralised network that optimises and evolves our competences. True to biomimicry, we will experiment with how this can be facilitated in a cellular and nested manner.
Further meetings and workshops are scheduled.
